Reflections from the artist

My Little Monster was not what our dev team, Cats With Knives, originally had planned for the ECGC Wake Tech game jam. Corey and I planned out an RPG that is still currently in development. We both realized this past month that the scope of the game was too large and we didn’t want to sacrifice the quality of the game. Yet we also felt it was important we submit a game. 

My Little Monster was born from various pet simulator ideas we had in the past. Although the base idea was already there, it still proved to be a challenge to bring it to creation in two weeks. I have created assets in a short period of time before, but it was always on a larger team. So I did little to no implementation with the assets. With being a team of two people I had to implement much more than I was used to, and I am so grateful for that.

Overall this project had a lot of highs and lows with even more “if onlys”. I wanted to have way more animations, more miscellaneous background assets, and a more varied UI. When starting the game I don’t think I had a solid understanding of what was truly a “need” versus a “want”. This caused me to start working on art assets that should have been some of the first things made. This was a good lesson that I will bring with me into future projects. 

Having to cut my own sprite sheets was something I should have learned before I even created a sprite sheet. Due to the fact that I didn’t understand how to implement it, I didn’t know how important things such as spacing actually are. ( I apologize to my past teammates who had to deal with my awful sprite sheets). Implementing the animations was something I assumed would be easy, but there were a lot of unexpected issues that we didn’t expect and sadly didn’t have time to fully fix. Going forward I am going to educate myself on the animation pipeline to ensure that I can see it through. 

Having 100% original art assets is something that’s really important to me. It was the plan for My Little Monster to have all original art assets, so when I didn’t have the time to create all the assets it really got to me. I was really disappointed in myself, especially at that moment. Towards the end of the project I had to choose between creating 3 more backgrounds, or creating the end evolutions. If I would have prioritized the needs better I think this could have been avoided. The evolutions should have been made before any of the backgrounds, animations and UI and instead they were the last assets I made.

Overall I am really proud of what Cats With Knives created in the time we had. It’s definitely not perfect, but I’m not sure if I would have learned as much as I did if it wasn’t in such a short period. I am excited to see what we create in the future and to continue to learn and grow. Thanks for playing My Little Monster!

-Gracie