Life Update 8/17/13

I've got a new job working for ADG Architects and I'm living in OKC now.  ADG is the firm that did the ballpark stadium in bricktown, so that's cool.  I've been here in OKC for a month now, so here's the rundown:

Home: I'm still not done unpacking. *sigh*  I have less free time in my day because of a longer drive (plus getting up earlier for the drive means going to bed a little earlier).  And the first couple of weeks were so exhausting that now that things have slowed down a bit, I don't want to work on anything like unpacking or decorating.  I just want to relax.

The apartment complex is pretty good.  Aside from the occasional blaring car radio the place seems pretty quiet.  (Why is it an unwritten law that loud radios have to have rap?  Why can't somebody blare something cool, like 80's pop?)  My street is full of retail stores and restaurants, which is nice.  I feel like I can appreciate where I am more, both my part of town and the whole city, once I get a little more settled in and explore everything the place has to offer.  I mean, I've lived here a full month and I haven't even been to a mall yet!  What is wrong with me!

Oh, also, my grandparents live in one of the city's suburbs, which is nice.  I've already gone to visit them.  My grandma fed me enchiladas!  Score!

Work: As soon as I started they threw me into overtime for the first two weeks.  Which was very stressful.  I was learning on the fly, working late every day, plus there are all those post-move chores, like changing addresses, talking to insurance agents, talking to your bank, etc.  So the first few weeks I was running at 100 mph all day every day.  Very glad things are slowing down now.

The place seems pretty good.  There are 40-50 employees, but I work on a team of about six.  I've heard Princess Bride quotes being thrown around by my coworkers.  That's a good sign.  Every Friday the place provides bagels and fruit for breakfast, and there's been occasional cookies just because.  Another random pro/con is that I can't go home for lunch (too far away).  The con is that I have to pack a lunch before work every morning.  The pro is that I use my lunch break to read, which is something I haven't been doing much of lately, and I'm glad to be back in that habit.

I'm reading Anne of Green Gables, by the way.  If you want something light hearted and cute, then do read it.  It's adorable.

Creative Projects:  I... don't know.

I hit a sudden Trigun burnout (Woah!  Gasp!) so any writing/art/whatever on that front I dropped.  As for the video game, I don't know what it's fate is.  A big part of me still wants to do it, but I feel like our little group lost interest and I would be left on my own if I continued with it.  That's a bit daunting.  For the moment, I'm just letting the project sit in hiatus-land until I'm more settled into my new home and job and ready to turn my attention to projects again.

That's about it, I guess.  I'm still sort of coming down off the stress of having moved and the overtime and such.  I still feel like things haven't quite become normal yet.  But I'm doing good.

Still Truckin' Along

It's been a while since I did a blog post.

In the meanwhile, I drew this:

Pen and colored pencil, and a piano with slightly wonky perspective.  (This is technically fanart, just weird alternate-universe fanart, so ten points if you can name the man, twenty if you can name the chic.)

On the video game front:

(It might be helpful to note, for anyone who doesn't know, that a "thomas" is a large, flightless bird that exists in the Trigun universe.)

I've got the first bit of game started, but I'm like 1/2349728347928th of the way through. XD  But the beginning is going to go the slowest, because I'm having to make graphics and learn the program.  I'm holding out hope that it will go faster later in the project.

So, yeah, that's it for now, I guess.

Peace out!

Video Games - Week 2

A lot of work done, but not the kind of work that gives me very much to show off.

I've been learning more RPG Maker, and compiling info for my team mates to use, such as sprite sizes and such.  And this weekend a few of us had a big brainstorming session via Skype group chat and knocked out most of the plot.  That part was REALLY fun for me.  I've never collaborated on a story before, but myself and one other person in particular seemed to click really well and then exciting stuff happened.  "What if we did this?"  "Oh!  Hey!  What if we took that idea, and we did THIS with it?"  Yes yes yes!  That's cool!  Let's do that!  And then we can do this and this!"  "Oh!  Yes!  Good thinking!"  At one point she told me, "I'm super excited about this project, so if I start steamrolling you with my ideas, just tell me to slow down.  I don't want to be overbearing."  I was like, "Pfft!  Are you kidding?  I love you for being this excited!"

