New Digital Sketchbook - Sketchbook Vorgus

It dawned on me that I haven't let all you wonderful people know about my new sketchbook blog.

It all began when I noticed that conceptart.org completely disappeared! This was a bit of a shock because it seemed to me to be a fairly active community, at least when I was posting there more often a couple of years ago, but I suppose things might have changed. What this meant though was that all of my sketches, doodles, and studies that I had uploaded over the years had been snapped out of existence. Thanks Thanos...

So, I had decided to start another blog just for that kind of content, Sketchbook Vorgus!

I realize it won't ever have as much traffic as it did over at conceptart.org, but maybe it will get some. By putting it on blogger my hope is that it'll be less likely to just vanish, though who knows with Google because they make a lot of things that sometimes just vanish. I'm hopeful though. My other hope is that by creating a blog for that kind of content I'll be keeping myself to a semi-regular posting schedule. I still do a lot of sketching and drawing and doodling so the content is there - now I just need to post it!

Here's a taste.

If you're interested in this kind of stuff, drawing, sketching, study, perspective, etc. then I hope you'll check out Sketchbook Vorgus some time. It's still early days so there's not a ton there at the moment, but with time I'm hoping I'll fill it right up!

Superbia's Tank is Alive!

That's right! The board game I've been been working on, for longer than I'd like to admit, is finally a thing that actually exists. It's printed. It's playable. It's available for purchase! It's a real thing.

All the parts of the game!

Here's a quick blurb about the game:

A lost civilization known only as Superbia has been discovered in uncharted territory. Ancient and valuable tank part artifacts have been uncovered. Now, military organizations around the world have pledged to fund expeditions for the retrieval of these artifacts.

     Players give their tank commands to progress through the expedition. Shoot opponents to set back their advances, research locations to find powerful new tank part artifacts, and move all the way to the end to win! Develop a strategy utilizing a wide array of artifacts to complete the expedition and become the ultimate tank commander.

A game mid-play.

So, some thoughts...

One, as I mentioned, this took a lot longer than I thought it would. The game went through various revisions and one huge revision where half the game completely changed. The gameplay should have been hammered out first and foremost before I started creating art for the project. Luckily, I was able to reuse most of the art throughout the various revisions, but there were definitely some things cut that I had spent lots of time on.

The board and accompanying hex tiles were completely cut from the game!

Two, I think I've learned how long I can work on something until I start getting tired with it. Not to bash the game itself, but the process of creating the game was becoming a grueling slog. I was ready to be done with it a long time ago. The broken gameplay and subsequent huge revision to the game was a swift kick to moral, but I'm glad I stuck through it despite wanting to give up.

And three, I'm really grateful that my friends helped test the game out - especially one long night where it became clear the game was nigh unwinnable. I really appreciate the critiques and ideas from my friends and wife. Also, how awesome is it that there is a print-on-demand board game store? I'm glad to live in an age where something like The Game Crafter exists.

Well, thanks for reading, and if you ever get a chance to play Superbia's Tank I hope you have a fun, good time and thanks for trying it!

Some cards from the game!

Pixel Art

I recently completed a course on pixel art from Udemy, and though it was short I really enjoyed it. The instructor, Benjamin Anderson, went through some art basics and related them to pixel art. Things like shape, line, value, and colour. He introduces the free web based software Piskel which is easy and fun to use. Here are some of the exercises I did for this early section.

These are my reference pictures.

The course then includes some animation. We start in Piskel, but end in Aseprite which has a lot of extra features that help with animating your pixel art. It's free if you know how to compile it, or you can buy it off their website for about $20 Canadian. I'm not familiar with all the program's features, but the course does teach the basics of setting up a new animation and how to work with the key frames and colours to create your project. For the final assignment we had to google some animation key frames and base our animation off of that. Here's what I did!

A diving and rolling gymnast!

This was my reference image.

I really enjoyed the course, the instructor was great and knew what he was talking about. There were a lot of little tips and tricks you might not be able to learn on your own. It was great to just get exposed to a couple of nice pixel editing software and I had a lot of fun.

Here's another animation I did in Piskel of some old turtle-man running! He's silly!

Next I'm planning to do another course from the same instructor and finally start learning GameMaker!

The Amiibopocalypse is Over... For Now

Well, Nintendo finally released the final Smash Bros amiibo and they are now sitting on our shelf. I was a little frustrated that Nintendo would release 2 versions of the final 3 amiibo because, well, because that's twice the price for completing the collection! However, Corrine P2 and Cloud P2 have been extremely difficult to get a hold of. As such, my cognitive dissonance allows me to be satisfied with having a "complete" collection without having a "complete" collection. We may never get those final alternate versions of 2 of the characters, but at least we have 1 of each character!

