Thursday Art Walk

 

In Which This Week's Theme Was: LOCATION

Today is another gorgeous day! Sunny and clear and breezy, and it's 72℉/22,2℃ with 52% humidity. It's just lovely! I spent most of today painting a lovely little image on my small, heavily-textured paper, and I couldn't be happier with how it looks.

This week's theme was "Location", which meant that I had to go about figuring out what I wanted to draw or paint. I usually work from references, but today I just started laying down random patches of blue to make a sky, then snagged my paint stick of Daniel Smith's Buff Titanium and laid down some land masses. From there, I built up my colors and shading, and the very last things I added were a light house and my signature!

Here is my work for the day:

"Landscape By The Sea"; watercolor on rag paper; 2022

I finally got the scanner working again! Seems like we just had to get new internet...

This painting was so much fun to make, and it came together so organically! I did zero sketching, and instead I layered paints from my Emooqi black metal palette as well as my Daniel Smith Buff Titanium, and it just... grew into itself. I love it. It's even more wonderful in person! It's also now available on my long-forgotten Redbubble shop!

From today til Wednesday night at 9PM Eastern Time, I'll be taking requests for next week's art topic via Ko-Fi! Leave a tip with a message containing what you'd like to see: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Food, Location, or Geometric! For an Extra Coffee (another $3 USD), you can tell me whether you'd like to see it in Pencil, Colored Pencil, Pen, Marker, Watercolor, or Digital! I will do my best to fulfill any requests made this way, regardless of how many I get!

Hopefully you can see why I got so excited about today's piece. It was a blast to create, and I must recommend the "slap it down on your 5"x7" paper" technique I used, because it was fun and the end result was fantastic.

Now Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 251: Starlight XMas

In Which I Play A Very Sweet Game

Back in the earliest days of my being an internet gamer, I discovered a little studio called Armor Games. Of course, within a year, Armor Games became a massive publisher, but back when I first encountered them, they had a few lil Flash games under their belt and hadn't yet seen massive success. Through Armor Games, I found a lot of RPGs and weird action puzzlers that I loved, but then Christmas rolled around, and I found Starlight Xmas.

A fun, clever puzzle game by Zedarus on Kongregate

The goal of the Starlight series is to use your mouse to guide a field of stars into position. You're rotating a 3D field until you form a constellation, at which point you have beaten the level! This mechanic is so clever it's no wonder that there's at least two main games at this point, and to top it all off, the music is gorgeous (if a bit loud at times).

It's perhaps a one-trick pony, but when your trick is this cool, you don't really need more.

This is not a game for the adrenaline junkie. It's not intense in any way shape or form. It's peaceful. It's tranquil. It's occasionally frustrating as you search for just the right position to make the reindeer appear... In short, this is a borderline Grandma Game, and I love it even more for it. With its simple, elegant art style and its easy-to-learn-lifetime-to-master gameplay, it's the perfect thing to curl up with a cup of cocoa and play through.

If you're looking for a sweet, simple game to put you in a holiday mood, why not give it a look-see? I mean, you're probably gonna need to activate Flash or install a substitute in order to play it, but it's so great that I'm down with that. It's one of those games where I replay it every year to see if I can beat my old high scores, and every year, I remember why I love it.

Happy Holidays,
Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 230: Merge City

Sphere Games Studios made this merging game!

So, you might have noticed that I'm really getting into these merging games - you take two of the same item, you drag one on top of the other, bam, new item. Do this until you win. Or get bored. Or both. I like the monotony, believe it or not. Monotony is my jam.

So are neon colors and building things, so this Sphere Game Studios offering on Android is absolutely tailor-made for me.

You start off with a limited amount of space.

In the early game, you have just the nine spaces in the center, but as you level up (by merging more and more buildings together) you don't just gain new styles of building, you also earn more spaces in your city! There looks like there's a lot going on here, but don't worry, it's not as complex as you might think.

The double arrow button is just a cash shop where you can spend real money to gain some in-game bonuses. I'm not a cash-shop person, but if you feel a burning desire to support Sphere Games Studio, that's certainly a fast way to do so!

The medal button leads to your Achievements - these will earn you more coins as you go along, so keep an eye out and tap it when it throws up a little red bubble with a white exclamation point - that means you have a new Achievement to check!

The last button on the left is the x2 button. This is... pretty self-explanatory - it's a way of doubling income from your houses by watching an ad.

On the upper left are your gear button - a way to check out in-game options like volume (though I haven't heard any music?) notifications, language, etc - and your bar-graph button - which is the leaderboard. I'm in more than 4000th place...

On the upper right, there's a game pad button. This enables a mini-game where you try to stack blocks all the way to the top of the screen without them collapsing. I suck at this game, and it was impossible for me to play it and take a screenshot, so... sorry about that.

On the bottom right, there are three buttons (eventually). On the top, you'll have a globe button, which will take you to a new city or "world" when you reach a high enough level. Below that is a standard shop button, which you can access to buy buildings from with your coins!

Below that is a little house with a number - this is a quick-buy for a house. I haven't had much use for it, but it's cool to see the box color be yellow instead of the red, blue, or purple boxes I'm used to.

Speaking of boxes...

As usually happens in games like this, you have boxes which your buildings come in. The red boxes are your normal buildings - the lowest level ones you can get, usually. The blue boxes are higher-level buildings that appear randomly as a bonus as you play. Purple boxes are bonus coins! All of these boxes are free and can either be tapped into existence on the center bottom box button, or they'll time into being on their own, slowly filling your board!

Eventually, you'll get enough levels to gain another city/world.

One of the chief complaints I've seen on this game is that it's just what it says - a merging game. I don't really see how that's a bad thing. Yes, these games can get tedious. Yes, they can be hard to manage over time. No, I don't mind - that's half the fun!

So if the only real complaint I've seen is that the game is honest about its nature, that's not so bad, eh?

One last note: on occasion, you'll see a paper airplane gliding over the city. This is another ad opportunity where you can get bonuses by clicking on it. Otherwise, I haven't been bombarded by ads at all!

Overall, I'd say that Merge City is a really pleasant, simple game with some stunning visuals. I love the eternal sunset background on these floating cities, and the gameplay is fun while not being too taxing. It's a perfect bus-ride game!

That'll do it for me today, guys!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC