#planning on making a yt video showing off the redesigns

[josephsaturn]

Making Miraculous redesigns, what do y'all think?

[proyectotaco-blog]

The birth of a Taco

Sometimes you just need to do something. Something that was urging inside you and at the starting point of that new adventure, you regret not having started before. But it might have not been the time for it. A few months back I received my first graphic tablet as a birthday present, and something snapped in my brain.

(or what I’ll call the First Impact)

While I was searching tutorial after tutorial on YT, it dawned on me that I kept seeing more and more the words “concept” and “video games”. That was the point where I started to doubt if deciding to go back to drawing and designing would not be too simple, or at least enough. If I would be able to take a step further. I still don’t know how I ended up watching Shaun Spaulding’s tutorials and they showed me the potential of Game Maker Studio, discovering games such as Hyperlight Drifter… And my brain changed gears, there was no turning back:

My flux diagram has been the following one:

I can draw > Now I can draw DIGITALLY > I’ve been a pen and paper player all my life > a DM half of it > I have a certain easiness building up puzzles and riddles > I have studies as a movie script writer > I have played more games that I can remember…

(bull****, I remember them all, and so do all of you)

What was missing? What triggered the epiphany that took me down this path? Learning that it was no longer “necessary” to know coding in order to develop video games.

(or what I would call the Second Impact)

Proyecto Taco is born.

Who is “Proyecto Taco”, just me. But I’m not planning to keep at it like this, I want to build a team, but let’s not barge ahead, firstly I have to accomplish a dream and to achieve a feat: Design my first project solo. Ok, not precisely by myself, I will have aid in certain aspects of it, I want a challenge, not a crappy game. The monster is growing, to this point at least.

(the impacts are headbutts against the keyboard nowadays)

I’ve already faced many obstacles along the path, decisions to retake, software acquisitions too good to let pass by but that make certain paths impossible to take any longer and above all a lesson duly learned: WRITE A GDD (Game Development Document) and be loyal to it. Saying this I don’t mean that you need a gazillion-paged dossier and that you need to keep at it syllable by syllable. But you do need to take some hard decisions, you have to know where to stop thinking about new contents, and when to stop chasing rainbows and face the code.

(this is said by someone who doesn’t know how to code)

One of these decisions and before some of you face the walls I’ve encountered is the graphic aspect. You may think, “let’s do pixel art, it will be easier”, nope, big mistake. A few weeks of planning later you will see the numbers, and, in my case, it was more than 16.000 pictures to be drawn one by one in order to have fluent animations for the project. With that amount of work, you rethink your plan, your decisions, your faith, your breakfast…

Which takes you to a crossroad: -I could carry on with the pixel art and air the game by 2025 -I could research some animation software and be able to finish this before the decade’s end.

The second path took me to Esoteric Software’s Spine and a new graphic design for my project, because, could you do pixel animations with it? Yes, and no. Let me elaborate, you can, but it doesn’t look like it should and I’m no purist, but I don’t want to piss them off either. There is where I’m nowadays, changing the whole visual part of the project, redesigning all my concepts, gathering source material and back to a square I don’t dislike: Drawing with a bit more of freedom.

(translation: Pixel artists, you have my respect)

With this post I start what I hope is the first of many mussing like this one, mainly because is nearly Christmas and the first project of this one-person-studio will have its first real push and test flight.

Wish me luck.

En taro Tassadar, Executioners.