CardChasm

[sburrow]

Well, it's been a busy two days for me. Not with coding! But yesterday I was getting pretty discouraged. I think that my pixel art isn't great, and just because I had only "two more to do" before I moved on, I have many many more planned for the full game. Basically I felt like it'll end up amateur-hour and then be a pointless endeavor. And without enough morale, any project I'm doing is dead.

My wife is a multi-decade hobbyist artist, and I asked her for her opinion. I showed her my best pixel art, then compared to the rest I was churning out. Then I showed her the AI generated versions, with severe modifications from me. And honestly, the AI stuff just looks better. AND, maybe equally important, is that they are far faster since I am doing only small hand modifications and then using code to finish it up.

I then made two enemies in just minutes last night, and with what little time I've had today I made about 8 others. See attached!

So, yes, it's AI generated. And we've already had this discussion. But I will probably be going down this road for the remainder of the project. I think the end product will be better for it. Most importantly, my morale is high once again, so I can continue working on this.

Well, there's my update. I might be a sell-out, but at least the project continues.

Chad

[BigEd]

It's good to watch out for your morale and to find a way to make progress.

A non-AI approach, perhaps, would be to reach out to someone who does pixel art, and make a collaboration of it. That's the sort of things online communities can be good for.

[drogon]

sburrow wrote:

Well, it's been a busy two days for me. Not with coding! But yesterday I was getting pretty discouraged. I think that my pixel art isn't great, and just because I had only "two more to do" before I moved on, I have many many more planned for the full game. Basically I felt like it'll end up amateur-hour and then be a pointless endeavor. And without enough morale, any project I'm doing is dead.

My wife is a multi-decade hobbyist artist, and I asked her for her opinion. I showed her my best pixel art, then compared to the rest I was churning out. Then I showed her the AI generated versions, with severe modifications from me. And honestly, the AI stuff just looks better. AND, maybe equally important, is that they are far faster since I am doing only small hand modifications and then using code to finish it up.

I then made two enemies in just minutes last night, and with what little time I've had today I made about 8 others. See attached!

So, yes, it's AI generated. And we've already had this discussion. But I will probably be going down this road for the remainder of the project. I think the end product will be better for it. Most importantly, my morale is high once again, so I can continue working on this.

Well, there's my update. I might be a sell-out, but at least the project continues.

Chad

If your focus is the coding then why not let someone/thing else go the graphics? I've no issues with that. Maybe it might even stimulate your artisty wife to start looking at other ways to develop her work too?

Once upon a time I worked for a PC Games company... We had a team of artists and a team of programmers. I wasn't in the artists team but would often (As we all did) have meetings with the artists to discuss various aspects.

My wife is a writer and she sometimes uses AI to resolve some tricky writings she needs (poems) - she reckons they're not quite good enough for her work yet, so if she's using an AI (and some are better than others) she'll spend time tweaking their output, or re-wording the input - and that's a skill that will take AI more time to "learn".

-Gordon

[sburrow]

BigEd wrote:

It's good to watch out for your morale and to find a way to make progress.

drogon wrote:

Maybe it might even stimulate your artisty wife to start looking at other ways to develop her work too?

Thank you both for the encouraging words. I felt very sheepish posting about it after our previous discussion, but I wouldn't like to hide it either. Good points, and again, thank you.

Chad

[BigDumbDinosaur]

sburrow wrote:

Well, it's been a busy two days for me. Not with coding! But yesterday I was getting pretty discouraged...So, yes, it's AI generated...

Many years ago, a programmer I worked with often justified the use of canned routines in his code by saying when he built his house, he didn’t make his bricks from scratch and didn’t fell trees to making the wall studs.  Or, viewed from a culinary perspective, even the most advanced professional chefs don’t go out to a cattle ranch and slaughter steers to prepare steak flambeau.  You should consider that line of thinking as you flesh out your game.

In my large-scale railroad hobby, I make the things that I can’t purchase, and purchase the things I can’t make. 

[sburrow]

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

You should consider that line of thinking as you flesh out your game.

Thank you BDD. It is tricky, because at this type of bare-metal level, I tend to make my own tools in order to make more tools! Many times now I tried a couple of tools that other have used to convert to this or that format, but I was displeased, so I made my own tools. But when is it ok to just let someone else do it for you? When is it ok to say, "Ah there's a library for that"? It's tough.

So for now I'm going to keep morale high by not bearing the full weight of the title of 'artist' just yet. See attached for a menu title that was thrown at me by AI! Better than what I could do right now.

In case y'all are wondering, I'm using a Perchance AI Image Generator, specifically https://perchance.org/3iey4i1ckv. It is incredibly multi-purposed.

Tomorrow is another busy day, very little time to do this sort of thing. Oh well, day by day.

Thanks everyone.

Chad

[BigDumbDinosaur]

sburrow wrote:

...because at this type of bare-metal level, I tend to make my own tools in order to make more tools! Many times now I tried a couple of tools that other have used to convert to this or that format, but I was displeased, so I made my own tools. But when is it ok to just let someone else do it for you? When is it ok to say, "Ah there's a library for that"? It's tough.

