Meet Mr. Goblin Green

Being a fantastical creature working as a desk clerk, it is quite fortunate how little he is judged for actually being a goblin. However it is equally unfortunate how much he is judged by his attitude, smell and a general sense of awkwardness that comes with being stuck in a dead-end job with no chance of promotion, social life nor happiness.

The world itself being corporate and uncaring in equal measure, it is not so different from our own, with the only real anomaly being our little green associate.

Materialism is God and wealth is to show how devoted you have been, the corporatocracy is here to stay.

The style is deemed to be set as realistic while ever so slightly skirting into the territory of the more detailed cartoony style.

Being thought of as a darkly humoured Beat’em Up, the main competitors are deemed to be Double Dragon Neo, Guacamelee and Scott Pilgrim vs The World: The Game.

All in I reckoned it was an interesting concept from the start, but in the end it was the Nekrogoblikon song and its accompanying video that truly sold me the idea. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsMKOx6fumc)

The main things I needed to know to properly complete the assigment was, and still is the location of my laptop charger. Although more software knowledge is always welcome in all fields.

Possible risks were; running out of electricity, somehow screwing up the model because of my unfamiliarity with 3dsmax and letting my familiarity with other lesser software lead me to make decisions that simply should not be done in “max”.

Addressing those concerns were as thus, getting as much of the software I could legally get to my stationary computer, begging, borrowing and stealing electricity from my colleagues, familiarising myself with 3dsmax by forcing myself to use it and it alone for side projects, once I actually have enough to get back to working on said side projects again and finally solemnly swearing that I should never, ever again attempt to triangulate anything in max, to trust in the strange and weird utility called “edge loops”, and forget everything I’ve learned from working with my old programs so that I may be cleansed from my past and rise from the ashes as the immortal phoenix itself.

The motivations behind the style chosen is because of time constraints, it was deemed too risky to take too long working out a new one, that and the existing concept art really spoke to me, feeling it would be a waste not to follow it as best as I could.

In the end, the final mesh still have ways to go, and likewise with the texture with plenty of minor and not so minor issues remaining to be fixed.

The silhouette, while being given ample aid from the textures is still much too clunky in spite of its high poly count, the face, hands and feet in particular needing much more attention, while the back and chest still not interesting enough to warrant as many polies as it has received.

As for the diffuse, one can at once see how disastrous and sloppy the uv-mapping was, and while a more confident person would claim to be not entirely unsatisfied with how the cloth texture ended up, it still is lacking in shadows and more pronounced folds and wrinkles that could be used to further accentuate the body, making up for the still-lacking silhouette in the process.

The yellow highlights on the skin was more of an after-thought and while they enhance the green through the power of analogous colours, they could have used more work on the actual texture on the skin as currently they are too flat in comparison.

 

 

 

As for the normal, it serves as an epitaph to Crazy Bump, hallowed be its name, missed forever it will be.

While the folds are emphasised, some things that could’ve used some post-process work are quite visible, such as the eyes and the tie that really could have used some smoothing up as their patterns most certainly shouldn’t be bumped like this.

 

 

 

 

And finally the specular map is a bit too faint to really make a difference, and while it is felt that focusing on the eyes was the right thing to do, surely the trousers, belt and skin also could’ve benefited from a lighter specular.

 

 

 

 

The font that God forgot

A highly incomplete piece, this rendition of a baptismal font has yet to see better days, but someday it hopefully will.

The thoughts of the style are definitively meant to be angle towards Skyrim more than Asterix and Obelix, even if the simpleness of the mesh and texture tell another tale, although there is still a considerable journey left to undertake before it achieves that lofty goal. Speaking of lofty goals, the motivations behind the attempt of making it in that style is primarily fuelled by the secret desire to one day on a game such as the much-praised Bethesda-made rpg (although with an artstyle and historical focus more in the direction of Deliverance: Kingdom Come, but that’s splitting hairs.)

The scheme is once again the favoured monochromatic one, partly because of the referenced piece itself, but mostly because of the unease of rocking the metaphorical boat by being too adventurous in a time crammed to the brim with deadlines, minor illnesses and technical obstructions.

