Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: House Background Art “Finished”

Last week, I reported that I was focused on other priorities and didn’t get too much done in The Dungeon Under My House, my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project.

I set out to finish the background art this week.

Sprint 46: Pre-production and initialization

Planned and complete:

• Create location art

I didn’t spend as much time on game development as I wanted this week either, but it was definitely more substantial work.

I think the bathroom has become my favorite room, partly because I was getting the hang of using Gimp’s Perspective Tool to ensure the perspective of the art was more or less correct.

All that remained was the basement. I created a secret entryway from the main room, which leads to a secret second room with a ladder.

Now, you might have noticed that one image shows in-game footage and the other does not.

That’s because the doorway isn’t always present, and I still need to make the intro script and programming changes to allow the player to go from not knowing about the secret entrance to discovering the secret entrance.

Part of my work is turning that background image of a doorway into a separate set of sprites that I can overlay onto the actual background art.

Anyway, these rooms were the last things to do for this pass of the art work. I anticipate that I might want to change things or revisit, and there is always more I could do to improve the art, but let’s say that it is finished enough for now.

Meanwhile, we’re at the beginning of the December now, which is usually one of my least productive months, partly because I like to use some of my time to prepare for the coming year.

But I also want to take stock of the project and figure out more precisely what the remaining scope is. Despite putting in about a year of development, I feel very, very far away from a concrete version of my vision for this game, which included multiple characters with their own agendas and desires, a sprawling underground dungeon, a player-editable map, items and inventories, and a time system among others.

It’s a lot, and while I already anticipated slimming the scope down, I am worried that I need to do even more scope cutting, and I’d like to make sure I keep the essence of the planned game as well as get a better idea of how much work is left to do.

Thanks for reading!
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