ｄｕｓｔ

"Everything was a mess but at least he was cool." -Johnny Got His Gun, Dalton Trumbo

[hopoo]

Devblog #12 – Somewhere, Over the Double Fucking Rainbow

Hello there! This is Chris, hijacking the RoR2 devblog to share a few notes on music.

Tl;dr:

Yes, I am writing the music for RoR2

No, there won’t be a Coalescence 2

Chanson à nouveau..

The day I would start composing for RoR2 was a day I looked forward to with equal amounts of excitement and fear. The score to the original RoR is one I hold very dearly. It is music I loved writing, created during a very special time of my life, infused by each and every musical influence of my childhood and adulthood. It’s a perfect capture of me at that particular space and time. It also happens to be my most successful soundtrack to date, primarily because it’s part of a great game that people love to play, but also—if people’s feedback is to be believed—because it’s not too bad in its own right.

Now I find myself exploring the musical world or RoR once again and I can assure you it’s an awe-inspiring place! It’s also immense, savage and untrodden… You can witness this for yourself in the wonderful images posted on this blog and all over the internet, but let me tell you, it’s one thing looking at it and a whole different thing experiencing it first-hand.

The move to 3D was a bold one and I’m its biggest supporter. Honestly, even if it didn’t offer this amazing opportunity to expand the game’s universe into this whole new level of detail and immersion, I would still embrace it only because it gives me the perfect excuse—the obligation, even—to avoid repeating myself. The thing I feared most starting this project was writing the same music all over again. Not because I don’t like the existing music (I love it) but because the existing music already… exists. What would be the point of Coalescence 2 (some people have actually asked for it)? If anyone wants to listen to Coalescence it’s right there for the listening. The RoR OST is a product of very specific, irreplicable circumstances. Even if I wanted to write sequels to these tracks, I couldn’t. They would be mere parodies.

So, I’m writing new music for a new game. Hopefully it will be better music for a better game, but I’m going to be satisfied if turns out being good music for a good game. I know many of you will not be happy reading this but I ask you to be open minded and trust me. If you liked the music for the first game chances are, you’ll like this one too. It’s the same person doing the writing (and performing, and producing, and mixing, and mastering) after all. It will be different, but it won’t be that different.

Paying my Dews

Let’s make sure we avoid any misunderstanding here: I don’t take the RoR musical legacy lightly. Rest assured that many things will carry over, not least of which the RoR motif. The usual odd meter and various polyrhythms will be featured prominently too. There’s drumming, lots of drumming, way too much drumming…. Several cameos of familiar instruments and even entire sections that will sound very reminiscent to old players. And then, there’s the unsung (pun intended) hero: form. Even though you can’t literally hear it you can certainly feel it. Form is the glue holding the music together. Just like with the first game, I’m working my ass off to fit these new tracks into meticulously woven forms.

As such, all the above elements that are part and parcel to the RoR sound will not be let behind. As previously mentioned, this is terra incognita we’re heading into and only a fool would go into the unknown without a flashlight. I plan to use the original music to illuminate all the new one hidden in the darkness beyond.

Forecast

It’s still too early to tell what the new soundtrack will actually sound like. I guess it will sound more like the original RoR than anything else—a definition as intentionally vague as can be. A word I liked using to describe the first soundtrack was “monolithic”. I feel the RoR2 OST will be even more so. To use a classical music analogy, if RoR1 was a suite, RoR2 will be more like a symphony. Don’t worry though, I’m still delivering discreet pieces of music that you will be able to tell apart (and prefer over others). Let’s just say I’ve set up my sessions like communication vessels of sorts.

For the time being, you can sample some new music in the game’s teaser and this SoundCloud playlist (which I plan to sparsely update). There’s a lot of material already written but most of it is still being forged into shape. There are also new things we’re testing to make the in-game music more dynamic and meaningful to the player, which have directly impacted my workflow. For the moment, all I can say I’m working on it steadily but slowly—slower than usual (sorry, Duncan & Paul!). As I said, while I’m very excited I’m also quite fearful. There’s plenty of pressure to satisfy the many fans of the music from the original game (thank you all so much, btw!!!) and even more self-imposed pressure to write music that I feel proud of and enjoy listening to for years to come. You see, I’m trying to uncover music I’ve not written before and I need to make sure my excavation brings to surface more than just petrified feces…

FAQ

When? When the great Magma Worm in the sky deems us worthy.

