Arting!

To the left you will find animated versions of the main character from Rusty Larner and my Sokoban clone for the iPhone. This is heavily, amazingly, tremendously inspired by a 16×16 sprite named “bobo” made by Jon “evilbob” Wofford back in the early v3 days. I gained his permission to derive a work from his, him stating that most anything from those days are now derilict.  

I always remembered it because it was so simple in design.  The slightly-pissed-off, slightly-defeated blue orb.  I loved the eyes, and the way that the shading stayed in the same orientation no matter the view (showing that it was light shading on it’s orb body instead of any particular coloration).  I also like the lack of connection between the feet and the body and the eyes.

So I upgraded it from 16×16 to 32×32, but of note is that I actually preserved, without almost any alteration at all, the eyes and eyebrows from the original.  The rest of the sprite was redone for a native 32×32 sprite.

Anyways, the sprite is done. The game will shortly follow, now several weekends overdue from the original “deadline”.
 

lateness

So, last night I spent entirely setting up backups to amazon s3 for this server using Brad Fitzpatrick’s “Brackup”. Actually, I killed a lot of time trying to use duplicity, but in the end debian’s apt-get defied me and I threw my hands into the air.

Anyway, at any time I could’ve made a gruedorf post, but I didn’t because my Gruedorf Competition Widget said I had 1 day, 2 hours left! So I was all “oh, cool!”, and went along with my system administration.

Unfortunately, when I first built the first one, it wouldn’t auto-refresh. So I was looking at page results from the previous day, which was when I last hit the update button.

Oops.

Here’s an Updated Gruedorf Competition Widget, which auto-updates every 15 minutes. ]]> http://www.egometry.com/gruedorf/clocks-and-art/feed/ 0 http://www.egometry.com/gruedorf/jujube-i-hardly-knew-ye/ http://www.egometry.com/gruedorf/jujube-i-hardly-knew-ye/#comments Mon, 24 Mar 2008 04:14:33 +0000 mcgrue

Jujube, I hardly knew ye!

So many pretty layers!

So, today I finished Station 3 of Jujube, added two layers of waterfall to the entire map, hooked up the installed Esk’s Bridge. This bridge has a long and sordid story, the history of which you’ll need to read Esk’s post for and then my comment at the bottom.

Look at us: Gruedorfers working together towards a common goal. At least, Esk isn’t my arch nemesis, who most assuredly didn’t do anything for sully today, because he’s a wanton jerk and maker of nothing good.

OMG, downloadable file!

And that’s it. Get the update via SVN here. Or, actually, since everything is hella awesome, just download a WIP copy of this build of Sully here. You’ll want to load save 5 and walk to the northeast to see the jujube work!

Mounting piles of Mountain

Darin looking wistfully into the distance

I continued on station three of the ne Mount Jujube for Sully. More tilework, laying down everything but the bridge (which esk will be doing) the waterfall, and the exit plateau. Put in some parallaxing background, because mountain zones need effing paralaxing background, I’m going to modify the bacground so there’s green land around the mountain, and the open sea in the middle of the horizon, and then modify the world map to have some mountains in the corners of that area. It always pissed me off when games didn’t try to make the zone’s interior match up with the zone’s overworld location.

Also fun: I obstructed this station. Obstruction is the most boring bit of map creation for me, mainly because the interface is even worse. It’s such a saving grace that the tile eyedropper functionality extends to obstructions though. Hooray!

And that’s it. Get the update via SVN here.

Dot dot dot (ellipsis!)

I hate everything.
Especially you

I spent 8 hours on Saturday trying to get paypal all working with cakePHP for breadbros.com after zara made an ultimatum to me.

C’est la vie.

The fun news was there was a segfault in php5, so I attempted to update it via apt-get. Long story short, things fucked up, and 12 hours of work later I’m still paying off administrative debt trying to get things on this server back the way they were before. Sorry VERGE community!

So, even though I blew my weekend on this offal when I could’ve been having the sex with women and doing other debaucherizing tasks like gambling or taking The Lord’s name in vain, I decided I should also work on gruedorf. I updated the Mount Jujube map because of the “sorry that the internets is broken” image I used on vrpg to indicate that the forums and screenshot functionality are still broken. Ah, progress.

Get the update here. I don’t hate you. There’s over a 40% chance that that’s not a lie, too!

Guards!

It’s the po-po.

I’ve decided that the testing and systems-shoring-up need to be done on the sully side of things, and that my SotS efforts should be directed towards making some playable demoage. Towards this end I pulled together my favorite versions of sprites from the previous build and have been upgrading them. Today’s entry: the Alden Castle Guards.

Now in three flavors!

The animations are completly done on this one, and he’s got three different flavors: Private, Captain, and Gold! These three sprites will be littered all over the castle, and provide a bit of variety without too much extra work.