The main colour is yellow, with brown and almost the hint of a slightly not-at-all-green-but-still-somehow-giving-the-impression-of-something-nearing-green-ish hue. Although that may be because I’ve been staring at its picture for too long. At any rate, it was chosen because yellow in stone is what this one associate with the things of yore, incredibly broad sweep that it may be. It is also good for catching the eye and it in this humble opinion gives off the feeling of brimming with the weight of history, plus it works great with the dodge tool when making highlights.

While mostly saturated, with plenty of highlights, the shadows are given more hue to further denote the differences betwixt the dark and the light, with the carvings and other details brightened, or rather bleached, to make them properly stand out.

One can say that the colours are definitively wading in the warmer pool as opposed to the coldness one would normally associate with stone.

The uv, being horribly rushed and quite unfortunately turned upside down certainly made a stressed mind ever so slightly more stressed, and while intentions were good and ambitions high, the notions of 8 unique carved images and 4 equally unique faces were swiftly turned to dust as time came crashing down.

As such, the diffuse suffered because of it, just as the silhouette of the mesh itself remained low in detail and poor of execution.

 

 

As for the normal map, it once again proved how brilliant Crazy Bump is, especially compared to the bump mapping plug in for gimp that one has been stuck with using in the past.

The main job of the normal being to accentuate the carvings and the coarseness of the surface texture, being the veritable cavalry that comes in the diffuse’s time of need, while not necessary saving the day but at least giving it a fighting chance, one last blaze of glory one could say.

 

 

Meanwhile the specular is there for one thing and one thing alone, aiding the normal. Doing its work by accentuating the carvings and the edges while giving but the slightest of glints to the recesses of the stone.

 

 

 

 

 

The little crate that wouldn’t open

Keyboards make really bad pillows, but this is neither the time nor the place to lament about such things, instead it is time to finally start being properly reflective.

The style attempted for this piece was that of realistic post-apocalyptic, partly because the opportunity to make something completely in metal felt interesting to attempt it but also because the chances for making something battered, deformed, full of scratches and rust would be a good experience.

The colour scheme was safely influenced by most post-apocalyptic world-of-brown-worlds, as a highly monochromatic choice of brown with splashes of lighter brown and some more brown as well as hints of orange, red for the much-loved dominance harmony brought by using analogous colours.

With that said, it is equally safe to say that the dominant colour is indeed brown, the main reason being cowardice and the too-highly regarded notion of “playing it safe”. That and the fact that it is a highly established choice of dominant colour in these types of worlds.

While lacking the proper amount of thought behind itself, the colours can express the notion of the metaphorical destruction after pride, the bleak yearning after a past that is no more and the re-assertion of the earth itself as it tries to reclaim what was once taken from it.

Saturation was the watchword of the day the texture was made, with everything from the metal to shades of rust, saturation is very much the main thing utilised.

Even with the bleak melancholy of the piece, being derived from red and yellow one is highly tempted to say that the colours are warm. In the end the end one would say that the colours are warmer than they are cool, possibly venturing into the area of neutral warm, although that is mostly if not fully influenced by the lingering thoughts of the piece rather than the visual feedback and it should in fact be properly considered as fully warm.

As for the maps themselves, the diffuse does most of the work, getting most if not almost all of the attention such as the scratches in the metal, the rust and the details, simply put the diffuse is the star of the show with the normal and specular being there simply to make it shine (figuratively and literally).

 

In the end, that is the true goal however they are most decidedly capable of much more than just conforming to the whims of the diffuse. Working with he normal and specular together they could very likely have created some much more believable scratches that the diffuse could merely had hinted at, and with more variation on the specular to further denote where the rust has attacked the hardest could only have improved the piece further. In the end, what should be thought is “how can I enhance the mesh in ways the other maps couldn’t”, in this humble person’s humble opinion.

The specular in particular are important in without at least the minuscule of sheens, even things that style themselves the epitome of matte-ness would suffer from it, it breathes a hint of life into it, a breath that even that which has no life sometimes need.

 

 

Board Game Analysis: Super Dungeon Explore

And now, once again, the deadline informs me it is time to write a board game analysis review thingy. The board game in question this time is Super Dungeon Explore!

Simply the best:

Starting with the best is starting to be a habit of mine, and I see no reason to break that habit anytime soon.

At any rate, the best of Super Dungeon Explore is the build up, and the drama that is brought forth by said build up. For that is something that Super Dungeon Explore does well, because at first our entrepid heroes are living through their wildest power fantasies, taking out multitudes of kobolds and other creepy crawlies, slowly but surely slaughtering their way through the hordes to jab at the spawners with much gusto and bloodshed.

Once enough deaths have occured, the consul then gets the chance to change the mood by bringing out his mini-boss and giving the heroes a proper fight for their money, while they get a little more uncertain as the skull counter ticks towards the spawning of the final boss, the dragon Starfire.

At that point the tables are surely turned as they are now fighting for their very lives, letting both nerves and tempers fly high as every roll of a die now matters more than ever.

While the heroes never survived on our play-throughs, we never felt the dissapointment we suffered at the end of the game like in Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game. Every gruesome end still felt, of not good, then at least not unpleasant. Instead of an flat ‘Oh…’ we got a teeth wrenching ‘Dammit, so close!’, even if it was in fact not very close at all.

All in all, the build up was simply the best of any board game that I have played so far, and it truly enhanced the drama in a good way, at least in this humble writer’s opinion.

The worst:

But it wasn’t all milk, honey and roses in Super Dungeon Quest. The worst part of it was the loot system, which felt disjointed and almost separated from the action, even though it was directly related to it.

The fact that every damaged done by the heroes added a tick on the loot counter, even if no kills were made, felt a bit odd, and it had no relation to what we actually damaged or killed, which further dealt a little damage to our suspension of disbelief. The way it was designed, it just didn’t give us what we felt we wanted, which is all subjective opinions and what not but then again what truly is not, when it comes to reviewing board games.

The Core game system:

Movement, actions, attacks, health, stats, potions, loot cards

The core game system consists of a few different parts, but most are dictated by the special dice that comes with the box.

The game is played out in turns, where either one of the heroes get to move his or her character or the consul gets to activate and move 4 skulls worth of minions, before it’s the turn of one of the heroes to move again.

All in all, when all the heroes have moved and acted, the consul then gets to move the rest of his minions, irregardless of how many skulls they are worth, and then the turn is ended and it all starts over again.

3 are the types of dice that will guide you in your dungeon crawling adventure, the most common and weakest being the blue dice, the more reliable but still chancy red dice and finally the strong and much coveted green dice.

The strengths and weaknesses on the characters and enemies are mainly conveyed through how many dice they get to roll and the colour of said rollable dice.

The stats available to the heroes and enemies on their special cards is attack, which dictates how many coloured dice you get to throw when doing a melêé attack, armour, which dictates how many dice (if any) you get to throw to defend against against an attack (be it melêé , ranged or magic), followed by will, which tells you how many dice you get to throw when attempting to use magic (as well as for rolling for initiative, a pretty important roll which decides whether one of the heroes get to do their turn before some of the monsters), and finally dexterity, which conveys how many dice you get to use on a ranged attack, if your character is capable of doing something like that, that is (n0t to mention a certain character’s special being the option to use her dexterity to dodge attacks instead of relying on armour).

Not only that, the cards also tells you how far you get to move on your turn, as well as how many actions you get to make, for example an enemy costs you one action.

Furthermore there is also health, a very important stat that tells you how many wounds you get to suffer before you die.

Most of the minions have only one health, which further adds to the ‘I am mighty’ power fantasy of the heroes, as they are able to slaughter their way through hordes of them, relising in the massive shedding of blood.

One rather interesting system (but not the most interesting, not even close), is the way heroes get to heal themselves through attacks. Certain dice, well actually only the blue ones, have hearts on some sides, which is in concert with other dice that actually allows the hero to cause a wound, then get to heal either himself or one of his fellow heroes once, or removing a malicious effect, such as poison, fire or even being knocked down.

While a bit odd, it nonetheless somewhat works as a system, and it adds to the drama of the dice rolls, which in this humble opinion is ultimately a good thing.

There is also special actions on each card that you may use instead of attacking normally, such as utilising strange magics or great feats of strength.

Finally there is the potions, the effects of which is unique to each hero. The kicker with potions is that the player is able to quaff them at any given time, giving their usage an extra layer of possible tactical planning, for those who fancy that sort of stuff.

