Thursday Art Walk

 

In Which Today's Art is... Prestigious

Today's art was brought to you by Z, who bought me a coffee and asked for a DEDBERT drawing! I was, as always, very excited to draw my boy, so here he is channeling his inner Zatara and performing some magic for us!

"Prestige"; colored pencil & micron pen; 2022

Dug out an old sketchbook of mine to do this. Unfortunately, this sketchbook is too chonky to go in my scanner (if the thing is works again...), so I had to snap a pic and upload it.

I love how he always looks faintly bored with anything he's doing! He's just so... mono-expressive, and yet that single look conveys so much lol!

If you'd like to have a say on what I draw next week, feel free to buy me a coffee over on Ko-fi with a message telling me what category you'd like to see next. This week's was "DEDBERT", for instance!

Available categories are:

• Animal
• Vegetable
• Mineral
• Dedbert
• Location
• Geometric
• Word

Anywho, minor self-advertising aside, I'm looking forward to sketching and writing more this month.

Yes, it's NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), so I'll be working even harder than usual on my various manuscripts. I'm hoping to make some real headway this month, too.

I'm not, however, ascribing to the, frankly insane, wordcounts recommended by some people doing NaNoWriMo. No, your manuscript does not have to be 80k-100k words long for the love of God.

You're not Stephen King.

You're don't need to write 1200 words a day. You don't need to avoid sleep or food or hygiene to get your book done.

Just... write.

Just sit down and write a sentence.

Will you finish your novel this month? Probably not. It's an unrealistic expectation for a world where a lot of aspiring writers work 40-90 hours a week.

Just write one sentence after another as often and as long as you can without causing yourself undue hardship. Don't skip meals. Don't skip sleep. Don't skip hanging out with friends. Don't deny yourself your life while you're writing.

Your book is in you. You're just putting it down into writing. It's not as scary or complex as you think it is. You can do that. You can write your book.

And so can I!

By the way, if you're more art focused and feel a bit of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) with NaNoWriMo, then you could try writing/drawing a graphic novel of some sort? They're usually much shorter than a novel, but that's because you're cutting out most of the visual detail in the writing process and putting it into the art process! I still recommend writing out a script for a comic or graphic novel - that way you have a plan for what you're going to do!

Heck, if you're an artist who wants to branch out into writing, you can also use Visual Storyboarding to help you work out what you'll write! Basically, just storyboard out a scene, image by image, and then try to write out what you just drew - describe it! Writing is just describing life, whether or not that life you're describing is or was happening in the real world.

Anywho, that'll about do it for me. I'm a little bran-jellied from the art and I'm gonna try to figure out my next move in my manuscript.

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 310: Merge Magic

In Which Gram Games Has Done It Again

Once Upon a Time, I played a mobile game called Merge Dragons, and it was good. It got overwhelming at a certain point, and some of the challenges seemed literally impossible, but I enjoyed it when I played it.

Then I discovered Gram Games' other merge/match-3 game: Merge Magic.

What a pretty loading screen...

So Merge Magic is basically identical to Merge Dragons, but with an emphasis on other mythical beasts, rather than solely focusing on dragons. So it's literally the same game with a paint job.

Except...

I'm having more fun playing it, it's more challenging yet much more fairly balanced, and a lot of the creatures are cuter than the dragons were.

So I'm having a blast. I've got magic llamas, magic squirrels, fairies, and more - all digging up rocks and throwing money at me and it's great.

And the holiday events! If I devoted an entire weekend to them, like they seem to expect, I might actually be able to beat one, one of these tries, but they're impossible for a casual player to defeat unaided by real money. Then again, half the fun is seeing how many event points you can rack up before the event ends, so that's still really fun!

And it's actually pretty easy to get the home garden cleared in good time, too!

So basically, if you liked Merge Dragons, you'll probably like Merge Magic. Keep an eye out for secret levels on the level select screen, match away to your heart's content, and just... earn all of the stars. Earn them all. Every last one. You never know when one will turn out to contain gems (the premium currency)!

It's available in the app store, if you were wondering.

That'll about do it for me today - I know, short and sweet...

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