Where? All over the place, starting with Bandcamp.

Vinyl? Probably. Hopefully in a nice boxset with an RoR1 re-print.

Engineer Edition 2? Yes, but no sheet music this time around. Too many arpeggiators and modular patches for it to make any sense.

DEADBOLT 2? I sure damn hope so!

“It Can’t Rain All the Time”

That will be all for now! If you made it this far, thank you for reading and see you next time! If you want to keep the conversation going you can find me in the social media outlets below, where I will post the occasional RoR2 update, answer all your questions and share pictures of my cats:

Twitter | Facebook | Instagram |YouTube |SoundCloud

Take care, Chris

[mantoupan]

Hollow Knight Mimikyu i did for a friend last month

[kiraoji]

art cheats

hello i am here today to not lose track of the art cheats i have discovered over the years. what i call art cheat is actually a cool filter/coloring style/way to shade/etc. that singlehandedly makes art like 20 times better

80’s anime style

glitch effect

glow effects

adding colors to grayscale paintings

foreshortening ( coil )

foreshortening ( perspective )

clipping group (lines)

clipping group (colors)

dramatic lighting ( GOOD )

shading metal

lighting faces

that is all for today, do stay tuned as i am always hunting for cool shit like this

[lockzinhas]

© c.a.chou

[catchymemes]

Astronaut tweets

[orteil42]

[dconthedancefloor]

Found some hands tutorial by me

Not in English but hope it will help???????

[soup-erb]

How do I get my art noticed online; A simple guide based on what I have experienced.

This is one of my most asked questions so I am going to try and offer what advice I can. It certainly did not make any sense to me years ago and I would have liked a bit of help.

To preface this entire guide will be from the perspective of an artist attracting an audience for their work that is interested in buying and supporting their art.

Understanding and reaching the audience.

These are the people you want to see your work. If you are trying to create something commercially viable you must always keep the audience in mind. What matters to you is often lost on them and it is easy to lose track of that when you are emotionally involved in your work. 

Everything I discuss from here on is centred around the audience and how they will potentially regard you and your artwork. 

1. Time does not matter to the audience. 

I see this brought up a lot. “I worked very hard for a long time on my art, someone else did not, why don’t people appreciate that.”

To be incredibly blunt, why should they? Two artists create two similar pieces of work. One took 3 days, one took 3 hours. Both are at the same technical level and a similar concept. Why should one be “worth” anything more to the audience, who only sees the end result.

Time rarely matters to the audience. An audience with no art background of any kind will find it very hard to judge how long someone spent on a piece of art (especially digital art) unless-

It’s very clear. A huge traditional painting for example, with something for scale. A linked video showing the process. 

The artist states the time taken somewhere. Again, this is only really going to matter to the audience if it surprises them or justifies their own assumptions about the work. (It looks good, but they work quickly, how do they do it!)

I know there will be exceptions. People who really appreciate art will understand and recognise the time taken to create it. You aren’t leaving your success to exceptions though. You need to work with the majority.

Taking a long time to produce a piece of work only really informs your potential audience that they are going to have to wait a while to receive the content. If the work or the concept behind it are strong enough this is not a problem. It hurts an unknown artist trying to establish themselves though for the following reasons… 

2. Your upload schedule.

People like consistency and the best way to capture any kind of audience in media is with quick regular uploads of content they are prepared for, are looking for or easily understand. I will list a few things that I feel an audience appreciates or deviates towards.

A regular upload schedule, be it daily, twice a week, even once a month. As long as it is clear. This is a great way to keep viewers coming back to you once they find your work and are happy with the content you appear to be providing. 

