Vilmos @the-hope-gnome - Tumblr Blog

I fell a little bit asleep and dreamt that I could hear my cat's thoughts. I heard him just think, "I'm a pretty little man" and then start kneading my ribs, and I laughed so hard I woke up to him on my ribs

#4 cs #fontos #iconic

scramratz

Check it out on your phones and lmk if I got the formatting right! It looks good on my laptop, tablet and flip phone but you never know!

&starf;SCRAM!&starf;

scramratz

Hmmmm I looks fine on my tablet but on the phone it’s squished weird……hmmmmmm

scramratz

thoughtsroamguy

If you had to describe Tears of Xivo in ten words or less, what would you say about it?

Black as hell action fantasy game with lots of lesbians.

sacred-portal

scribeherself

I think one of the gentlest things in the world is when a friend just gets your weird little brain. like you say half a sentence and they finish it. you reference something incredibly niche from seven years ago and they’re already nodding. they understand your strange vocabulary for emotions that don’t have real words yet. it’s being seen and known and still loved. maybe especially because you’re known. god. what a gift.

#4 cs

thoughtsroamguy

What was your inspiration for ToX? Do you get inspired by people in your everyday life?

Honestly the original inspiration for Tears of Xivo started simple. When I first started messing around with DAZ and going through the marketplace, I came across the sword(s) that the protagonist uses.

When I was a little kid, before I knew I wanted to be a writer, I would draw swords a bunch (I’m not very good at drawing 😅) and come up with cool powers and such for them. I honestly think swords are just the coolest weapon. Their iconography is unmatched to me, but I digress. So when I saw this sword, its crystalline appearance struck me and I immediately started coming up with a story for it.

I usually come up with a story behind a character before I come up an actual external story for them. In this case, our protagonist Katrina has her destiny tied to this sword. I don’t wanna give away more than that.

Past that, having played a lot of video games I’ve always wanted to make them. Ironically, when I was younger my mom put me in a video game making program but I thought the computer science aspect was too difficult so I just stuck to writing the stories I wanted to go into a video game. Now here I am, years later, teaching myself programming 😅.

If I had to name games that influenced me the most, I’d have to say Fable

This was my first RPG with a morality scale and choices you can make to affect the story. It’s safe to say anyone that played this game has a direct look into my brain on how I think games should operate. Tears of Xivo won’t be like it that much in terms of everything, but I want to make a game like it one day.

Now as for the overall aesthetic, I definitely draw inspiration from real life. I want this game to be Black As Hell. I wanted the game to have an almost anachronistic feel. People have modern materials and styles, yet magic and fantasy is the core of what they wear.

With Katrina, specifically, I wanted her to have a Stemme (white ppl call it Futch) look. Like she’s a girl from the block but in a fantasy setting. From her chains to hair, I wanted no doubt in anyone’s mind she could easily exist in our world.

Most of my characters are Black or Black-coded if they’re nonhuman.

For Artelia her dreadlocks and Terrya with her braids, both have protective hairstyles. (Terrya was a nightmare to find a hair style that fit with her horns)

Here are some enemy NPC concepts that keep the theme

Everyone should feel like they’re just a step or two from our world, in terms of their styles.

Black culture a stated influence on my world building process. One of the locations in the game is gonna be called Sycpher island. Like a cypher in rap, in which ppl come together to come up with rhymes on the fly. Ppl there will [spoiler alert].

We’ll see Black culture influence in pretty much every aspect of the game. However some characters will vary culturally, such as Xiuhcoatl here:

If her name wasn’t enough, one might recognize the weapon she’s leaning on as a macuahuitl, an Aztec obsidian longsword. Yeowch!

Thanks so much for the ask, I had fun thinking about it!

#leonidasz #art

the-quasar-hero

do you make all of your models from scratch, or do you use pre-made models? also, regardless of that, how long is your character/model creation process? just curious since all your stuff is super cool :)

Thanks for the ask!

Most of my characters are made from pre-made figures in DAZ studio, but I obviously change them to suit my sensibilities and aesthetic. Let's start with Katrina, the protagonist of Tears of Xivo!

This is the figure I started off with to make her, Dana. I liked the structure of her face so that's why I chose her, but you can see that's the only way she remains after being changed into Katrina. Different skin, height, proportions, etc

I do like to extensively a figure to make them mine when it comes to major characters. The closest I've come to making a character "from scratch" is taking a blank model like this

and basically creating a person from then on by choosing skins, shapes of their body parts, and well everything else. But I don't like make the bodies themselves from scratch cuz they'd be ugly if I did.