Now behold, the amiibo in all their glory! :)

It looks awesome, and I'm proud to have actually played and trained up a number of them into Smash Bros monsters. The hunt for amiibos is over for now... though the amiibos of the 4 champions from Zelda: Breath of the Wild look awesome and dang it Nintendo I will have to get those too!

The Great Note Archive Mission

I've been holding on to a huge couple of binders full of notes for years now. I have high school notes from all sorts of classes - math, physics, social studies, english, etc. I have post-secondary notes from the Art Institute of Vancouver. There's notes from my time in Kwantlen in the Drafting program. Basically, there's a lot of paper just sitting around taking up space. I'd like to change that!

Part of me thinks, "I'll never look at this stuff again so just chuck it out and move on." Well, the other part of me says, "WHAT IF I NEED IT ONE DAY?!"

So, to compromise I'll try to take all these notes, turn them into digital copies, and chuck the hard copies. It's a bit of an undertaking that's for sure. So here's what I'm going to do...

Here's my Note Picture Taking K'Nex Apparatus!

I've created an apparatus to place my phone in and take pictures of every page of notes. It's built out of K'Nex and will allow me to slide a page in, take a picture, pull the page out, and repeat. I've opted for this method as opposed to scanning as it should simply be much quicker to simply hit a button on my phone every couple of seconds. The scanner takes too long to move up and down the page and wait for me to drop it and push a couple of buttons. This, combined with the fact that I don't need the quality to be amazing, just good enough to read, means I really don't need to use the scanner.

Here's the skeleton of the apparatus. The papers were only there to help reflect light.

The photos will be uploaded automatically to Google's Google Photo cloud. From there I plan to download them (possibly crop them) and reupload them in an organized fashion to Google Drive. Google Photos are weird in that if you move them around in Google Drive they still relate back to Google Photos and I really don't know how else to break this connection other than by downloading them and then deleting them from Google Photos. This was they'll only be accessible in Google Drive and not turning my Google Photos page into a collection of notes. It should work.

By the end I'll hopefully gain a couple shelves of space! Goodbye clutter!

Nintendo Power Collection

When you move into a new house and pack up all of your stuff you get a better sense of how much "stuff" you have. So, in the spirit of reducing my material possessions, I've concluded, through much heartache, that my Nintendo Power magazines really do take up a LOT of space. I have nearly the entire collection in hard copy and am only missing about 20 or 30 in all out of 285... that's a lot of paper! And boy does it weigh a gosh darn ton (as my back can attest to).

That's only about half of them...

I don't want to completely get rid of them though... Nintendo Power was a huge part of my life growing up. My parents got me a subscription each year as part of my birthday present and I was always so excited to receive my newest issue. I'd read the magazine through cover to back and sometimes do it multiple times. This huge stack of coloured paper holds a plethora of nostalgia. How am I to part with it - while not parting with it?

Well the digital age is well upon us and it seems there are a good number of Nintendo Powers scanned and available online at websites like EmuParadise and RetroMags. Still, they only account for about half of the issues in existence... which means I'm still left with some hard copies. I wish I could find them all, but some extensive googling has turned up nothing past what the before mentioned websites already host.

What does that mean for me?! What will I do?! Well - I'm up for the task. I can pick up where others have left off I suppose. Let's start the scanning!!!!

...okay, so it's actually a lot of scanning. I'm worried I'll go through a scanner or two! I roughly calculated just over 15,000 pages to scan. COUGH. Ahem. Woah... *feeling mildly dizzy*

RRrrrr... Mmmm... Oh Gee... it hurts.

Ever wish you could clone yourself consequence free? It looks like I'll be holding onto some of my hard copies for some time to come. I'd like to start scanning them and completing the entire Nintendo Power digital collection, but even if I scanned 1 a week it would still take me nearly 3 years to finish... I guess I'll see. No promises!

N64 Cartridges: What Are You?

Almost everyone stores their N64 Cartridges the same way... front to back. Not open-faced like some deconstructed sandwich on Cutthroat Kitchen. It's just not practical - they are designed to be stored like this:

Like this!

You can't store them like this! Who has that much floor space?!

But after storing them front to back what is what? What game are you cartridge 6th from the left. I have no idea - the cartridge probably doesn't even know what game it is because it's so disorganized. The front of the cartridge lets everyone know who you are, but you are hidden behind other confused cartridges.

So now if I want to find Quest 64 and fondly remember the terrible nostalgia of grinding enemies and hitting them with my little oaken staff I have to look through each and every cartridge until I find it! WHAT?! Nintendo, Nintendo, what were you thinking? There's perfect real estate on top of the cartridge for a label!

The solution is to make our own - or for those who are lazy and want something probably waaaay nicer than any home made sort of label you could just pick up some of these:

Oh thank goodness!

Sweet mother of cartridge identification! It works perfect and looks great to boot! These stickers are the must-have solution. The pack comes with the entire North American N64 game collection. I picked some up a few weeks ago and they were easy to stick on and look fantastic. You can pick them up from this Etsy shop - AfterMidnightps!