Next up will be the Alden Mages, Amin, and Ilsdan. Once I’ve got those all out of the way, I’ll continue on by actually coding up an intro segment.

subversion, gdorf 19.

Please feel free, once again, to check out the current demo’s build over at http://www.verge-rpg.com/svn/sots/.

Now it’s time to do my laundry!

Spritastic!

A bit more work on Erikk has come into being. I spend way too much time on someone so monochromatic, but what can I say? I’m gay for the little guy.

I’m also showing the now lower contrast tanata-hair to people. Y’all seemed to disagree with the previous version, so I’m getting a feeler for this new one.

Some random pimping of friends!

Doctor Zath to medbay…
Doctor Zath, medbay?

On a wonderful side note, the Astrad’s illustrious master maestro, Matthew Steele has released a video game remix of the always awesome System Shock 2′s Deck 4 theme. System Shock 2 is home to the fiendish SHODAN, of which GLADoS is a passive-aggressive knock-off… if an awesome entity in of her own murderous cake-loving right.

…

Go here to hear the tune! Also vote for it!

Sweet sixteen.

Sixteenth update, revision 33 for the svn repo. http://www.verge-rpg.com/svn/sots/. I still don’t have internet at home. What’s up with that?

One of the distracting
animations!

Annoyingly, I did the classic digital-age noob error around thursday. Namely: I didn’t save my work and blew it away. See, I was helping a friend of mine animate some stuff for her RPGMaker game (like the charming tit-squeezing victory animation you see here), and in my amusement I sorta killed my paint.net with an unsaved treatment of Erikk. C’est la vie.

But I made good on doing work of my own that actually got saved this week. Here you can see a reconstructed Erikk in progress. I am spending way too much time making his stylish red hat fully asymettrically awesome. Also, I’ve made his sprite 18 pixels wide to accomodate a properly wide brim. This is an experiment in the dark and might cause problems with map interaction later, but I’m willing to cross that bridge later.

Back to the cute things that aren’t mine.

More of Mia Ausa’s work…

So here’s a sprite I made a two-frame animation out of from a single frame that’s not mine. It involves one of the simplest techniques you can possibly do to animate a sprite: grabbing a “connected” area (like head/hair, or shoulderpads/cape) and moving them a small amount for the second frame. It’s very simple, and it’s very effective.

subversion advisory.

Please feel free, once again, to check out the current demo’s build over at http://www.verge-rpg.com/svn/sots/.

Maybe by next week I’ll have a real internet connection. Maybe.

:(

The prince goes marching one
by one. hurrah! hurrah!

Today I completed the first version of the third major revision of Prince Onam Alden. That’s right: Onam 3.0. Unless you start counting at the recolored version of Edgar Figaro, in which case this is 4.0.

In either case, here he is: lower color, slightly larger, and not based directly upon any other game’s. That’s right, this little guy for better or worse was done sans template. I went with an asymmetrical stance based on years of admiring Chrono Trigger’s take (I still am in awe of how much they packed in so little space.), and use bright primary colors taking a cue from Lufia’s sense of design. As a result, the sprites are off-center and the sides don’t match up perfectly.

I’m mostly pleased with them, and if y’all have any feedback, please: feel free to email me. Or post on the general discussion board of verge-rpg.com. I promise one day I’ll implement comments here. I just have too many projects and not enough time…

More done than expected?

One of the side effects of the simplified sprites of this revision is that it’s a bit easier to cook up a finished sprite. The previous version had five frames per direction, whereas this new version has only three. That’s a total of 12 versus 20. In addition, I limited the colors I used intentionally to further speed the coloring process. With less colors, there’s less fussing over how best to shade some newly exposed area. So with 40% less frames and each frame taking less time to color, I was able to fully crank out Tanata here from scratch in under 40 minutes. Stuff like this matters when you’ve got a limited amount of time…

Tanata here is a major character that has yet to be seen in a released version of The Astrad. For those of you lurking since 1997, she’s the princess of a the kingdom of Allrusen, which was on the other side of the mountain pass my final “real” demo ended at. I’ve always liked women who could kick ass, and Tanata here does just that. She’s the only character in the game who lacks magical abilities, and plays the role of the tank and the physical damage powerhouse.

She is also black, which… has rarely been seen in sprite characters. Shockingly, I will be breaking from RPG tradition by not arbitrarily making my dark-skinned characters speak ebonics.

14 weeks, still suverting.

This is my fourteenth consecutive gruedorf entry, and I’m showing no signs of giving up this ghost. What would a gruedorf be without a grue, after all? As always, my revisions can be snatched and audited over at http://www.verge-rpg.com/svn/sots/. I’m almost finished settling into my new place in Mountain View, CA (home of teh google). So hopefully I’ll be kicking ass and taking names in short order.