DEV Community: James

I was sick

James — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 14:15:46 +0000

I got sick earlier this month and it tooooook meeeee ooouuuuut. I finally feel back to normal, so I shall resume.

Here's a bird that was in my backyard.

Dev 008 - First Video Generated Locally

James — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 15:56:08 +0000

My goal was to generate an image locally and then generate a video from it so I can create a sprite sheet. I succeeded in this and I'm a little spooked. It was too easy and it's only going to get easier.

I'm using ComfyUI since I needed a more robust environment to create the workflow. Fortunately I found some workflows available online that I could import, which I did. I was met with a bunch of dependency errors but was able to get them installed and I created many usable videos that I can generate sprites from.

Fabian likes taking naps next to me.

Dev 007 - GPU Swap, More Sprites

James — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 22:34:23 +0000

Sooooo with NVideo announcing there will not be a new lineup of of GPUs released this year along with the consumer GPU shortage and astronomical RAM prices I made an impulse decision to buy a GPU and I have no regrets. I've been wanting one since 2019.

I waited.

I didn't go to the gym because I had to sign for it and I didn't want to miss the delivery.

Yaaayyy GPU.

Dev 006 - Stable Diffusion, GPU Too Old

James — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 16:30:11 +0000

I'm convinced it's just a short time more until we see sprite sheets being generated entirely with AI, and that's the perfect excuse to "do it tomorrow", but I'm going to proceed today with the tools I have.

I've been talking about getting a new GPU for years, since 2019, and with NVidia announcing that there will be no new lineup of GPUs this year, along with the chip shortage and skyrocketing RAM prices, I made an impulse decision and bought a GPU. It arrives today.

I spent most of my time last week reading up on the nature of models and Lora's available for them, how they're trained, and how/why certain keywords are necessary to get them to run correctly. It was fun! And I successfully generated several images using my own prompts. I also changed up many of the parameters just to experiment because it's fun.

But I learned that my dear old GTX 1070 Ti just won't work efficiently. It only has 8GB of vRAM so I'm not even able to fully load big models into memory and processing time is abysmal. Hence the above mentioned impulse purchase that I have no regrets about.

But here are some of the images I created with the UmeAirt Lora trained on the Flux-1.dev model:

I saw a male cardinal in my backyard :)

Dev 005 - AI Slop Sprite Sheets

James — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 19:04:57 +0000

Assets will forever be the hardest part of game dev for me because I'm simply not a visual artist. Yet I refuse to use already-created assets readily available in many online stores. My assets, sprites, need to come about from my brain, even if they don't come out of my hands.

I'm still working with Stable Diffusion and the many available models but nothing comes close to usable. I still plan on bringing any AI generated assets into Photoshop, as I've been doing, and cleaning them up, but so far the sprite sheets I'm generating in Stable Diffusion are simply not it. I'm sure there's a lot of user error, but also the models just aren't sufficiently trained, or so I believe.

Here's I'm using RealVisXL_V4.0.safetensors with the Pixel_Art_Sprite_Sheet_space_candy_media Lora with the following prompt:

sprite sheet, silent comic, jumping, parody, blue background, 
male focus, multiple views, 
closed eyes <lora:Pixel_Art_Sprite_Sheet_space_candy_media:1>

Negative Prompt:

(worst quality:2), (low quality:2), (normal quality:2), (jpeg artifacts), 
(blurry), (duplicate), (morbid), (mutilated), (out of frame), 
(extra limbs), (bad anatomy), (disfigured), (deformed), (cross-eye), 
(glitch), (oversaturated), (overexposed), (underexposed), 
(bad proportions), (bad hands), (bad feet), (cloned face), 
(long neck), (missing arms), (missing legs), (extra fingers), 
(fused fingers), (poorly drawn hands), (poorly drawn face), 
(mutation), (deformed eyes), watermark, text, logo, signature, 
grainy, tiling, censored, nsfw, ugly, blurry eyes, noisy image, 
bad lighting, unnatural skin, asymmetry

Other parameters:

Steps: 30, Sampler: DPM++ 2M, Schedule type: Karras, CFG scale: 7, 
Seed: 1886189679, Size: 512x512, Model hash: 912c9dc74f, 
Model: RealVisXL_V4.0, Denoising strength: 0.45, Tiling: True, 
Hires upscale: 2, Hires steps: 15, Hires upscaler: Latent, 
Lora hashes: "Pixel_Art_Sprite_Sheet_space_candy_media: 
4ee6879e3489", Version: v1.10.1

And the final image:

There was a female cardinal in my backyard :)

Dev 04 - I Made a Window

James — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 22:25:57 +0000

I'm not an artist so I'm happy I could construct this.

Creating assets is grueling for me. It's been the biggest barrier of entry for working on my game. But with AI I think I can do it and so far I've been able to. I'd rather be implementing fun game mechanics and stuff. I can't wait for that part.

