Thursday Art Walk

 

In Which I Need To Plan Better

Thursdays are hard, man.

Not only am I trying to make art, but I usually don't know what I'm making until the night before, so then it's a CRUNCH, and it means I neglect things I'd also like to do - like shower and talk to my boyfriend.

But you're not here to hear me whine about how I can't manage my time, you're here for today's artwork, which is a strange little pixel DEDBERT!

DORDBORT - digital 2022
(It's actually pretty good sized, I don't understand computers...)

I think next time I try to do a digital Dedbert, I won't try anything fancy. I'll just go for colors, shading, and then post.

This experimental bubble/pixel piece is cute, but boy did he take way too long. Again, it's all the background's fault. Inevitably, I gave up. It was too muddy and busy and took away from my boy.

As it is, I think I did pretty well on the mirroring everywhere but the beak, so I'll be practicing that, too!

I would also love any suggestions for 100% free, non-pirated artist's software that anyone might have! Bear in mind, of course, that I have an older laptop with limited GPU, so I'll never be making anything exquisite, effects-wise, but if it has some better brushes (I cannot figure out how to make or import brushes on Paint.net, so it'll have to be super duper user-friendly...) or a cleaner interface, I'm down to try it!

Hopefully next week, I'll have an easier time of it!

Time management has always been a struggle for me. I've never been tested for anything, but if you've read even one of my blogs, it's probably pretty clear that I struggle to think in and operate in a straight line. Not trying to pull the "I'm so special!" card here, I'm just stating a fact. I've never been able to accurately lay out what I'm going to do, in the order in which I'll do it, actually follow the directions, and then finish something in a timely manner. I've just never been able to.

So I'm going to try to trick myself this week.

I'm going to start a pixel project, and if I get a commission-lite this week, I'll work on that when I get it. If not, you'll see what I'm working on on Thursday. Hopefully before 9pm...

That's the plan!

I'll see you all next week on Monday, where hopefully I'll also have more of the crochet-along project finished!!!

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Thursday Art Walk

 

In Which I Have Squares, More Squares, And A Goomba.

"Squares 1.0" digital art; 2022

I... screwed up. Big time. See, I forgot to set things to "Nearest Neighbor" and "lock aspect ratio"... and it's now perma-blurred. Balls. I'll have to try again, sadly. Maybe this time I'll do it with fewer colors & more pixels? It's a fun project though!!!

Regardless, I also have a bit of a product review!

I recently bought some more Peter Pauper Press goodies - namely some watercolor brush markers! I decided to swatch them up and try to make a painting with them. There's 24 brushes plus one water brush (yes another one).

I swatched up the colors to see how they worked!

Swatches!

All of these colors are very bright and saturated and delightful, the paint goes on strong and thick and did I mention bright? Yeah, they're BRIGHT. They respond well to water when you try to blend, and they have absolutely no smell! There's a good variety of colors, too. Plenty of different tones.

These would probably work really well for someone who wanted to do watercolor lettering or illustration (which it suggests on the shockingly sturdy plastic box), and they seem like they'd be great for travel.

My only issues are that the brown brush has a loose cap so it's already dried out (I only got to use it once and now it's.... not really working anymore, sadly) and that the colors do not have names anywhere on them.

That being said, I really do think they're nifty!

And since it's March 10, I figured I'd get in on the Mar10 day shenanigans!

"Goombye-bye"; Watercolor brush marker; 2022

Don't worry, Dedbert isn't gonna hurt the Goomba, he's just gonna drop him off at the nearest warp pipe! (Not that the Goomba understands what's happening lol).

Alright, that'll about do it for me today. Don't know why I'm so tired, but here we are, 9:30 at night on a week night and I already want to curl up with some fun videos and a nice chat with my guy, maybe drift off to the sounds of a cute beagle who likes neither cats nor pools...

Go Enjoy Something, guys!

FC

Thursday Art Walk

 

It Might Snow, I Dunno

It's been a heck of a week, and I've been super busy, but I did manage to whip up a couple of simple pixel drawings to share with you guys!

"SM01"

"Egg of Layers 01"

With the Snowman, I'm thinking of going back into the image and giving his arms an outline, then basically cutting them out and putting them on their own layer, same with his hat and the front of his scarf. Then I want to practice making a sprite sheet for him so I can maybe animate it!

As for the egg, I just wanted to experiment with different fill qualities, shading, etc. I'm gonna keep experimenting with shapes and lighting!

I think I'm gonna go play with more pixels and crochet a bunch of stuff lol.

I'll post some more stuff next week, but this week was busy as heck, which is why I'm so far behind!

