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steftastan · 9 months

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Carian Stroll

“Tell Blaidd, and Iji…I love them.”

Before this piece, I had been wanting for a long time to create my own piece of Elden Ring fanart featuring Ranni. I had tried several sketches unsuccessfully, just wasn’t particularly feeling the ideas I had sketched up until that point.

One day of usual internet scrolling, I stumbled upon this gorgeous piece of art by Shimomura Kanzan.

I knew immediately I wanted to do something like this for my Elden Ring fanart. In fact, if you look at this piece, there is tons of inspiration that I drew from the original artwork, such as the style of the yellow leaves and the main subject matter being a prominent silhouette of the brightest value, placed at approximately the bottom third of the image.

The main character is cleverly shrouded amidst various layers of trees and foliage, giving us the impression that we're peeking into candid moment of their life. In the case of the fox, we caught it during a mid-day snack. In the case of Ranni and her party, we caught them in a leisurely stroll, while Iji outfits the dreaded Fingercreepers with their iconic rings.

I wasn't sure if I wanted to capture a happy moment, but Ranni goes as far as to ask us to deliver to Iji and Blaidd the message that she loves them dearly as her quest draws near its end. I would imagine they all must have had fun moments together as a family. Hey, maybe even the hands liked to be around them?

The process

youtube

I started this on my iPad using the procreate app. Sadly the full process is not captured on video, as I switched to Photoshop for the rendering phase of the illustration. This video is a fun window into my chaotic process and how I iterate on the fly on the same canvas. I probably wouldn't do that in a professional setting where you often need to have color keys and iterations to be reviewed and analyzed. I like to I cut myself some slack when doing personal art to keep things fun.

Trying and failing some more

This illustration was not a straightforward path. I haven’t been very diligent about personal art, and at some point I started deviating too much from my reference by adding too many levels of depth to the background and suffocating the piece. I got into a weird loop where I would randomly open the PSD, play around with the values, pushing Iji to the back, then bringing him back, cranking all the levers on Ranni, etc., decide it would look horrible, then begrudgingly determine I’d never complete this image and go on with my life.

As artists we likely have unfinished work sitting everywhere, be it in our sketchbooks, canvases, or hard drives. But it’s a different kind of sting when you feel like you can’t even nail the fundamentals.

Anyway, so a couple weeks ago, I decided to give it another go, but this time I would get rid of all the unnecessary stuff, even stuff that I had been trying to render for ages. I would not hold on to anything, I would try and recapture what drew me to Kanzan's beautiful painting to begin with.

After it became a matter of pushing and pulling pixels until the image was finished!

That’s about it. I didn’t go crazy in depth but lately I’ve been enjoying reading into artists’ processes and I’d be remiss to not share my own thought process also.

Thank you for viewing!

#elden ring #lunar princess ranni #blaidd the half wolf #war counselor iji #illustration #artists on tumblr #fromsoftware #digital art #video game #fanart #Youtube

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sexhaver · 8 months

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ive been playing Cassette Beasts for a minute and it never stops being funny to me how flagrant they are about making this "Pokemon but with features you didn't know Pokemon has always needed". off the top of my head:

super effective/NVE hits have added benefits/debuffs beyond just doubling/halving the damage (hitting Electric types with Ground reduces their evasion and speed, hitting Steel types with Poison gives them poison-coated spikes that do contact damage, etc)

legally-distinct-Pokemon will learn new moves while in your party without having to battle, and you can then straight up steal these moves from them and put them on a not-Pokemon you actually care about using, which gives an actual incentive to hunt down and raise otherwise fringe not-mons beyond completing the not-Pokedex

we all played the Pokemon Infinite Fusion fangame right? we know how fusions work? okay so this game has them as temporary per-battle things instead of permanent ones, which is only marginally less cool while being infinitely easier to balance around

attempting to catch something shows you the percentage chance of success so you know whether you just got unlucky or if you should save your Pokeballs-i-mean-blank-cassette-tapes

leveling up is tied to your not-trainer instead of your not-pokemon, so you don't end up in the classic trap where your starter is way overleveled and everything else is underleveled and then you hit a fight your starter can't solo and have to spend an hour grinding to get the weaker not-mons up to par (funnily enough most Pokemon Nuzlocke romhacks have already figured this out and give you infinite rare candies with the only restriction being that you can't level past the next gym leader's ace pokemon, because Pokemon fans have realized that grinding is the worst part of the game way before Game Freak has)

moves, not-Pokeballs, not-PokeCenter visits, and healing items are all bought using entirely separate currencies which stops you from trivially breaking the economy in half

the soundtrack, fittingly, is pretty good! the vocals were a bit much for my taste but there's an option in the settings menu to straight up turn them off (letting the BGM play on its own), which i've never seen in any other game and really appreciate

downsides:

on a game design level, i understand why can i only carry a max of 5 not-Potions and 1 not-Revive at a time - it's to put a limit on how far away from fast travel points i can get by just running away from everything and healing off damage. on a gameplay level, however, this feels pretty bad

the pixel art style is trying to look as much like Pokemon as possible without actually being Pokemon so the overworld sprites look more like beta stuff from Pokemon that they cut for looking too weird. i have yet to find a haircut that doesn't look bad

this is super petty of me but something about the bloom and lighting of the 3d environments combined with pixelated 2d sprites that still cast shadows makes me painfully aware im playing a video game. it's like they were going for the same aesthetic as Octopath Traveler but fell just barely short. i can't think of a better way to articulate this feeling but if you know you know

it does that really obnoxious half-assed style of voice acting where plot-relevant characters will sometimes (maybe every third or fourth textbox) speak the first two or three words of dialogue before trailing off. mashing through textboxes (as one does) means constantly getting jumpscared by "hmm"s and "haha!"s "okay then!"s

i get that they wanted to make the player feel involved in the story, and it has a pretty decent hook so far, but oh my god. the amount of dialogue "choices" that just transparently do not matter. you know how people memed on Fallout 3 and 4's dialogue choices all leading to the same outcome, to the extent that you were basically choosing between "yes" and "yes (rude)"? and you know how Bethesda would at least attempt to justify how both options led to you accepting the quest anyways, even if it was really dumb? Cassette Beasts has streamlined this process even further by making the options in most of their binary decisions so identical that they don't even require different followup dailogue before rejoining into the main conversation thread. a solid 2/3rds of the dialogue options in this game so far feel like checks that you're still awake. i know this is a minor issue because people aren't playing Pokemon-likes for the engaging "choices matter" approach to storytelling, and i did ignore it at first, but it's so pervasive that you really can't ignore it

#cassette beasts

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iron-shears · 7 months

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Ignota's Top Surgery Fund Commissions!

