Reflection #80 – November 24

Aaaaand the year is almost over!

I can’t wait to properly reflect on the whole year and take a look back at the previous annual reflections as well! It feels like so much has happened and developed and there’s still a month ahead…

I’m sitting here, warming up a bottle against the freezing tempratures outside and eating some cookies and drinking tea. Last week we had snow and here’s hoping it will give us some proper winter feel during the holidays (for once).

Thanks to the time plan I have started in October, it’s gotten easy to tell what I’ve been doing and what my plans were this month.

IN addition to my weekly goals, I also started adding physical exercises to the list and so far it’s been a good success to upkeep almost daily exercises. The goals are fixed by the weekend but I am flexible by how I want to reach them. For example, I want to do 75 push-ups a week – whcih would be about 15 a day for 5 days. If I can’t make it in one day, it’s fine – giving me just more motivation to get it done the next day or do double the amount so I can rest another day. At the end of the week, I determine how easy the goal was to reach and increase the amount for the following week and so on.

The first week of November was dedicated to finishing my script for class and the first of two larger commissions.

Initially, it was planned to be done in late October but as I explained in my last reflection, I couldn’t fully dedicate my time to it. A few revisions here and there and my need to add more detail where I could stretched this projec’s schedule until it was finally finished! And how lucky I got to have been able to work on a lovely setting like this. I was happy to venture into a jungle adventure theme taht is kinda also pirate-oriented. Such a lovely premise made it fun to visualize and made me needy also to return to some adventure films ^v^

Though looking back at it, I was having a lot of trouble with the painting part of the artwork. As per usual, I skipped the line (or in my case clean-up) phase and went straight to painting. Which came back with a vengeance as it turned out, I was revisiting shapes and lines multiple times, making the painting phase last unusually long. In the future, I have to better finalize the sketch and let less changes come when painting.

In the same week, we had an Arcane marathon at school, meaning three episodes per day for 4 days starting with the new season. Needless to say, it was an amazing experience, cherishing the craftsmanship, dedication and love to a project. The series’ new episodes followed me through the month quite nicely and were always a highlight to look forward to.

In the second week, I started taking a free month of Brilliant to get me into understanding code more for my game project. Starting it felt very nice, I was eager and engaged but it started to lose its appeal on me with last week. So I will head on to tutorials and projects to learn how to code a game. Speaking of which, it wasn’t easy to work on it. I underestimated the complexity of Godot’s code and working out even the bare bones of my game was as fruitless as it was frustrating. Without a doubt, I’ll have to turn to my friends who have much more experience with the engine to help me through this process.

Work on the second commission was slow as well, once again I didn’t have the focus to work on it extensively and the many details featured in it was a welcome yet obvious reason it is taking more time than expected. My goal was to make it by the end of November but with an upcoming presentation of my script – which (I) demanded to be properly prepared – and another big project I’ll talk about in a moment, I have merely been able to finish the lines and greater parts of a scenic background.

However, this time I really want to finish it in the upcoming weeks so it won’t be dragged into the next year. I need to have a good rounded-up end to the year so I can be planning ahead well enough with the least amount of projects possible as NFC is creeping up already…

Speaking of that script project…

I’ve been writing an episode of Zalumnee’s Story in the spirit of an animation series. Working out the third episode was a lot of fun. I managed to balance whacky humour with important dramatic character moments and it has been received very well by class. I only hope, I can find a format to safely and properly show it off one day.

The last major thing that happened in November was my (sudden) participation in a furry game jam.

My fellow birb and friend Redkite promptly asked me last friday if I were to join his game jam team. I evaluated my priorities and saw that I just had too little time… and yet I still decided to join

The reason was that I was so fed up with working on my own game Project, taht I wanted the developing experience but nothing to do with coding – and the game jam provided a suitable position where I could actively work on a game and get behind the scenes look on the implementation and problem solving on a small scale… with quite possibly a new thing to add to my portfolio.

So I practically only had things to gain whilst having to sacrifice about a week that I couldn’t spend with my other projects… and BOY was it extensive in the end.

I was doing practically every graphic in teh game that was directly connected to the player; meaning props, character design, key-art, UI-design and ‘enemy’ designs.

It was a completely new experience for me and it was quite exciting but my gosh was it exhausting.

After Tuesday when I had a meeting with our new aniamtion professor, I was urged on to keep working on my animation project while I was DESTINED to work on the game jam instead. I couldn’t work on the commission either, working me up even more. I was yearning for the end of the week by the end of the day already but had to push through, limitign my time with friends as well as time to cook food and do other stuff besides work on game assets.

Under these circumstances, it was a tad extreme: finishing a game in a week. It feels more practical and exciting to work on a bigger project for a much longer time with more flexibility in the approach. Still, it was an awesome experience. Here are a couple of graphics I made for the game:

And yes! The fruits of our team’scombined efforts can be played here for free on itch.io!

-> https://redkitedev.itch.io/out-of-borbit

I am still recovering from last week. I’ve had trouble with sleep as of recent and am hoping it will normalize again soon.

Up next will be finishing the second commission so I can get back to some little personal projects – I’ve been looking at designs from the upcoming monster hunter Wilds and will want to realize a fun little idea I got ^v^

Nothing new aside from that. Same old projects to be done, a few trips to make, hopefully having some free time to enjoy at Uni as well.

This shall be it, my next post after that will be the annual reflection or the yearly round-up of artworks sometime in the first half of January. I gotta get some time to rest after Furvester anyhow…

So enjoy the remainder of the year, have lovely holidays and festivities!

With love,

Souvillaine