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Thursday Art Walk: Pixels & Bubbles

 

In Which I Made An Art!

I know my abstract stuff has been... somewhat scattered as of late. I have been experimenting on Paint.net with different ways to do things, and I finally bit the bullet, turned of anti-aliasing, dragged the hardness to 100%, and made the line quality "pixellated".

Hence today's title.

I didn't know right away if the paintbrushes would retain the sharp edges I was looking for, but eventually, I realized I was good to go! I will say this, though - I was maybe too conservative in my circle-drawing.

"Signis"; digital art; 2020

I really like this palette, which I got from Coolers, which is fun as heck to use. I took the 5 basic colors and then carefully blended them together, one by one, by moving the alpha back to about 227 and layering the two, then using the eyedropper to add that color onto my new palette. I ended up with 15 colors total, and I used every one!

I did make one error, though - I put a 2 pixel block in the wrong spot, but by the time I noticed, I had already made several new layers so I just... put another lil block in the right spot lol.

I am very thrilled with the saturation! I think I'll go for full Alpha on future projects instead of my usual attempts at layering... unless.... hmmmmm.... Stay tuned for future experiments!

Alright, I have a novel to write, so y'all stay chill and

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 233: Pride of Place

Pride of Place from Rubble Games

I explore a lot on Kongregate. It's lead me to a lot of really cool, fun games, like NGU Idle or Realm Grinder, and that's basically what happened with Pride of Place.

What a cool game!

This is a fun little game from Rubble Games out of Sheffield, UK. With a fun pixelly style and great bleeps and bloops mixed with cartoonish screams and grunts, as well as a fantastic score, this is a great game both visually and audibly, though you may want to turn the sound down a bit, as the bleeps and bloops may be a bit jarring for the unprepared.

The story of Pride of Place is basically this: you are a put-upon drone desperate to protect your intellectually lacking master as the two of you fly through space. Since you're flying exhausted and un-maintained, due to your master's inability to stop napping, you fly the spaceship right into an asteroid belt. Now, to be fair, humans need sleep, so I'm not going to give PoP Guy a lot of trouble over this. Especially when you consider how cool this all looks!

Is it showing my age if this is how I think games look when I think about games?

You crashland on a strange world and are almost immediately thrown into the combat system. It's a match-3 system, but you don't swipe or drag, you click the adjacent pieces you're swapping. That took me a hot minute to figure out and I got a littttttle frustrated there. I think that's more on me for trying to figure out simple gameplay elements at 4AM while struggling with acid reflux... Regardless, combat is automatic and pretty easy to grasp once you understand the "click to swap" thing.

And you are going to swap a lot as you play.

While you're swapping, sometimes you'll find different shapes (a gray rock, a gold rock, money, hearts, red diamonds, etc) - these are your resources, and you need them to buy upgrades. Do not skip out on resources - PoP Guy will shoot baddies automatically (albeit not as powerfully, I think?) while you gather resources. Once gathered, you take the resources back to Town and sell them to the various NPCs (who you have to rescue). Sell enough of each resource they ask for and you'll find they've made you weapons or armor or other upgrades! Then you buy the upgrades from them. Yeah. I don't really understand their economy either. I'm also reasonably certain that you are being taken advantage of by the NPCs.

I'm really enjoying my runs through Pride of Place, so if you're looking for a fun, odd RPG to play, and you like the idea of playing as basically Skeets from Booster Gold, this'll definitely be great for you, too!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 231: The Dark One

The Dark One from Tenfor on Kongregate

If you know me, you'll know that I love me some RPGs. You'll also know that I've played all kinds of very blocky, pixelly RPGs and loved them just as much as any hyper-realistic super 3D 1080p ultra-high-end RPG from a major AAA company and boy was that some word-salad right there... deep breaths.

Anywho, this is a game from Tenfor on Kongregate called The Dark One.

First things first: this game is a prequel to Tenfor's Landor Quest series, which are all also RPGs, and I found this one at random on the Kongregate landing page. Published back in March of 2019, this is a really new game, too, but so far, I haven't encountered any bugs (which is kind of novel, when you consider how buggy console games tend to be even a year out from the first sales). Score one for the little guys!

We enter with a story:

I love me some stories!

The gist of the tale is this: a very bad demon tried to take over the world and was stopped by a tough wizard who wound up stuck as the demon's prison guard and opened a wizard school right on top of his prisoner. If that seems like poor planning, you'd be right. You play as Varthen, a wizard-in-training who ends up having to help stop a necromancer from taking over because, as you might guess, sometimes wizards aren't the good guys.

You start out, however, taking your final exam - killing a big bad demon in the school's dungeon.

look at this lovely pixel art!