Hello! I am Ignota. I am a 25-year-old non-binary artist, known mostly for my pixel animations, my comics, the Godot games/interactives I've made/am making for the SCP Wiki, and TikTok videos. I recently FINALLY got my insurance to cover top surgery(I live in California, but my insurance is out of Florida)

I just found out my insurance kinda lied about my doctor being in-network. My insurance agreed to cover the top surgery itself but does not cover the surgical center I need to get it done at. I've been quoted at $2140, not including additional medical workup, prescriptions, travel, and temporary living expenses.

I am trying to reach out to my insurance to see if it'll be covered, but I am about to age out of my current insurance and I am not in a position to afford new insurance. There is still a chance I can convince my insurance to cover it, but this is time-sensitive and I want to have the ABILITY to do it regardless. So, I am doing commissions now.

PRICING

Pixel animation $50-$400

$50(Art similar to the first image): Maximum of 12 frames. One character. Very limited movement. Canvas size under 135x135

$80(Art similar to the second image) Maximum of 24 frames at any framerate(Typically 4fps for 6 seconds or 8fps for 3 seconds), Simple Movement, 1-2 characters, maximum canvas size of 135x135. Price can be adjusted to accommodate more detail

$200(Art similar to the third image) a couple characters, a detailed environment, and a moving scene. Maximum canvas of 256x240. The scene can be converted to a simple one-room HTML5 format that can play in-browser.

$400+(Art similar to the fourth Image) A complex environment, multiple characters/moving parts, and the ability for a scrolling background.

Illustrations $50-$250

$50(Art similar to the first image): A simple close-up shot in any style.

$100(Art similar to the second image) A simple scene or full body with no background.

$250+(Art similar to the third and fourth images) A complex environment. Alternatively, a detailed comic page.

All features are negotiable and individual requests might change the price. If there's something from one tier you want but don't want all the other stuff, chances I may be able to work something out that will fit your needs. These descriptions are suggestions to make it a little easier, not solid outlines of what they need to look like. Feel free to bring other ideas to the table. I have worked on background illustrations and pixel animations for indie devs making games, Dungeons and Dragons character sheets, individual character pieces, and many other things in the past.

Contact me through my Email([email protected]) or my Discord(ironshears)! Alternatively, I do have a Ko-Fi if you want to support my art.

Alex Thorley's Blind Date(The Dating Sim) by me under CC-BY-SA

Kuobach's Eyes(Orange Comic) by me under CC-BY-SA

Nacre Series by me under CC-BY-SA

The other pixel game in question is tentatively titled Brand New Colors and has not been completed yet, but you can find more of it on my blog. It will also be under CC-BY-SA

#artwork #commissions #lgbtq #top surgery #scp foundation #scp #transgender #nonbinary

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nilly002 · 10 months

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Probably nobody that wants to hear this but I am so fucking pissed about reddit killing itself.

Reddit was my favourite place on the entire web. Unlike all the other social media it wasn't about putting individual users on a stage and everyone following them it was simply a shared stage with the users collectively deciding what get's to be in the spotlight.

Yes it was a shithole but it was our shithole. We decided what we got. The algorithm on reddit was utter dogshit and everyone just disabled it, the real algorithm was the hive mind filtering the best content to the top. All the while actual conversation and debate was actually possible because the comments were not arbitrarily limited in length or ordered by what can only be described as little Timmy's first attempt at a Bogosort algorithm.

We had a fucking contract: users bring the content and watch ads, moderators keep the site usable and the amount of effort reddit has to put in to not get sued down to a minimum, all reddit had to do was provide the servers, ban a subreddit once in a blue moon and be content with having a decently profitable site with the factually most worthless users of big social media

But NOOOOO "We NeEd To InCrEaSe PrOfItS! ThOsE pEsKy ThIrD pArTy ApPs ArE sTeAlInG oUr MoNeY" No you idiot they just provided a better service than you did. Why shut them down when you could just copy what they have and make them unnecessary? And then in the process they try to softban nsfw as well because "ItS bAd FoR aDvErTiSmEnT!" god how I fucking hate capitalism.

There's this beautiful thing that people have created in collaboration which brings joy, news, entertainment, education, support and community to so many people and it was ALREADY PROFITABLE but no we need to ruin it to squeeze out as much cash as possible.

Fuck all those people who helped build the website and make it what it is today, fuck all the users who contributed it and spent sleepless nights to make some dumb pixel art bringing your shitty ass website into the news all across the globe fuck all the moderators who spent countless hours doing unpaid labour to keep a community they loved alive and saving you billions in moderation costs, fuck everyone that loves this website

BECAUSE WE WANT MORE MONEY!

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell and for reddit the diagnosis is terminal.

#fuck reddit #fuck capitalism #fuck u/spez #reddit #r/196 #196 #r196 #reddit migration #rant

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blueskittlesart · 6 months

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hi, correct me if i'm wrong but i seem to remember you saying that you're majoring in illustration! i'm currently in the process of applying to colleges and i plan on majoring in illustration as well, so i was wondering if you had any advice for portfolios. I could really use some tips on the presentation aspect specifically, bc I'm a little lost when it comes to stuff like the arrangement/organization of pieces, how I should crop my pictures, etc. any advice you can give me is greatly appreciated!!

hi yes i can totally help you out with this! i like to think my college portfolio was pretty good bc i got accepted to every school i sent it to lol :) the main pieces of advice that i was given when building it were this:

studies and pieces that show off your technical skill are great, but limit them to around a third of your portfolio at most. art schools DO want to see that you're technically skilled and can like, draw a charcoal still life or a self-portrait, because those ARE important skills to have, but ESPECIALLY if you're applying to a school that's more known for contemporary fields like animation or illustration, it's much more likely that they want to see your creative mind at work. the single best thing you can put in your portfolio is a BODY OF WORK, and specifically a body of work that shows off your own ideas and your own take on whatever you're producing. this means 3+ pieces that are interconnected or related to the same central theme. my portfoilo, for example, consisted of 2 or 3ish traditional, technical pieces which showed that I had a certain level of technical skill, and the ENTIRE rest of it was devoted to a series of original interconnected narrative comics I'd written and drawn. Every reviewer I met with told me that this was what made my portfolio stand out to them--it showed that I was not only technically skilled, but that i had something i wanted to DO with that skill, that I had direction and drive with my art and was able to produce work that reflected that. If you're maybe (definitely) not quite as ambitious as me, something like a series of 3-5 interconnected illustrations or a short comic if you're into that might do the same thing.

as a side note, if you DO have a body of work as the central focus of your portfolio, a lot of colleges will be interested in your process as well! for example with my comic portfolio, i used one slot to demonstrate my process, because I penciled every page traditionally before digitalizing it and i had extensive character and worldbuilding sketches. I wouldn't devote more than one slot to it, but if you have a body of work where the process is important to you it could be worth throwing in!

arrangement is tricky, but the advice I generally heard was "put your best stuff first." whatever you're most excited about, whatever is going to grab someone's attention the fastest, that's what you want to have in your first slot. (I actually don't think I followed this advice on my applications LOL but it's what i was TOLD to do and i think it's solid advice.)

in terms of editing, assuming we're talking about traditional pieces being photographed, you want to make sure your pieces are 1. well-lit, (DO NOT TAKE YOUR PHOTOS WITH OVERHEAD LIGHTING. wait for an overcast day and take them outside trust me) 2. legible, (no weird shadows obscuring parts of the piece, high-quality enough that no details are lost due to digital pixelation, etc) and 3. as color-accurate to real life as you can make them. most of this is just about getting a decent-quality camera (a newer iphone should be fine) and a good location. (outside and overcast, as previously mentioned) you may want to throw your pics into photoshop and play with the balance slightly, but I wouldn't do anything too drastic, try to get the most accurate photo possible without any editing. (if your pieces are small and flat, scanning them in may work better. most public and school libraries have scanners you can use for free.)

finally, cropping. the general rule that I was taught is to crop the piece, not the photograph. if you've got a piece on paper and you're not sure you like how the actual drawing is oriented on the paper, crop the PAPER down to size, and THEN photograph it. your photos should aim to show the ENTIRE piece from edge to edge (unless it's a detail shot obv) and I even like to include a little bit of extra "breathing room" around the piece so that it's clear exactly where the dimensions of it end. here's a piece I used for my college portfolios for reference:

i lowkey do not like this piece now but that's not the point. this is what i mean by breathing room--a few extra inches of space around the actual canvas so it's clear that this isn't a closeup and you can see where the canvas actually ends. the same is true for digital pieces. if it's a full bleed illustration (something with full color all the way to the edges of the canvas) just make sure you like the composition cropped the way it is and submit the full piece as-is. if it's a floating spot or something similar without hard edges, leave a bit of white or transparent breathing room around the edge of your image.

hope this helps! if you have any more specific questions lmk :)

#asks #^ guy who is terrified at the prospect of having to build a portfolio for fucking JOB INTERVIEWS now lmfao

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unlimitedtrees · 9 months

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making character sprites as a one-person indie game developer

(huh. turns out this post on cohost didnt have a “read me” section”. o well. i will put the read me section Here, before any of da actual text. click it if u dare !!)

so, i've been meaning on making a Big post talkin all about how i actually Make my games and my processes n such ,but also ive been procrastinating on making it for so long that i thought i might as well just make One part of that post now .. and its about making the Character Sprites for my games .

So. these images are the (mostly) full sprite sheets of the three characters from my game UNITRES Dreams, taken directly from the big giant 'charactersprites.png' image that i used for nearly every sprite for Most of the game's development. some quick things to make note of: First off, Trees (the first one) was one of the earliest things i made for the game, and had their sprite sheet redone Twice since then.. this first picture doesnt contain the latest sprite sheet as the new sprites were done on aesprite and im too lazy to make a sprite sheet out of them right now.

Secondly, the Second character (the pink one), had two different designs, being completely redesigned as i didnt like their first design all too much. their redesign's animations was done in aesprite, but i made a sprite sheet out of em before so i was able to just put them here. Lastly, the Third character (the blue one with the big silly hat) remained mostly unchanged as their original sprites and design were pretty good, but they needed to be cleaned up and given better colors so i ended up polishing all of their sprites.

Anyways. it's going to be hard for me to explain my actual process, as i am Bad With Words, but i will try my best.. So. for Most of my time as a game dev, I've used Paint.NET for Everything. This includes backgrounds, tilesets, and every animation ever in all of my games. For my character sprites specifically, i usually start with making the color palette (which is a whole different process where i mess around with the RGB values until i get a specific color that i think looks pretty ... its hard to describe). When making a new character, i usaully start with an Idle animation, just so i have a good base to make all the other sprites on. I just make a sketch of the character, then i do the flat colors (as my games dont have line art), and once i have the colors i start doing the rendering , where i try to pull off a sort of Sonic CD-esque , celshaded style while Also including a bit of anti-aliasing and other modern pixel art techniques to give the sprites more Depth and make them look Sharp. Idk. it's hard to describe my process in words ... i Did make a video Years ago showing off my process, but its old and my editing in that video isnt the Greatest.

