Writing Day!!!

My boy and I are writing today!

Here's some of our soundtrack:

(10 HOURS) Blizzard at Night
Relaxing VGM Compilations
The Prime Thanatos Playlists
Radio Cutman
Daikaiju

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

Thursday Art Walk 246: Sketching Along

In Which I Done Did Drawings

It's snowing.

It's 33℉ (~0.5℃), so cloudy it's nearly too dark to see, and it's spitting snow.

I am not ready for winter. My fluffy Star Wars jim jams are on. My soft sweatshirt is on. My slipper socks are on. My blanket fort and my blanket nest are well-stocked with fluffy coverings and I have my shawl wrapped around Dedbert to keep him warm (Dedbert is my cute green owl son). Yet still, I am unprepared.

My cat refuses all attempts at cuddling, as that would mean leaving one of the many blanket nests we've set up for her in the living room, which she refuses to entertain if food is not involved.

What I'm saying is that it's the perfect day to stay inside if you can, curl up with cocoa, and sketch random stuff you see.

"Coffee, Cardinal, and Cat"; pencil and ink study on legal size printer paper; 2019

I'll be doing more art as the day progresses, but that's what I've taken a picture of so far, so there you go!

Also, the wrinkles are because my cat decided that the papers were the right place to stand while waiting for me to arrange her new blanket tent. Which she proceeded to fall asleep on top of. :| Cats.

Such a sleepy baby she didn't even notice the flash...

I have many things to do, and a limited window in which to do them, so that's all from me :)

Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Talk About Tuesday 230

It's finally not a million degrees out there. The air is cool and damp - it feels like fall, almost, and I'm absolutely down with that. I'm wrapped up with my extra-big coffee mug next to me, typing away. My desktop is littered with text documents of varying lengths, and I'm pretty excited for the projects inside them. I've been typing away at the Gimmicksmith, I've been working on a potential graphic novel script, I've been working on my weird cannibal vs possibly insane writer story, and I'm trying to figure out where I'm going with an intentionally trashy story about a shark. So... busy busy.

As for crochet, I'm still working on the shorts, though I have to admit that the Micaela pattern is a bit... obtuse on occasion. I want to make a few other projects after the top and shorts, too, like a plushie version of a pocket shark. If I were really crazy, I'd get some glow-in-the-dark thread to add to black yarn and add hidden pockets that contain glow-in-the-dark glittery fabric... that would be so cool. I also want to work on some other stuffed animals and some character bags.

Art-wise, I kind of want to draw some of the characters from my Scarlet Rose Manor series. This world was created for a graphic novel class in college and was one of the only assignments I got higher than a B- on. I was really proud of it and really enjoyed making it, so suddenly I had a million more ideas for it!

I'm looking forward to watching some more wrestling, too! It's great to see the internet really opening up to wrestling and learning how creative these guys are. I'm still a huge fan of Luchasaurus, too, in case anyone was wondering.

As far as movies go, we watched a really weird one last night, but I still have a plan for this Friday.

Actually, here's a schedule for you:

• Tomorrow I'm going to talk a bit about Sumo and how much I love watching Al Snow talk about wrestling.
• Thursday will have me doing the art thing!
• Friday will absolutely be about The Last Black Man in San Francisco
• Saturday is kind of up in the air - I haven't found a game to talk about yet.
• Sunday will be a baking day on the blog!
• Monday will inevitably contain skulls, but also shorts progress!
• Next Tuesday, I'll be back here blathering away.

So far, today has consisted of trying (and failing) to take pictures of the butterscotch-colored pigeon we've had under our feeder, looking for the cat, drinking coffee, and writing. I'm at 1100 words on the pre-script for my Scarlet Rose based graphic idea, but there's no scriptwriting yet. I'm just nailing down characters and setting at this juncture. After this point, I'll start writing actual scenes. I think I'll enter with my character getting his assignment to go to a spooky haunted island. The project is tentatively called Spook Patrol: Isolation.