As you play, Varthen will level up, gain artifacts, and learn new spells. All of this is shown in adorable pixel art on a nifty weathered-parchment background that I dig.

As you can see, I took these screenshots way early in the game to avoid spoilers.

You'll travel to various locations, all with a very cute pixely vibe to them. The game isn't afraid to use humor to defuse the tension of literally being thrown into the fires of a necromantic invasion five seconds after you graduate.

I cackled when I saw that bird's name!

You move around using the A and D keys on your keyboard, interact with E, and cast spells or use potions during battle with Q, W, E, A, S, and D. The music is an adorable and super simple chiptune that loops around and kind of blends into the gameplay, augmenting the world around you without being too obtrusive, and the sound effects make me feel like I'm playing video games in the early 1990s. I love it!

Combat isn't turn based, by the way.

When you cast spells, they have a cooldown period, which means that you sometimes have to just absorb some hits in between blasts, and you also have to manage your magic carefully, because you can run out of MP during battle. While your Q attack uses no mana, it also has a pretty significant cooldown period compared to your W attack (a fireball), so you have to choose between hurling the powerful stuff quickly and running out of magic or waiting for your Q attack to recharge while you're pummeled by faster enemies.

All in all, I like this RPG. It's simple without being dumbed-down, it's fun without being addictive, and it's heckin pretty to look at and listen to. For being a game about fighting demons and undead, it had me smiling my whole playtime!

If you're looking for an RPG to fiddle around with, definitely give The Dark One a go, and while you're at it, follow the links on Kongregate to the other games in the Landor series!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 229: Miner Dash

It's so freaking hot it feels like the Earth's core is squeezing up into my soul...

I know, I know, it's way warmer and muggier than 88℉ (~31℃) with 51% humidity elsewhere in the world on a more consistent basis, but...

I'm a fall person. I prefer the cool, crisp weather of a proper New England autumn, and this gross oilslick weather just will not stand!

I will confess that I was originally going to do something like a "Christmas in July" schtick where I would list a bunch of Kongregate titles that feature snow and ice, but then I found a totally unrelated game and fell down the rabbithole of playing it. Before I knew it, it was lunch time and I hadn't written anything in this blog!!! Oops.

The game, as you may have guessed from the title, is Miner Dash, and it's an offering from Kongregate user "dabontv", who has made 26 games on Kongregate alone, all of which are absolutely bonkers. They have what appears to be an Angry Birds-style slingshot game about mummies, an idle clicker starring poop (with a sequel!) and a game where you set people on fire.

Miner Dash is a relatively simple and straighforward game by comparison, but even here we find some small hint of crazy.

When you click on the Guide, it helpfully informs you of the goal of this game.

Your goal, as this tiny red-bearded miner, is to dig to the center of the Earth. No, seriously, that's the goal. You want to dig down to the Earth's core (and they're very specific that it's Earth, and not some random fantasy world) within 30 in-game days, which are measured in mining time.

See the thermometer at the top of the screen? That's your time.
You have until the whole thing fills up with red to get to the core or as close as possible.

You can use the left and right arrows to move either direction while digging,
but you have to hold and not just tap, because he needs some nudging.

Once you fill your gauge all the way red, your pick explodes, which means you have to go to the crafting screen and make a new one or multiple replacements.

That's why you want to get a bunch of the ore and even trees!

Whenever you breach a new layer of soil, you find a "recipe", though perhaps "blueprints" are a better term. This "recipe" will allow you to make something new. You start out only being able to make wooden pickaxes and cheapo bombs, but so far, after a few hours of fiddling around, I've gotten special items, golden pickaxes, and red bombs that explode way bigger.

And while some experimentation is possible, it's just easier to just wait for the recipe
to show up, and then just click on what you want to craft from your Recipe bar.

Provided you have the materials, crafting is as simple as "click item, click CRAFT"

I love the red bombs, since they can really take you deeper when you're running out of pickaxe power or when you're trying to get large swaths of materials but you don't want to change direction!

Overall, this is a fun, silly little game with great graphics. I think I'll probably be sinking more time into this mining simulator (especially since it's so hot out and I kinda want to stay near fans and AC).

Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 227: Tap! Dig! My Museum!

I used to want to be a paleontologist. I was little, Jurassic Park had just come out on VHS, I had the flu so I sounded like a Velociraptor when I coughed... good times. Finding Tap! Dig! My Museum! by Oridio on the Google App Store seemed to be just the thing I needed to feed my dino obsession.

And it was!

So, you start out with an empty, run-down museum and a small bag of cash. You take that money and build a display case, then you go dig for dinos! The digging is a lot of fun.