And then there is the two counters, that is slowly ticked up by damage.

One is the beforementioned loot counter, which goes up one tick for each damage the heroes cause to the minions of the consul, and at regular intervals rewards the damaging hero with a loot card, which usually comes in the form of a piece of armour, a weapon or a trinket that gives a small boost in the number of dice that he gets to use in one stat. The loot counter is reset after each turn of the game.

Unrelated but similar is the treasure cards, which the hero gets to draw one of when he opens a treasure chest.

These items are significantly more powerful than those of the loot cards, but then again it is much, much harder to actually get access to said treasure chests, what with the hordes of kobolds, fire creatures and small dragons in the way.

But anyway other is the skull counter, which goes up one tick for each damaged caused, no matter who causes and it affected by it. At regular intervals it goes past a skull (hence its name), which gives the consul another skull point to spend on spawning minions during his next round, which I will go into more detail on below.

The skull counter also decides when the consul gets to spawn his mini boss, and when it reaches the end (or when all spawners are taken out), the big boss is spawned and the fun part truly starts for the consul.

The most interesting:

It is that very spawn system that is nominated as the most interesting system of Super Dungeon Explore.

At the start of each game round, the consul gets to spawn 4 skull points worth of minions near each of his spawners, these minions range from tiny 1 skull kobolds to bigger 2 skull creatures and deadly 3 skull beasts.

And then there is the 4 skulls boss monsters, which the heroes should rightly fear.

As mentioned above he also gets an extra skull to use for spawning for each skull the skull counter has gone past on the previous turn, giving the consul a good chance to recover quite well from a particularly devastating round.

A particularly effective tactic for the consul has proven to be to spawn all his weak swarmers as close to the heroes as possible, and saving his bigger monsters for the spawners further away. That way he gets to earn more skulls for his next round when the swarms are slaughtered, bringing the counter closer to the mini boss and big boss, which he then can back up with his bigger regular monsters and utterly crush the heroes in one fell swoop.

If the dice allows him to, that is.

Target audience:

The target audience given is 11+, which I find to be a suitable age for this game.

It is not a hard game, unlike Battlestar Galactica, nor is it gruesome, at least not gruesome in a gruesome way.

The art style is cutesy, to say the least, and the game play while having the potential to be played in a more advanced way is still accessible for the younger crowd.

The game is quick, easy to get into and I’d say most importantly of all, while naturally highly subjective and purely an unmeasurable matter of opinion, quite enjoyable.

Summary:

All in all, I’d say the craftmanship is of the highest quality, and while it may not menace with spikes of giant cave spider chitin, it is a swell romp and a good way to get people of all ages interested in dungeon crawlers.

Much recommended.

Board Game Analysis: Battlestar Galactica the Board Game

Like worrying about the past and the receding hairlines of today, the time to get back to blogging is long overdue.

In this wholesome and decidedly un-spoilerly blog post we’ll be having the pleasure of analysing Battlestar Galactica: the Board Game. What joy!

The best of the beast:

As a starter, one must say, without any doubt whatsoever that the build-up is the best part of BSGtBG. The journey, rather than the destination, is the most sublime, entertaining and thought-provoking part of this cruel and down-right sadistic little game.

Survival is key, and having crisis after heart-wrenchingly humorous crisis thrown upon you time and time again where one have to juggle the fleet’s ever-dwindling resources while keeping an eye and a half on each fellow gamer for even the smallest signs of treachery has been found to be pretty darn entertaining once one got into the spirit of the thing.

The social claustrophobia one encounters when the whole board is sure they know who the Machiavellian mechanical monstrosity is, only for everyone to lay their suspicions on different heads is always a great laugh, and even with a traitor in the midst the group of hardy survivors does get welded together quite nicely after facing adversity after adversity, sacrificing several thousands of people so that the ship will have just enough fuel for doing another jump away from the hostile robotic fleet.

The worst of the warbles:

Which leads me to the oh so often less fun part of any journey, the end.

Win or lose, it all peters out into a rather un-climactic ‘oh, we’re done?’ which a more witty person could base a whole career in stand-up comedy about.