The time you upload matters. If you post your artwork while the world is asleep no one is going to see it. On sites like tumblr this is even worse, hours can go by and your work will be pushed further and further down the audiences dashboard.

Consistent content. It’s great to try new stuff, but unless your audience knows you for it it could possibly confuse people browsing your page or site. Artists often get categorised as “The dude that draws X, Y Z” for a reason, it’s just easier for an audience to understand.

Do not add unnecessary comments to posts. Nothing puts people off more than 2 paragraphs of text explaining the process or a personal story on why it took so long. Save that for a separate post, consider that your audience needs to share your image. Make it as easy to share as possible.

3. Your content and the concept.

Content is important. Your finished artwork can be technically beautiful, but if there is nothing there for people to understand or relate to they will have no reason to care, or they will be purely judging your work on its level of technical ability. 

That can only go so far if the content is too strange, specific or incomprehensible. Very few people are going to share a technically impressive piece of work if it disgusts confuses or upsets them in some other aspect. 

Vice versa, a strong or interesting concept can take very simple artwork a very long way. The perfect storm is to have both a fantastic concept and strong artwork working together, but you must consider how much work that will mean you have to do and how fast can you do it. Find a balance. 

What grabs an audience varies greatly. You can build up your own brand with your own ideas concepts and characters as long as there is a consistent theme. More often than not an audience will look for:

Things they recognise 

Things they can understand at a glance

Things that are relevant to them and their lives

Consider these examples, try to consider which one has the most immediate appeal to the general public:

4. Make things easy for them, some important general advice. 

Upload on as many sites as possible, and where appropriate. (No one on a website purely for webcomics is going to appreciate your oil paintings, for example).

Join forums, sign up for art sites. Get to know people and make contacts to get your work out there. Understand the audience on the sites you frequent and what content they do and don’t enjoy. This takes time, this does not happen overnight. You have to commit and find your own path here. 

The audience will not just come to you. You need to be proactive. You have to get out there and find them, but be careful, nobody likes to feel like they’re being sold something. 

Wherever you post your art, MAKE IT EASY FOR PEOPLE TO FIND AND SHARE! Tag, list and group your content. Tags allow people to find things they already like, make use of that. Give them as few reasons as possible not to share your content. Put yourself in the shoes of the audience and think about what they would and would not want to share with their friends and people that know them. 

To conclude

I hope this will give some people who are really lost a few extra ideas when it comes to creating commercially viable content. It upsets me to say this but sometimes there are ideas that, no matter how beautifully illustrated or conceptually brilliant, will just not resonate with certain groups of people.

This is a sad reality, but if this is an issue for you don’t worry. Use this information to create content you know people will enjoy, make a profit from that and then when you have the time and money make the things you really want to make.

[hopoo]

DevBlog #10 - Year One

Hi It has been exactly 1 year (and 1 day) since we announced we were working on Risk of Rain 2.This update isn’t going to be about specific new systems or content, but about the overall cadence of development and what our goals are going forward.

Where are we in development?

A majority of the time spent in the last year was working on backend systems to better support the full game, and we feel that that is finally coming to completion. We are hoping to focus on content and polish throughout the next year, and prepping the game so it’s presentable to people, not just us internally.

New classes, levels, items, monsters, bosses, and of course original ones from Risk of Rain have been added. With the core systems in place we are able to start designing new content that adds new layers on top of the existing loop for RoR1. We want to make sure that there is a lot of fresh new content that adds to the fun, and we are holding ourselves to a higher standard of game design than in our previous games. We are trying our best to make sure there isn’t a lot of filler items or monsters.

Beta Plans

Since announcing RoR2 we haven’t stopped getting emails or tweets asking about alpha/beta testing and how that is going to work. Because RoR2 is quite a complicated game, we will need to do a lot of testing for networking, progression, balance, and overall game feel.

We are getting to a point in development where we are starting to plan out how we want to invite people to start testing RoR2 and help us build a community for the long term. This will most likely start off with a small/private closed alpha that people can sign up for via a website (that doesnt exist yet). We will also launch an official RoR2 discord once that time arrives, so people can talk about the game and give feedback directly.

