Miscellanous posts, shop talk.
bunny day
honestly I’ve already drawn an eishi bunny, radona already has stuff on her head, and there are too many plane girls to choose from
please excuse my anatomy
Posts categoriezed as Banter
Chiseling A Story
I know I was all fired up about plane girls and game design and stuff, and I still am, but lately I’ve been really feeling my dragon girl Radona and thinking about what to actually do with her.
She basically came into being when I was on a big 80s fantasy anime/game kick, mostly brought on by Valis and Astalon, and I kind of just thought of her as just a random fun character to doodle when nothing else sounded good. She feels like she’d be a great character to make some sprites of and throw into GameMaker to fool around and learn the program, or otherwise exist as a prototyping assistant. She’s kind of just this upbeat, adventurous half-dragon who lives to roam around and see the world with the ‘catch’ being she’s superhumanly strong and really has no sense of danger in regards to herself.
Sometimes I think about things that would be really interesting to apply to her in a bigger picture story or something- she’s going to live a *really* long time and that kind of thing paired with nigh-indestructibility and a general lackadaisical attitude would pretty believably lead to her just being completely out of touch with general humanity in a non malevolent way, just, things like promising to come back and visit someone and only remembering to do so by the time their grandkids are all that are left, or ‘settling down’ and starting a family, repeatedly, getting bored once the kids grow up and hitting the road again to the point where any time she sees someone with dragon blood she gives them a little sniff to be sure they’re not her offspring.
For a while, a few years back, I was thinking about doing a reset of Revolver Knight using some story ideas from online roleplaying and well, generally approaching it with a better idea of how stories fucking work. A lot of the ‘rules’ from that reboot still stuck with me as good ideas and I’ve been kind of retroactively applying them to the tentative Wanderer Radona setting, along with some stuff that was intended for the Irrgarten card game. I almost wonder if it would be a good idea to redesign Radona’s gun blade into a revolver style one and just recycle the title since I’m sitting on the domain name.
I think,maybe, she’s another character that just kind of gelled for me out of traits I wish I had or feel like I’d like to have around. It’s not quite the same as like a Twitter Artist Waifu thing, but more like designing your own muse or cheerleader. Eishi has bottomless optimism, Tomcat is like a ‘cool big sis’ who acts like a goof but is low key wise and powerful, and Radona is brave, adventurous, and not tied down by anything.
Also Flanker is a little troll bitch and sometimes being pointlessly antagonistic sounds really fun! But alas, I live in a society.
Chaos Is Honestly A Cooler Name For Spring
It seems like the weather is finally trending warmer, but still likes to randomly throw us a freeze advisory curveball and otherwise wobble up and down by 30 degrees over the course of the day and make my sinus cavities writhe in pain. Thank you, industrialists who bravely accelerate the climate crisis in the name of pleasing stockholders.
Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of my ACL tear! I choose to celebrate it because I’ve ended up in the ER one way or another each spring for the past 3 years and I’ve vowed to watch my back until Summer officially begins this time. Observing the date involved shitposting, as do most standard dates.
The actual point of this post is that I’m getting really sick of hearing about AI features being rolled out and promoted on art platforms despite being massively unpopular with actual artists. I already wasn’t wild about it being pretty constant background radiation in art spaces lately, and I kind of snapped when TGL fan page runner Arseniy randomly commented on one of my sketches, that I could make something “actually cool” if I fed my sketches into an AI generator as if I was incapable of finishing a piece or making something appealing on my own. Between the phrasing and the fact that my TGL fan art is like the only thing I make that is regularly stolen and reposted it really rubbed me the wrong way, even if he didn’t mean anything by it. Plenty of people see AI as a tool, or a way to optimize work flow, but the stuff just inherently doesn’t work without ingesting mass sample data and it’s been shown time and time again that the people developing the shit don’t bother asking permission and are including ways to specifically copy the styles of specific artists. It would bug the heck out of me if I had a tool that would take care of inking for me but needed to trawl someone’s portfolio for just the perfect hair stroke.
It really fucking sucks that it’s difficult to build reach online without making use of social media. I understand wholeheartedly that most people don’t go out of their way to look at things, hell, most of the time I don’t bother loading up my deviantart (which ALSO rolled out AI generation tools, which is one of the dickest moves since ‘move forward and back a lot’) and only visit pixiv when Discord friends post porn from it. Discord *itself* is now force feeding people its new Clyde AI which will be peeping in on your conversations and presumably funneling it to fuel something else that sucks.
So, I’m really, seriously going to make an effort to use my site more. I don’t intend to run ads or anything. I may even revert to a static HTML template again out of spite since nobody is commenting anyway and it’s easier to make things look how I want than trying to sweet talk WordPress into doing things like “show archives of this category in a nice way” or “incorporate a webcomic navigation bar in a way that doesn’t require an unsupported plugin.” Hell that kind of goes back to the initial point, because I think most people are either using Webtoon or some other hosting site instead of their own.
In all honesty, I have thought of just letting my domain and hosting account lapse due to inactivity, but I like having MY space that I can control how I like. Last year, I made a grand total of like $50 on artwork due to Paypal shenanigans and one of my friends being busy on the road and not paying up as yet. I thought there was more, but when I pulled up my receipts from last year most of the incoming funds were when I was injured so I could order delivery. So, I run my stuff at a loss because I like creating, and I like helping my friends more than opening requests to everyone just because I like helping my friends. That’s why I’m weird about commissions. This also reminded me my friends rock. Thanks a bunch, guys!
I hope that you check back often, I’m still working on some game ideas and will probably keep the minutiae here or in my Discord’s skunk works channel so the ideas don’t just rot in my head forever.
Anyway, here’s some sketches I did since last posting; I actually invested in a Good PC finally but I’m adjusting everything how I like it.
Y’know
Just sayin’, if you read this site, you’re only indulging a *poor* egomaniac manchild
Updates on This and That
You may have noticed progress has been uber slow on my game(s) and my art grind progress has been a bit erratic, and both are kind of related. I had this kind of “eureka!” moment last week to change focus from a tabletop lite strategy game a la Heroscape to a card dueling game then when I sat to print out and test things I realized, “oh shit- I have no idea where to begin making this actually function.”
See, my goal with CH and Irrgarten before it was to keep things quick and easy to set up and play without making it so simple as to be boring or the same every match. So, the concept of the duel system was going to be danmaku, basically. Shmup stuff broken down in such a way it could be played with cards but still have the “vibe” of carefully taking shots while avoiding massed fire. The idea was each player gets a Battleship style board, but can move around between turns while trading fire via pattern cards. So, main issues:
- would require a large number of markers/tokens
- on a 5×5 grid, there’s a *lot* of possible bullet patterns
So, it was kind of starting to lose the vision I had in mind and all the compromises I could think of either were too board gamey or inadvertently ripping off something else (which I confirmed by going through my copies of Bullet?? and Pocket Paragons.) So, all that paired with the odds of anyone wanting to help test it have me a little crestfallen. I’m not quite ready to give up or anything, but I think I’m better off focusing on art for a while and/or learning how to make a digital version of the game for easier access and distribution.
Finally shaking off the funk so I hope to have more real content soon. Until then… take it easy folks.