The end simply can’t measure up to the journey, and in case of a loss more often than not depended on a single dice-roll, further enhancing the anti-climax of the situation. Even a win is a bit of a downer, since like previously said, this game is in this humble opinion all about the journey, and while even the greatest journeys have to end sometime, all that is left is a big gaping whole in one’s soul where all the thrills and enjoyment used to be.

And if one reaches the time where the journey is actually starting to feel a little bit tedious, the ending feels even worse, since while if it would end when it was still, in a word, ‘awesome’, one would still partially be fuelled by the great time one indubitably had.

But then if one was in the state of tedium, the change from almost-ennui to nothingness is still a bit of a downer, because even with total boredom and lack of sleep bouncing in the back of one’s skull, the sudden yet inevitable end still feels like a bummer, which one would guess is a power of it’s own.

After all, if the game wasn’t good, one wouldn’t be bummed out of not playing it any more.

The Core game system:

At any rate, what could be described as the core game system is one big loop consisting of a few but oh so vital phases.

At the beginning of the game, and each subsequent turn of the player, the player in question gets to draw a number of differently coloured ‘skill cards’, more often than not around 5.

After the drawing of the skill cards it is time for the movement phase, where the player gets to move their character to one of the locations available to that character, depending on whether or not the character in question is a human or an outed cylon.

Humans and cylons-in-hiding gets to move around the big ships of the fleet, while discovered cylons have their own locations on the board.

After the movement phase is the action phase, where the player is allowed to make use of an action, either through the location the character is placed on the board, or through skill cards or one of the actions noted on the character’s character sheet.

After that, it’s time for the crisis phase.

The player gets the joy of drawing a crisis card, where the players get the joy of balancing the various resources left on the fleet and sacrificing that which they feel they can afford to sacrifice in order to keep going, even if it is just one more turn.

There are generally two kinds of crisis cards, the skill check crises and the choice crises.

With the skill check cards, the group of players get to band together and use their skill cards in order to work together and get through whatever crisis it is that has befallen them in order to not suffer the penalties given on the card.

Alternatively, they can with stiff upper lips and hardened hearts save their skill cards and ride through the storm, even if it means they lose some oh so precious resources.

This is also a perfect chance for the cylon or cylons-in-hiding to throw their spanners in the works by getting the crises to fail on purpose.

The way it works is that skill cards are placed face-down to avoid card-counting and other rain-man no-good-ness, while promoting sneakiness and scheming. Furthermore two skill cards are drawn from the so-called ‘destiny deck’ and placed face-down amongst the others in order to make it even harder to know who placed what cards and potentially make the crisis even harder to solve.

Each skill check has got a number assigned to it, which denotes how difficult it is to pass it, as well as a number of colours that signifies what types of skill cards gives a positive or negative value to the end score of the skill check.

After all the players have had an opportunity to add cards to the pile, they are shuffled and then flipped so that the cards can be counted, adding the value of the positive cards and subtracting the value of the negative cards.

If the value of the cards is greater or equal to that of the skill check, the crisis is solved and all is fine.

If the value is less then the skill check has failed and the fleet must suffer the penalties.

The second kind of crisis is where one specific player, like the president or the admiral, have to make a choice between two options, usually the situation is best described as choosing between plague and cholera, but they get more important the further the game goes along when certain resources start dwindling faster than others.

The actually win Battlestar Galactica: the Board Game, one have to escape far enough with the fleet so that the cylons won’t bother you any more, or so I’ve been told.

The mean of escape is activating the faster than light, or FTL, jump drive, which is done by filling the jump preparation track up to 5 slots, which is being done through the drawing of certain crisis cards.

Once the jump drive is prepared, the ship will jump and the admiral gets to draw 2 destination cards and, without consulting the rest of the group, pick one and then resolve the crisis written upon that card.

The destination cards also have a number written upon them, which signifies how far the ship have actually jumped.

To win BSGtBG, you have to have a jump-distance of 8, collected through the destination cards and then survive long enough to make one additional jump. That is the only way the humans can win, while the cylon players win when the humans lose.

The ways the humans can lose are numerous.

The first is through damage, if the main ship, Galactica, has 4 damage tokens or destroyed locations, the ship is utterly destroyed and all the humans dies.

The second is by fully losing one of the 4 resources, being Food, Fuel, Morale and Population.

