#i started working on the redraw the day the art was released but my phone decided to conk out before I could finish all of them orz | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

herotome · 8 months

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Special Informal Devlog

Hi-ho, Wudge here! Aaaa. I missed the update last week... as we crawl closer and closer to release, it's become harder for me to write devlogs. I'm making progress every single day, and that makes me so frustrated that it isn't done yet, you know? 😭 Something something curse of perfectionism...

Anyway.

I thought I'd try something a little different with this post by chronicling a specific screen I've worked very hard on, from start to finish!

(Pictured: a preview of where we're gonna end up)

It all began on... August 2021?! Yowza, two years ago! When I posted a poll on tumblr and on itch about how I should handle flirt indicators. The votes were split 50/50 between two popular options, and I was able to surmise that yall would really, really love an option to toggle between the two.

It didn't take me long to figure out how to implement the toggle itself.

The following year (September 2022), I came up with the idea of putting in an illustrated tutorial on how my flirt indication system works - after all, poll participants had told me that they loved the idea and had never seen it before in other games. I was on a treadmill at the time, so I quickly doodled the idea on my phone. It looks like this:

Then when I got home, I did a rough pen draft to solidify the idea...

I worked on the digital version over the next 2-3 weeks, and asked my friends for help with editing the text to ensure clarity.

.... Then I took a looong break from the infographic to, uh.... write, edit, playtest the game, draw expressions for Griffin CG, draw expressions for the landlord, work on a new Clammy Lady sprite, playtest the game again, make all the characters blink, make the first glowing animation for Jade's powers, code in Griffin's CG expressions, stress about paypal making changes in my country, do concept art for upcoming npcs, write some more, playtest some more, draw a birthday picture for Dart, write devlogs every single week, make sure all my files were safely transferred to my new laptop before my old one completely died... etc.

So it was February 2023 by the time I came back around to try implementing the infographic in code :')

... It was functional, but no matter what I tried, I didn't like how it looked with everything crammed into one page.

... Then I got really sick... but after I recovered and did some more work (drawing, writing, playtesting, etc) I came back to the infographic with the intention to learn how to code pages in renpy.

Still didn't look phenomenal, but there's a whole lot more breathing room! This was in April 2023.

I took another "break" (worked on a million other things) and then... FINALLY... in late August 2023, just a few weeks ago, I had an art breakthrough!

I had garnered a better understanding of color and poses, and as a result my chibis became a LOT cuter! I was able to redraw most of them without too much hassle - whereas when I first started, it would take me all day to draw a single one.

I also drew custom heart icons (a plain heart, a golden heart, and a broken heart), figured out how to make text buttons look more fun and intuitive..

And here's where we're at now!!! I still need to draw eyes for Dart.... but I researched and absorbed a lot about screen compositions, and had a rather late realization that I could re-use backgrounds and assets I already have in the game.

That's it for the special edition. I'll update with more soon!

Stay safe and keep warm,

Wudge.

#herotome update #herotome highlights #interactive fiction #indie game #oelvn #otome #visual novel #otome game #english otome #indie #chibis #anime

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serenedash · 3 years

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I started rambling about my experience with kh and then it turned into khux and then it just turned into me rambling about Ryou and my art journey????? enjoy I guess,

it’s very long but there’s art in there :)

It’s funny to think about my kh journey as a whole tbh, I grew up watching my mom play video games, which included kh1 and 2. I wasn’t allowed to play the playstation2 we owned BUT I did have a gameboy so the first game I played was CoM (after my mom finished it ofc,) so I guess you could say I’ve always been passionate about kh “””side games””” lmao but I did fall off of kh very quickly bc again, I wasn’t allowed to play our PS2 and also I Am A Terrible Gamer I’ve Never Finished CoM I’m sorry you all had to find out like this, but then 358/2 came out when I was in middle school and!!! I didn’t care and I didn’t play idk why lol

Anyway, fast forward to high school I’m like 15 and my older sister, who HAS been keeping up with kh, has a wallpaper on her phone of roxas and ventus. And bc I haven’t kept up I say “nice roxas wallpaper” and she says “thanks but it’s roxas and ventus” and I proceeded to get so mad that I was determined to prove to her that her wallpaper was just roxas twice and then I fell down the BBS rabbit hole and suddenly I was reading about vanitas and then I’m reading the fan translations of the BBS novel and I’m crying??? I am sobbing???? and that’s how I actually got into kh for real lol we are vanitas stans before we are people,

It’s so funny how I thought I was some kh super fan, knowing all this stuff that I spent so long reading and rewatching cutscene movies, but I never once, SOMEHOW NEVER ever came across khx. It’s so absurd and bizarre I seriously have no idea how I never once encountered khx prior to khux. I suppose that has to do with the fact I wasn’t involved in the fandom? In early high school I had stepped away from fandoms as a whole and I didn’t have any interest in really posting content or interacting with fans anymore bc of how burnt out I was from a previous fandom,

but khux released! and I was so hype and excited for it! on launch day I was a senior in high school, I had ran around to every “nerd” and weeb I could find in school to ask them to join my party and fun fact about me is I have crippling social anxiety I literally refuse to start conversations irl so holy shit I was OUT HERE doing the MOST

My player just originally had my name (Matt) but everyone in my party had fun names so Ryou was born! High school was one big yugioh phase for me and ryou bakura is one of my favorite characters ever so it was just the logical name choice lol I quickly started creating Ryou, the character, as well. I was also leaving my homestuck phase and that + vanitas obsession made This character design (art circa 2016)

If y’all are familiar with my kh oc’s you might notice that keyblade now belongs to my kid Monty LOL

Anyway that got scrapped quickly for the chip and dale outfit (which is where Ryou’s trademark goggles are from <3) Goggles have been a staple of my character designs for a LONG TIME so like, it had to be done, (that’s a separate ramble about a separate oc tho)

OG Ryou was an interesting guy; he was a young party leader with this overwhelming responsibility on his shoulders bc of his status as a party leader. In his original story, he also struggled heavily with darkness, much like Terra but for Ryou it was more that the darkness was controlling him and not like a source of power like it was for Terra

A big part of early Ryou I kept, however, was the crushing awareness of loss. One of my party members (the strongest one at the time,) had left without saying a word and I was very confused and hurt. This was around the time the ephemera plot was happening so I decided to incorporate it into Ryou’s story; having him experience losing a friend to darkness since it’s so normal for wielders in Daybreak Town to just disappear, and this would unintentionally become a theme for both me and Ryou as khux friends would just randomly disappear.

I was desperate for khux at this point and I decided to watch the fan translations for khx and GOD, god, was I obsessed. I couldn’t stop thinking about the foretellers. And I’m not going off about that here bc I already did that, but I actually started entering fandom again! I did it slowly, I started on tumblr before this blog was made altho it was me sending anons to the few khux related blogs I could have lol a friend convinced me to get twitter where I got involved with the ffxv fandom, which led me to the kh fandom and eventually the khux fandom there which is what REALLY got me going on khux.

I joined discord servers, most of the servers I’m in are khux related, and from there I joined the khux oc rp (shout out to anyone there who might be reading this lol here’s some art from the beginning of the rp,)

It’s SO FUNNY how the RP influenced me so heavily. I hadn’t RP’d in YEARS, I used to have a strict no oc rp policy, but here I was? And the funny part is, I had barely developed Ryou. I had scrapped his original story and all I had was POST WAR Ryou so I literally had to reverse write him; I had only ever written him as a depressed, guilt ridden adult, but it was a fucking blast and I have such fond memories of this rp when it was active,

But anyway, this encouraged me to get more serious about art! I started drawing, writing, cosplaying, and roleplaying when I hadn’t done any of that stuff in a very long time. The first time I ever drew a background was for a deviant art khux competition actually LOL

also! I always think extremely fondly of the drawing I did of Aced in the keyblade war. It was also one of the first backgrounds I ever drew and it felt like my real starting point in the khux fandom. It got a ton of notes on here and someone wrote a tiny fic in a reblog which just made me SO HAPPY like it really felt like people were noticing me :) I was going to draw a matching Ira but!! I just never did!! One day tho, it’s on my art bucket list to redraw this along with Ira,

