I made a small stone spritual icon for my scene that I never seem to work on. These little warriors protect the site from bad spirits such as procrastinatias and the deamons of otherwork!
“Too sweet to be sour, too nice to be mean”
A little tribute to MCA.
One of the few things I will reblog.
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There’s a well documented habit of artists, students in particular, to never want to show their stuff until it’s ‘ready’ or ‘good enough’. It’s an idea that I think is a bunch of crap, coming from the polycount boards where the unofficial creed is pretty much ‘Post Art, Get Crits.’
Despite this I sometimes fall into this trap. which is odd - because I still post turds in the form of my drawing practices and sketching exercises. But how it usually goes is I fall into that mindset momentarily, and don’t post for a week. And somehow this action wipes the fact that I even have a tumblr account from my memory! I still post to Polycount or to twitter, but it takes me months to remember tumblr. (I still check my dashboard about three times a day for the artists I follow!)
ANYWAY the TL:DR point of this is I have a bunch of wip looking stuff to post, and I’m going to just post it all today. And the moral is ALWAYS POST FOREVER.
Because I just bought it on Good Old Games recently, I’m going to waffle at you about my favourite loot collection mechanic ever.
In the 90’s DOS game Magic Carpet, everything you kill explodes into large golden balls called ‘Mana’. They pull towards each other ever so slightly, and when they touch, they combine into a larger ball. (or a larger sprite of a ball!) So you have all these golden balls that slowly collect in nooks and valleys and on the shores of rivers and lakes.
To collect mana, you tagged it with your colour. that’s it, it belongs to you and contributes to your score. But Other players and NPCs can tag your mana back. So - a hot air balloon departs from your castle (you have a castle), floats over to a your tagged mana and collects it. It moves around the map collecting mana until it is full, and it returns to base where the mana is protected. (unless someone levels your castle to the ground).
The reason this was so fun, was because you got to race around tagging other players mana, even as their balloons collected it. Or track down an enemy balloon and kill it, then taking the mana it was carrying for yourself.
But this also led to a sometimes annoying game of micromanagement, as you darted between various pools of mana warding off other wizards in a tagging war until your balloons showed up.
Anyway, I love the mana and balloon mechanic so much I will happily spew forth about it at any and every opportunity.
What I’ve been doing this evening with Razzles
(Source: goodracerazzles)
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It’s rough as fuck but at least the ball is rolling. I’m shattered, time for bed. Clean pencils and ink tomorrow!
Small update about later, bigger updates: Aside from sketching, My illustration course has been progressing and I’ve nearly finished my storyboards and character sheets for the childrens book I’m illustrating; The Night Train, by Allan Ahlberg. Alberg and his wife are two of the most famous children’s writers in Britain, This short story I’ve chosen is a totally factual account of that time there was a train robbery and theives made away with the very fabric of night itself, dooming the country to perpetual day.
So, I’ll post those soon. Also, I am committing myself to NanoMango!
PAX Valkyrie: No Flat Girls: How Allies are Born -
I don’t reblog, and I don’t post work that isn’t mine. But this post highlights a topic I think is really important in games culture today. Gaming is still largely male oriented, somewhat understandably, but what’s less understandable is the rampant sexism you find in gamer communities. It’s present in subtle ways that once you start noticing, really do cause you to dispair at the state of our pastime. And it’s present in less subtle ways. Like the singling out of women who play games and the female characters who feature in them. Take a read:
This is a story about gamer culture, casual sexism, the silence of friends, and its fallout - more or less in that order.
Firstly, context. I’m a recent graduate working as a game designer for a social games startup in New York City, and I identify strongly with other students and alumni who…
(Source: teamvalkyrieftw)