Aww yeah, that's the stuff!

For us Canadians it's a little pricey with our flailing dollar, but I bit the Bullet Bill and ordered it. Totally worth it in my opinion!

Halloween Good Times

This is a little overdue, but me and my girlfriend celebrated our first Halloween in our new house! It was exciting and fun and hectic, but also a letdown on the trick or treaters front!

We bought our first Halloween decorations together which included an inflatable pumpkin, and my parents found us an inflatable vampire minion! It was a hit with a lot of the kids (I could hear them outside... Not creepy at all!).

Isn't he frightfully adorable!

 Pumpkins were carved - right down to the last minute! A bit of mad scramble to get them done, but totally worth it. We carved a Minion, Rainbow Dash, Boo, and Patrick pumpkin!

We watched the traditional Nightmare before Christmas movie along with The Great Pumpkin, and Hocus Pocus. After the trick or treaters died down we went over to some friends and watched Paranorman while eating tons of sugary sweet things.

There were not that many trick or treaters in the complex, and unfortunately, not as many people handing out candy this year as there was the previous year. That all adds up to a pretty quiet neighborhood. Everytime there was a trick or treater we would scramble to the door - we weren't always ready - they were few and far between. We saw a Slenderman costume and an awesome Pinata costume though!

All in all it was an excellent Halloween! Now we just have to om nom nom all this leftover candy!

New Home!

Me and my girlfriend recently moved into our new house! We moved in on the 28th of September and it's been a bit of a hectic month. It's a big wonderful life step and we couldn't be happier!

There's so much that goes into a house that it took a while to get set up. Heat, electricity, internet, food, furnishings, clothing, electronics, and all manner of books and games. There's also setting up all your mailing addresses and changing your information on driver's licences and other id's. It's a busy time!

You also get a sense of just how much "stuff" you own - for better or worse. Thank goodness we had help loading and unloading it all. My girlfriend's computer desk just about killed 4 people trying to get it into the house. It's a beast! We even emptied that sucker and took all the drawers out... it's just a grade A solid beast of a desk. The sectional was a pain too... I'll never forget getting it stuck practically jammed in the doorway while desperately trying to hold it up while standing in a bush on the other side of a railing. Heh.

Pivot ended up being another word for "crush fingers."

My girlfriend and I have also been reducing the "things" we own and trying to just chuck things we don't need. It's amazing the junk you find when go through all your belongings - there are some treasures in there too! I found awesome/weird stickers and I have no idea what they are from or how I got them. They are disturbing and hilarious. 0_0

heh heh heh.

Another thing I learned from packing and unpacking is that there is a ton of cardboard involved. I literally filled an entire dumpster (one of those large recycling ones found outside most businesses) with cardboard. It's not just the boxes from all the stuff we packed up, but all the cardboard from the new things we bought for the house too. A few appliances, chairs, a table, a tv - we were the cardboard king and queen (not a title I'm eager to hold on to). The one benefit of the wide variety of cardboard was that I was able to make some handy cardboard storage slides for all of our games and a container for controllers etc.

Wooo! Awesome, easy storage!

While going through things and deciding what to keep or chuck it should be noted that I get very nostalgic. Almost every item has some history or story or memory attached to it - and sometimes it's time to just let it go. Nostalgia has been working in hyper-drive lately, but I've still managed to part with a fair chunk of things. It's worth it for marginally less clutter and storage around the house.

There's still some things to do in the house, replace the hot water tank, install garage shelving, and buy a basement storage unit, but it definitely feels more and more like home everyday!

Lychee Woopee!

Lychee. All I ever knew was that it was a flavour you could get when you ordered bubble tea. Sweet, cold, delicious bubble tea with those slimy gummy tapioca pearls at the bottom. Also, the straws are really fat so you can suck up all the delicious goopy tapioca and lychee flavour... mmm...

Mmmm... I want some now!

So, I typically get the lychee flavour when I get bubble tea, but I had no idea what a lychee was or anything about it at all. I knew it tasted good - and for the most part that was good enough for me! However, while shopping at the Real Canadian Superstore a little while ago I noticed something labeled lychee. Could it be? The fabled fruit of the flavour I enjoy sucking through large straws? It was!

...interesting... AND DELICIOUS!

Here is a lychee in all it's glory. It's kind of small, spiky, and the inside reminds me of a gooey eyeball. All that aside it actually tastes the same as the bubble tea. Rather, now I should say the bubble tea tastes just like the fruit! I picked some up and have been enjoying them. I'm getting better at opening them, and am thinking of saving some of the massive seeds to try and plant my own lychee plant. :)

Nice tree you got there...

Okay... so the tree is kind of big and I don't really have a space to plant one... but maybe one day. One day this can be mine!

They look awesome! So many!