So., that's my process Lol . the only thing thats really changed is that Now i use Aesprite for making the Actual Animations , as making animations with Paint.NET is Really Difficult and Annoying , as i have No Idea how the animation will Look until it actually appears ingame .. which results in the early versions of each character's animations looking a little weird (such as Trees' first two versions, the first version of the Pink character, and the Blue character's animations.. .though the blue character isnt as bad as the other two and i kept their animations mostly the same in the final game LOL).

Something that people have kind of criticized about UNITRES Dreams' animations is that some of em dont exactly ... Look Good. a lot of animations are pretty Inconsistent , with characters like Trees having inconsistent sizes in some animations and the movement in animations such as the Pink character's walking animation and various other animations (Especially the ones made in Paint.NET) looking Unnatural.

And Well .. here's the thing about making animations and sprites for something like this. When you're the Main person making an indie game, you have Tons of different parts of the game that need to be worked on while having Very little time to work on others. On Top of making every single animation for UNITRES , i had to make every single Tileset and background for every single level, On Top of making the Level Layouts , Programming , and even making sprites for things like the UI. And you have to constantly Test the game to make sure everything works and things Look good.

So. i had very little time to work on the sprites, and i Knew this. Something you have to consider is that, not only are you making the animations for the main character , you Also have to make Tons of animations and sprites for Literally Every Other Aspect of The Game . this includes Enemies , Level Gimmicks , NPCs, And the UI .. so you end up having to work on Thousands of sprites by yourself in such a short time.

I ain't the best animator , nor the best sprite artist . But , for this game I chose an art style which is Kinda simple and comfortable for me, which made making things like tilesets and backgrounds so much easier for me. The character sprites specificially only use a few amount of colors ,but also i tried my best to give them as much depth and make them as Colorful looking as i could. Also , something you might notice is that all of the playable characters dont actually have a whole lot of animations .. each of the characters only have the Exact amount of frames and animations necessary for them to Look Good moving around the levels. Aside from a few Gimmick Specific animations that arent in the sprite sheets i posted , there arent many Extra animations or animations with Tons of Frames that i wish i could have added .. and it Kind Of Sucks . Having to split my time across Three Different Characters , i had no time to make any animations Too Crazy or Too Smooth , and i couldnt include any extra animations that could add a bit of personality to the characters ... In Fact ,the Idle "animation" isnt an animation , its just a still frame. I didnt have time to even make a simple waiting animation !!

It Is What It Is. For what its worth , Ithink Im pretty proud of the animations i did for UNITRES Dreams. while i think ive become a much better artist and animator since then, i still think some animations and some of the frames look really good ..just looking at some of the still frames is really nice .. so i think i did a good job, especially for a game that was made in 2 years and is Free. And Hey, while the animations in UNITRES Dreams may not be the best or have the most smooth animations , i Did get to experiment with making more smooth animations for TREES' ADVENTURE. while ,now, i think some stuff could use some work, i am Really Proud of how some of the animations look .. ididnt get to make Too Many extra animations (there still isnt even an Idle animation), i Did get to make some cool extra animations , such as individual animations for your Jump that are based on how fast you're moving . (the original post on cohost had a buncha gifs of da animations but im Too Fuckin Tired 2 post em here LOL !!!)

So Yea . the moral of the story: making video games is kind of hard and time consuming , Especially when you're like , the Only one working on them. just make sure to plan ahead and try not to overwork urself .. make what you can and do it when you can. Thats what i think , anyways.

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babiebom · 3 months

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apologies for my absence- holiday periods are tiring lmao how were they for you? unfortunately we have yet to watch the fnaf movie, as our group is one that is exceedingly difficult to make plans around because we're all busy 💀 but then there's the one guy who doesn't want to leave his house lmao luckily, iv'e been pretty good at staying away from spoilers, so i've got that going for me. on the other hand, i'm planning to go see Trolls 3, and my mother and sister recently went to see the new Wonka movie. Though from what i've heard from a friend, Wonka's no good :// Yeahhh, if i actually commit to the mod, i'd have to learn pixel art and reteach myself code and programming 😭... i used to be somewhat decent at it. oooo yes i love a good choose your own adventure! they're so much fun and i've actually coded 1 of my own :,) it was through Visual Basics though, so the formatting was a bit weird for me lmao if you're going for a visual novel type of look and playability, I'd probably recommend Unity or itch.io? in my experience, Unity is probably easier to use.. theres another website/app i used but i can't recall the name sadly :( if i do i'll get back to you though! i don't have that much of a detailed request this time, but perhaps some fluff and love languages between rasmodius and the reader? or like hcs of rasmodius's evolving interest/thoughts arund the reader before finally getting together? i'd perhaps request nsfw/smut stuff too but tbh i just don't have any ideas 💛 tysmm :D -🔮

A/N: I’m glad you’re okay!! Honestly I’ve been sick these past couple of weeks (I caught pneumonia and had it for a month before going to the hospital. I thought it was a cold oopsies) I haven’t watched anything new recently but I am watching the third season of singles inferno with some friends. And I guess until I can figure out how to make a visual novel I have to write the fic out lmao sucks for me because I think a game would be better but oh well. What can I do? And like always I’ll try to do both!! Check back for the second one!!

Tw: cursing, slight nsfw but no full on smut. Let me know if there’s something I missed!!

Wc: I have no idea! But these are headcanons so 10+ is the goal!!

Sdv Masterlist

Okay so there are five main types of love languages.

Physical touch, Words of Affirmation, Receiving Gifts, Acts of Service, and Quality Time.

I would also like anyone reading this to remember that these love languages are how you want to be loved/receive love not how you show love to others.

I do think that Rasmodius is very connected to himself

And by that I mean I think he knows himself very well, or at least he thinks he knows himself very well.

And for a long time I think he probably thought that Quality Time and Physical Touch were his main two love languages.

I mean idk if it’s canon but in my opinion I do think he cheated on the witch with Caroline

And I’m not gonna go into it here because this isn’t about them, but I think it might’ve had to do with that and his own struggles with temptations.

And I also think gift giving is canon for literally every single character in stardew because that’s the main way to befriend someone.

But I think that after marrying you/beginning to date you he realizes that his actual love language is words of affirmation.

