Latest Posts by somonastic - Page 2

We're very serious game makers. Look at our potato buttons. Look at our idk shell. 

Well, this is what my in progress games usually look like… It takes a while to make all the imagebuttons for the actual game, so I usually have placeholders that are textbuttons or… potatoes. The potatoes are actually the save/load/options/quit buttons, so it’s kind of hard to tell which is which right now haha.

Anyway, this is kind of what it’ll look like when you’re exploring the island. There’ll be actual arrow buttons to click on to go to different areas instead of the textbuttons in the top left, and the day/time info will probably be in the right corner I think? And the background will be different depending on the weather instead of just having text that tells you the weather.

But yeah, since this is the beach, I made a thing where you can pick up shells! Each time it’s a new day or night, it generates a few random shells for you to pick up.  You can take them to a shop in town and sell them. There’ll be about 10 different kinds and some are more rare than others.

I want to work on this game more! I’m trying to go through the parts of it I made in November and fix/improve some things.  I should get back into writing the fisherman route too…

So this is, oddly enough, an insight into the weird shenanigans I get up to at work. It started when Edmond imed me to ask if I had any Hostess Ho Hos at my desk. Explanation of convoluted work shenanigans under the cut.

I said no, and that since I had no car it would probably take me a while to walk to a store to get some Ho Hos. He asked me if I thought we could trick Ellen into getting some and I said, possibly. He suggested I fake a coma, and then they'd find a note in my jacket saying they needed to feed me Ho Hos to revive me. I said I wasn't confident in my ability to convincingly fake a coma. Edmond said he'd do it, but he'd already done it twice so it would be suspicious. I suggested he fake the coma and I pretend to be a doctor to legitimize his medical need for Ho Hos. So we did that. 

This whole Ho Hos thing inspired a pretty long email thread too, but I won't really get into that. At one point though, Ellen joked that we'd eat Ho Hos at our bi-weekly instructional designer jam session this week while Edmond would be out of office. Edmond told us adamantly not to eat Ho Hos without him.

We probably wouldn't have eaten Ho Hos without him, except that the next day, Ellen discovered a pack's worth of peeps hidden around her cubicle, including drowned in her water bottle. (The peeps are a whole nother Thing I won't even explain.)

A little revenge was, thus, in order. In addition to relocating the peeps to hiding spots around Edmond's cubicle (including the rescued drowned peep, now placed in a bowl and perturbingly still soggy a day later), we decided to eat Ho Hos at the jam session while Edmond was gone. 

And of course, if you're trying to make someone envious of your Ho Hos, they've gotta be damn magnificent. So we decided to try for some fancy plating. Ellen provided the Ho Hos (we've actually got an extra pack to give Edmond - after he sees the photos of these ones) and the little plate. I brought in the Torani sauce, glitter, and carved the strawberry roses.

tldr; my co-workers and I get kind of ridiculous and now I have gained the useful life skill of knowing how to carve strawberry roses.

Rad palette studies azaraih did to be used for selkie game backgrounds later. I'm really interested weather aspect of the game but we...haven't really hammered out how it works exactly and what all it affects haha :] Hopefully it'll be a cool element though! 

I really like this little island. Kind of a small and quiet place. I'm glad azaraih did these on a whim cause I feel like it'd be really great to do some neat things with evocative/atmospheric color because I feel like the game has some interesting moods. Huh, which reminds me that we've got a jamendo playlist for it actually, not sure if you guys would want a link to it though? I like to listen to it when working on stuff for selk gam. 

Did some selk gam sketches recently but I think I gotta decide if they're too spoilery to post haha. 

Hey I actually worked on some backgrounds for selkie game! These are really messy (they look better when the images are smaller) but I really wanted to make some images to show what the atmosphere of the setting would be like. I’m not totally sure yet what role the weather is going to play in the game, but I feel like it should have some impact on the gameplay at least. Maybe it changes what areas you can get to? I guess there’s already some plot points involving the rain, but it’d be cool if it changed the environment somehow… I’ll have to think about it some more.

Hey friends! Managed to do a fair amount of sketching today but nothing really to post at the moment. Reblogging this since we'll be wrapping up the rating period on 4/15. Here is my jumbly chaosblob of an entry for the design contest. If you dig the design, haven't yet rated it, and would be down to leave a rating, I'd much appreciate it if you left a rating on welovefine! Reblogs much appreciated as well.

Oh, and I guess if anybody wanted to see a larger version of this, I've got it up on da as well. 

To any homestucks, happy 4/13! :] Hope you're keeping busy during the gigapause. I'm pretty stoked about paradoxspace. 

My entry for the Homestuck Design Contest over on welovefine! If you like the design, please go rate it here! Ratings/reblogs/spreading the word is all appreciated :] There are a ton of entries so check all of them out!

