Tag: gamedev

Today is the 22th birthday of Furamo, this blog.

I used to hold parties to celebrate its birthday years ago, but not anymore. So, to still do something for it, I’ll give an overview of what has been going on for both Furamo and Me that I haven’t mentioned here yet.

Furamo:

• Nothing much. I used to hold quizzes on its birthday, where I would show people random blog posts and they had to guess on what date it was written. That was a nice tradition. It is now dead, but my love for quizzes in general has only grown since then.

Me:

• I haven’t really been learning Japanese anymore. For like half a year already. It used to be a cool regular educational hobby. But haven’t been feeling like doing it. It’s fine probably, I’ve been studying it on and off since high school. So I’ll get back to it when it is the right time.
  Fun fact, I won the local Linguistics Olympiad in high school, because they had a few Japanese questions in it and I guess they didn’t expect competitors to know basic Japanese.
• But instead of learning Japanese I’m slowly learning to draw. Both because I want to draw the art myself for the next video game I am making, and because I just have always been fascinated by drawing, or art in general, and I want my skills to match my vision.
• The first video game I made, Quintillion Quest, didn’t make much money. I lost a few thousand euros total by making it. And its reviews are kinda mixed. Because I made it too hard and confusing, inspired by the hard and confusing games that I play myself. You really need to read guides to get anywhere in my game. I did write some guides for it. But there are no guides in Chinese and Japanese, so the players from these countries don’t really get my game and leave a negative review.
• I’m going to Tartu at the end of the next week for a few days. If you know me, live there, and wanna hang out – let me know.

Hi, welcome back and here’s a low effort blog post for you because I haven’t managed a better one for too long.

I’ve had the hobby of developing my own video games for years now. I have started and abandoned a bunch of projects. But this time I’m the furthest I’ve ever been with a game.

So, I was looking for a background image for the game, to make the negative space in the game look more polished. The Internet nowadays sucks, you can’t find shit on Google, so I just browsed Reddit which is one of the few places left with reasonable human created content.

I found this image that I liked: https://www.reddit.com/r/PixelArt/comments/1bgspon/town_with_a_view/

And I posted a request to the PixelArt community asking whether someone can create a similar piece of art for me.

I got a ton of replies – looks like there are a lot of hungry artists out there looking for work. The prices for this kind of art ranged between $80 and $160.

Finally, the original author of the exact picture that I used as an example contacted me and asked if he can do it himself.

I was embarrassed – I could have just asked him first if he wanted to make a similar one for me, but instead went out looking for others.

So yeah, I did hire him in the end. And I am pleased with the result – it is pretty much what I envisioned for the game.

The final result for the art: