#opark forest

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040 // I am not dead. Just lazy.

Ed.Note: I am not going to lie to you. I recently started a Twitter account and it has been taking up a lot of my time and it is easier to maintain than Tumblr, and I became entirely sidetracked with it. I had actually written this post in December of last year, then saved it as a draft intending to get more images ready for it. 

I forgot and only remembered now, so here they are! Again, sorry for the long delay. u_u;

So I have spent the past few months working alternatingly on a project for/with one of my fantastic girlfriends, making art slides for her project called "Skeleton Planet." These slides have been fun to do, with the mixed challenge/handicap of a four-colour monochrome palette and fixed image size. Here are some of them:

Admittedly, these art pieces have not taken up too much of my time in contrast to the length of time it has been since my last update. The other work I have been alternating back and forth with have been my original project (derailed months ago by the stupid jaywalking game; both still incomplete), a grid maker tool that should help me lay out doodles for landscapes (finished!) and pixel dailies submissions that tend to take a day or two to make (I will show you those later~).

The work I have done on the original project has centered mainly around a complex set piece in an even larger tile-based map for Opark Forest. The set piece has involved a great deal of animation for a number of materials I have never had to animate (properly) before, namely a canvas tent (in a breezy spot) and leaves on large trees (also in that windy location), and while it has required no new elements in terms of my engine (though a few have required revision), the map editor has so far been updated several times to correct flaws and improve its useability. The creation of the animated elements has been painstaking, though rewarding and I will reveal those later.

Matan kids on an incomplete fort!

Besides that, much of my time has gone to laying tiles and trying to make them look good next to one another. I have made a quick time-lapse thing using ASEprite to show the evolution of a part of this current map, although it is not particularly impressive.

Mazarre Ridge: Work-In-Progress. There are some colour palette issues in this .gif related to ASEprite’s palette quantizing that I could not avoid and sorry. :s

Now that you have seen it, maybe you would like to know a little about it? This is the 'Mazarre Ridge' area of Opark Forest. It is a rather unstable formation at the edge of Omalla continent's central plains that did not collapse (as the rest of the plains did) during the initial tectonic conditioning of the planet hundreds of years ago. The ridge is rocky and covered in a thin layer of soil created by the leaves and needles of the shrubs and large conifers the grow on top of it. The soil is quite good once you move away from the ridge where the wind prevents it from accumulating for long. There is a large lake not too far away, separating the ridge from the Matan Terraforming Platform. The terrain below the ridge is riddled with narrow caves and swallowholes that join and link together in Nigran Cavern beneath, and these holes are the primary reason why the road connecting Matan to the platform take the much longer route to the east of the lake, and why the area has only a narrow and seldom-used hiking trail connecting it to the town. The wind and steepness do not recommend it, either. Six years ago, Gustek Radomr constructed a small shack on one of the few stable outcroppings on the edge of the ridge for Celia Roscoe to play in; since then, Celia has expanded it slightly and maintains it to this day. It is quite difficult to reach.

Seedbird, in the woods on Mazarre Ridge.

Anyway, that is all for this update. I will try and be more diligent about adding more to this weblog but realistically, who knows-- I am not good at publicity. u_u;

I have made some new visual effects in the past couple of days. I hope to have a post ready soon, because I realize that it has been entirely too long. Here is a preview for you: a sort of shattered-funhouse-mirror effect for uneven reflective things!

Garbling a reflection was both harder and easier than I thought it would be.

Incidentally, if you were looking forward to more stupid-jaywalking-game updates, they will slow somewhat, but I would like to continue that project in the future. I just did not want to leave my main project on the back burner for any longer, so I picked it up again. The most recent thing I worked on for SJG was a code module that allowed me to make road layouts more easily from sets of locations and road-width data, rather than having to work out the carriageways on paper. The next element is other pedestrians, I think!

That is all for now! Talk to you next time! :y

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033 // ~ Wow! It’s Made! No.2: “A Tree In 2,023 Steps!”

I captured this from the redo stack of a tree I drew recently as a technique study, and I thought that I might also post a capture of the creation of it. I hope you find this kind of thing as mesmerizing as I do.

Start to finish, it took maybe three hours to do. Slow, but I am becoming better at it, I think.

As if you had missed it, the name is a reference to the plentiful and very useful, if slightly frustrating, tutorial images available online that offer you a lesson on drawing something in six or eight steps, which tend to leave out some critical leap or structure that tells you exactly how to get the details the way you need them (it tends to be around the fourth or fifth). Instead of that, I would like to offer you the complete process, directly from my edit history, from vacant workspace to signed product. Confounding step? Miss something? Need a bit of interpolation? Go back to the exact moment where it happened and study the result in this fun, 108-second animated image, uncluttered by explanations, descriptions, or frame numbers! Tell your friends!