There's still the details to work on in the plot, like the actual dialogue and such.  And... you know... the actual levels, since right now our descriptions of them are stuff like, "It's a cave, and it's got lots of cliffs and ledges and stuff, and some places are really sandy and you slide down to a lower ledge, but some places you can climb up the cliff, so it's like shoots and ladders.  And in the end, you fight a sandworm."  Yeah, that might need some fleshing out.  But I think some of our artists have decided to start on the graphics for the main characters, and we're getting pretty close to actually starting in on the game.

At one point in the conversation I started quietly panicking.  I knew I was working on the programming, but no one else had really said anything about doing it with me, so I was starting to think I might be the only one.  And then one of our team mates starts in on all this outside-the-box stuff, "Can we fiddle with the battle mode so that you can move around and do things inside the battle,"  "Can we take it from a top-down view and make it a side-scroller,"  etc.  And I'm sitting there about to hyperventilate like, "askdjfalsdk Are you going to make me do that?  Are you going to make me figure that out?  I don't know! I'm still learning how to do things NORMALLY!  I don't think so?  But maybe?  If I say 'Maybe' are you going to make me do it?  Should I tell you 'No' just in case so I don't have to?"  But then things calmed down, and we settled on the idea that side scrolling was possible, because other people had done it with RPG Maker, but we would only have a short segment that way, almost like a mini game, and that was the only weird thing we would do.  And I can live with that, so I breathed a sigh of relief.  A big one.

We're planning on making a proof of concept game, a mini version of our game about ten minutes long that tests out the look and feel of the thing.  When we do that, I'll post it on here and you guys can play it.

That's about it, I guess.  Here, have a Wolfwood dialogue face that one of my teammates made.

<(Thanks for visiting the blog.  I'm gonna go find Needle-noggin now.)


Peace out.

Making Video Games?

I don't know, am I?  I'm not really sure.

There's a program out there called RPG Maker, which lets amateurs build their own video games.  (The newer editions of RPG Maker, you have to pay for, but there are old versions that are free.)  I was talking with some fellow Trigun fans online and mentioned that I had once thought about making a Trigun game on RPG Maker, but the amount of work it would take scared me away.  I was really surprised when several people said that sounded like an awesome idea and that they'd love to help work on something like that.  And the next thing I knew people were throwing ideas around and volunteering to help make the sprites, and it just kind of... happened.  And now there's about eight of us who are building a video game.

Honestly, I feel really weird about this.  Part of it is that I'm not much of a gamer.  I play once in a while when the whim strikes me, but I feel underqualified to be a part of the project.  Mostly, though, I have a strong fear that the initial novelty will wear off, and everyone will ditch the idea.  I don't know.  We'll have to see what happens.

My major job will be to work on "programming" the game inside RPG Maker.  I've downloaded it and started learning the ropes.  It's easy to use, but getting things to actually happen in the game requires coding them a certain way, and that's the tricky part.  It's giving me flashbacks of the computer programming class I took in high school, which is kind of a good thing, actually, because I liked that class.  While reading tutorials, I've been testing out what I'm learning by building a test game, which isn't really much of a game, but more like a place where the character runs around and random stuff happens for no very good reason.

But I did put together a mini game this afternoon using what I've learned so far.  You have to collect chickens for an old lady.  RPG Maker comes with freebie graphics to use, although you're encouraged to make your own.  I used those to make things easy, and then started throwing chickens around just to see if I could make a coherent game.  (And, yes, certain friends will note that my very first coherent game I made involves chickens.  Of course it does.)

I recorded myself playing the game, although the video quality stinks out loud, because I'm a noob at recording my screen, so sorry about that.  The video starts out in RPG Maker, and then I open the game in a new window.  You gotta give me a second, because I wasn't sure if I was recording or not. XD

So, yeah, that's what I've been up to.  I'll likely be updating my progress here on my blog.

That's it, I guess.  Peace out!

Adventures in Minimalism

I heard someone say once that everything we experience gets thrown into a big pile in our brains and gets all jumbled up in there, and then, once in a while, we can reach in and pull something out that's new.