If really simple

Basically, you're taken to a screen and, with a limited number of moves, you dig into the dirt by tapping on a section. Sometimes you'll find money. Sometimes you'll find fossils. You can watch an ad to get more moves, too, but only once per dig. When you run out of moves (or find all available fossils), you get sent back to your museum with your spoils. The first dinosaur I uncovered was a Velociraptor, but after that some of the choices are... weird but awesome. I'm pretty sure I dug up dinos I'd never heard of before - seriously.

And they're fairly accurate representations!

While you build up your collection, guests will arrive at your museum. They drop money, which you can then use to buy upgrades or fund digs. The upgrades come in five varieties - on your main museum, you can upgrade things buy opening new exhibits, or you can expand your museum. This, sadly, can only be done once so far (as of the writing of this blog), but the developers say they're working on new expansions and upgrades, so that's cool. The other three kinds of upgrade are in the yellow museum button. These will let you fit more people in your museum at a given time, hire more diggers (and thus have more moves per dig), or increase the power of your taps during digs. I tried to maximize my museum perks as quickly as possible, which made digging the larger dinos much easier!

I flipping love spinosaurus!!!

I'm a big fan of cute pixel games like this, and this game has everything I like. It's simple and easy to understand and play, it's pretty to look at, and it's got great music. It even has a camera button to let you take quick screen shots! They save as .png files, which means...

Yes.

The museum shots are from my actual in-game museum! That makes it so much easier to talk about on the internet. No complicated multi-button presses on my phone hoping I'm doing it right and missing the good shots! Just... tap! Done. Save it to my Drive!

I hope a lot more games start doing that!

So yeah, Oridio's Tap! Dig! My Museum! is a nifty game that I can't wait to get updates on. Especially since it only took me 5 days to play out the missions...

If you're looking for a cute game with dinosaurs, museums, and a great sense of accomplishment, try it out!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 226: Coloring Pixels

Since I started gaming with handhelds back in the 1990s, you can guess that I love me some pixels. I love 8- and 16-bit (and 32-bit!) images. I love the creativity inherent in stacking colored blocks to make things look recognizable or to come up with something brand new! It's always wonderful.

And since I draw and color and paint, you might be able to guess that I love coloring books.

I do not have a ton of space for coloring books, however, so the recent boom in digital coloring books has been a major boon to me! I was bumming around last year on Steam and found this:

From ToastieLabs, this is Coloring Pixels

Coloring Pixels is a really cool free-to-play coloring book you can download from Steam and fill in beautiful pixel art images that range from incredibly simple shapes to incredibly lush scenes. I love the way it looks, the fact that there are occasionally overlays for holidays (there was snow around Christmas, drifting slowly over the screen, and the edges of the screen were, I believe, on fire around Halloween) just makes it more fun!

Now, I'm the kind of coloring person who likes to finish one color before moving on to the next, which works really easily on small images, but when you get here...

Well... once you get into the crazy amount of colors, things go much slower.
Much. Much slower.

But your reward for finishing each image is that wonderful sense of accomplishment from completing a very difficult task! And it really does feel like an accomplishment. You feel like you've done something, and on days when I literally can't will myself out of bed, that can be soothing.

It's not done, yet, but this is a zoomed-in portion of that same image!
Looooook at allllll that deeeeetaaaaaaiiillllll!

Now, the argument can certainly be made that these sorts of things are not, technically, games, but I'm going to count it because it was free, it makes me happy, it requires input, and you are, technically, finishing tasks to get to an end goal. The tasks are just "input all colors in the appropriate locations" and the end goal is just "finish the picture"...

I did mention that it's only kind of a free game. There is DLC. The DLC is really cool, but it also costs money, which means it isn't happening for me. I mean, there are 12 DLC packs (all of which sound fun), and none of them are more than a dollar. The only reason the "Buy All" function on Steam tells you it's over sixteen dollars is the addition of a downloadable copy of the soundtrack. While the music is pretty fun, it's not something I'm dying to download, but I can always appreciate wanting people to pay you for the music.

That wasn't sarcasm. I've played music in a community band before. The number of people who took "community band" to mean "free of charge because we're not famous" was horrific. No, we will not play your wedding for free. The band itself does have financial needs. Like renting practice space and buying water.

What I'm saying here is, I don't think soundtracks should always be free to download. It's cool when a company can afford to do it, but I'm not going to be butthurt when it's under seven bucks.

If they were charging twenty bucks for the soundtrack, then I'd be butthurt.

But yes, the art you're coloring, the colors you use, the soundtrack, the little extras (like the holiday particle effects), and the overall game itself are more than worth your time if you need a moment of zen!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC