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Gestures days 6-8

So I’m giving myself weekends off, so 5 exercises a week for 4 weeks.

I’ve started building out the thirtydays.club a website for letting artists do this same thing and share the results and earn badges for completing a challenge.  I’ve got a good 7 or 8 different challenges already planned out and the core guts (forum, social integration) is pretty much there already.

I hope to have the core platform up and running by some time in October.

Anyway here’s the next 3 studies. Continue reading Gestures days 6-8

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Ah that post painting funk

Ok after a little breather It’s time to get back to working on things that are fun.  Finishing a painting is both exhilarating and exhausting and I find myself having to take a couple days and recoup my creative energy or I’ll find the need to go back and fix, and tweak and tweak irrisistable.  But taking a bit of time away lets me just be proud of what I’ve done and let it be.

After a couple days I had a little fun playing with skin rendering and trying to get a sense of translucency. One of the many attempts actually turned out to become this guy, which has a nice tone to it that I like.

sketch-45

 

Followed by a couple silly monsters following my son’s obsession with pokemon all of a sudden.

sketch46

 

And then this thing.. .. this might become a thing.. it’s still rough, but it’s speaking to me.  It started out as a perspective homework.. then became an epic skies homework.. and now it might be something else altogether..

songofthestorm-rough

 

On an art related note, I cracked some oil paints open for the first time in 7 years (it was a disaster then) and … holy cow…I’m loving them..

Something about the transparency and the need to go slow really just works for me.. maybe it’s because I’m getting older and not in as much of a hurry.  Not sure exactly what it is, but I’m doing some test pieces and maybe finishing/reworking the initial disastrous attempt and who knows maybe they’ll be worthy of showing on the inter-tron some day.

 

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More Make-a-thing days end of m1

OK so i lost a few days to kids, illness and a mini-vacation to PAX South (which was awesome!)

But none the less, scribbles were made, but i’m having a hard time ‘finishing’ even these things. So I’ve been making myself to more and more thumbnails to just start being able to see the composition before starting on the actual drawing. And i feel that it’s been improving my sense of wholeness of each thing, if that makes any sense.   That and watching The Hair lessons on the Magic Box there was a total ‘ah-ha’ moment, where talking about visual rest and the need to NOT render something felt like it clicked. ( see the goblin girl’s hair below)

sketch-20

But finally I’ve watched a bunch of other artist talks and one struck me as particularly poignant,  essentailly you should be able to describe your painting in 5 values.  Which I did below and a couple of them are fairly successful.  Now I used the full range and the same 5 values across the board instead of selecting high key / low key values specific to each thumbnail which was probably a mistake, but I’m actually pretty happy with the graphic result.

sketch-24

Other misc thing a days, that were more of a mental check out rather than focused on actually learning something.

sketch-23

 

Ok Failing to grasp cloud structure was kinda fun.sketch-17 sketch-18 sketch-19 sketch-19b

Other than the overworked face and broken neck structure.. this was actually much nicer looking 45 min earlier. sketch-21

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Start a new Year with a thing-a-day

 

Start of a new year.

But it’s time to get some practice, so in an attempt to do a ‘thing a day’ here’s the first 8 days worth of things,  Even the ugly stuff, even the unfinished stuff.  Lots of it is just technique practice or late nite scribbles (or both).

sketch-6 sketch-7 sketch-8 sketch-9 sketch-10 sketch-1 sketch-2 sketch-3 sketch-4a sketch-4c sketch-5

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Milestone 2: Week 4 – Finallly Fixed!

Finally got some time to dev last friday and Made Progress(tm) since the week before was spent rebuilding the pc.

The Maze Generator works!

milestone2MapI’ll need to increase the internal branching, it’s a bit too linear right now but that’s just a variable that needs to be tweaked.

Rooms now get harder and harder, the further in you go.  Next up is some minor UI tweaks and then a second enemy and that’s it for Milestone 2.  Just a couple months behind schedule.. but that’s the way it goes on top of real job, consulting work, children and a house to maintain.

 

 

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Milestone 2: Week 3 – step back & leap ahead

In the funniest of ironies the advice that got me making progress by leaps and bounds this week came from me, as randomly re-tweeted by the 1GAM twitterbot.


And yet here I was wasting a month doing exactly that building a rocketship of an editor when all I just needed was to look for off the shelf parts.

Tiled EditorOne quick download of the Tiled editor (http://www.mapeditor.org/) and a quick peek at the raw file format reveals that it saves the files in XML.

A few hours later, and I have a functional loader which generates in-game rooms from maps saved from tiled.

Bulkify it and presto, all the levels are loaded automatically and the maze generator from week 1 now has a collection of rooms to choose from.

And so after a very long weekend, we’ve got a whole map being generated (ok so there’s still some significant glitches, but at least it’s loading it all from disk, generating a random maze and creating a bazillion prefabs from it)

milestone2-w3-progress

 

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Milestone 2: Week 1 – Mappage Commences

Ok so we’re going to go on pretending February didn’t exist at all and here we are at the beginning of milestone 2.

Good progress this week (ok it’s been 2 days, short week)

No new playable build for a bit, there’s just a lot of groundwork to do before any of this stuff pays off.

“Just what is the big push for Milestone 2” I hear you ask?

Full game map generation and room editor.

This week I think I’ve got the maze generator 90% of the way there, it’s now generating a maze and throwing in some internal extra branches because the basic depth first algorithm doesn’t have a lot of internal branches for smaller mazes like BSDDoD will be using.

And secondly

I’ve got a level editor 75% functional, still needs to write the output files and have some sort of load capability. But it draws the level and lets you select and fill tiles.

Level Editor

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Milestone 1: Week 5 – the un-update

Short and to the point, having family in town all week and then a week’s worth of misc stuff to take care of over the weekend means 0hrs to allocate to GameDev this week.

That’s life, and I’m not going to beat myself up over it.  I’m just going to churn it out asap and then keep plugging away into the fun of Milestone 2!   Hope to have a start on that this week.

In the mean while, reboot yourself and get ready for Month 2 with this:

and some misc concept art scribble, which is the only creative thing I got done this week.

buggy concept