Hello Gourdlet friends! Now that its starting to get warm enough to venture outside, I thought this would be a good time to take tentative steps out of my solo development cave and give a little update on what Ive been working on, which recently, has been tons and tons of drawing. If you happened to catch me at GDC & Day of the Devs then maybe you got a sneak peek at some of the new things Im working on! Thank you everyone who took the time to say hello! I cant wait to share more news soon but until then I thought it would be fun to dig up some old pictures and show you how the drawings have evolved.

Behind the Scenes: Home Sweet Home!

Here is the original house artwork that I drew in June 2022, when Gourdlets didnt have a name yet and was just a hobby that I would spend a few hours on each weekend.
And then here it was in November 2022, a week before I put up the Steam page and Gourdlets became slightly more real. I realized that not all pixel art needs a thick dark border! With enough visual trickery in the game, this makes things look slightly more 3D. Its a big compliment when someone is surprised to hear that all of the art in the game is just flat PNG images.
And then here is what I came up with this past February, at which point I had been seriously working on Gourdlets for a full year, and was fully in the grips of insanity- dreaming in lines of code, losing all objectivity, and spending 2 hours moving around the pixels on an individual roof shingle in a way that no one but me could possibly notice. But in a fun way!
Ive also been hard at work on programmatically generating many colors of each object- this is really fun because I just have to draw the 1 base item, and then can spend the next 15 hours a normal amount of time coming up with a color palette, and then my code spits out all the recolored artwork. Im also working on updating the UI like crazy to make it look more organized, heres a sneak peek at what I have so far:
Plus a sneak peek at some of the other buildings! There are just a few houses in the current Steam demo, but now I have 8 base houses x 8 colors = 64 unique house buildings. Math! And here they are on display with a few other new items

Cool houses! Now what?

Now its time for me to get back to drawing a ton more objects, and answering tricky questions like: do gourdlets need toasters?????? Thank you so much for reading this and supporting the development of Gourdlets! Here is your reward: an important picture of Cinny and Poppy eating salad.
- Preethi Vaidyanathan