The roughly four months that I’ve spend almost full time with Blender and Godot this year were mostly occupied with learning how to use the primary tools I am going to be using to make my game and what they are for. For a good while I felt like I was impulsively running from one thing to the next, never really applying the new skills I had just learned. But the last two weeks in particular I have been discovering that this has actually been a really good approach, as it turns out there are a lot of things that really only start to fully make sense when you can see them in the context of the other tools they will be working together with. I could have made a big library of assets over the course of this year, but probably would have ended up doing everything over from scratch because my understanding of how I will be lighting the game has changed a lot. And plenty of other things like that.

But I feel that at least in the graphical department, I do have all the skills that I was planning to use, and I also have worked out the exact specifications for the textures that will go into the game, and the process of how I can produce more as they become needed quickly, without causing a big disruption of what I am working on. Scripting game mechanics is of course still a very different story, but fortunately the Cogito template already has most of the functions I am going to need. And diving into it to see how they work will be a lot easier than learning how to do all these things from scratch.

But I am now very confident about starting work on the main asset library, and not having to come back later and completely rework most of the models and textures. And first impressions are looking highly promising. I am absolutely happy with this level of graphical fidelity and quality, and it is exactly what I’ve been envisioning for over a year now. I do think this is probably going to be the art style of Iridium Moons pretty much locked in already.