The tree has ten colours, plus a transparency value. 1,971 of the GIF's 2,023 frames are of its construction, and the remainder are just me being fancy, plus a bit of LICEcap being a nuisance at the end.

Anyway, this has been a good week for neither my game nor my health, so I am afraid there is not much to see here. Hopefully, there will be more to see next time.

Until then!

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035 // ~ Wow! It’s Made! No.3: “Tree Super Redux”

The tree-drawing-visualization thing seems to be popular right now, so here are some more I made just today! They are not quite as articulate as the usual ones, but should do well for near-backgrounds and views through windows.

The first ‘lumpy’ tree is more of an artistic experiment than a legitimate game asset. I doodled a couple of leaves in with the second set and they are really there more as a mascot than anything. :1

- The first tree is drawn in 125 steps. - The second tree is drawn in 159 steps. - The third tree is drawn in 172 steps. - The last tree is drawn in 238 steps (+2 where I relocate it in the workspace). - All of the trees use five colours, except for the first which has seven, plus a transparency value.

I drew this as another sort of design study, mainly to have a few samples to put into a map to see if they look any good. I will post the results of that experiment later.

I hope thse low-fidelity trees amuse you! They were also fun to draw! :D

Incidentally, I find I have collected quite a set of GIF compression solutions to make up for ASEprite's unfortunate GIF-saving shortfalls. As before, I had to make some revisions to the original LICEcap capture (934kB), and when I went to save the altered version out with ASEprite, the result was 22.4MB! This is not really so horrible considering its size and length of the thing but is hardly internet-friendly and shows some considerable bit of a space for improvement, algorithm-wise. Anyway, I ran it through a sketchy online compression tool (a new one this time; the last one broke!) and got this 1,045kB lossless version back, and hooray!

Anyway, that is that for now, I will also try to put out another post this week, since this one is not really that interesting, game-development-wise.

Please look forward to it~ :D

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022 // Loose Images No.6: “The Hand of Jeremiah” and Celia Roscoe.

Welp, I did not get as much ready as I had hoped to. I spent a lot of this week smashing my head against a mountain of old code from years ago that I meant to update and never did, or that I did not know needed updating until I actually dusted it off again and subsequently felt compelled to update it. Arduous stuff!

Celia is actually animated to climb the tree, and she does quite elegantly! But! She is not yet animated to sit down properly, and my myriad neuroses will not permit me to send a screencapture out with missing frames. No, no, no.

Therefore, in the interim, you get this: Celia goofin’ off in the branches (she’ll actually do more next time, I swear!) and a somewhat colourful expository moment about the tree in the graphic, below.

Enjoy! :y

This big tree is a member of the species Corymbia terminalis-III salite; a hardwood that likes salty, rocky soil and which has been growing on that spot since before the Erusa Skyfall disaster. The girl sitting in it is Celia Roscoe, who you know. This tree is named "The Hand of Jeremiah." Celia named it that. Celia has only told her mother who 'Jeremiah' is and it's a secret.

C. terminalis-3 salite trees absorb salts in the soil and minerals they grow through and inter it in their thick, scab-like bark. The trees regularly shed their bark to eliminate excess salt, and, normally, the wind and rain will carry the discarded salt-laden wood off before it crumbles and re-salinizes the soil. 'Jeremiah’ is in the shelter of the Matan Escarpment, though, and the bark does not travel very far before it decomposes, and that is why this particular tree has such a broad space around it for it to thrive in. Others like it can be found growing in oceanfront groves and scattered across salty alluvial plains. The species of tree is now fairly rare on Luan-II, as non-seaside plants tend to die out as the salt in the soil is depleted-- a task they were specifically bred and engineered to perform in biocycle-terraforming situations.

A thick pseudolignotuberous root crown can support several trunks and stems per plant, sending thick, woody runners out from an original trunk and growing thick, appendage-like roots that may eventually branch into new, connected trees. The result is a plant with a thick, central trunk and several heavy, insect-like 'legs' splaying out in all directions, sprouting smaller trees of their own. These legs are where the species gets its nickname: Roga's "Walking" Corymbia.

Salite bark can be ground and used as a pretty-okay seasoning, but you really have to like salt. It tastes terrible on its own.

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nb00 // Delayed, due to illness.

I know that I had promised you some sweet caves this week but I have found myself in the unenviable position of being both busy with “life” (so-called) as well as finding myself a tad infirm.

Taken together, little fun has been had.

As a way of saying "I’m sorry,” here is a screen capture from the Opark Forest Wreck Site featuring some of the new flora featured recently. I redid the sky and the midground, and some other things. There are several updates and revisions compared to the version in the Tumblr-theme-title-backdrop version posted at the top of the main page (and possibly this page as well).

I had intended to save this for a bit later, but I had intended to do a lot of other things which did not happen.

Anyway, here is my apology; I hope you will find it acceptable:

Next week will be better. Next week is always better.