Spook Patrol is actually a spinoff of the Scarlet Rose stories which follows one of the side characters, Spencer, through his employment with a fairly bizarre internet-based ghost hunting show called Spook Patrol. Yes, I looked up a list of ghost hunter/paranormal shows and tried to make the dumbest name possible. I like the idea that this group with a stupid name ends up getting entangled with actual eldritch horrors and the only one who has any idea how to survive is the little nerdy guy who secretly has already been there, done that, and has the mental scars to prove it. Poor Spencer...

When I write, I usually like some noise, and depending on what I'm writing, that can either contain vocals or it has to be just plain music. Writing my blog, I like to have YouTube videos playing - either some Let's Plays or someone giving a tutorial on how to sew or something. When I'm writing stories, however, it's usually best to just have music.

If my story is pretty chill at the moment (like most of a story I've been pecking away at called Sorcery Con Leche is), I like to put on some jazz or bossa nova playlists. If I'm writing something a little more hardcore, I'll go with something like video game boss music, metal, or cyberpunk. If I'm just feeling like some sound behind the writing in general, I like to go with lo-fi hip hop or Japanese City Pop. On occasion, I'll want something classical - Satie, Gershwin, Copeland, Stravinsky, etc.

Sometimes I'm feeling... weird. If I'm feeling weird, there's only one band to turn to:

Daikaiju.

Seriously, I love me some psycho-surf, and these guys are some of the best. I'm not exaggerating when I say that Daikaiju make writing feel like a privilege when I use them to back me up. I want to buy every album they've ever put out and play them at full blast until I get the cops knocking down the door with a noise complaint.

Daikaiju are the October Dark of music for me - obscure to most, fantastic, and highly inspirational.

At the end of the day, however, mostly, I just love good music, and any of it helps.

How do you guys get the writing down when you write? Do you use music? What are your guys favorite bands or classical pieces? Let me know in the comments if you could!

Now Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 228: Incremental Popping 2

I'll be honest, I've never played the first Incremental Popping game from Diamonax on Kongregate, but since I have played other chain reaction games, I basically got to just breeze through the opening.

If you couldn't tell, this is a very, very simple game.
Simple, here, is not a bad thing!

This is a chain reaction based single-button game. That means that you only need one button - your right mouse button, to play this game, and every move makes other things happen.

Colorful, pretty things.

In this case, you lay a starting circle/charge by clicking on a point on the screen. There are colorful balls bouncing around the screen like in a Breakout-style game, and if they bump against the circle, they'll expand into another circle, possibly giving you higher scores. Higher scores give you more money, and if you "pop" all of the balls, the screen refreshes and gives you more balls to pop, leveling you up, somewhat.

The money is useful. I think...

Now, generally, when you are playing one of these incremental games, the gains you make are slight, but noticeable. I... don't really notice much improvement when I'm playing this game. I've leveled up, I've popped lots of balls, and I've paid for a lot of upgrades, but... I'm still not 100% sure what use the Boost function is? I think it speeds up the balls on the screen if you click and hold anywhere after laying your initial charge. Still, it's kinda fun, and I can't bring myself to badmouth a game this neat.

And, of course, there are Achievements!

I haven't played this game too long, so I'm not surprised that I only have one of the Achievements so far, but... no balls at all? That's gonna be hard.

There's also a Statistics screen!

I love knowing what I've done and how much I've done, so I love screens like this. I also like games that forgive you if you botch things early on and allow you to wipe your game data. It allows me to try a game and, if I enjoy playing it, start over fresh so that I can take notes on it while I play start-to-finish for the blog!

Now, you can see that the graphics are ultra-simple. 2D balls bouncing around a 2D plane with a very, very faint grid in the background, plus some text here and there. Mechanically, too, this game is extremely simple - click, wait, maybe click-and-hold for a little extra speed.

The music is where this game shines.

It has a lovely, jazzy score that I enjoyed listening to the entire time I played. I usually mute games because I have a low threshold for music and sound effects, but since this game is 100% lacking in sound effects, the music was able to really shine. I dig it!

You can find this game here on Kongregate, and I strongly recommend giving it a play.

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