Guitar Fretter Progress Update

Actual screen capture made into a fancy article banner via Canva.

I'm continuing work on Guitar Fretter. Though I don't have lot new to show.

Working on a video game is different than so many other kinds of art. Sure there's always good old reliable perfectionism to stop anyone making anything from sharing work. But I do see other forms as being more naturally self documenting about new stuff to observe.

Continuing that thought, making interactive games has a lot in common with other software development in that it takes invisible behind the scenes effort mixed with occasional bursts new obvious changes. When those changes happen and what comes of the changes can arrive soon or take longer. It can emerge as working better in subtle ways, like being a smaller download or being a little easier to navigate for someone playing the game. Or some new visual effects and feedback animations then suddenly things feel instantly new.

Now I have my latest workshop published, I'm putting more focus on Guitar Fretter for a few weeks. Hoping to get both the existing game updated and release a new less featured free version before the end of March.

Some things I'm learning since my previous Guitar Fretter status update.

• Processing game assets from layers in Photoshop PSD files via Python is a finicky mixed bag. PSD-Tools is amazing library in many cases but for me it keeps breaking on my new screen layouts.
• Recently the Affinity Photo and Designer tools went on sale for a 50% discount. Added those tools to my Windows machine and switched my screen layout to export from there. It saves layers as PNGs and layer position and size information as JSON. Those file formats are very reliable to process from Python. Now I can quickly layout screens and make them interactive in Lua and Solar 2D.

Well back to work on Guitar Fretter! In case you're excited about the updates, one way to get in the loop is to buy a copy on Android, iOS, Windows, or Mac.