Based on the feedback of the closed alpha we will then plan our next steps depending on what requires more testing and feedback. Things like matchmaking require a large volume of people to properly test. We also have a couple new design directions that we want to hear lots of feedback for.

Moving Forward

Now that we have a few games under our belts, we want to make sure Risk of Rain 2 is the best game we can possibly make and sustain. We want to include as many features as possible to build a growing community and continue to update the game into the future. Local co-op, online multiplayer with matchmaking, localization, discord servers and free updates are all things we think will help foster a community, but we would love to hear feedback on how we can keep the game active for the long haul. One of the most important things going forward is community engagement – and we will be opening up avenues for discussion later in development.

We’ve posted a RAW JUICY video from one of our playtests, bugs and all, as a milestone of where we are in development. While it’s obviously still a work in progress, it is representative of the direction we are taking the game. Please let us know how you feel - it’s really important that we begin to collect community feedback as early as possible.

Overall this has been a fantastic year of development for us, and I really feel like we’ve begun to make a game that everyone will have a great time playing. I’m sure that we will exceed everyone’s expectations by the time we are done :)

thx nerds

[amanda-fior]

Cookie in a Cup

Ingredients 1 Tablespoon Butter 1 Tablespoon White Sugar 1 Tablespoon of Brown Sugar 3 Drops of Vanilla Extract Small Pinch of Salt 1 Egg Yolk (discard the egg white or save for different recipe) ¼ cup Flour 2 tablespoons of Chocolate Chips

Instructions 1. Start by melting your butter in the microwave. Butter should just be melted, not boiling. 2. Add sugars, vanilla and salt. Stir to combine. 3. Separate your egg and add the yolk only to your cup. Stir to combine. 4. Add ¼  cup of all-purpose flour. 5. Add the chocolate chips, and give a final stir. Now your mixture will look like cookie dough. 6. Cook in microwave 40-60 seconds, start checking for doneness at 40 seconds. Mine takes 50 seconds. Do not cook past one minute, just like a regular cookie, this will continue cooking as it cools. If the cookie is dry or cake like, try less time. 7. Serve warm. I like mine with milk.

[taquito]

the 3 bosses u fight before being able to enter the shaving cream aisle

[mechanicalriddle]

final boss

[bozers]

FIGHT

[gif87a-com]

[mmmskulljuice]

slug: hmmm… plant: *chawmp* slug: ah I see. no thank you.

[my-hand-in-your-pocket]

YALL.

CALL YOUR REPS!

https://twitter.com/TheBoneHeadClan/status/940369097052827654

[kingcyrus]

Guys it’s real Here’s the link to the actual bill: https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/4585/cosponsors Go here: https://callyourrep.co/ Find your house rep CALL THEM The aid I just spoke with for my Republican Rep was really nice and asked if I had any comments to pass along to her EMPHASIZE THE FCC SHOULD NOT SET THE PRECEDENT THAT THEY CAN JUST DO WHAT THEY WANT WITH NO OVERSIGHT I know you guys don’t wanna talk to people, god knows I didn’t want to either but for the good of us all, CALL THEM BE HEARD They can’t say ‘these are fake’ the way the FCC did

[blackrebelz-deactivated20240608]

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

#BOOST THIS

[eddieandsteve86]

i dont live in the USA but i have friends that do so i’ll reblog the shit out of this for you guys

[vonisv]

I was thinking about why I prefer to read manga over American comics (as in, monthly serialized comics) and, putting aside opinions about the “quality” of either medium, I think the reason why is because I have absolutely no idea how American comics work.

Say you’re a complete noob to manga. You don’t know shit about it. But that One Piece thing you saw on TV looks really cool and you want to read it. Where do you start? Volume 1 and go from there. 

But imagine the same situation but with comics. You just saw the new Spiderman movie and now you got a craving for more like it. Where do you begin? Well, no one knows because there’s been 901823434^34 different iterations of the character for decades.

