To those who are realistic yet choose chase your wildest dreams anyway: On Sunday nights, my wife and I welcome the week ahead by watching our favorite youtuber named Martijn Doolaard. He releases an hour long video each and every Sunday, in which he uses vlogging and breathtaking views captured with drone footage to tell his story: as a 39 years old man from the Netherlands, he is single-handedly renovating an abandoned ruins in the middle of nowhere in the mountains of rural Northern Italy. Martijn himself is a person to look up to. He’s humble, fair, stoic, clever, and quiet – but what’s most important is that he’s an pragmatic realist yet somehow he’s also a cultivator of beautiful dreams.
In his early twenties, he began his career in graphics design (a skill he still uses to make income), and eventually decided to start finding ways to make passive income on the side. One of the ways which he achieved this was by blogging, which led him to eventually take a break from his job and start an epic biking journey that took him all the way around the world. Now, he works primarily as an off-grid homesteading vlogger who endlessly finds ways to improve his rustic property. He works on a variety of complex projects all by hand – plumbing, stone-carving, masonry, roofing, and so much more.
During last night’s episode, Martijn was doing a Q&A, and someone asked him how he prevents himself from becoming overwhelmed by large projects, or when he makes mistakes.
“You have to keep going. Because the alternative, giving up, is worse. So you have no choice other than to keep going. And I like big projects because they give me purpose. That’s why I did the bicycle journeys. They sound like insane, big projects which you can’t do. You can’t cycle around the world…
“But you can, if you take it slowly.”
Martijn Doolaard, November 2023
And with that, welcome back to the Cider Mill! Let’s dive into this week’s post – we’ve got some good cider brewing.
Goop, my First Character Sprite

Meet Goop. He’s a blue beetle guy, but with eight appendages. I tried giving him wings:

I was quite happy with Goop’s wings themselves, but I thought that they didn’t really fit the calm, cute nature of Goop. Also if he’s a beetle, you’d expect to see more beetle-ish wings rather than dragon wings! So I ditched the wings for now.
But what if you wanted to see Goop from different angles? For instance, what if he was an NPC or an enemy in a videogame? These questions gave rise to Goop’s left, right, and rear aspects:

So now, all that’s left to do is animate Goop! (this may be a project to work on for next week).
Experimenting with different color schemes, Goop’s friends were born:

During this upcoming week, I’ll try to animate Goop and his friends in the idle state. Maybe in the future, we can even give Goop other animation states like a “sleeping state” or an “defensive state”, perhaps adding an attack animation.
Barn Upgrade
Remember the barn from last week? It now has a roof and chimney!

While I’m happy with the whole composition, I feel like the roof looks too simple, and I want to add some variation to the material. Right now, it looks like a brand new shiny metal roof with no flaws or variation. It’s also incredibly tall. I made the roof very vertically long to give the appearance that the barn extends backwards behind the front of the barn, to make it look like the barn’s depth is about twice its width.
Also, I love the colors of the chimney, but I feel the shape is a bit off. Looks a bit wonky. This is something I would like to improve in the future.
The next thing I added were some simple animations. I added smoke to the chimney an animation for the door opening and closing. A close friend of mine suggested that I could add a baby cow sticking it’s head out of the barn when the door opens, and perhaps it could take a little stroll in front of the barn before heading back in. I loved this idea and I will try to work on realizing it in the coming weeks.
My first Tile-Sets
The last thing I worked on this week are creating Tile-sets. In Aseprite 1.3 (currently in beta), you have the ability to create a set of 2D tiles that you can use to build structures in your game. I watched a video by AdamCYounis (one of my favorite pixel artists on YouTube) on how to create these types of tile-sets. Here’s a link to that video.
Keep in mind, these tile-sets are not done! They’re just the skeleton of a much more detailed series of tile-sets that will probably take a few days (each) to complete.
Here’s the first preliminary tile set, titled “simple grassy tiles”:

There are two main squares, consisting of 13 total tiles. The square on the left consists of 9 tiles (3×3) that make a box with lighter shades of green on the outside and progressively darker shades on the inside. The smaller square on the right consists of 4 tiles (2×2) that make a box with the opposite color sequence. Here is what these squares look like divided into tiles:

With Aseprite 1.3, you can easily use tiles like these to make structures very quickly. Using these 13 tiles, I was able to make this “landmass” (which may be used later for a 2D platformer game) in less than 5 minutes:

Here are some other color schemes for the same exact tile-set, along with the landmasses which they produce:


My hope in the future is to use this feature in Aseprite 1.3 to efficiently design immersive levels. An exciting task would be to challenge myself artistically by adding convincing details – grass, rocks, flowers, etc… But for getting a prototype up and running, all I currently need are these basic tile sets I can at least import these assets into unity and begin designing my first games. Speaking of which…
Goals for this week:
In terms of art design, my skills are still well beneath the par of the indie standard. The fact is, my ability to make art is the rate limiting factor of getting my first indie games published. So, that being said, my goal for this week is to begin diving into the meat and potatoes of game design – programming! This will be a long journey. Coding is complicated and I have no idea where to even begin. I’ll download Unity, look up some tutorials and see where I can get.
Simultaneously, I’ll still work on pixel art, and hopefully traditional art technique as well. Although I haven’t posted much about it, I’ve been delving into linear perspective recently. I’ve tried my hand at drawing some boxes using one point and two point linear perspective. Here are some digital drawings I made from two weeks ago:



Thank you all for joining us here at the Cider Mill this week! This past week I’ve been on overload with school and family stuff. But this week is Thanksgiving in the US, and I have a few days off for the holiday! I plan on getting some work done during that time.
See you all next week, and have a wonderful and cozy Thanksgiving!
Cheers to our dreams,
Wady