These resources show how well the fleet is doing, and the total loss of any means the destruction of the fleet.

The third is by letting the cylons get a boarding party into the ship and killing everybody from the inside.

The epilektos of the system:

The most interesting system of BSGtBG would be the loyalty system, which basically assigns each player to the role of either human or a cylon infiltrator, which adds an added sense of danger and mystery to each session.

The subterfuge and witch-hunts and can happen are great opportunities for great fun for those who are into that sort of thing.

The actual assigning is pretty simple, at the start each player is given a card, which either reads ‘You are not a Cylon’, or ‘You are a Cylon’. Either way players are encouraged to spend up to 30 seconds reading that card, just to add to the mystique.

If you’re given the ‘You are a Cylon’, everything changes. Your end-goal is now the destruction of the fleet while getting the rest of the group to suspect everybody but yourself, having a big internal laugh while you’re practising your Machiavellian ways.

The rest of the group is bound to be eager to find out who the traitor or traitors are, in order to protect their dwindling resources and sanity, but the chance of actually discovering it are few and far between.

The suspicions, subterfuge and witch-hunts adds a layer of depth to the game, depending on the group of course.

The Target group:

One would say that the target group is mainly scheming bastards of 15 years or more of age, male and female both.

People interested in lengthy board-games, social politics and the Battlestar franchise also comes to mind.

Summary:

In conclusion, one would say that Battlestar Galactica: the Board Game is a great way to kill an evening, along with the afternoon and late night as collateral damage as well.

The hardships, intrigues and scheming are all great ways to knit together a group in adversity, only to break it down again when the accusations and witch-hunting starts.

Only thing that truly marrs the experience is the aforementioned anti-climax of the endings, the way it just fades away into nothingness, and it have been debated and well concluded that the cylon boarding party seems a bit tacked on because of lore rather than game play, and that the game could do well without it as it is just another loss condition and a rather measly one at that.

But other than that, the game is a brilliant romp and a great laugh, if only one had more time to throw at it than one does in today’s society.

That’s all for me for this moment, with plenty more blog posts to come, preferably not as close to their deadlines as this one.

The Sad But True Story Of Ray Mingus, The Lumberjack Of Bulk Rock City, And His Never Slacking Strive To Exploit The So Far Undiscovered Areas Of The Intention To Bodily Intercourse From The Opposite Species Of His Kind, During Intake Of All The Mental Conditions That Could Be Derived From Fermentation

This week has been a week of, if not actual toil, one of heavy emotional strife, having to contend with the grueling graphical scars that befalls upon one’s creations when one scale them up because apparently even though they were made first, since they don’t fit the furniture we have they have to be enlarged, leaving this poor worker, this mere servant, to watch the fruits of his figurative loins grow up in all the wrong ways.

Because with the end of the tunnel looming ever closer, the matters of time and space conspire to steal any hope of gently guiding these poor lost souls to achieve the greatness that they so deserve, doing touch ups here, slimming down lines there, enhancing them so that they can become proper adults with proper careers, maybe even finding and settling down other sprite-sheets.

But no, instead we get this, these dregs of society, drunkards and junkies not fit to shine a pimp’s shoes.

Blurry, discoloured and utterly unwholesome.

I mean, just look at them, look at them and despair!

Because the scale tool is never generous, never benevolent. Especially when scaling something up.

While some tools give with one hand and takes with the other, the scale tool truly takes with both, takes and destroys with fiery hate and chilling malice.

It shudders the mind when one thinks about this process, this evil of evils, and one ask himself, would it hurt, being transformed to something like that?

Do they still cry themselves to bed every night?

I know I do.

But anyway yeah that’s basically what I’ve been doing this week, adding scaled-up variations of the sprite-sheets and fiddling with some txt’s so that their frames (hopefully) work properly.

Since the furniture debacle, it was decided that both versions of 120 pixels and 144 were needed, and hopefully the powers that be will be able to pick one of them so that we can move on from this dreadful scaling up business.

Yes, it’s really been that simple, open a sprite-sheet, press the scale tool, put in the proper amount of pixels, press scale, cry internally at how the scale tool ruins the few good parts left in the images, repeat. Always repeat. Except when you shouldn’t.

