Alright, so today I wanna talk about this little project I called “cityguy”. Nothing earth-shattering, you know, just something I tinkered with a while back. It’s funny how these small things sometimes stick with you more than the big, serious stuff.
How It All Started
I remember I was feeling a bit stuck, creatively. Everything I tried to work on felt too big, too complicated. You know that feeling? Like you’re wading through mud. I just wanted to make something, anything, that I could actually see an end to. So, “cityguy” wasn’t born out of some grand vision, more like a need to just… do something simple.
I decided I wanted to make a little character, a “cityguy,” just walking. That’s it. No epic story, no complex mechanics. Just a dude, in a city, taking a stroll.
Fumbling Through the Process
So, first things first, I needed to actually make the guy. I’m no artist, mind you. I found some free pixel art software online – the kind that’s pretty straightforward, point and click. Man, my first attempts were rough. He looked more like a lopsided rectangle with stick legs. I spent a good evening just tweaking pixels, trying to get a shape that at least resembled a person. Lots of erasing and re-drawing.
Then came the walking part. Oh boy. Animation is a whole other beast, even super simple pixel animation. I wanted him to have a little bounce in his step. So, I had to figure out how to:
- Draw a few different frames for the walk cycle.
- Make sure they looped smoothly.
- Not make him look like he was sliding on ice.
This took way longer than I thought. I was just previewing this tiny loop over and over, tweaking a pixel here, shifting a leg there. My cat probably thought I’d lost my mind, staring at this jerky little figure for hours.
Once I had him sort of walking, I thought, well, a “cityguy” needs a city, right? Again, super simple. Just some blocky building shapes in the background. Different shades of grey, maybe a dark blue for the sky. I tried to add a car once, just a moving rectangle. Total disaster. It looked like a brick flying across the screen. Scrapped that idea pretty quick. Less is more, I told myself.
What Came Out of It
In the end, “cityguy” was just that: a tiny pixel dude, endlessly walking past some very basic buildings. I didn’t put it in a game, didn’t try to sell it as an NFT or anything crazy. He just lived on my computer for a while. Sometimes I’d just watch him loop for a minute or two.
It sounds pretty pointless, I guess. But for me, it was about the making of it. I’d been wrestling with this other massive project before, some database thing for a local club, and it was just a nightmare. Forms not working, data getting lost, people complaining. I was pulling my hair out. Seriously. My wife said I was becoming a real grump.
So, switching to making this little “cityguy” was like a breath of fresh air. It was something I had total control over. If a pixel was wrong, I moved it. If the color was off, I changed it. No angry emails, no confusing error messages I couldn’t decipher. Just me and this little dude.
And you know what? After I finished him, I actually felt a bit better. Like I’d cleared some cobwebs from my brain. It’s funny, the actual “cityguy” animation is probably saved on an old hard drive somewhere, gathering digital dust. But the process, that little journey of making something incredibly simple, just for the heck of it? Yeah, I still remember that pretty clearly. Sometimes, that’s all you need.