Aside from my personal growth, khux was great for my social life ngl, I made SO MANY friends online and got to meet a ton of people irl over the years! It’s crazy to think about all the people I now know and talk to? It honestly makes me really emotional. I’ll never forget taking the train into NYC and meeting up with discord friends. Going to conventions and talking with people about the latest khux update? Absolutely insane and those were some GOOD TIMES, if I thanked every khux friend or even just person who made an impact on me then we’d be here for a LONG TIME,

Fun fact, for my Lauriam cosplay all I needed to buy was the wig I just owned his outfit LOL also? Probably retiring that cosplay ngl people treated me like absolute garbage when I wore him and it led to a lot of confidence issues for awhile ngl. That’s probably one of the only memorable negative experiences I have with khux; it was great when khux people recognized me but for kh fans that weren’t in khux? They were FUCKING MEAN??? fuck kh fandom at large, I only care about khux fandom,

This leads me to another huge part of my experience in khux fandom: THEORIES!! I used to write SO MANY and oh my god my brain was so full all the time. It was a huge appeal for me in the fandom; I had been previously writing theory posts in the RWBY fandom and it just migrated over to khux for me lol I had done a ton of theorizing around Lauriam tbh, it was really the only reason I liked his character at all bc initially I did not care about the dandelions, anyone who wasn’t Skuld I was like “please leave Now thanks”

A funny part of khux fandom I never intended to be apart of is the MEMES, I really only started doing memes as stress relief bc college had me so busy all I had time/energy for was these quick little shit post drawings.

The first meme I made, file name “invi despair” LOL we need to get her a girlfriend smh anyway, I think in my senior year of college I did a bunch of rapid fire memes all in one month bc the stress of finals was getting so bad afdgfhdgf as far as I know my impact on this fandom will be my memes bc all I do now is enter a kh/khux server and introduce myself and I go “yeah I draw art. here’s a meme” and everyone goes OH YOU, honestly I am nothing if not a clown

I’ve talked so much idk where I’m going with this. Khux is just a good game even if the gameplay actually kind of really sucks yknow lol but it was the first game I played where I like, REALLY got into the meta and the mechanics. I used to read so much on the mechanics and watch youtube videos on which medals were worth pulling for. I was never a whale or a top player exactly, but I could rank well if I tried lol I’ve made it to the top 100 for solo rankings, my party has made it to top 10, and in pvp I’ve made top 300. I’m not the highest level in my party but FUCK do I know how to manipulate this game LOL

And with all that hard work, the strategies, the theorizing, the content I’ve made-- it’s been my life for 5 years. I’ve logged into khux almost every single day. At the end, I have logged 1820 days in khux out of 1910 days. Kinda crazy. Crazier I’ve never spent money on khux either lol the only “money” gone into it was one time my mom gave me a google play store gift card and I used it on my birthday for a VIP xemnas medal which eventually made it to regular pulls anyway but it was nice and a little treat :)

I’m not a gacha fan, I don’t care for it, so I don’t think I’ll be touching another gacha again. But for kh? This was pretty fucking awesome, even if it sucked a lot sometimes LOL It was worth it for the people I’ve met most of all I think. I would honestly be a completely different person without khux and that’s REALLY insane to think about.

#the khux hyperfixation is REAL #but yall knew this about me #there's so much more I could say but it's 2am and this is long enough already #im rambling

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goope-jp-tenmei · 7 years

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Behind the Stationery: And Here We Are

Everyone has such unique stories about how they came into the stationery world and Meghan from And Here We Are is no exception. Meghan eased into the stationery industry after designing and printing her own wedding invitations, and after 9 years in New York, moved her Brooklyn studio to Columbus, Ohio where she recently moved (again!) to an industrial space. Walking us through her design process from brainstorming and sketching to printing techniques, here’s Meghan! —Megan Soh

From Meghan: Hi there! I’m Meghan, owner and founder of And Here We Are, a design & letterpress printing studio based in Columbus, Ohio. I went to school for graphic design – and back again for typeface design – and in past lives have worked as a textile designer, a designer in a traditional firm, an in-house designer for a PR firm, and finally, a print designer at a television network. I live in the Short North neighborhood here in Columbus with my husband, John, our son Wiley, and our dog Martha.

