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!

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!

Free Programs of Creative Awesomeness

Just as the title says, this blog post is more or less a list.  I couldn't think of anything in particular that I really wanted to talk about, so I thought, "Let's talk about everything!"

Okay, so it's not really everything but there's writing, gaming, 3D modeling and music here.  That's kind of like everything, right?  It's all the really important stuff anyway.