While Physical touch and quality time are still very important to him, being with you makes him see that he really does like being praised.

Like whenever you say that he has done something well, or that you like something he has done his heart flutters as if he were a teenager again.

Especially when it comes to his magic

Like I feel like the townspeople aren’t really fond of him

And they never thank him for the things that he does whenever they actually need him for stuff

Like the haunted maze

Like they’re just talking about how weird he is and how he got it done

But they never stop and say anything that’s positive like WTF

So I think he would appreciate whenever you thank him or praise him and it would go straight to his head (which one idk 👀)

With quality time I feel like you get a lot of it after he moves to the farm

Like unless he’s working in his tower, or you’re off somewhere like in the mines

That you’re like together even if it’s spent in silence

And he loves that

Like he was super lonely before even if he doesn’t want to admit it

So just being in the same room as you counts as quality time for him.

And if you’re doing an activity that’s particularly domestic

He’s in heaven like he doesn’t wanna make it a big deal

But baking and helping you around the farm makes his heart soar.

I think in terms of how he shows love i think he would show it in acts of service and gift giving

Like oh you don’t feel well?

Don’t bother going to the clinic he’s just going to create a potion that stops you from getting sick

You’re afab and you’re having bad cramps during your period?

Consider them gone

Look at this thing he got for you

And while yeah this might seem like either a lot of insincere

In his mind and heart this is how he shows that he appreciates you and wants you to live a good and easy life.

If he can make things easier and less stressful for you

That’s exactly what he’s going to do

He loves you and while he loves receiving attention and love he’s kinda crap at giving it in the same way because he just doesn’t really know how

So this is how he does

He’s VERY romantic sometimes and shows it through gifts and services.

Very cute and a good significant other when you get past his rough exterior.

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anartificialsatellite · 3 months

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So I can't play a lot of video games because anything 3D where the camera moves around a lot with the player character makes me very motion sick pretty quickly. I used to be able to play these sorts of games, but as I've gotten older it's gotten worse and I haven't been able to for a few years now. (I thought finally getting glasses would fix it and it does kind of help, but not enough.) This sucks because it does mean that I miss out on a lot of games, but it also has forced me to broaden my horizons and try games I might not have found otherwise.

One of the places where this becomes more of a problem for me is the horror/thriller genres - I think there's especially a tendency to rely on 3D first and third person perspective (and especially first person) in games that are meant to be scary or creepy or whathaveyou, because when you limit the player's field of view it's not difficult to make them feel trapped and uneasy, and it lends itself well to jumpscares.

...Which makes it all the more impressive, imo, when a game that doesn't use that still succeeds at building that sort of atmosphere and immersion. So!

Here's three of my favorite scary/spooky/creepy atmospheric games without a 3D first or third person perspective:

The Excavation of Hob's Barrow

This point-and-click adventure game has 2D pixel graphics, an excellent soundtrack, and a fascinating and compelling folk horror mystery at its center. Antiquarian Thomasina Bateman travels to an isolated English town on the moors to pursue research for her book on the barrows of England, and (as one usually does in this genre) discovers something strange and sinister lurking beneath the surface. I finished this game in about 2 sessions, by which I mean I've got 10 hours of playtime on it and the only reason it wasn't one session was because I had to stop and do normal human things. (I found this game because I'm a fan of one of the publisher's other titles, The Shivah, a kind of weird and super short detective style adventure game whose main character is a bitter, depressed rabbi, and I really recommend that one as well.)

Oxenfree

Not really horror, I guess, but definitely a supernatural thriller? We'll go with that. Another adventure game, this time one where your choices affect the story. The main character is Alex, a teenage girl who, along with some friends and some non-friends, is spending the night on an island that was once home to an old military base. Using a radio, you unintentionally open a portal and find yourself facing the supernatural effects of a decades old naval disaster. The art is gorgeous, the music is absolutely tits, and there's some really cool gameplay mechanics, as well. I'm also a sucker for spooky radio shit, so when I came across this game I was all over it.

It's got a sequel, Oxenfree II: LOST SIGNALS, which is a similar style game set on a nearby island some time after the events of the first game, and I also super recommend that one, too.

FAITH

I'll start with a caveat for this one: I've only played Chapter 1, because when I first bought and played it that was the only part that was out. I can't speak for any of the rest of this game, and annoyingly, it looks like you can't buy Chapter 1 by itself anymore.

In this retro-styled game you play as a priest returning to the site of a failed exorcism, so if demonic posession and that kind of Catholic religious horror isn't your bag this game probably won't be either, but even as someone who is not Christian, I super enjoyed it. It features 8-bit graphics that remind me of Atari and some old DOS adventure games I haven't played in almost two decades, as well as some truly creepy rotoscoped pixel art. The sound is just as old school as the art and is used to deeply unsettling effect, and I was continuously impressed by how the dev managed to make such a creepy game in this style.

If you've got any others, please share them with me! I absolutely love this kind of thing and am always happy to add more to my "to play" list.

#video games #horror games #the excavation of hob's barrow #oxenfree #faith the unholy trinity #please share your faves with me if you have them i love scary game and i hate throwing up so this is an ongoing search for me

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no-sabo · 3 months

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Alexander's Top 10 Games of 2023

#10: Street Fighter 6

Street Fighter 6 is landing on my list de panzazo because I didn't play enough of Baldur's Gate to include it. Act 1 gang, rise up!

It's tough trying to find the same hype that I had playing Street Fighter IV on the Xbox 360. I don't think I ever put as much hours trying to get good at a fighting game since and I don't think I ever will. This isn't to say that I don't think 6 is as good. My main thing is that I don't think I'll ever be in that kind of place in my life, or have the same friends with the same free time. Getting older is so wack. Street Fighter 6 is cool as hell, though.

#9: Venba

I think for immigrants Venba's themes are well worn ground. Food is perhaps the most powerful anchor to one's culture. Venba is beautiful, touching, and deeply relatable to me as a first born child of immigrant parents.

Make sure you eat something before jumping into this one. I'm pretty sure I ordered Indian food the day after.

