Another fall begins in the University District, bringing with it new upstairs neighbors who have never lived in an apartment building before and need to be politely reminded that there is a bedroom right beneath them and can they please be so kind as to refrain from playing dance music at 2AM.
They look younger every year.
(I always try to be as chill about this as possible. It is my hope to never be that cranky old bitch downstairs.)
thumbnail – click for glorious full size.
Illustration for an article a friend wrote about a Japanese video game where you collect and marry war machines. Read it here.
He suggested that the end result might be better if I did not dig up images of the actual game before drawing this, and I think it was the right choice – my drawings of Cute Lady War Machines ended up a lot crazier than the actual game art.
Today I wandered down to “Seattle Indy Expo”, which was basically ‘some local devs who couldn’t get into PAX putting on a n event near PAX’. There were several competitive multiplayer games. I tried a few.
Within two or three rounds, I was beating the pants off of everyone who was not a developer of the game I was playing. I feel like I have discovered a skill I didn’t know I had.
I guess this is what happens when you play video games for like thirty years, and never try competitive multiplayer stuff except in game genres you never play – I mean, try to get me to play Smash Bros and I’m just lost, because I don’t have much Fighting Game skill.
Today I wandered down to “Seattle Indy Expo”, which was basically ‘some local devs who couldn’t get into PAX putting on a n event near PAX’. There were several competitive multiplayer games. I tried a few.
Within two or three rounds, I was beating the pants off of everyone who was not a developer of the game I was playing. I feel like I have discovered a skill I didn’t know I had.
I guess this is what happens when you play video games for like thirty years, and never try competitive multiplayer stuff except in game genres you never play – I mean, try to get me to play Smash Bros and I’m just lost, because I don’t have much Fighting Game skill.
Idle thoughts towards a Paradroid clone that preserves some of what I like about the game. Mostly inspired by Puppygames’ Droid Assault, which does not.
More realistic art: each droid class has a different unifying color scheme, to aid in quick tactical decisions. “Oh shit this 400 class droid is about to reject me, and all I see is 7/8/9… oh YES there’s a 200.”
I think I would make the fog of war more obvious: render unseen areas in a more schematic view. Like Monaco. Make it VERY OBVIOUS that you can’t see enemy droids because they’re Out Of View.
TWIN-STICK SHOOTER.
Must have a transfer game. Every single damn clone of Paradroid drops it. Having this separate little thing to master was part of the fun; being able to take over the 999 with the 001 is totally An Achievement that should go into your virtual trophy case.
Randomly-generated ships? Paradroid the Roguelike. Or not – design different decks to present a different kind of mood.
It’s definitely a game set in a Place rather than a series of Levels – you can stealth your way to the command deck and take over the 999 as your first action, if you want.
Oh hey look here’s an arena shooter that comes as source with Unity. Well that’s a good chunk of the basic work then.
Ramp the reflex up: some bots should be total bulletstorm. (Adaptive difficulty: alert level determines power level of bots. Or is there an explicit EASY/NORMAL/BULLETSTORM difficulty setting?)
Visual style: as much flat color as possible. Possibly every object has 3 colors, white/midtone/dark, as per its droid class? Similarly, each level has its own hyper-limited palette applied to the standard tiles.
(Maybe a 4th accent color that shows you where the droid is in its class? ie, a 304 has some of the colors of a 2xx, while a 389 has some of the colors of a 4x?)
Button to turn on ID numbers above droids?
Lights? Would add cast shadows as a way to notice other droids.
Smart-bomb: you emit a bulletstorm, at the cost of a dramatic amount of your host’s energy. You probably can’t do it at all on low-power droids. Maybe one-shot energy tank pickups?
Is upgrading your host/yourself possible? I want to say no. The heart of the game is “get better equipment by transferring”.
Each droid has a sentience rating. At the end of the game you are told how many droids you killed, and what their combined total human equivalent was. You do not get points or achievements for this. You just know.
Hmm. Narrative: what if the droids are just going ‘fuck this war thing’? There could be the odd NOT A GUN moment. Some ‘bosses’ are heavily armored, and try to reason with you before opening a can of whoop-ass. You can join them at which point the game ends with a cinematic of the fleet flying off into the unknown. (If I am insane enough to do a sequel, this is what it assumes you chose…)
(There is an achievement for choosing the ‘be loyal to your human masters’ ending, and an achievement for choosing the ‘be loyal to your fellow software people’. They are both called “Loyalist”.)
Some terminals have extra features… if you can win the hacking game with them. It’s the same game as taking over a droid, less is more. Lock all doors. Change alert level. View security cameras. Also basics like ‘ship map’ and ‘droid database’.
There are places only small bots, and only hovering bots, can go.
You do not gain allies. This is single infiltration, not squad combat.
Hacking game. Research existing ones.
Paradroid
Neuromancer
Bioshock (and its sequels?)
Uplink?
Oddly enough, not Hacker.
Invisible, Inc.
System Shock 2
Ratchet and Clank?
This morning, I dreamed I was reading a book. It was full of gorgeous full-bleed illustrations of techno-mesoamerican-hindu architecture floating in the sky. Everything was rendered in a palette of deep, saturated brown, an intense turquoise, and a golden yellow. It was all supposedly drawn by Jack Kirby, but didn’t have any of his signature handling of black – it was all flat color without lines. Each illustration had a small bit of text laid over it Like a quarter of the page, I think.
