Today is September 24, 2026. Feeling a bit better just by writing this…
Ever since the problem with coding was solved for me, in a way that I can now not only do high-level coding (or scripting which would be better term) but mid-level coding too, allowing me to build myself necessary tools for scripting, thanks to Unity and now Godot, the new “king of the problems” became — graphics. And that left me once again in trouble, since none of my other ideas could contain gathered graphics as Limit Load could. Cool, no? You put incredible amount of effort to jump over one wall, only to crash your nose in the next one right behind it. Life, I guess. In other words, all ideas of mine are pure creation of my own imagination so I won’t find graphics on internet for them.
But after series of fascinating and completely unbelievable events, where I also met Godot among other things (those guys were futilely waiting for him in classic drama, but mine seems like it has actually arrived…), I was, lets say — very — encouraged to learn to make graphics from the scratch myself, particularly stylized graphics aka cartoony one, as my most developed game idea was centered around cartoony 2D arcade game. Thus I went on learning to draw in that particular style. Fun fact is that by going in that direction, I soon got aware that anime had completely conquered world of traditional 2D animation and from what I could see during studies, I gotta say, fair and square. It’s almost touching with how much love and care are anime techniques documented and explained for that semi-realistic category of drawing I was pursuing (real human proportions, impression of real scenery and such), so no wonder its everywhere….
As a small kid who was avid fan of cartoons, before getting into gaming, I considered Don Bluth’s animation as topmost quality animation (which probably still is). Later my idea was that I eventually make 2D game in cartoony style; in that Don Bluth’s art style (but certainly not gameplay!)
And then somewhere during Limit Load development, I came up with this idea…
Basically this is story and setting inspired by an actual WW2 element. Russians did use trained dogs in fight with Nazis and I got this whole idea after I found out that they didn’t use dogs as cannon fodder, but rather trained them to do the job and try to get back alive. And that the job was usually about planting explosive.
https://learning-history.com/soviet-anti-tank-dogs
(German shepherds??! That explains the setbacks then; yeah right, they mixed up the soviet and nazi diesel… they were lying like dogs! They knew well who was who but didn’t want to go against countrymen! Anyway, I am not changing my stance; mine’s gonna be a bum, picked from the streets. Once he goes against real royal german shepherds — that do not pretend for who they work for — it will capture well the essence of the class struggle! …Ahem)
So this is supposed to be an action game where main protagonist is one such exceptional dog; going on, doing usual commando business. But then I had some hardship in unfolding this idea further. For start, I am not really fan of WW2 setting, thus I was thinking going also beyond WW2, where this dog would be harassing operations like famous “Operation Paperclip” or maybe go into altered WW2 setting. And then there was a question of how was this dog going to fight in 2D arcade game. For example, using his jaws is somehow too primitive, but then how to use that NR-40 to go Blaskowitz on his opponents (okay, not THAT gruesome!)? Some pictures of soviet dogs on the web capture somewhat pretty well what’s on my mind at the moment, regarding this element :)
Anyway there were various questions that I was slowly unfolding, expecting that I would soon start making this game, but then, in the last moment, during that series of fascinating and unbelievable events, this idea went on the back seat for now…