#8: A Space for the Unbound

I don't think there's a game on my list with such a stark difference with the level of enjoyment I had between the narrative and the actual play. At times A Space for the Unbound can be extremely tedious.

A lot of the play involves solving puzzles, usually with a pen and paper at hand. That stuff can be nice, however the brief but constant loading in between areas really strained my patience. There's also empty calories in the form of fetch quests that trip up the pacing.

In the end, once credits rolled, those complaints melted away. It's a gripping fantasy story about community, bullying, domestic abuse, anxiety, and depression wrapped in gorgeous, detailed pixel art. And there's an achievement for petting all the cats.

#7: Hi-Fi Rush

Hi-Fi Rush feels like the remake to a long lost Sega game that they developed for the Xbox during their messy Dreamcast console exit. It's tough for me to describe why it's on here. I think I just genuinely miss this tier of game existing. Like, this game had fucking music from Zwan in it. Zwan.

I don't know, man. It's a vibe. It's really well animated, the characters are bright and goofy, and the rhythm infused third person action combat smacks.

I think this was the first game I completed on my Steam Deck in 2023. Actually, I think it's the first game I beaten front to back on it period?

#6: Super Mario Bros. Wonder

I know it's in to trash the New Super Mario Bros. games but I genuinely never had any strong positive feelings for that first DS game and it only lead to further my resentment for that series. They just made so damn many of them.

Mario Wonder, with its Wile E. the Coyote ass animations is so damn refreshing. I think this is probably the best implementation of the self governed difficulty levels, too. A kid can breeze through a lot of these levels, but being a completionist can get brutal in a satisfying kind of way. It's just so nice to be excited for a 2D Mario game again.

#5: Mediterranea Inferno

Part visual novel, part art-house movie, Mediterranea Inferno takes you on vacation with three Italian twinks trying to move past their Covid-19 lock-down trauma. It's funny at times, but quickly veers into some deeply uncomfortable situations. Also, it can get spooky.

It's an important game, but please heed the content warnings.

#4: Eternights

There's something alluring to me about the Persona Social Link system and any time a game decides to mess with that kind of thing I'm game to give it a shot. Eternights' main sell was "dating action game", so, there it is.

The gist here is there's an apocalypse and your player character gets his arm cut off and replaced with a magical one that can transform into, I think, anything? It's a sword for 98% of the game that you use to kill monsters. It's in third person and for the most part it's an OK action game. You get a skill tree and all that and your buds help you fight, though I think the combat truly shines in the back quarter of the game.

The game's whole thing is that you've got a time limit for when a dungeon has to be completed and you can either choose to progress through it or spend time with your friends, who are mostly female.

Now, to my surprise there is a male character that joins your crew late in game who can serve as a love interest and I was curious to see how that would play out given the homophobia present in the games with which it was inspired by.

The same sex story is, I feel, the most interesting route. It flips the corny harem trope on its head and you get what I believe is the most touching and fulfilling end given that character's relationship to the plot. It's respectful in a way the rest of the game wouldn't suggest it.

At some point in the story your characters are falling from up high and to save everyone the player character turns his arm into a bra parachute because in a quick panic he remembers seeing them on one of the girls in your group. It's childish as hell to be sure, but there's a lot of heart here and I can't wait to see what this one man studio does next.

And I'd like to request for more RPGs to be sub-20 hours like this one. It does wonders for pacing.

#3: Jusant

I kinda' just melted into Jusant. This game is gorgeous and the danger free climbing was so meditative during some really dark and ongoing political unrest. It feels selfish to even say this but it felt good to get home and get lost in something that provided very little consequence.

Fuck Joe Biden and free Palestine.

#2: Bomb Rush Cyberfunk

Sega can keep Jet Set Radio. Team Reptile understood the assignment.

Look, there's a lot you can do to modernize Jet Set and I'm sure Sega's got their top engineers on it but fuck all that. This shit with its simplified graphics runs at 90 FPS on my Steam Deck. It's got all the vibes down and it manages to improve on the mobility and graffiti systems.

Like Hi-Fi Rush I just miss this tier of game but, like, x10 for this specific series. It improves on the concepts of the games that inspired it. I was eating here.

#1: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

I don't think I have the capacity to express what Breathe of the Wild meant to me when I first played that game back in 2017. It's gotta' be my favorite game of all time. At least, it was? Still is? It's a toss up. Both Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild have surprisingly different philosophies and it sort of depends on how I'm feeling. All this to say that Tears of the Kingdom is a genuine master piece.

I'm sitting here trying to think of where to even begin. Is it the physics driven world that doesn't seem to break no matter what nonsense you throw at it? Do I talk about the fact that this is the most touching Zelda story to date? How about how the Colgera boss fight theme smacks? Why does this game look so good off like 2011 hardware?

Tears of the Kingdom embodies play. It begs you to be curious and creative. A sanbox with a capital S. My favorite game of 2023 and favorite game period?

Best Games of 2022 in 2023

2023 was stacked, but I had to make room for some stuff that I missed the previous year. If I do this list again the 2023 in 2024 section is gonna' be a damn mess.

Melatonin

I played Melatonin in December of 2023 and it came out December of 2022. i'm so sad it took me a whole year to check it out.

It's got cozy little Rhythm Heaven-like micro games that take place within an insomniac's melatonin infused dreams. It's dripping in pastels and good vibes.

Each level, or "night", has 4 or 5 stages that you navigate kind of like a Mario overworld. You'll walk to, say, the "Work" stage where it runs you through a brief tutorial. There you get a feel for the song and the beats you need to match with button presses. Once you get through that it begins your real run. Rinse, wash, repeat.

I like it a lot. The visuals are super pleasant and it's really satisfying when you nail those perfectly timed button presses to the beat of the music. I only just started it but felt compelled to throw it on here.

He Fucked the Girl Out of Me

This one's tough to talk about. I feel like I don't need to be taking up oxygen in this conversation.

He Fucked the Girl Out of Me is a short Game Boy game about sex work and trauma. This game isn't enjoyable, but it is profound and important.

