Full Speed Ahead on Asset Creation

January 10, 2020

Happy New Year, everyone!

I’m back after a bit of a break from the blog and a bit of a break from Sleuthhounds: Cruise that helped to recharge the creative batteries for the next phase of production. 2020 is set to be a good year as the game logic scripting is now done, which means it’s finally time to jump into the creation of all the artwork, sound effects, voice lines, and other odds and ends needed to create a polished game.

Before getting to the details of asset creation news, there was one scary moment early in December. My old hard drive started to get flaky on my development machine. When hard drives go they tend to go rather quickly so I scrambled to get a new hard drive and everything moved over to it. The good news is I have a regular backup scheduled to run every week. The bad news is somehow I had incorrectly configured the backup to only store data files and not an image of the operating system or all the applications. Whoops! At least the data was safe. I got lucky in that I was able to use some Linux tools to successfully copy a complete image from my failing drive to a new one (three cheers for ddrescue!).

It’s always a scary moment when a hard drive goes belly up. Fortunately, my fears evaporated once I confirmed that the game’s data was backed up (and I went on to make a couple of new backups of it elsewhere just to be safe). In some ways, the timing of the hard drive failure was actually really good. It happened just before I was getting set to work on asset creation, which I do on my 2-in-1 tablet/laptop instead of my desktop. My laptop has a stylus that allows me to draw all the backgrounds and animations right into it, which is far, far easier than working with the mouse. However, I hadn’t setup any sort of backup schedule for the laptop. So my desktop woes prompted me to get that into place. No losing any artwork here!

To this point in the development of Cruise I have intentionally been pushing off working on the various visual and audio assets for the game. It’s very easy to change things while still working at just the story writing/scripting level. However, once backgrounds start getting produced, things become much more solidified. If I suddenly decide that a door needs to be on the left side of a room instead of the right, for example, that requires a LOT of extra effort if the background for the room has already been drawn and coloured. Over the course of the scripting phase there were quite a number of incidents where I needed to move things around or make other changes that would have impacted backgrounds or animations if I’d already done them. Now, I’m at a point where anything that affects the layout of a location has been dealt with. That means it’s time to jump into the creation of the graphics, sound effects, and dialog full on.

This has always been a great point in any Sleuthhounds game. The games exist in a really rough state for such a long time that it does get to be a bit demoralizing. Even though I know work is being done on the scripting side, I don’t actually see the game looking better until I start putting finished artwork in. So I’m really excited to dig into the mountain of assets that need to be created now. In coming weeks, watch for sneak peeks at some of the finalized locations and animations as they start dropping into place.