I had fun doing this. Thanks for having a look!

Today was cool! And terrible.

Today was cool: 

Hey again! I still live. Still working on getting my work/life/etc balance in order, sorry I haven't been posting much at all for a while. Recently apartment hunting's been thrown into that mix, so. Someday I will be on top of my shit. Someday.. 

Got news today that tomorrow I'll be put onto my first instructional design interaction prototyping assignment! For Google?? I'M SCARED AND EXCITED. I'M HEAVY BREATHING CAT REACTION IMAGE. I'm real stoked to try my hand at it and it's awesome I'm being shifted towards more instructional design stuff in addition to the scripting, QA, and revisions I normally do. I also was part of some client conference calls this week and that was cool. I like my job a lot and I'm horribly fond of my co-workers. Today an email/im highfive chain made its rounds in our studio. I got a couple ims that just said "/highfive!" followed by an im instructing me that my new top priority was to send Tim an email with the subject "/highfive!" and paste this image into the body. Basically, I work with a bunch of kawaii as hell nerds. 

To people who follow me for game/otome stuff, azaraih and I have been getting pumped to work on the selkie game again, and I know tiny-shout's been doing some writing for Prince route on and off. 

There appear to be some new folks here who seem to maybe have been lead here by AFA? Hello? Haha welcome. Uh, like I said and as you can see, I haven't been posting much. Thanks for checking me out though! :]

Uh, sad stuff under the cut. Not related to anything else I said here, but..

Today was terrible:

Well, in the middle of writing this post I found out an amazing professor I had, Adrianne Wadewitz, has died. Prof. Wadewitz was such an awesome person that I honestly just don't even know how to believe that she's gone. She was seriously fucking cool, and brilliant, and nice. And I really don't know what to say, but this news is just...so incredibly awful that I felt it'd be somehow...really strange to post about cool things that happened to me today without mentioning this truly terrible thing that happened. So if you'd like to learn a little about (and maybe in some small way honor?) an incredibly smart and cool woman who did great things with digital and literary scholarship, and for whom I once helped build a rad website about the New England Primer, this was Adrianne Wadewitz. 

My entry for the Homestuck Design Contest over on welovefine! If you like the design, please go rate it here! Ratings/reblogs/spreading the word is all appreciated :] There are a ton of entries so check all of them out!

I had fun doing this. Thanks for having a look!

Hey friends! How are you? Hope y'all are swell. Sorry s'been real dead over here so soon after I just started this blog up. Bunch of stuff's happened with me recently, got contacted by a place I was really close to being hired by last fall after months of assuming I wouldn't hear back from them about another opening this soon if it all. Had a whirlwind week of interviews and meetings and then after being quickly hired at the end of the week, ANOTHER whirlwind of a first work week. Got immediately put on two projects, clocked in 54.5 hours that week. Thankfully that's settled down to a regular 40ish average now but it's still keeping me real occupied and sleepy. Going on my 3rd week now but still finding it pretty crazy to go from months of unemployment to sudden pretty much OVERemployment in no time at all. I'm actually loving the job despite how challenging it is though and my co-workers are rad and super nice and I like working with them!

But obv all that's meant my work/life balance struggle hasn't quite been in a place where I've been able to do as much art/post as much stuff here as I'd like. I'm workin on it, I'll get there! This past week I just wrapped up an shirt design entry for the Homestuck Design Contest over on welovefine. Yep I'm a Homestuck. (Although not really a Homestuck blogger, so if you want to talk Homestuck with me cool! If you're not a Homestuck s'all good.) So I'll throw a post plugging my design up here soon. If you like Dave Striders you're in luck? If you're here for game/otome stuff, I'm hoping to get more done with that soon! I miss it. You know who has been real productive on the game/ren'py/vn front lately though is my favorite person azaraih so if you're interested you should go check that shiz out.

Thanks! Take care! Art soon! :]

Just rewatched Pacific Rim, I LOVED it the first time but hadn't had a chance to see it again since. Ugh just as good second time around. I have a lot of feelings about Pacific Rim and how much I appreciate it but I won't really get into all that at the moment. I'll just say I enjoy it a ton :] Watched some of the special features including the drift space which was really interesting (although I wish we'd seen some drift facts about the Kaidanovskys, the Wei triplets, etc) and the bloopers (which solidify the fact that everyone on this film is super adorable.)

Watched the digital artistry feature too and it was awesome seeing del Toro's thoughts and input and creative process and how teams worked together with him on making the film. I always love watching this stuff on special features - production stuff, concept art, art direction, all that goodness that goes into making films and games and comics. That's why I'm so into "art of" books! I've been thinking about this more often lately so I think I'm gonna try to look more into this kind of development stuff. This stuff is fascinating to me and I wanna soak it up like a sponge.

