Fire Emblem Three Houses - I The Best Professor

I got Fire Emblem Three Houses for my birthday this last summer, and I've finally had the chance to play it - after managing to take a break from Minecraft for a bit. That's a hard thing to do sometimes! I'm glad I managed to though, because Fire Emblem sucked me in good.

If you're not familiar with Fire Emblem, it is a Tactical RPG set in a medieval fantasy world. There's plenty of characters and you level them up and assign them various classes as you progress through the story. This Fire Emblem features a hefty first half of the game where you play the role of a professor educating these young, up and coming lords and ladies. You can build relationships with them and guide them down their (or your) desired route of progression. There are options to do some of this automatically, but I enjoyed manually teaching my students.

I spent about 90 hours playing through the game - which is a bit longer than the average, but I liked talking to everybody! You have a choice early on which house you'd like to join and teach. This is effectively a choice about which characters you want to play through the game with and which story you want to experience. I'm terrible at making choices! This game is full of them. The nice thing is it warns you up front if the choice you are about to make will have permanent repercussions to the story. So don't fret the other choices throughout the game - they mainly help you build bonds with your students.

For my first time through the game I chose The Black Eagles house. This means I've got Edelgard at the helm and her whole crew to work with. Choosing was tough, as there were characters I liked my first impression of from all the houses. In the end, I grew to love every one of the misfits in the merry band I chose. I was even able to recruit Felix from one of the other houses.

Throughout the game there are days where you'll be able to explore the school and fish, garden, collect items, have meals, train skills, and bond with students. At the end of each month the story mission takes place. You can also take on quests and have non-story battles through the month to level up characters and collect rewards.

Now that I've beaten the game I have access to the New Game+ which I'm hoping to have the time to come back to one day. I'm super curious as to how the other houses stories unfold. Also, I'm excited to start a new game with the ability to carry over a lot of what I earned and collected in my first playthrough. One day. One day.

Something I don't think I ever fully utilized was the battalion system. This is a new mechanic to the Fire Emblem series. Having a battalion equipped to a unit boosts some of its stats, but it also gives them the ability to perform a gambit - a sort of special attack. Despite spending lots of time leveling up everyone's leaderships skills I never really used the gambits all that much. I've heard they're more useful in harder game modes - maybe I'll try to utilize them more in my next playthrough.

Overall, the game was excellent! It pulled me in. I enjoyed playing professor, I fell in love with all the character's in my house, and I enjoyed the battles. The battles themselves got a little easy the further I got into the game and the stronger my characters became. The final battle however, was a good difficulty. Maybe I'll try a harder game mode next time to have more of a challenge. The game was great, and I can't wait to play it again and experience a whole new story.

All New Shop Vorgus on Zazzle

I've been hard at work updating the brand for good ole' Shop Vorgus. I decided to keep the squid octopus thingy as my logo, but I gave it a new look and will be making it consistent through all the platforms. I've posted some of the sketches on my other blog, Sketchbook Vorgus, if you want a peak at the design process. Below is the final design!

I've cleaned up a lot of stuff at Shop Vorgus, organized things, and also added some new designs. In the future I'd like to expand to other digital marketplaces, but for now I'll focus on finishing up the original Zazzle shop. Below are some of the collections I've put together in the shop - click on them if you're interested, thanks!

Popular Clothing
by Vorgus

Laughs and Giggles
by Vorgus

Geek Out
by Vorgus

Around the House
by Vorgus

Triangle Dude Comics Most Popular
by Vorgus

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!

All New Triangle Dude Website

Triangle Dude Comics has a new home! Same website, tdcomics.com, but now it's hosted on Blogger. It looks nice and new, while also looking pretty much the exact same. However, now it's free to host! So that's the big change for me. It has everything from the old site, sans the downloadable desktop wallpapers. If that's something people really want me to bring back then I'll do it, but for now they are gone.

That's it! Just a quick update. Hope everyone enjoys the new site :)

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!

Do The Dø

I have to thank YouTube's autoplay for leading me to this band. Every so often the autoplay leads me down a new path of music listening while I do whatever sort of work I'm doing on the computer. Eventually, while wading through some pleasant music, I'll be piqued by a certain song - I have to check them out. I pop back into the browser and click to the YouTube tab. The Dø is what I found that day.

I've really enjoyed their music so far and am excited to share! So if you care to listen here's a of couple songs from them I've been listening to recently.

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!

Superbia's Tank Update!

Hey everyone! I've got a bit of an update on the board game I've been working on. Superbia's Tank is still tankin' along - bit by bit. A lot of the artwork, which you'll see some of in a moment below, is mostly done. It's been a lot of work, but also a blast to create these really creative, wacky parts for each player's constantly transforming tank. Each tank is made up of three parts which are the treads, the frame, and the turret. As player's move around and explore the island of Superbia they'll discover cards with all manner of tank parts and other suprises.

The island of Superbia. As you explore you'll add hex tiles to the island.

The artwork, as I said, is mostly complete (as far as I can tell!). Gameplay, however, needs to be a little more thoroughly tested. I have tested the mechanics myself and managed to test the game with a group as well. More testing will be needed though. I want to make sure that at the end of the day the game doesn't have any odd hiccups or broken rules and that above all it is fun! Usually it's important to get the gameplay nailed down before doing a lot of the art, but I found people were not as interested in testing a game if they didn't have anything visually interesting to attach to. Risky move - we'll see how it pans out.

Anyway, now for the good stuff!


Artifacts: The island of Superbia is littered with old and powerful tank parts called artifacts.

Each part has it's own abilities and there are 45 different parts!

 

Events: Exploring the island of Superbia can be tricky business. As players move across the map they'll draw event cards that could test a players strength, or they may find a helpful item for later.

There are good events and bad ones too!

 I'll try to keep this blog updated with any other large milestones! Currently, I'm working on the manual and the box, but I can't complete the manual until there has been more testing. See ya!