With manga, there’s usually one guy (and maybe a team of artists under them to help) working on it. Even if it goes on for years or may switch leads, there’s usually some “consistency” to keep everything in check. With American comics on the other hand, it’s the complete opposite: you have multiple different writers and artists, each contributing their own take on the character: alternate timelines, alternate motifs, etc etc. It’s all a big clusterfuck to me and I have no idea how anyone can keep track of it all.

[opticbread]

i wanna read spiderman, where do i start?

“well, you’ll have to choose one of the major points in the series to start at and then switch between different iterations depending on what kind of tone you’re looking for“

i wanna read jojo, where do i start?

“volume 1“

[alexxdz]

“I want to read X-Men and Wolverine, where do I start?”

[los17aurelianos]

FACES

Drawing a face (the circle thing)

How to draw faces

Heads in profile

Drawing heads

A face tutorial

Avoid same facing

Diversify your faces

Face shapes

To make your drawing look like the person you’re drawing

Make your faces look like the person

Expressions

More about expressions

Drawing lips

Lip tutorial

Drawing ears

Drawing eyes

Realistic eyes

Drawing a nose

Drawing kisses

Drawing glasses

Drawing hoods

BODIES

Guide to human types part 1

Guide to human types part 2

Guide to human types part 3

Different kinds of athletic body types

Ladies tutorial (nudity)

Fellas tutorial

Curves on girls tutorial

How to draw necks

Drawing shoulders

Drawing arms

Drawing hands

Hand tips

More hands

Hands tips and techniques

Hands, arms, legs and feet

Legs, torso and expressions

Drawing boobs

How to boob

Boobs and hips

Drawing abs

Beer belly tutorial

Drawing backs

How to draw back views

Legs reference

Drawing knees

How to draw butts

Penis tutorial (nsfw)

Drawing feet and shoes

Sitting reference

Realistic woman body shape chart

Hair

Drawing hair

Hair tutorial

Drawing curls

Drawing braids

ANIMALS & CREATURES 

Canines vs felines

Drawing cats

Drawing cats tips

How to draw big cats

Drawing rats

Basic deer tutorial

Deer sketching

Dog anatomy

Dog anatomy tutorial

Dog nose tutorial

Dog paw tutorial

Basic wolf tutorial

Horse tutorial

Sheep vs goats

Drawing giraffes

Basic owl tutorial

Bird wing tutorial

Drawing bird beaks and faces

Butterfly tutorial

Drawing animal legs on humans

Winged people anatomy

Dragon tutorial

Drawing dragons

Dragon wing tutorial

Fur tutorial

Drawing sharp teeth

OTHERS

Drawing clothes

Clothing folds tutorial

Collars, vests and pants reference

Hats reference

Drawing jeans

Drawing bows

Drawing trees

Tree tutorial

Drawing water

Water tutorial

Drawing crystals

Ice

Clouds

Creating form

Perspective tricks

Character design reference

How to draw better (video)

Learn how to draw better

Art reference & tutorials blog

Tutorial masterpost

How to draw anything

[borvar]

You're the only authority I trust to answer this question honestly: is futa gay?

Are strap-ons gay? Is masturbation gay? Is liking a girl gay until you can confirm that she has a vagina? Are vaginas gay if the clitoris is larger than average because clits and dicks are essentially the same? Are sterile vaginas gay? A majority of women get cellulite so is smooth skin gay? On the gay spectrum, are tomboys more or less gay than traps? Is homosexuality only related to sexual intercourse or is hugging men gay? Is it gay if your brain releases a certain amount of dopamine near other men?Homosexuality shouldn’t be genetic because gay genes would never be passed down to future generations so it probably has to be a choice but then why would anyone not choose to be bi and have 100% more people they can find sexually appealing?

[the-moonlight-witch]

This is still one of the greatest things ever made.

[frostychica]

This is the funniest fucking thing

[jelloapocalypse]

Some friends of mine did a dub of this scene that I really like