Another selkie game preview, mockup screenshot of a conversation this time. Sorry for the roughness! I kind of just have a separate psd where I occasionally drop updated versions of background/character/interface art so I can have an ongoing idea of how different elements are gonna come together eventually. So here's a sloppy wip of the Inn interior bg + not quite finished Selkie + idk what that expression the Storyteller has is, semi-amused pondering? + dialogue box I roughed out.

azaraih worked out the base perspective for the overall room and I've since taken over and I am WAY slower at fleshing this out haha. Oh well, I'm learning I guess? azaraih's also got some misc progress shots from selk gam, I think the initial sketch for this background and some interface/ui and coding stuff? So check that out if you're interested in seeing other selk gam  work! (Also I've been referring to this as selk gam just cause...that's what I call it in my head, it really isn't titled that haha woops)

Man, yesterday I was at the mall and stopped by the disney store to check out Frozen merch cause I am too far gone, I am too invested now and there was a ton of Kristoff stuff and a bunch of Anna but Elsa was noticeably absent and I realized it's cause her stuff's sold out? I found it like, RIDICULOUSLY ENDEARING seeing how popular she is like omg buddy people really like you did you know that? You aren't alone anymore ;__; You have friends and you're making hella bank I'm so proud of you

Haven't been drawing much digitally lately but I've been trying to do more figure drawing and I've been brushing up on web coding again (having found I forgot a lot of what I used to know and can't decipher coding from sites I've previously made for the life of me??) and I've got a big ol list of various stuff I want to improve in/how to accomplish that so that's pretty neat? Simultaneously lookin for employment still, been a while since I graduated and being an unemployed graduate so long takes its toll on you. B

I think I'm gonna make a sideblog to use as a repository for daily positive things that happened to me/minor accomplishments? When you're in a tough place I've found managing to do at least some small stuff every day helps and letting yourself acknowledge you did a good job by doin that stuff helps too so it seems like it'd be nice to be able to kind of keep track of that and look over them sometimes. We'll see how it goes!

Btw I'm gonna go ahead and tag little random personal rambles and stuff with "hush somo" in case you want to tumblr savior these. Have a nice day, internet!

How many white people will there be?

In our selkie otome you mean? Hm well pretty much all the characters you’d interact with have been posted so that’s about it. I’d say the Storyteller is white. You could possibly read the Seamstress as white but I didn’t decide she was? We didn’t really situate our game in a specific real world or historical context so racially they’re a little ambiguous. I mean Teen Alchemist’s fam’s got purple eyes which isn’t exactly grounded in anything. I’m not quite sure what you were looking for in this ask so if you want to know something else more specific let me know.

One more batch! This about rounds up the characters you can expect to be interacting with on the island (except for one of Teen Alchemist's rambunctious younger siblings whose sprite I haven't gotten the chance to finish yet.) Other character batches here and o'er here.

These three you aren't necessarily going to need to interact with like the route characters or the Innkeeper or Shopkeeper. It might be in your best interest to take a shot at befriending them though. Might be more to them than there seems and hey, maybe they've got some help to offer you? You might as well chat them up, what else you got to preoccupy you while trapped on this tiny rock, you silly grump?

Still to come, probably some alternate sprite expressions, screen mockups, stuff like that? I'll try to post a bit more in general too, although it won't all be game-related work. I'd like to post sketches and fanart and other personal art too :]

Another round of characters from our in-progress Selkie game. Some of the island villagers you can interact with. They may not be the primary route/attainable characters but you'll certainly run into them. You could probably use their help.

Sorry about your hands, Shopkeeper, I'll fix those later.

So! Azaraih and tiny-shout and I have been working on and off on our first game. It'll be a fairly short otome/dating sim made in Ren'Py. Here is the main cast, your playable protag and the three primary route characters. I'm not sure I'd call them datable exactly, since you don't really date them in a conventional sense?

You're mostly focused on trying to find your seal skin and whoever took it so you can stop being trapped on this tiny island. There's a handful of other interesting folks you can interact with on the island but you're pretty sure one of these fellas is the culprit.

I've been having a lot of fun designing the characters for this game and drawing their sprites. Since this is our first game, it's definitely a learning process but it's been forcing me to finish a lot more art which is always good. These are the default sprites in their almost finished state. Later I'll post some other stuff - alternate expressions, background wips, screenshot mockups, secondary characters etc. Stay tuned!

Hi

Startin up this blog to post sketches and art and stuff on since my main one is definitely more of a reblog blog now. I look forward to posting more art over here.

If you followed me over here from my other blog, hey there! Thanks! Feel free to unfollow my other tumblr and switch to this one if you prefer to just see my art and don't wanna deal with all the stuff I reblog.