Figure 2: What could be in this drawer!?

As part of the art rework, I've started polishing and improving the UX of the minigames encountered in Act 1; these reworks always take longer than I expect but it's satisfying to finally experience the improved game feel.

I decided to stop trying to shoehorn Blender into my workflow (bye-bye pipe-dream of auto-generating pixel assets) and instead roll up my sleeves to hand-pixel them, hopefully improving observational skill in the process.

There was some initial trepidation about nothing looking good but now I'm finding the physical process of blocking out shapes and then adding shading and highlights to be a more soothing process than fidgeting with camera and lights.

3D assisted art gen might make a resurgence later but for now, there's only one scene left that's got some procedurally-generated assets in it (the one with hexagonal grids).

After trying out Aseprite for a while, I went back to Krita as I used its layer palletisation feature a lot: to add depth, I'd often eyedrop (hold <Ctrl> and click) the current colour, tweak it a shade (k to darken, l to lighten), apply some pixels and then palettise (<Ctrl-f>) the layer to turn those colours into ones that are only present in my palette.

I'm still struggling with character sprite art however; at that level, every pixel is so significant. Getting the walk cycle or other custom animations done feels like pulling teeth but I've found having the Pokemon 4th generation spritesheets in view as reference helps.

I can't believe I'm only finding out about Krita's scripting school resource this week (https://scripting.krita.org/lessons/introduction) - namely, writing Python scripts binding them to hotkeys (<Ctrl-Shift> + 1-9).

I've been producing most assets from a big spritesheet so I can be aware of the composition/set design, but this meant picking out the object's regions in Godot, which can be fragile if e.g. if I'd wanted to make the living room bigger I'd need to shift around some sofas in the process.

Now, when creating individual sprites, I've put each asset on a different layer and run a script to export them separately into their images.

For creating spritesheets to use for Godot tilemaps, a script that exports it to the right location also shaves off a few keypresses going through the export dialogue (and having to occasionally reselect the export location - this has been an annoyance for a while; my previous attempt was trying to use Krita from the command line to do the export (https://docs.krita.org/en/reference_manual/linux_command_line.html) but it requires Krita to be closed, which was a faff).