But I guess this week’s general complete opposite of busyness has been a blessing in disguise, bringing some much-needed time from the front lines to throw at that gorram 2d-report.

Sorrow Throughout The Nine Worlds

It seems like the guard in the wheelchair mentioned in last week’s blog was sadly laid off shortly before our main character decided to embark on his glorious and not at all sneaky mission to the land of freedom fries and liberty cabbage.

For a number of reasons, mostly of the chronological variety, with everybody’s hated Grandfather Time biting at our proverbial ankles every step of the way, it was decided that instead of adding a whole new guard version.

It would simply be better to polish the ones we had, and as such that has been what I’ve been doing.

More specifically, I have been refining and more importantly centring Guard#1’s various animations in order to make switching feel less abrupt and weird, so now instead of having his hat fly all over the place it’ll be more or less in the same standardised position, so that our producer won’t have an aneurysm.

Also I reckon the experience will be somewhat improved for the viewing pleasure of the players.

But really it’s mostly to keep the producer from rupturing a blood vessel because of overexposure and dying a horrible, horrible death.

The actual work process has mainly been a lot of measuring, lots and lots of measuring, and some moving, the occasional cutting and pasting, some more measuring, bit of erasing and re-drawing where necessary, and after that, you guessed it, more measuring.

‘Course with all this thrice-damned measuring I somehow accidentally forgot to take notes, meaning that I’d have to re-do that whole process twice more for the other guard variations, which is a less than ideal situation to find oneself in.

And of course since one cannot just walk into Mordor, meaning in this case that if the other guards don’t exactly match pixel by pixel the standards and measurements set by Guard#1, I would be the one having the aneurysm, if you pardon the pun.

A public and not at all secret lead artist’s meeting was held, where 100% of the people present voted Aye for of simply re-colouring Guard#1 and adding the different hats, what with the fancy and way too subtle stuff done on #2 and #3 had been too vague to actually be noticed, which is a bit of a shame, but oh well, live and learn.

With that decided, a small measure of peace can be found in this wretched mind, because while the workload went slightly to the upwards direction, at least it’ll be guaranteed to be nice and symmetric, confined to the templates set for the sake of one’s continued mental health.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Running Guard

This time around, I present you with the grand première of nameless guard #2, although I guess he would be more of an agent than a regular guard.

At any rate he’s got a fancy fedora and a differently coloured jacked showing a minor attempt at highlights, ‘course those highlights proved to be way too subtle for this resolution, but still being rather inexperienced with sprite sheets I didn’t really want to risk going too strong and having to spend hours fine-tuning them so that they won’t clash to much with their neighbouring frames.

The process has been a rather simple one, with mainly selecting and re-colouring the jacket on all sheets and copy-pasting the fedora over the guard caps, although some re-drawing proved necessary, not to mention having to do some final fine-tuning on both guard#1 and guard#2’s running animation, since their arm motions were a bit wonky and they somehow had ended up looking like they were limping.

Now I don’t want to be accused of being able-ist or something, but I would rather prefer to have these particular security guards and agents being able run without limping. Granted a wheel-chaired guard could be relatively easy to depict, with his flash light directly mounted on the frame, leaving at least one hand free for such things as acceleration so that he’d still be able to pursue our main character, guns blazing.

Although the knocked-out animation would be bothersome, especially if it meant that the wheelchair tipped over, which would make the following “no longer unconscious” animation even harder to make, I mean, how strong would his arms have to be to un-tip himself?

Then again, while Joe Swanson is a cartoon character I’m sure there are plenty of wheelchair-bound people with damn strong arms.

‘Sides this is the FBI we are talking about, (or are we?), I’m sure the handicapped people they hire for night-time guarding are mighty enough for such things.

In fact, I’ll ask my producer right now!

But anyway that is now a future story to tell.

Now where was I?

Ah yes, the re-skinned version of guard#1.

The reason for our beloved guard#2’s existence is simple, variation is the spice of life.

Now some may say that spice is the spice of life, but they’re drunk and we shouldn’t listen to them.

Variation is key, I tell you, instead of facing hordes of light-blue-jacketed guards with flash lights we now have a god 50/50 mix of light-blue-jacketed guards and dark-blue-jacketed guards with different hats.

