Gourdlets: Spring Dev Diary 🌼

A little update featuring buildings and bunnies!

Hello there!

I hope this email finds you well! Now that it’s April and starting to get warm enough to venture outside, I thought this would be a good time to take tentative steps out of my solo development cave and give a little update on what I’ve been working on, which recently, has been tons and tons of drawing… 

I thought it would be fun to dig up some old pictures and show you how the drawings have evolved over time. 

Home Sweet Home

Here is the original house artwork that I drew in June 2022, when Gourdlets didn’t have a name yet and was just a hobby that I would spend a few hours on each weekend. 

A little pixel art house begins to take shape

And then here it was in November 2022, a week before I put up the steam page and Gourdlets became slightly more real. I realized that not all pixel art needs a thick dark border! With enough visual trickery in the game, this makes things look slightly more 3D. It’s a big compliment when someone is surprised to hear that all of the art in the game is just flat PNG images.

Soft colors are the way to go!

And then here is what I came up with this past February, at which point I had been seriously working on Gourdlets for a full year, and was fully in the grips of insanity- dreaming in lines of code, losing all objectivity, and spending 2 hours moving around the pixels on an individual roof shingle in a way that no one but me could possibly notice. But in a fun way!

Brick work to add a nice texture

I’ve also been hard at work on programmatically generating many colors of each object. This is really fun because I just have to draw the 1 base item, and then can spend the next 15 hours a normal amount of time coming up with a color palette, and then my code spits out all the recolored artwork! I’m also working on updating the UI like crazy to make it look more organized, here’s a sneak peek at what I have so far:

Look at all those houses! And possible new UI?

Plus a sneak peek at some of the other buildings! There are just a few houses in the current steam demo, but now I have 8 base houses x 8 colors = 64 unique house buildings. Math!

And here they are on display with a few other new items that I haven’t shown anywhere else yet 👀

A very colorful neighborhood

Cool houses! Now what?

Now it’s time for me to get back to drawing a ton more objects, and answering tricky questions like: do gourdlets need toasters??????

Thank you so much for reading this and supporting the development of Gourdlets! Here is your reward: an important picture of Cinny and Poppy eating salad.

Cinny and Poppy. Bunny Besties.

- Preethi Vaidyanathan, AuntyGames