So it's been a week since the jam deadline - the jam that motivated me to actually sit down and attempt to make the game I've kind of always wanted to, but didn't think it would float in the modern world - a homage to Monkey Island!

Not the remastered one. Or the latest, weird square-headed version, with the unsettling clean UI. Nope, I'm thinking the 1990 classic, with the awesome LucasFilm Games pixel art, and funny dialogue that kind of skirts around what it would actually be like to be a pirate, using humorous and clever situations and puzzles to drive you through a movie-like experience, that everybody remembers once they've been through it. And then you have Monkey Island 2 - even better. What if I could make two games that pay tribute to these classics, while telling my own story, with my own characters, and creating my own world? Will people be interested? Does anyone want to play that? 
Well, yeah, I reckon they do. .Maybe not millions. Perhaps not hundreds of thousands (of people, not the little flakey things you put on ice cream). But there will be some. Enough. 

Just enough, perhaps, to make it a worthwhile pursuit. And even if not, if the game is complete and just a few old timers get a kick out of it, then that'll be worth it too ;)

So, then, where do we go from here? First, make a demo, put it into a game jam. Realise you have nowhere near enough time to finish even the first few puzzles and plot points, but submit what you've got. Hopefully there'll be someone to inspire the further endevour.

Well, that's what happened, so here we are. In seven days, I've spent more time on pixel art than programming, which is a nice change from the pressure of doing it all in a game jam. That's the key to any type of success -the pixel art.

At the moment, I'm doing it all alone, and learning as quickly as I can to scale up from my comfort zone - 24 x 24 range characters. Gameboy Color type sprites. Now, I need to step up to the Amiga and VGA style graphics, which I have done a bit, but not on the scale this will take.

I've already made an "attempting to pull swordy from the stone" animation sequence that I'm pretty pleased with. That's the thing with pixel art: the more you do it, the better you get. Same with coding, but sometimes you get hazy, forget things or confuse the best way to approach a problem. But with pixel art, things just seem to improve exponentially, the more stuff you make.

So that's where I'm going now - get a few more sprites done for the opening sequence ;)