Once upon a time, I watched an anime titled "Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo."  (Don't ask me how to pronounce that.)  It's is, indeed, The Count of Monte Cristo, but moved to a steampunk-ish sci-fi setting, and given some trippy animation.  Seriously, the whole show looks like this:

Notice there's little to no shading, and nearly everything is colored in with some kind of texture or pattern.  The show was a little darker than what I usually go for, and it was told from the point of view of Albert, (the son in the story, and the kid in the picture above,) who was annoyingly emotional most of the time.  So, to be quite honest, I watched it for the art style.  (And for Albert's friend Franz, who was the only person in the show besides the count who was competent in any way.  He rocked.)  It's been on my to-do list ever since to do some kind of picture that imitated that style.  I just never really figured out what that picture would be.

Some time later I discovered an art style called minimalism.  I really don't know how to describe minimalism, so here, have an example:

kuabci.deviantart.com

Honestly, I never had any intention of doing anything in this style.  I just really liked it, and logged it away in my brain under the label "Things that Look Cool."

I own a nook, which I quite like.  (This is all related, I swear.)  It comes with a few wallpapers for your screen, but nothing very impressive.  I finally decided it would be cool to make my own, and to do something related to my favorite book characters (in hopes that seeing them would inspire me to read and not just play the sudoku app.)  So, I reached into that pile in my brain, fished around a little bit, and pulled out this:

 

Erik, aka The Phantom of the Opera, Inspector Javert (Les Miserables), Sherlock Holmes, and Percy Blakeney (The Scarlet Pimpernel).  (There's so much space at the bottom because the nook puts a row of icons down there.  I managed to get the spacing so that they fit pretty comfortably in the free space on the screen.)

This was one of those projects that, the farther along I got in making it, the more I realized there were easier ways of doing it.  Even by the end, I was probably making things more complicated than they needed to be.  So, suffice it to say that this happened in photoshop, with pictures of the characters combined with pictures of fabric.

Finding pictures of the characters standing full length was by far the hardest part.  The Phantom and Holmes saved me by being popular enough to have Halloween costumes, and those were the only full length images of them I could find.  Javert came from a book illustration.  Percy was a pain in the butt.  His top half came from a book cover, and the bottom half from a picture of a period costume sewing pattern.

Finding pictures of fabric was the most time-consuming part, but also kinda the funnest part.  The background is a stock image of old paper.

So, yes, now my nook has awesome wallpaper, and I'm pretty happy about that.  It was really time consuming, but really fun, too.

Peace out, gang!

---

Bonus ramble, if you want to stick around to hear it.

Making this was strangely nostalgic for me, because, a few summers ago, I did a lot of fanfiction writing about these guys... all together... in one story.

I really wanted to write something, but didn't have any good ideas.  So just to scratch the itch, I started doing these little drabbles in which a teenage girl named Michelle had the ability to enter the world inside of books and bring characters back out with her if she wanted to.  These four guys practically lived with her.  All the little scenes I wrote were plot-less, pointless, inconsistent, and out of order, but they kept me entertained.  Erik was well-behaved because Michelle bribed him with an ipod.  (Oh, did he love his ipod!)  Javert hated him, unsurprisingly, but Holmes kinda liked him because he was interesting, intelligent, and played the violin.  (Holmes still watched him like a hawk, though.)  Percy just kinda hung around, cool as a cucumber, being a bit of a goof sometimes.

I don't even remember now what kind of stuff I wrote.  I think some of it was melodramatic.  Javert was taken from the end of his story, which is a very unfortunate ending for him, and had some lingering issues that crept up once in a while.  And Erik... was Erik.  But mostly it was just silly stuff, like everyone being really impressed with the microwave, except Holmes broke it because he started putting random stuff in it just to see what would happen.

And, yeah, I just felt like sharing.

Project Wrap-ups and Naka-kon

Okay, let me start by getting this picture out of the way.

Here's Vash with his gang of Pokemon.  That makes all four of the main characters, and this little series is complete!  Yay!

