game of the month: pomodotchi!!

introducing my game for february: pomodotchi! I have fond memories of taking care of its partial namesake the tamagotchi, and I'm glad to be part of the long tradition of digital pets. if your mind is also primed by the idea of taking care of a little guy perhaps indefinitely, give this one a shot.

this is my second month doing game of the month and let me just say... this is tough!! I started doing this to kick my vice of perfectionism and try a bunch of new things, but I don't quite have the skill or intuition to make the games I want to in the limited time I have. my biggest challenge is trying not to double the scope of the game halfway through making it. there are so many good and funny things!!

but..... BUT!! I'm having a lot of fun, learning a lot (note: what the author set out to do) and I'm actually quite happy with how this one came out!!

a couple fun things I learned along the way this month:

• how not to fall victim to jaggies, and other pixel art learnings from "Pixel Logic" by Michael Azzi. many thanks to my friend and discord conspirator DT who lent me his digital copy! it was the perfect book for the busy month I was having - easy to read, full of beautiful examples, and offering super direct and modular methods to make pixel art look cleaner. that said, I still felt like I was breaking a sweat drawing a little banana or two. I'm looking forward to playing around more in the medium and getting the hang of it.
• gamemaker alarms are good! no more boilerplate counters in 2D game development in the fortuitous year of 2023
• the pomodoro method suggests you take 4 pomodoros before taking a long break (mentioned for no reason at all... very unrelated to the game.... stop reading this sentence!)

until next month!!