You ever have one of those days where...

You've got loads of code planned that will move your project forwards, and you're under pressure anyway and want to get on with it, then you end up getting bogged down by some technical detail you totally didn't plan for and it takes all day.

BUT by the end of the day, asside from an aching back and neck (cos you haven't got out of your chair once) and eyestrain, you know considerably more than when you started and you never need to cross that bridge again, plus your project (and all future ones) are better off as a result of your pain...

I have whole weeks like that!

I spent weeks agonising over the best approach to creating graphics for my new game. It took me ages to dismiss 3D completely in favour of 2D vector art. Animation sequences are exported as a sequence of PNGs then I use an animstrip creator I wrote to turn them into a single image I can load into BlitzMax.

I don't have deadlines, though. The fact that I wasted probably three weeks on this makes little difference.

um.. no

Quite a few days like that.

GfK: what you using for the vector art? Yeah all the anims in my game are made with GlueIT, but I'm not using any fancy "single surface" code. I'm quite tempted to convert some of my framework to use it now to save on huge amounts of VRAM.

I've already blasted through a couple of deadlines but that's OK because the designer has kept putting new things in and we've also been polishing the hell out of the game-screen. Anyway, I do have a big dealine now because I'm going to the Ukraine at the end of July for two weeks of Aikido training.

I'm using Flash. I had an 'evaluation' copy a few weeks ago after somebody suggested it might fit my requirements, and found Macromedia Studio 8 on eBay which I won for £51 inc postage!

OK so it aint CS3, and I technically paid for Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and a few other bits I'll likely never use, but it seemed like a good deal.

Drawing in vectors is plain weird at first, but there's a lot of benefits when you can draw something and fine tune it afterwards, plus, the lines you get are very smooth. You can draw your graphics, then export it at any size you want and the results always look great.

It definitely beats doing pixel art.

There needs to be a vector art editor made with Blitz, so that graphics for my game can be created at run-time from a fairly small data set. I really really want resolution independance for my stuff :-/

I call it creative block.

I wasn't creatively blocked, I just had a ton of technical issues to solve, it's not quite the same thing :-)

GfK. Yeah I always fancied vector drawing for that reason.

Ah, but they block u from creating so its.... 'creative block' (not the other 'twiddling thumbs while staring out of the window and dribbling' sort that plagues us all at times) :P

Lol i thinkthe politically correct term is feeling creatively challenged due to technical impediments :)

creatively impeded, fair enough.

..its happening to me from time to time..and i figure out that kicking bag in boxing room can help a lot...I actually got very easy angry :)

Oh I don't get angry about stuff like that, it's just stuff to solve that get's in the way of the main project, but once it's done you have a good feeling of accomplishment.

compiling C can do that to you... I just need to suss a way of keeping those bridges built. practice makes perfick... all in good time.

Yup. I've been wasting 2 weeks to decide on the style of graphics I will use for my next game. I settled on a simple style for now. It looks like I am making progress now though.