Hey everyone, long time no post. I feel an update is long overdue.

Work on No Light Town and The New World Saga was going well until June came along.

Summer time is a notoriously busy time of year for me. The kids are out of school and into their summer club and the Jeff Johnson taxi service goes into full time work for the kid’s baseball tournaments, soccer, beach days and camping trips.

Do I regret any of this? Absolutely not. I’m happy I can keep my kids as active as possible and enjoy the time I have with them before they become teenagers and don’t want to spend as much time with their Dad.

Plus I love swimming…

And water slides…

So summer was a bit of a wash when it came to actually programming the game or working on art assets digitally, but it did have some major benefits for the project, namely a trip to Ontario, the setting of my game!

I spent the month of July in southwestern Ontario for a long overdue family vacation. While I was in Ontario, I travelled around the area the game is going to be set in and took pictures of real life locations.

These are just some of the pictures taken from around Ontario. My train of thought on taking these is to give a feel for the real-life locations in the design of the game. It’ll also help in designing some of the pixel art for the various locations included, which will be awesome to design as I go.

So summer was full of adventure and family time, but then a different kind of delay hit… a healthcare issue.

In October, I was diagnosed with diabetes after three months of some pretty rough symptoms. I won’t go too much into the finer details, but long story short, my doctors were amazed I was even walking when I was diagnosed.

So I’ve spent the last month getting adjusted to the new normal. On one hand, my weight saw a significant drop (can’t argue with losing 50 pounds!), but on the other hand, the diabetes had an impact on my eyesight.

Basically, high blood sugars can impact your eyes, which can make you see better than before. However, once I went back to low blood sugar levels, my eyesight was also reduced, no longer matching my existing glasses prescription. That made reading and editing pixel art a nightmare.

So here we are one month after diagnosis and my blood sugar levels have stabilized really well. I can actually read small print again and I have started doing some pixel editing again. I’ve got nothing significant to share yet (more trees and some wildlife sprites), but I should have some awesome artwork to share soon!

My goal is to finish all the main character sprites early in the new year, then start hammering through some more map design work. Its a lot of work, but it’ll be worth it in the end.

Thanks for sticking with us!