I had reserved 7-8 days to work on “Art” in M2, which includes Outsider’s second soundtrack song and the Steam “capsule” image, which might also be reused for the game’s opening screen. Due to unexpectedly high output, particularly with the capsule, I finished the whole thing this week… Freeing time for completing the milestone early - likely by Tuesday of the next week. Instead of early milestone completion, I will pick up some M3 work and try to keep wrapping up milestones on Friday.

This was, then, a good week! But things could have been very different… The initial work with the Outsider capsule was frustrating due to poor DAZ3D documentation, and at one point, I thought the work would take longer than initially planned. However, things came together when I least expected, and things just started falling into place. The capsule was done within a few hours of the DAZ3D Blender import working. This is not necessarily the final image, but I think changes will be minimal from the current version:

I then went to work on the soundtrack on Wednesday. One of the hardest things about planning composition work is that, traditionally, I’ve done most of it when “inspiration hits”. I already had some ideas for the song from earlier weekend jamming, but I nonetheless found myself sitting in front of my studio computer at 9 AM, wondering what I should do next… Fortunately, many famous writers and composers stress the importance of actually not waiting for inspiration and instead forcing yourself to work - exactly what I was doing due to the circumstances. And voila, after 10 or 15 minutes of scratching my head, music did start “flowing,” and I spent a full day in front of the sequencer getting things done.

On the next day, however, I experienced a common problem among people who work with audio: listener fatigue, which came with no warning right after my morning walk - when I always listen to music. It’s really hard to do anything meaningful with audio when feeling this; it’s very much like trying to keep exercising after a long workout. So, I had to take a 2-hour break where I tried to be in a completely quiet environment… Slowly, I started feeling better and was able to get back to audio work. After a few more hours, I finished a rough mix of the song, titled Lazuli, and was quite pleased with the result. It’s not really “Berlin school ambient” music… But hey, that’s what “came to me” this week. :)

With things done ahead of time, I finally dedicated time to figuring out something I had been procrastinating for a long time: the game’s font selection. This sounds like an irrelevant detail, but picking beautiful and functional fonts is very important for any game, and in particular games involving nontrivial amounts of reading. My goal is to offer a diverse palette of fonts from which the player will be able to pick and change at will during the game. The fonts needed to be somewhat familiar but not too familiar so the game doesn’t look like every other game; ultimately, I selected Source Sans 3 for the UI, which won’t be configurable by the player, plus seven font options for the game text:

That’s it for the week!