Again, please heed the content warnings.

I Was a Teenage Exocolonist

If this game had come out in 2023 it would be my number 2.

You begin life on a colony as a 10 year old. You, your parents, and the other colonists escape an Earth on the brink of collapse and crash land on a barely habitable planet. From there you live your life through to adulthood, making choices along the way that affect you, your friends, and the overall colony.

There's a card system that carries a lot of your decision making as a sort of stand in for something like a skill check or a random dice roll. You obtain cards through specific actions and relationships. It's not the greatest mechanic but it's serviceable and feeds well into the gameplay loop.

The game ends when your character turns 20 where your story concludes in one of many different outcomes, but that's not where it stops. The game has a time loop mechanic. You're meant to roll back in on a NG+ and see a lot of the different ways the game could end where you're meant to "fix" mistakes you made in your first playthrough. It works really well and is a core part of the experience.

I binged this game for a whole weekend. I could not put my Steam Deck down. I Was a Teenage Exocolonist is Young Adult fiction at its peak and in a year full of platitudes, "one of my all time favorites" feels like it has very little meaning, but man this one of my all time favorites.

#video games #i was a teenage exocolonist #tears of the kingdom #Street Fighter 6 #Venba #He Fucked the Girl Outta Me #Melatonin #Eternights #hi fi rush #Jusant #bomb rush cyberfunk #mediterranea inferno

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secretgamergirl · 3 months

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Wire Witch Hex - Wearing Many Hats (Font Design)

Lately most of the traffic I'm getting on this blog has been people stumbling onto my multipart series on how a computer works. Glad people are enjoying that as much as they seem to be. My reason for teaching myself all of that (besides just the joy of learning) is I'm very slowly working on designing a new video game console that anyone sufficiently motivated can build for themselves as a neat little DIY project. There are so many moving parts to this project that for now I'm focusing mainly on just the controller and its unique features. To avoid having to make a whole working console, with software, to test it, and make sure I have something to show for all this if the rest doesn't pan out, I'm designing the controller to also be more or less compatible with the NES and SNES (which secretly use the same input standard, just differently shaped plugs at the end of the cord).

This means all I'll need to test and demo my controller is an SNES ROM that knows what to do with my scroll-wheel outputs, a setup where an emulator accurately handles those signals, and later a cart I can slap a couple EEPROMs into and test on real hardware. Oh and I also need to teach myself enough about SNES development to actually create every demo I want to run, do all the art, code it up, and compile it. This is a big job, and I'm not getting paid, so maybe consider throwing me a little money before we dig into this?

Since... really the last time I reported in on this, I've been studying away trying to learn all this, and hey, have a compiled ROM image that'll display a blank screen in any color I want, and a third party program that IN THEORY with a bit of massaging will convert a 256x256 image into an SNES character ROM image. AKA the file with all the graphics. My ultimate goal for this demo cart is to cycle through several very simple games, showcasing how my controller works with each. So I need to cram every image any of these are going to need into my one big image file, which I'm slowly picking away at, but the one thing I knew from the start that I'd definitely need is to throw some text on screen explaining the controls for each demo. And since it's not like there's a built in font in in the system, I had to make my own.

This is not my first font-making rodeo. For this one, my thinking was, I'm going to be in a fixed 16x16 resolution per character (because I forgot the specifics of how the SNES actually tiles graphics), some built in spacing so I can slap them all right up against each other or some border and still be readable, and I wanted a nice little shadow built into every character in case they end up on a low contrast background. Let's zoom in on what I have here so far, in case you don't feel like downloading the file and blowing it up to something more readable.

The first thing I want to note is that after finishing the first 4 rows of characters here, I double checked, and while the SNES CAN break backgrounds into 16x16 tiles, the absolute minimum is 8x8. If I were really trying to be space efficient, I should have designed around that. Several of these characters would easily fit into a 16x8 space, that level of compression would also let me have just the period and comma and be able to build a colon, semicolon, or apostrophe from those, and most importantly, I rendered this with all of the lowercase letters exactly 1 pixel too tall to fit into a 16x8 space and let me double up there. Since I'm rather happy with this font so far and I'd eventually like to make some version of it available for, if nothing else, other people writing software for my eventual console here, I will likely, at some point, make a more space-optimized variation. I'd also like to cover a wider range of characters. At the very least, have some accent marks, wouldn't be too hard to add support for Cyrillic. Pretty sure I can get Japanese and Korean text in keeping with this look. Maybe some other languages. Anyway though, let's talk about what I've got.

My general design rule here was, where possible, make lines 2 pixels thick, and have each white pixel cast a black pixel shadow immediately below, to the right, and the diagonal between them. This gives a pretty convincing relief effect in my opinion, and keeping the shadows this thick keeps a nice firm edge there so it's even generally readable on a pure white background. Within each 16x16 tile, I was extremely strict about keeping a 1 pixel margin clear at the top and bottom of each image, and 2 or 3 on the sides (often 3 on the left, 2 on the right. With capital letters, I went with a generally rigid and blocky style, trying to stretch things to my arbitrary margins. Lowercase letters I restricted to just 8 pixels tall, and those featuring tails are given special permission to drop down an extra pixel, leaving the shadow right on the edge of their true bounding box.

While it wasn't an intentional move at first, several lowercase letters ended up with a decidedly rounded, squashed look, particularly g and q. I found that to be both kind of cute, giving the whole font a real unique character, and eventually started to actively lean into it (which may not be super obvious, I started with W as it's kinda the letter than needs the most breathing room and worked outward from there), and did my best to distort all the rounder shapes and in particular the highly mirrorable b d p q set, as I seem to recall once reading the more you avoid identical shapes with those, the more legible the font becomes for people with dyslexia. Similarly, I made a point of distinguishing the shapes of the Ms and Ws, and added a little whimsy to the numerals. Overall I'm super happy with all the lowercase letters (except for e and s being too thin, but that was an inevitable compromise), and if I ever have the time to kill it's very likely I'll revisit this someday and apply this squishy rounded aesthetic to the capitals too.

