Creative arts week turned out to be a bit of a wash-out. I'd decided that this week I'd spend my game dev time working through some drawing exercises from How to Draw Anime and Game Characters (vol. 1). However, it seems I've been plagued once again with insomnia this week, so after spending a mere half day working on robot vision research I'm just too fatigued to do anything much except rest for several hours. I have managed to get as far as drawing several bald deformed heads in various orientations, but nothing good enough to post here yet.

I've also been meaning to try and some up with some "tournament" sounding music, but I just can't seem to get something that sounds right. I've stumbled on a whole bunch of other nice sounding tunes, but nothing appopriate. If I was feeling a bit better I'd have whipped one of those up as an exercise in composition, but it's been a bit hard to do anything that creative this week.

Other than that, I've been playing a few games occasionally when I feel up to it. If you're a fan of puzzle games, I'd recommend The Adventures of Bobo that Kuro recently posted on the forums. It's quite hard in places, but still an awful lot of fun.

I've also been playing a little bit of Fire Emblem for the Gamecube; I'd never played a strategy or tactics game for a console before, but it's actually a lot of fun. For some reason, combining an RPG world with some actual gameplay is a winning combination with me [grin]. I'm also impressed with how effective the minimalist presentation of the story is; the story is progressed through text boxes and by superimposing cutouts of the characters with animated heads on predrawn backgrounds. It actually works quite well, and if I get my art skills up to scratch then I think this method would be feasible for a lone developer like me.

Now that there's only half a week before I head off back home to Melbourne, I doubt I can get much more done before then; I've still got to do all the preparation for the holidays. However, if I can muster the energy I still want to get some art or music samples finished, just to keep working on building up my skills. Since I'm also still stuck on game ideas, I think I'll write down a one page concept description for every great game idea that I've had (that I can remember).