Gotta take a sortof 'life pause' right now, put my Twitch Streaming project goals on hold for another week while I take care of life.  Using the time to develop ideas, and reflect on input from friends - I've decided to make a 'video framework' in my Sony Vegas program so I can drop in video footage and easily edit it down for content and upload to YouTube and this will be a better way to cater to any audience I may attract with a Twitch stream as I may not be able to stream as regularly as some people are able.
While I handle things, I've been spending my time learning Java for games development.  My goal is to make a small game (2D game like the old NES or Atari stuff) that will be an exercise to teach me the different bits that make up a game in Java and how to program them.  If I do it right, my 'first game' may be a decent framework for me to make other little games out of in the future if I want.

I already know the basics of programming in a few other languages, so it's not as hard as it could be to learn, but I do need to get into some new areas for me, so it's properly challenging as well.  Had to put the 'code learning' on hold to actually draw some characters and objects (and background stuff) for this little game I'm making.  The max size of things in the world is 32 pixels by 32 pixels, so I'm using MS Paint to make all sorts of textures - grass, dirt, stone, brick, etc.  and also to make a character framework I can tailor to different in-game creatures like the Player or "monsters" or some "princess" to save, but all sharing the same style of legs, arms, head, feet - so I've made all those up, getting 2 frames that look like 'walking' when I flip between the two (will be used for animations in game).

Fun fun!

I'm spending the time to make the look good, and when it's just pixels, it's limiting - I've made my character's framework 64x64 pixels and will scale it down in-game to 32x32 pixels to fit the world, but it will retain the extra level of detail in that way.  I suppose any graphical item that needs extra detail to look good I will do that way.
Here is a little doodle I did last night, gonna turn it into a properly drawn character for my little game, it's inspired from my memories of that little mage from Final Fantasy 9 and those wizards from the Legend of Zelda game (the original NES):