Your eyes were probably drawn really quickly to the parentheses here, where for at least the moment I'm breaking my rules about blank space and shifting them inward quite a bit rather than centering them. That's going to look really bad if I use them in a sentence (like this), but the main reason I'm including them right now is so I can list button prompts with both the icons representing what's actually going to be on my controller, and the SNES buttons sharing the same signals. So something like: "GO (A) Jump" and I think the half-spacing and closeness to what they enclose will look pretty nice in this one specific case.

As a final note, the particular hardware I'm working with absolutely supports the ability to mirror any image horizontally or vertically, as well as change the palette. If I truly wanted to cram letters in as efficiently as possible at this font size, I could, for instance, have an 8x8 right-angle segment, build a whole H just from mirroring that, also use it for the legs of the A, P, F, the left side of the D, etc. This however is incompatible with the shadows I'm using for extra readability. And of course for other projects I HAVE made a perfectly legible 8x8 font before.

I'm pointing this out because hey, if you do the math, JUST these characters I've set aside for having arbitrary on-screen text, as is, are consuming 5/16ths of my total graphical memory, and I'm probably never even going to display most of these anywhere. Again, not a huge problem for the simple demo pack I'm making, and that 256x256 drawing space isn't a hard limit. Spending an extra processor cycle to change an index value and access a whole other page of image data is a pretty common practice on the hardware, but especially with older computers and racing to get things ready to draw before a screen refreshes, it's good to at least be mindful of the tradeoffs with that sort of thing.

And again, my sole source of income at the moment is patreon donations, so if you're excited about seeing updates to this weird project of mine or you're learning useful things from any of it, maybe consider throwing me a little support?

#wire witch hex #console design #programming #fonts #art #tutorial #SNES

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supernaturallyginger · 4 months

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2023, my third full year after deciding to teach myself digital illustration!

After two years of trying to grasp some of the basics and growing comfortable with the new craft, I started to extend my net past just the same character (or two) in front of a solid color background.

While I still often draw the same two guys, sometimes even in front of a blank background, I also began to experiment with simple backgrounds and lighting. Trying to create the environment the characters are in.

I also started to teach myself pixel art ^_^

There is a long and exciting journey into the art world ahead of me. I am proud of the work I did this year, and I know my art will only further improve in 2024!!

#my art #art summary #one piece

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blazehedgehog · 8 days

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Is it possible to make a game like Sonic 3 today within the deadlines it had back then? Pixel art, physics and all.

Why wouldn't it be?

It was the third game in the series. They already had a very strong idea of what they were trying to do with the character, they already had proven technology under them that they could easily extend and upgrade. They had been doing this on Sonic for three years already, and some of the people had been working for Sega even longer than that.

These were talented, experienced people. Professionals. Having the prior knowledge to be able to say, "if we do X, then we get Y" allowed them to work quickly and efficiently.

So I would compare it to, say, what I did with OverBite. OverBite was a game I made for a Clickteam Fusion Game Jam in 2016. We had from like, September 30th or even the 29th up to October 31st to make an entire game. It came out to something like 33 days.

youtube

So I made this game where you play as Dracula. I wrote all the code, designed all the mechanics, made all of the sprites, and built all of the levels. Alone. By myself. A single person. The only other person to help me with anything was my old friend Malcolm Brown, who handed me some music.

I had JUST bought Clickteam Fusion 2.5 on Steam, which means it had 0 hours of usage registered. I used it to make OverBite, which means I could track exactly how many hours I spent working on the game, and though I don't remember the exact total, I remember after doing the math it ended up shaking out to between 9 to 11 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 33 days. It was more than 300 hours total.

Again. For one person. I'm not saying it's the greatest game ever made. The level design in particular was extremely last second -- literally, I was down to the last day, only really had finished the gameplay engine, so I cobbled together four levels in a few hours and put it up seconds before the deadline at midnight. But the point is that I had worked in Clickteam Fusion for a decade and a half and could execute on my needs very well. I knew the software and the process like the back of my hand.

Now imagine having two people like that. Or five. Or ten. "300 hours of work in one month" suddenly turns into 3000 hours in one month. Using tech they already have, and proven gameplay concepts they have a lot of familiarity with.

It still wasn't easy, mind you. But the concepts that made it work back then not only still work today, they probably work even better because you aren't fighting to squeeze things down into such limited hardware. Like, the entire reason a game jam can even exist as a concept at all is because at a certain level of development, things are just easier now.

A game jam in 1994 is an impossible concept to think of because the tools had to be so super specialized to an incredibly narrow kind of work environment. You had to be a genius computer scientist to get something like Sonic the Hedgehog to function, never mind how much money it would cost to get something like a development kit.

Today, literally anyone can pick up a copy of Godot or Unreal 5, watch a few Youtube tutorials, and make a game from their bedroom with consumer tools. And those tools are faster, easier, and more intuitive to work with than anything that came before. It cannot be understated what a huge concept that is, and how that used to be totally impossible 15-20 years ago.

(And before some British dude rolls up like "yeah well you could always do that with the amiga" -- that's true, but it's also still different, and the fact that you can just give Microsoft $20 to unlock "Developer Mode" on an Xbox and start pushing Unity and Unreal games you develop on your PC to a console is still mindblowing in context.)

And it trickles down, too. If you know the conversion process, you can use these nice amazing modern tools to make proper retro games that run on real retro hardware.

All of this is to say that just because it's easier doesn't mean it should be done. OverBite absolutely slaughtered me. 11 hours of game development a day, 7 days a week, for almost five solid weeks was deeply unhealthy, physically and mentally. I haven't come close to finishing any game project, ever, since OverBite. It fried me.

And on Sonic Team's side, Sonic 3 was so massively stressful for them that they quit making Sonic games for almost half a decade. Crunch time development like that hurts in many ways, both visible and (mostly) invisible.

But yes, it could still absolutely be done.

#questions #Anonymous #sonic the hedgehog #sega #sonic team #overbite #gamedev #indie #sonic 3

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