It’s all about knowing when something that needs doing and is not one of your skills, is better done by some other entity.  Fundamentally, the question to be settled is whether or not investing time to learn a new skill is a good use of the finite (but unknown) amount of time you have been allotted in this life.  I have encountered that fork-in-the-road numerous times and as I have gotten older and more aware of how much time I don’t have left, I have learned to be realistic about how valuable a new skill will be five or ten years later (at my age, “ten years later” may never come).  As a result, there have been any number of things that went into my various projects that were some other’s work.

Turning to another to get help with completing project used to bother me...a lot.  I have been very self-reliant in years past, learning such diverse skills as sheet metal fabrication, precision machining and advanced welding techniques to build things such as my race cars and my locomotive.  For example, I built the race cars’ chassis and roll cages from scratch, cutting and shaping tubing, forming crossmembers, fabricating brackets, etc., followed by a lot of welding.  Obviously, I had to invest considerable time in developing those skills, which also involved trashing a not-inconsiderable amount of metal during the learning process.    The time invested in those skills was worth it because I was able to repeatedly use them up until very recently.

However, in those projects, there were occasions when I had to concede to myself that I needed outside help—the required skill was too specialized to justify investing more learning time.  The result was despite, for example, paying someone to do the paint and lettering on my race cars, I could still say “I built that.” with the same level of honesty that a man could say after designing and finishing his own house, even though he had to entice his buddies with pizza and beer to help him erect the framing, had to hire a professional to do the roof, and again call on his buddies to assist with hanging drywall.

Quote:

So for now I'm going to keep morale high by not bearing the full weight of the title of 'artist' just yet. See attached for a menu title that was thrown at me by AI! Better than what I could do right now.

That looks perfectly fine to me.  I’m not a visual artist—a stick figure is pretty much my skill level, but can recognize something that is artistic in appearance, whether drawn by man or machine.  If, for some unfathomable reason, I suddenly got a burr under my saddle to create a computer game (ain’t gonna happen!) and needed to create some reasonably-artistic action figures to populate it, I’d have absolutely no qualms about “borrowing” what I can find on-line.

[BigEd]

I'm tempted to say there's another slightly hidden aspect to this: if you collaborate, that's a skill that you can learn and improve, and likewise if you delegate. Even if you delegate to a machine, there's a skill in doing it well.

[Dr Jefyll]

Quote:

if you collaborate, that's a skill that you can learn and improve, and likewise if you delegate.

A thought-provoking point, Ed! And a gentle reminder that perhaps my own collaboration & delegations skills are due for review...

-- Jeff

[sburrow]

BigEd wrote:

Even if you delegate to a machine, there's a skill in doing it well.

That is true. Indeed, the AI prompt is like 1% of the work put into it. But then I have to scale it down properly, change colors, then edit it, then edit it again, etc. But that 1% would be 99% of the work I would have to do if I did it by hand. Math

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

Fundamentally, the question to be settled is whether or not investing time to learn a new skill is a good use of the finite (but unknown) amount of time you have been allotted in this life.

Yes. Even at 40 years old right now, I have the feeling like I'm running out of time, and I need to do as much as I can while I'm still alive.

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

The time invested in those skills was worth it because I was able to repeatedly use them up until very recently.

And that's the balance. Will I be using pixel art skills later? Probably, but no nearly as much as coding. Can I still put some time into pixel art and learn that skill as I go? Certainly! I think I already learned a lot. But still so much left to go.

Thanks for the conversation guys.

See attached. I've been coding all day long it seems, and for the better. I improved my title screen, then added an 'exchange' sub-menu. Essentially it will be a way for the player to swap out cards from their deck and their sideboard before entering into one of the tunnels. Right now the sideboard is not yet active, so I'm using placeholders for now, but you can see the idea.

Lots of little improvements all around really. After I get that sideboard set up in memory, I'd say that this project is about 95% complete. I just need to adjust some game mechanics that make it 'fun' and add replay value to the experience.

I finally had a full day of coding And it's been such a blast!

Thanks everyone.

Chad

[sburrow]

Done (-ish)! Everything is on my GitHub page, https://github.com/stevenchadburrow/CardChasm

So, yes, I'm done, basically. I only have to do audio at this point, and perhaps some small modifications to math or something.

I added a 'difficulty level' at the beginning of each tunnel, increasing enemy damage essentially. I added a 'player level' according to how many enemies you've beaten on the current tunnel. I added random reward cards from bosses. I made the 'exchange' into 'rewards' because it is now one-sided, knocking out your current deck card for whatever you chose from your rewards.

I'm amazed that I actually used less than 32KB of memory for this whole game, with all of it's artwork and whatnot. It uses the UxROM mapper, which is capable of up to 128KB of memory in standard form, but up to 4MB in extended form. Also, I am only using 256 bytes of PRG-RAM, where I would store the deck of cards in battery-backed RAM on the cart. I might just design a cart PCB for this game just because it would be neat to see

I'll keep y'all posted as I get the audio done. Another project, nearly complete!

Chad

[sburrow]

Alright, I think I'm done. I added sound effects for most things like walking, attacking, selecting things, etc. I haven't done music, but I think I'm going to call it here. The game is 'finished' but it could use a ton of polish, more enemies, more card effects, better math, etc. Might as well add music to the list of things to do also!

I posted the game on itch.io just now: https://stevenchadburrow.itch.io/card-chasm

And of course I have my GitHub page updated: https://github.com/stevenchadburrow/CardChasm

Thanks everyone, another fun adventure in 6502-land! What's next?

Chad