#that was originally just supposed to be a placeholder but. i grew attached.

[funsizedcrow]

Linktober day 31: Free for all

Using the power of being an artist to draw my ocs being silly lol. Anyways these are my link zelda and ganondorf ocs!!! You can read more about them here

Aaaand thats a wrap!! This is my first time actually finishing a monthly art challenge and overall im really pleased! Will i do this again next year? We'll see.

[julia-schuhmacher-blog]

Where did you get the idea for your game “Captain J.D. saves the Universe”? A game designer’s answer:

I came from a generation of Gamers that have been here since the beginning. I co-wrote two fairly successful BBS Doors back in the 90s. (Here is a let's play someone did of one of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGo6X7E4qY0) They were text based with very little art and players connected with their phone lines and played their "turns" each day. Since that time I have mostly been Modding (https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php?topic=144669.0) and making personal projects (http://www.theredaxe.com/2010/06/dimlit-thenotsobright-finished.html). As samples.. there have been many more projects. But the desire to make more games for people to play has always been with me. I started Capt. Doe Saves the Universe as a project to learn Construct 2. I had been using Unity 4 and just thought the path to 2d using it was too complex. I had tried Game Maker and Stencyl as well and didn't really like their "coding". Game Maker is ok but I didn't easily take to Stencyl's click-together code blocks. So when I found Construct 2 I really loved its simplicity and event style "coding". I wanted to make a project from start to finish that wouldn't take me years to complete so I could learn C2 well. The joke was on me.. CJDStU took 2 years to "complete". Not that I worked on it full time... less than a month total.  In the end I accomplished my goal. I am more familiar with C2 than I have ever been with any other engine and a couple of weeks ago knocked out Clicker Wizard "https://www.scirra.com/arcade/other-games/clicker-wizard-16810" in about 3 days. It is a complete clicker/idle game that is totally unbalanced and useless for anything except that it is cool. Of course I will continue to tweak it and CDStU as ideas inspire me. All that said, I grew up playing side scrolling games like Mario Bros, excitebike, Sonic, etc. I decided a side-scrolling space shooter would be easy to make since it is in space.. background art fairly easy, and it goes nowhere.. ie. all the action occurs on one screen with the assets spawning off screen and simply flying past. I didn't have a specific game in mind I was emulating. I just had an idea of what I wanted and tried to make it in C2. It originally was an endless side-scroller where you never actually won. You would just meet tougher and tougher enemies and bosses as long as you could stay alive. This turned out to be a game balancing nightmare since as the enemies got stronger so the player had to as well. CJDStU scales up with the player and I may one day make it endless but I decided to stop at 100 waves with a final boss because it "feels" right at that point. Instead I added the ability in the options menu for the player to make the "waves" longer or shorter thus drawing out (or shortening) the game if they wanted it longer or shorter. That is the plus side of making games for fun and not profit. I can modify it and make new versions all I want without people complaining.  If it ever gets to a point where I want to sell a version, I still can. If you have read this wall of text this far without going to sleep I will now answer your art question. XD I decided since I was making CJDStU to learn C2 that I would make as much of the art inside of it that I could. 80% of the art was made in the C2 sprite developer. I would decide what type of enemy I wanted (as in what was he doing.. ram ship, shield ship..) and I would draw them using the shapes, line, circle, ect. tools in the C2 sprite maker. Over the life of the project some were scrapped and reworked but the majority, including the player,player weapons, and orange enemy are the same as original except with some minor cosmetic tweaks and shading added (using alpha value in C2 sprite maker). They were all supposed to be placeholder art but I fell in love with them (especially the player with all the goofy weapons systems attached) and decided just to add shading and clean them up for the final release.

As you can see, the answer to my inspiration isn't a short one. It came from a lifetime of art and game making pursuit.