Hello Gourdlet friends! Now that it’s starting to get warm enough to venture outside, I thought this would be a good time to take tentative steps out of my solo development cave and give a little update on what I’ve been working on, which recently, has been tons and tons of drawing. If you happened to catch me at GDC & Day of the Devs then maybe you got a sneak peek at some of the new things I’m working on! Thank you everyone who took the time to say hello! I can’t wait to share more news soon but until then… I thought it would be fun to dig up some old pictures and show you how the drawings have evolved. [h2]Behind the Scenes: Home Sweet Home![/h2] Here is the original house artwork that I drew in June 2022, when Gourdlets didn’t have a name yet and was just a hobby that I would spend a few hours on each weekend. [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//43184551/fb055b4024aeea9f2cf218dffe3e54efa343d8e1.png[/img] And then here it was in November 2022, a week before I put up the Steam page and Gourdlets became slightly more real. I realized that not all pixel art needs a thick dark border! With enough visual trickery in the game, this makes things look slightly more 3D. It’s a big compliment when someone is surprised to hear that all of the art in the game is just flat PNG images. [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//43184551/67a0c8b722b5bd675956b21d0a6415901fd048e2.png[/img] And then here is what I came up with this past February, at which point I had been seriously working on Gourdlets for a full year, and was fully in the grips of insanity- dreaming in lines of code, losing all objectivity, and spending 2 hours moving around the pixels on an individual roof shingle in a way that no one but me could possibly notice. But in a fun way! [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//43184551/fa335755cbc3b247c6d0d959519a0bef7f65af6f.png[/img] I’ve also been hard at work on programmatically generating many colors of each object- this is really fun because I just have to draw the 1 base item, and then can spend the next 15 hours a normal amount of time coming up with a color palette, and then my code spits out all the recolored artwork. I’m also working on updating the UI like crazy to make it look more organized, here’s a sneak peek at what I have so far: [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//43184551/ec277b45a0a695f0418647186bb0899fd5972058.jpg[/img] Plus a sneak peek at some of the other buildings! There are just a few houses in the current Steam demo, but now I have 8 base houses x 8 colors = 64 unique house buildings. Math! And here they are on display with a few other new items… 👀 [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//43184551/15e061c42302c7957410b96496f95d14d271dce5.jpg[/img] [h2]Cool houses! Now what?[/h2] Now it’s time for me to get back to drawing a ton more objects, and answering tricky questions like: do gourdlets need toasters?????? Thank you so much for reading this and supporting the development of Gourdlets! Here is your reward: an important picture of Cinny and Poppy eating salad. [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//43184551/29c562e658470afa45bc3d36aa29e675aeb0ac6a.jpg[/img] - Preethi Vaidyanathan