Then I was interrupted by a small dark-skinned child, who asked me what I was reading. I started to explain it, then decided to show it to him, but as I flipped through the book all I got were pages full of text. They were in the same colors, with the page in the blue, and the text in the brown, with occasional use of the yellow in bold for emphasis.
It very much felt like a glimpse into Kirby’s version of Vallhalla, to be honest.
Edit. I decided to spend some time drawing that. I kinda got lost in filling in the text instead of drawing the city; I may come back and add more to the city. The composition is straight out of my dream; the text is me basically googling a bunch of Aztec randomness and asking myself “What would Kirby do with these elements?”.
I am not going to start writing this as an illustrated story. I hope.
I will however note that I figure “Ixtab” totally dresses like a superhero. And is ultimately possessed of some sort of reality-bending power that makes the whole story vanish up its own asshole. Seems about right for something I half-remember from a dream.
My site was down for a couple of days due to some complications with it moving to a faster server. Those happened to be days I doodled in.
A friend’s scruffy dragon lady character.
Twin, getting really stoned, on a day when all I seemed to be able to do was to get stoned and doodle my characters. I fucked around a lot with my collection of art brushes here.
Yesterday was Jack Kirby’s birthday. I saw a LOT of fan-art of his characters that day. Me, I just did a blatant style rip doodle. Probably needs some metallic leg bands to be honest but whatever, this was like ten minutes.
Continuing style test for that vampire thing I’ve been kicking around. Yeah, I think it works. Someday I’ll actually do a short story about her. Someday. In my copious free time.
Also I finally spent some time fixing the style for Five Glasses of Absinthe. Now it’s using my horizontally-oriented comics theme, with different css to make it, um, not horizontal and stuff. There’s still some stuff that needs tweaking but it looks a hell of a lot better than it did for a while.
I blew off yoga this morning and that kinda set the tone for the day. I feel like I got nothing done.
I wanted to sit down and work on the circuit housing for the dragon costume, but it turned out the multimeter I picked up the other day required a weird-sized battery, which I did not have. When I walked on down to Radio Shack to get one, only to get back home and discover this meter doesn’t have a ‘go beep when a continuous circuit is detected’ mode – the main thing I needed one for – I just ended up feeling kind of at loose ends. I didn’t want to go out AGAIN to acquire a new one that did, and I didn’t feel like doing anything on my to-do list.
I stood around for a while looking through my pornspiration directory, with the intent of using it as source material for some random pinuppy thing. But nothing clicked. I ended up just smoking a lot of weed and doodling various characters doing the same.
Plus my site is currently down for Technical Reasons – I volunteered to beta test faster hosting at my host, with the reward of having said faster hosting for cheap for a while. But right now the site’s not responding, and I can’t access the control panel, either. Need to bug technical support on that. It would be nice to put up the new Absinthe style I put together yesterday.
And then in the evening I got mail telling me that the place I take my pole classes at will close in a couple months. One more thing to have to deal with.
I did get some laundry done, so I guess there’s that.
Oh hey. I just managed to get the password reset on my site’s control panel to work. So that’s good.
And I have found what I should be changing my nameservers to, so that’s good too. Now I get to wait a while for it to propagate.
I made a very informative post on a webcomics forum, which resulted in another regular joking that he was going to start referring to me as Cerebro. X-Men are alright, but I’d rather be one of the New Gods…
Recently, there was a thread on a webcomics board I participate in: Post your old art and your recent work, to show how far you’ve come. I dug up some old B&W stuff from 2000; one regular on the forum commented that he really liked it and asked if I’ve ever thought of playing around with that medium again.
I replied that “…mostly I kinda feel like relying on outlines is just too damn easy; after all the time I’ve spent wrapping my head around ways to create a well-defined image with only a handful of colors it feels like cheating.”
And I kept on thinking of this moment from The Planiverse. It’s a book about a 2D world with 2D physics somewhat modelled on our own; at one point the main character encounters a Great Artist, and they discuss his work. At the time, Dar Jisbo is working on highly abstract art, and despairs of ever making a piece that doesn’t look like anything at all – it’s really hard to do this when you’re working for a 1-dimensional retina.
Na did her very best to shake Dar Jisbo from his despondent mood, ending by suggesting that he paint Yendred’s portrait.
[Dar Jisbo said] “You, dear one, closer are and far more beautiful. Allow me what little of my conventional skill remains to demonstrate.”
Taking a small pad of paper, Dar Jisbo studied his subject carefully and then, beginning at the top of the paper, skipped his pen lightly and confidently along its surface from top to bottom. The whole operation took about ten seconds. At the end, he detached the paper and handed it to Na, who cocked her head to examine it. Yendred leaned eagerly over her, the better to view the portrait.
“It perfect is! What skill! Why you more pictures like this do not create?”
“It too easy is.”
(Yes, all of the dialogue Yoda-mode in is. It’s somewhere between annoying and charmingly alienating. Yendred is the main character; Na is showing him around where he meets Dar Jisbo, and Dar Jisbo is the artist.)
I suspect this is probably an adaptation of a koan; it has the shape of one. Whatever its source, though, this is the version that stays with me, and bubbles up every time I think about what it’s like to be an artist.
“These drawings of yours with conventional lines are wonderful! Why don’t you do more like them?”
“It too easy is.”