And Here We Are launched in 2012 out of our apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. It started after I went a little nuts on our personal wedding invitations and paper goods, and the press led to several more custom wedding commissions. I always loved letterpress printing, which I’d discovered in college, and was really excited about the idea of getting my hands dirty again!

I worked nights and weekends for about a year before I officially left my day job to purse paper goods full time. At first I was working out of the corner of our living room, meeting clients in coffee shops and renting letterpresses at a local studio in Brooklyn. We bought our first letterpress in 2015, and moved out here to Columbus (after 9 years in New York) in search of affordable space. We were lucky to find an adorable little Victorian house just north of Downtown with a 400 square foot sun room that made a perfect home studio.

We worked out of this studio until it was just about bursting at the seams; we recently moved all of our equipment and product stock out into a 1,000 square foot space across town. Being in this industrial space will allow for more (and heavier) equipment, and I plan to host events and workshops, too.

In addition to custom design and printing, we have a full line of letterpress printed greeting cards and accessories that we sell both retail and wholesale (we exhibited in our first National Stationery Show this Spring). We do all of our letterpress printing in house, but offer all sorts of printing methods through our network of trusted vendors here and back in New York. We often combine letterpress printed pieces with foil stamping, digital printing or die cutting.

We currently have a Vandercook SP-15 letterpress, which carries about 90% of the load, and a C&P pilot press which we use mostly for coasters and some smaller items. We trim on a Challenge Triumph hydraulic trimmer. A Windmill or Kluge letterpress is probably not too far off in the future, and I’d like to bring foil-stamping in house too.

From 2014-16, my husband John was also working with me, but went back to a day job last year when we found out we had a baby on the way. So for now, I’m working by myself again, with the occasional part time or temp helpers. Now that we’ve moved into our new space I’m hoping to bring on 1-2 members to join the team.

There really isn’t such a thing as a typical day when you run a business and have an 8-month-old; most days we’re up at 6:30, having breakfast and taking a long walk before heading into the studio. Around 8:30, I drop the baby off at day care or bring him with me, depending on the day of the week. I could be drawing, printing, trimming, filling orders, or writing estimates and invoices (the most glamorous part of the job). There’s always a lot more emailing and administration than I’d like, but I’m often able to tackle those tasks at home after the little one’s gone to bed.

Even when I’m not in the studio, I’m almost always carrying a notebook or sketchbook to jot down new ideas, doodles or notes. I usually start with just a list of words that I keep on my phone, which I then distill into a few categories and then every month or two I’ll block out a few solid days to sketch out some lettering and illustrations, and then spend another week or two refining those.

I usually move from pencil sketches to brush and ink or brush pens, often drawing and redrawing an idea through layers of tracing paper to distill it down to the simplest form possible. Sometimes I work backwards from an ink color I really want to use, or a print method I want to try. Then the drawings get scanned into the computer, cleaned up and digitized. I assign ink colors on the computer (although I often change my mind when I’m on the press!), prep the files for letterpress printing, and send the art out to have plates made.

Often, I start with art prints, then extend the artwork through other items like totes, coasters or cards. I usually release new collections about once a quarter.

Custom work is a whole other monster. These start with a client meeting and idea board; then I’ll ruminate on it a bit and pull some visual examples into a Pinterest board. I keep my sketchbook handy and usually in a week or two I’ll hit on an idea that I can get excited about (and when I’m lucky, the client is excited about it too!). Totally custom jobs usually go through about 3-4 rounds of design before we hit the press. Since we had the baby, I’ve been shifting the focus of And Here We Are toward the retail and wholesale side of the business, but do still take a limited amount of custom projects each season.

And Here We Are is a member of the Designer Rolodex – see more of their beautiful work right here!

Follow along with And Here We Are on Instagram and Twitter.

Studio photos by Adam Lowe Photography; others by And Here We Are.

Interested in being featured on the Behind the Stationery column? Reach out to Megan for more information at megan[at]ohsobeautifulpaper.com.

from Oh So Beautiful Paper http://ift.tt/2vF55FC via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Oh So Beautiful Paper

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