I've also finished my stun gun.  Remember how I was putting paper mache on the whole thing?  It took longer than I thought it would, because when I put the paper mache on, I had to leave some parts of it dry, so it could sit on that part while the rest was drying, so I had to break it up into parts and do a part a day.  (And also because I procrastinated some.  But you didn't hear me say that.  Sh!)

When I hit crunch time, though, I couldn't afford to do it in parts, and ended up with wet areas all over the place.  I got a little creative trying to figure out how to let it dry.

Then I painted it, which went much faster than I expected (and waaaay faster than painting styrofoam goes), and so, finally, I had this.

Which is pretty much how it looked before, just with a different surface texture.  I took it to Naka-kon this weekend and I'm very pleased to announce that this is the first con which I didn't have to do any repair work afterward.  It got a little bumped and scraped, but nothing is loose and no paint came off.  Woohoo!


Naka-kon was a lot of fun.  (Of course!)  I think I had fallen into a rut before hand, in which nothing existed in the universe except for my job and the internet.  It was nice to have a reminder that there's a whole world out there with fun stuff to do and awesome people, and that those things make me happier than the internet does.

I won't post pictures on here, since they're already on facebook, but I will share one since I likely won't post it anywhere else.  I met one of Trigun's villains, Legato, and he suggested we take a picture of me shooting him.  Except I tried to kind of scowl at him and just ended up laughing.

(This guy was one of the highlights of the con for me.  Not only was I really excited to see someone cosplay Legato, but he was a super nice guy.  He caught sight of me the day before and told me he would be Legato on the next day, so "you should come find me and shoot me."  I told him his costume was fantastic and he said, "Thanks!  It makes me feel pretty.  I think it's the hair.")

Okay, that's everything!  Peace out!

Wood Puzzles, Pokemon, and Paper Mache

When I first started those Trigun + Pokemon pictures, I originally meant to do the main quartet, plus the main bad guys and perhaps a few secondary characters.  But I knew my attention span wouldn't hold out that long, so I cut it down the to four heroes.  Good call, because I have one left that I've started the sketch for and I'm itching to do other things!  So much so that I've been slipping in other small projects.

Project One:  Last weekend, I revamped a wood puzzle.  A friend gave it to me, and for some reason, I looked at it and said, "I want to paint it."

 

I painted the pieces black with acrylic paint, and then drew on the pieces with a silver sharpie.  I've been playing Zelda: Twilight Princess, and got the idea for the color scheme from the Twilight Realm, which features dark colors with light highlights.  The text is the Hylian alphabet used in that game.  It actually correlates with the English alphabet, and the blocks have real words on them, although I chose random, Zelda-related words like, "Link," "Hyrule," "Hero," etc.

Project Two:  If you could call it a project.  There's a drawing challenge floating around tumblr in which the participants go to a website that generates a random pokemon.  They then redraw that pokemon three times, redesigning it three ways.  It's for general drawing practice and for exercising your imagination.  I spent an evening doing some sketches.

Look at this derpy guy!  I tried to make him look a little cooler.

Keldeo's a little cutie.  Here's "Slightly More Realistic Keldeo," "Epic Stallion Keldeo," and "Baby Keldeo."

Project Three:  Naka-kon is coming up and I need to get cracking on my stun gun.  Today I started paper mache-ing it.  My paper mache paste kinda weirds me out.  It's made from flour and water, which the internet assures me is a totally common paper mache recipe.  But it has the look and feel of thick pancake batter, and I can't shake the feeling that I'm smearing pancake batter all over my gun.  I feel like a mad scientist creating an experiment in which a styrofoam gun, breakfast food and newspaper combine together into one monstrous abomination of nature.  Science has gone too far!

Here's a picture, by the way.

Tomorrow, I'll smear pancake batter on the other half.  Later in the week, or next weekend, I'll add a second layer.  The internet says to use about four layers, but I think that's for a hollow paper mache project that needs to be really sturdy?  I'm just going to go with two.  I think that'll do me, since I'm doing it to hide tape and to give a better surface to paint on, and I don't need it to be all that sturdy on it's own.

That's all for now!  Peace out!