There was a woodpecker in my backyard today :)

Dev 03 - Asset Creation with Photoshop Pattern View

James — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 15:48:59 +0000

I am still very hopeful that I will be able to utilize Stable Diffusion for more texture generation, but when it comes to the need of "tiling" textures it is nowhere near where I need it to be, at least with my models combined with my lack of experience with them. Here are some failed attempts:

Instead, I learned of Photoshop's "Tile View" feature which displays your image as a tile in real time. This makes editing a tile really easy because you instantly pick up on sub-patterns that you probably don't want but wouldn't actually see until it's placed in a grid:

Yay carpet.

There's a lot of birds in my backyard today. Here's a Blue Jay.

Dev 02 - Stable Diffusion - Pixel Art

James — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 15:53:20 +0000

I spent a day getting Stable Diffusion installed locally so I can use it to generate pixel sprites for my game. I'm becoming more familiar with its API and I've quickly learned there's a lot to these pipelines.

For those out of the loop, Stable Diffusion is an open source image generator pipeline using AI. There are many models available for it, many of which I've played around with.

It's funny, the first model I tried came with a default prompt. That prompt generated a very busty, topless, anime girl. I chuckled. I blurred it for you:

Now I'm embarking on finishing my Adobe Creative Suite install and I plan on piecing together my first background level art combining the last few days of preparation work on my computer.

There was a Crane in my backyard today :)

Day 01 -- Dev Log for My Game

James — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 20:36:57 +0000

My game ideas so far have been too ambitious for a first title, so I've decided to develop a 2D, top-down game in Unreal Engine using PaperZD. I know there are much simpler engines out there for 2D games, but I continue with UE for pedagogical reasons alone.

I thought I'd own a better GPU by now but AI has killed that dream. I move forward with my GTX 1070Ti that I bought on a whim at the computer store down the street in Watauga, Texas during the pandemic. It's loud lol, so I game on my PS5 Pro and sometimes my Switch 2.

Tech

Today I realized I had installed the "insider" version of Visual Studio 2026 which wasn't great because I'm not about to be the Internet's guineapig for Visual Studio so I downgraded, but now a certain VS Integration Tool isn't working. I'm convinced I can fix it but I'll worry about that later.

I'm using the following naming conventions:

Asset Type	Prefix	Example
Level / Map	`L_`	`L_FarmHouse`
Blueprint	`BP_`	`BP_Chicken`
Texture	`T_`	`T_Grass_D`
Sprite	`SPR_`	`SPR_Tree`
Tile Set	`TS_`	`TS_SpringBiome`
Tile Map	`TM_`	`TM_FarmBase`
Widget (UI)	`WBP_`	`WBP_Inventory`

Working On

I am creating my main assets for an entry to the game. I plan on creating an environment from my past, so it'll be personal which will help drive me. I am designing my code for the "battle mechanics" I'll be using. I plan on relying on UE's classes but also highly utilizing my advanced C++ skills to write some custom classes which I intend to turn into blue prints and maybe a plugin-in for the market, but we'll see. I'm obsessed with algorithms and want to incorporate many into my game in fun ways that I'm still figuring out.

There is a squirrel that lives in the tree outside my office window. I'm convinced he loves me. He just ran by. His name is Fabian because I said so.

My convertible top got stuck in the down position and my appointment to get it fixed was at 8:00 AM on literally the coldest day of the year. It was 35°F (1.66°C).

Ok, back to creating assets.

Coding Right Before Bed -- I Can't Do It

James — Thu, 06 Sep 2018 00:39:44 +0000

I was in junior high school and obsessed with Dance Dance revolution. If I went to bed directly after playing DDR, I'd shut my eyes and see arrows scrolling across the back of my eyelids. It was kinda cool, but annoying at the same time since I was trying to sleep.

Fast forward to college and I find myself in my dorm at 2:00 AM working on a take-home final.

The final's objective:
Take a buggy implementation of a Red Black Tree given by the professor and fix it.

It was late so I figured I'd call it a day and resume my work in the morning.

Didn't happen.

I could NOT fall asleep. I'd close my eyes but my brain wouldn't shut up. My mind kept going back to my code, recalling rules associated with Red Black Trees, mindlessly making up scenarios that had no solutions.

I ended up getting out of bed and working on it further. I even took Benadryl in hopes to get drowsy enough to sleep. I didn't make any progress despite spending a lot more time on it that evening.

So what was I suppose to do? After a few years of experience, I've noticed myself occasionally reliving this episode. I've discovered high correlation with not being able to sleep and coding into the late hours of the night. Solution: no coding within a few hours of going to bed.

I've become a true believer of winding down before bed. No coding. I try to avoid looking at screens in general and utilize blue light filters if possible. If I do end up playing my Nintendo Switch I'll play the zenful Stardew Valley instead of Splatoon 2 which tends to get me all riled up.

I still have restless nights occasionally, and a hard-to-find bug is quite capable of absorbing my mind's thoughts when I'm going to bed, but the more I try to unwind before going to sleep the better I'm able to.

This is my first post :)