Month: November 2019

28
Nov
2019

Early christmas gift (Huion Q11 v2)

So I decided to buy a new graphics tablet to replace my barely used and very cheap trust tablet with battery powered pen.

I must admit for £100 quid this tablet is nice, big and amply sensitive. I am not professional artist and I did wonder if I’d get my monies worth but all those concerns quickly evaporated when I began using it.

Little bit of Preston practice with new tablet

Quickly using raster persona in Affinity Designer to sketch out the cartoon character, then vector persona to create lines and shapes, I was able to produce the above picture in a few hours.

Another great thing about a decent graphics tablet is I’m able to write up notes on my PC rather than on paper. This help me reduce replication of information say when I taking free flowing notes and then adding them to an agile production web app.

Notes created in SketchBook (free from autodesk) and placed directly in to GDD in hacknplan

So even as a novice artist, I definetly think the tablet was a good move and a real bargain when considered against similar wacom tablets at 3 times the cost. If you thinking of getting a tablet I recommend you just paying a little more and plumbing for huion Q11 v2.

Posted by Ben Curley in Game Dev, 0 comments
18
Nov
2019

False Starts

Well as with all things in life, your best laid plans don’t always pan out. I had hoped to have a regular 15 hours a week to work on various projects but that allocation was tenuis at best.

With family demands and personal experiences the time left in an evening was quickly diminished, and soon any free time was eaten up by kids or playing games as means to unwind. So a few months of time lost ( optimistically about 180 hours) I’m back and I need a more pragmatic approach.

Firstly, the extend time from development has lead to rapid decline in my skills. I have gotten rusty with programming, forgetting the little in’s and outs of Godot and having to hit API more frequently. Familiarity with Affinity Designer gone too, I have to use it more often to start firing those old neurons and relearn old tricks.

The take away from all this is even a moderate break of a few months has a time and knowledge cost when returning. So I still like to manage 15 hours a week goal, but what more important is that I regular engage in game development skills just to keep them warm. It’s better that I sketch for an hour, write a short script and follow a blender tutorial for a total of 4 hours one week than nothing at all.

I will have more time, children are starting to grow up and attend full time school in a few years. This could give me 36-40 hours a week it would be a shame to have to spend some of that covering old ground.

Posted by Ben Curley in Game Dev, 0 comments