The third hatted version will be finished sometime later this week, and as such he’s not even worth mentioning here.

He could of course get the chance of gaining his 15 minutes of fame next week, but the look my producer gave me regarding the guard in the wheelchair tells me I’ll have something more interesting to write about by then.

Tubthumping with the Chumbawambas

This week, the main focus for me has been the doubling of the frames of a bunch of sprite sheets, since we accidentally finished making all the core sheets that we needed, and of course since we can’t be seen just twiddling our thumbs, it’s polishing time!

This artifact in particular is the sheet depicting the almost phoenixian rise from the proverbial ashes of unconsciousness that can befall any unwary guard, should he fail to notice our intrepid player character creeping up behind him, sap in hand and violence in mind, striking quick and running away quicker.

And thus does the guard awaken after his long slumber, with aching head and wounded pride, but luckily for him his trusty flashlight never rolls away too far for him to grab, letting him return to his standard standing frame without too much hassle, ‘course afterwards he’ll become properly activated by the strange and arcane rituals of coding leading to him drawing his weapon, but that’s a story for another time.

Now then, the doubling of frames has been a foreign concept to me, but then again so has 2d animation in been general so once again I turned to the harsh but fair powers of ”learn by doing”, trusting in its benevolence and the fact that even if it’d turn out bloody awful at least I would learn something from the experience.

The actual work process was mainly copying and pasting parts of neighboring frames to make them fit the squiggly black lines added on the layer above denoting how things should be placed before mending the gaps and adding details with the brush in order to try and achieve the illusion of a smooth, sleek and dare one say breathing human being.

Now obviously I failed at that, with our revived friend still being more of a Mr. Roboto than Mr. Guard, but it’s getting there, slowly and surely.

At least the arm isn’t making that odd jerky motion it did in its previous incarnation, now that was creepy.

As for the giving of some sort of justification as to why this particular artifact and its unmentioned brethren was given my chaotic yet undivided attention this week, without blowing it off with an silly comment about thumb-twiddling or going on an as yet thought of rant in the middle of the night, one would have to be a better word-smith than me, that’s for sure.

But anyway, it has been somewhat made, although looking closer at it some more work is needed at the feet, however there are plenty of days left in the week for finishing that as well as the rest of the batch in good time, so stop worrying about it Stig!

No one was Kung-Fu Fighting

Sometimes nothing goes well, this is one of those times.

Imagine thus, like thunder from a clear sky comes the command – “Gosh, the main character should like totally be able to attack the guards or something like that, you know! You there, you look unoccupied, go make an animation for it, chop chop!”

Which leads us to the matter of the artifact of the day, namely today’s attempt at making the male main character’s attack animation.

And once again all that is given on this blog is a sprite sheet, partly because of time constraints but mainly because this version simply isn’t good enough to be GIF’d and would cause grievous harm to the brain’s cerebral cortex.

But I digress, the command had been given so there was nothing to it but to start working.

The first notion was to try and simulate some sort of bare-handed technique, with strangling being thrown out of the window straight away because of a multitude of reasons which I won’t name, but I assure you they were all good ones.

After a good half-hour of karate-chopping in front of the mirror the animation was well on it’s way. The problem that was happened upon then was of course that nasty smelling thieving hobbit of a top-down camera, which lead to plenty of hair pulling trying to make said karate-chop look even somewhat believable from above.

In the end, it was discarded in favor of some sort of armed attack, preferably from the side as overhead attacks are simply too unfashionable for a graphics artist such as myself to be seen doing and not at all because I’m not good enough at this wonky top-down business yet.

While getting out of the Nile, I instead started researching for some sort of weapon or blunt object that would fit the whole espionage-in-the-60s-noir feel, instead of something fun like a bronze mace or a war-hammer.

Ultimately, the flat-profiled, leather-covered lead rod called a “sap” was chosen for it’s sleek design and unconscious-rendering capabilities, enabling the attempts at making graphics to resume.

Until the eyes were accidentally drawn to the clock and one discovered that by Jove, it is blog-time!

Which leaves one with this, a stiff and yet at the same time almost lava-lamp-like creation that shakily draws forth a giant black spoon and carefully dusts one off with it before jerking it back lest someone somehow would steal it from him.

But eh, every animation has to start somewhere.