I had no clue animating was this hard - until I started doing it today, and god, am I tired of it already. Admittedly, I’m drawing with a mouse, which isn’t optimal, but I’m doing like 64*128 size art, so it shouldn’t be too bad, but anyhow - I don’t know how artists do this stuff and remain sane. I’ve started to animate Juniper running, and making it flow coherently, making the legs the same length, making the hair flow, it’s all so hard to get just right. Whenever I draw it, it looks so close to completion, but it’s never complete - it’s really killing me.

Once I’ve got Juniper’s sprites made, I suppose I should probably start to think about gameplay, scenery, enemies, and how that’s all gonna work. That’s going to be a challenge in itself, just thinking up how I’m gonna make 40 levels out of this - but I will. I think I’m going to set it in the hospital, but making backgrounds for every bloody level is gonna kill me. Ah well.

I’m thinking of making it in a hospital with 40 levels, and she has to make it up to the roof, with the key to the elevator on each level being a can of Red Bull (or unmarked energy drink, to avoid copyright). On each level there is a different field of “medicine”, starting with regular fields and getting progressively weirder (and darker?) as she ascends. Once she gets to the rooftop she can escape the hospital on a helicopter. she wakes up on the ground floor with a heart rate of 0 bpm, and is locked in the building (can’t get out the locked doors). Every floor, when her heart rate increases, she gets faster, but the obstacles obviously get more challenging.

I’ll figure out what all of the different levels’ themes will be as I continue planning, I’m not that far in yet, and I think getting the animation of Juniper out of the way while I have the time is more useful as I can still ponder ideas while I’m in the process. I’m really not worried about programming this, it’ll just be a big project - but I’m worried about the drawing.