The Current Situation with Naked Little Dude

I decided to write up a little something on my site with regards to Naked Little Dude. Rather than have a lengthy post on Kickstarter I decided to just give a brief summary and then allow more information on here if any body is interested or wants to read more about it.

Recently the developments on Naked Little Dude have been slow and this is for numerous reasons that I’ll get into more now.

  • The obvious reason is Covid-19. Obviously this doesn’t just affect me and I know everyone is having a rough time with this but this leads into my next point.
  • My working environment is now my home environment and I’ve really struggled to pick up the development at home. It now feels like a less enjoyable environment as when I sit down to do something it’s like I’m sitting down to do work.
  • Work has also become pretty heavy and this is making me more tired and along with the above less interested in spending lengthy times at my laptop.
  • My mum isn’t dealing with it at all well. She was already showing signs of dementia and sadly since lock down has declined rapidly. All though has shown better sign of health recently thank god.
  • I had a little meltdown the other week for numerous reason (mainly above) but having spent a day in the sun and then having a drink with all of this fell apart a little.
  • I had a great idea to rush through and build the level and return to them later to polish them. This wasn’t a good idea (more on this one in a minute).

So as you see things aren’t going too well! Also with that said I get I’m luckily to have a job, my family is in good health and normally I don’t really talk much about my problems as they seem trivial in comparison to other people. I guess we’re all allowed a little wobble now and again.

Anyway…. moving on to the silly issues I have with Naked Little Dude and mainly the blocker that has demotivated me every time I try and do something…..

I had this great idea that I would tear through all my levels and make a rough design and then later return to it to polish it.

The above level was were I parked it and the reason is because each level has 3 collectables and piece of shopping so I try and think of ways that I can place them as I go. Only on this occasion I had to stop this level before I finished it and spend a few days off it

On my return to look at this I had totally forgotten what I was doing so parked it and returned to the water level I rushed to add an Eel I was working. Only I didn’t like the look of that level because I rushed it!

So instead of working on the Eel I started drawing some random sprites for in the water. But then I tried to finish my Eel (which I broke) and then the frustration of the level looking crappy got to me so I returned to that frozen level to finish that and then remembered why I stopped doing that…..

Eel

At this point I decided I should go back and finish the levels on the first world which is the right thing to do but having finally moved to the frozen world I felt this was a step in the wrong direction and then I seem to be stuck in a constant battle.

I do need to focus on one world at a time though and this is definitely an issue with the cave level. There’s too many silly leaps of faith that make no sense and in my crusade to make the level bigger and better I just made it bigger with empty space.

cave

On the positive side I have drawn a lot of stuff for in the water and a few more idle animations to go with the ones that pigeonhat originally did for me and I now understand I need to go back and try and improve on what I already have before I tear off through everything else.

I’ll also be leaving enemies until the end. And focus on the level design using just the gorilla enemies and then come back and add new ones once the foundation is there.

I might also just build the village area (or some of it) and release a small demo on Steam. I feel this might also be a good thing to try once I have everything sorted.

Finally I’d like to apologise for losing some momentum with this. I’m thankful to all the backers that made this possible but at the same time I haven’t been making the progress I would have liked.

Hopefully onward and upwards from here though!

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