Hello its Bimonthly Bonus blogging time again, and its personal project update time again! Because today I'm giving another quick update on SpyGames.
When we last left off, I discussed my search for software to display each edited frame from 816 Paint image suitable for creating the final animation which I found in the form of Scholastic's Slide Shop from 1988. Unfortunately, progress has been very slow. I still have not worked much on the story, The editing process for the footage is going very slow and the main code is yet to be written.
Now there are 2 reasons for this: the technology I was working with and my own personal life. Now the technology part is understandable, after all I'm creating this animation from stills generated on a computer that originally debuted 12 years before the first version of Photoshop was even available. All of the issues I have experienced from the inability to completely undo mistakes in editing more than one action at a time, to the limited amount of frames per disk or virtual hard drive image is all things I expected to happen going forward, but the things outside of this were far less than that.
Remember how I mentioned in the last update that the project itself has stalled due to personal responsibilities? Well, I wasn't kidding about that. You see I'm currently on a very unsuccessful job hunt. Due to college loans, I need to have enough money to pay it off. While I have a McDonalds Crew Member job, its not enough to pay off loans that are well into $24,000 dollars, So for the past few months its been a very fruitless search to even find a place that would even be interested in hiring me.
I'm technically not even supposed to be blogging right now, It's something I made a promise to my mother about.I should be doing more appropriate and responsible tasks like Checking my Email, keep searching for other places to apply to, even trying to do 30 lb weight excercises to train for a potential job as a whey bagger at a dairy company. However Its just kind of draining to me. I know very well I should do it, but I can't help but afterwards being drained physically, emotionally, and creatively. Whenever I do something outside of those tasks I know im doing somethings thats just making things worse rather than better. How I describe it, I'm really between a rock and a hard place: On one hand I could what im supposed to do, but effectually waste my time by getting another rejection letter and working out hurting me physically, emotionally, and creatively, or I could to do I want to do and waste time but at least have success in the form of access and keep my creativity in tact.
Despite this, I still want to at least try and get the game into being at least as a playable demo by the end of the year (Prefeably before New Years), Mainly because I still want it to be corelation with the day I first watched that infamous video that got me on this journey. It took a lot of convincing myself but I feel Like I can do it if I work hard and quickly enough. Im already at frame 136 of 200 for the first animation, I feel like if i can find someway to speed up the process I could get it done.
So, to sum up my challenges I need to fix I need to:
1). Finish all the frames for the first animation
2). Get all of the frames into Slide Shop Slides
3). Work out the rest of the story elements that I didn't before.
4). Somehow get ahold of some more first person footage for each of these actions.
5). Work out the actual code and soft ware (Graphics Magician and RenPy)
Once again, these are going to be difficult, and Im putting a lot of pressure on myself, but I feel I might be able to get it worked out. But that wraps up this brief entry on SpyGames for now, I plan to return as soon as I can with the finished demo. But until then that wraps it up for my entry today, as always, Thanks for reading! see you next time!