As for my creation process, it depends on the how important the character is to the story. When starting a new minor character I always say "this is just a quick character, don't spend too long on them." and then I'll spend too long on them 😅. A pretty basic rule of character design is one look should be enough to let the audience to know important details of your character. I follow that, I feel, pretty well. I think about their personalities, their purpose in the game, and how that comes across in how I design 'em. For random enemy npc's it's usually pretty quick to get their core designs, like 15 to 20 mins but then I start to obsess over details and color cohesion. So for me to be satisfied with a minor character, I take about an hour or two because I know it won't matter that much and I have to move on. But it's much different for bigger characters. Katrina went through a lot of iterations of designs before I settled.

This was her very first conception, we still see her sword she uses but a completely different look and feel we know her as currently.

Then I overhauled the entire aesthetic of the game to "Fantasy meets Contemporary fashion." And we got closer to how we know her. Darker skin, freckles, tooth gap. Too many belts 😅 I like belts it seems.

From there we got to her main silhouette. After this there were more tweaks and got her now

This process took me a couple weeks. Because she's MC I wanted her perfect for what I imagined her to be in my game. I love how she is now, and through this I learned how to design faster and not doubt myself so much. So for a major character, I say a few days or a week or two for me to be happy about them.

Thanks again for the ask, it was fun digging up Katrina's concept art. Just don't ask for Eve's... it's rough😅

johnnyslittleanimalblog

oh………..

it’s a kitty hurricane.

#4 cs #gato

johnnyslittleanimalblog

oh………..

it’s a kitty hurricane.

kashi-kakes

woman-respecter

it’s so hard for me to listen to heartbroken/angry breakup songs by straight men bc no matter how good the song is i’ll be like i’m not sure if i fully believe you. let’s hear her side of the story.

the-quasar-hero

What kind of genre will your game be? What will it play like? Any short blurbs of the story characters and or setting?

Tears of Xivo is an action/adventure fantasy game. The engine is Ren’Py so it’ll only be on PC (unless someone wants to teach me how to export it to consoles) and it’ll play as a visual novel, but with Ren’Py you have a lot of wiggle room, coding wise. I’ve played visual novels that have had turn based combat in them and thought was cool so there’s gonna be turn based combat in mine! There’s also a dating sim element to it, the core cast that we’ve seen can be romanced by players. If you raise their affection high enough through various means, they can become your Boo Thang and you get a boon in battle along with special scenes. But it’s basically a click and point game, you won’t move around a 3D model in a 3D world with real time combat. Maybe one day, but this ain’t that game.

There will be quests, choices you can make that’ll affect your reputation and relationships with the cast. Ability upgrades, an inventory and maybe some other stuff.

The setting is a world known as Kāertrə, a planet made by the Goddess of Chaos and Life: Xivo.

She let her imagination run wild as she created the life forms that populate it, but her most precious were the sapient beings she made; the Oris (humans) first among them. She adores them, and Marix, her counterpart of Order,

adores them too. As well as Xivo herself.

I don’t want to give too much away cuz I’m almost done with the demo and I’ll be releasing it soon so you can learn what happens next then. The game really begins when Katrina joins the Riptides; the most famous adventurers in the world. But geographically speaking, Kāertrə is a mostly water planet and the landmasses are almost all islands and islets. There’s lots of beaches and tropical areas in the game.

Here’s our protagonist in her hometown of Pique Island.

In terms of overall aesthetics I wanted to do something different, because medieval European architecture/martial arts/folklore/culture in general dominates the fantasy genre, especially in video games, so I wanted to do something I believe will be fresh. I also hate minimalism and monochromatic art direction as a personal preference. I think colors stand out more than just a bleak black and brown and gray world that we’ve seen a thousand times before.

I also just wanted to have a bunch of Black ppl cuz the fantasy genre needs us now more than ever, know what I’m saying 😉?

And as much as I’d like to blab about my characters, I don’t want to make this ask too long. I do have character sheets for most of them, which has more info on them on this and my side blog: ThoughtsRoamGuy. I’m working on the last two character sheets rn actually. Soon, I’ll make a central post that has links to all relevant info, and I’m making a Patreon for it.

Thank you for your interest and lmk if I didn’t fully answer anything you wanna know more about!

Peace and much love ❤️