Orthogonal Projections

Greetings interwebs.  Today I bring you an update on a couple of projects that aren't The Word Smith (with any luck it will hopefully resume early-ish in the new year).

First, that long running project - lets call it FR for short, if I haven't already - that I've commented on in my last couple of posts.  I'm currently about 3/5 of the way through the second draft of the outline.  The goal of this draft is to expand slightly on the details of the notewall draft, specifying some additional details without getting too deep into the nitty gritty.  This draft is being done the old fashioned way with paper and pencil.  A picture of a couple pages of my notebook is below, featuring my lovely handwriting.

Isn't it lovely?

The other project that I wanted to comment on today is a writing project, so no pictures for it.  I've decided to do some NaNoWriMo writing this year.  I'm not planning or expecting to hit the 50 000 word mark (which I did manage on my previous attempt - back in 2011) since I've got too many other things that a want (and in some cases need) to do that I'm unwilling to put on hiatus for a month.  Basically, I'm using this as motivation to do some writing and continue on with my previous NaNoWriMo project.  I've currently written about 8000 words and if I manage to keep up my current pace I'm hoping to make it to about 25 000 words by the end of the month.  We'll see how far I get and perhaps I'll write another update at the end of the month.

And that is all for today, interwebs.

Until Next Time,
-Freak Out

Getting Drafty

The Word Smith is still on hiatus.  Today we here at The Freak Report bring an update to the previous post regarding one of my long running projects.  In the previous post I showed off the start of a note wall that I had put together in an effort to help move the project along.  I am happy to say that the note wall is now complete!

Well, it would be more accurate to say that the first draft is complete.  Regardless, this still represents a notable step forward and is somewhat of a momentous occasion.  This draft represents what I think is the first complete draft of the game since its very early versions, but those early versions were so long ago that I don't remember how complete they actually were and I suspect that they may have been missing some details.  (I could probably still dig up my old notes and check but I suspect that may be an exercise that wouldn't really interest anyone other than me.)

There are two main things to do next.  One is to potentially revise the draft and tweak things and whatnot.  The other is that the above draft represents one particular path through the game.  I intend to make it possible to visit at least some of the areas in the order of the player's choosing so I need to create alternate paths through some areas as they may change depending on the order in which they are visited - this is the next task that I will likely undertake.

And now without any further commentary, here are close-up shots of each area, presented in the order that the current draft  intends them to be visited in.

 Until next time,
Freak Out
 -TFitC

Naming Conventions

The next page (that being page two) of episode five of The Word Smith is now online.  It reveals the great mystery of just what is The Word Smith's real name?  Read if you dare for you just may go insane from the revelation.  (Most likely not, but I cannot rule out the possibility.)

And I really need to get back to drawing in the sketchbook more often (regardless of how long Word Smithing takes) 'cause I'm running out of stuff.  But for today, I continue with some of the FR character "redesign":

On the left is Katara and on the right is Tirel.  No point saying much else about these character since I'm the only one who knows anything about them to begin with.

In other largely inconsequential news, I've been playing a bit of Magic recently (which I've not done in years) which was fun.  I just have to make sure I don't go spend too much on cards (not likely an issue, I'm generally fairly well self-disciplined about these things).

Anyway, until next time,
Freak Out
-TFitC

Not Batman

And verily, the first page of The Word Smith's fifth episode finds its way onto the weeb.  I'll be doing this episode in colour and also currently intend to do all remaining episodes in colour, but no guarantees.  I will also be giving a title to each page for whatever reason.

I've been rather lazy with the sketchbook lately since I've been focused on the comic, but here are a couple of character redesigns of my old FR characters:

Erin and Doran Windermere.  I didn't look back at the original designs though I suspect that these are at least somewhat similar.  I've never entirely decided on the exact relationship between these two characters (siblings, married, something else?), not that I expect it to make a huge difference.  Also, not entirely happy with the way Doran turned out so I'll probably redo that drawing at some point.

Anywho, that's all for this week.  Tune in next week for the exciting, continuing adventures of The Word Smith!

Freak Out,
-TFitC

The Cat's Meow

Hey, look, page 9 of episode 4 of The Word Smith is online.  It may even be a thing, or whatever.  Regardless, it looks like everything is going according to plan.  Hopefully page 10 will be ready for next week, but there's a chance there might be a slight delay or an interlude instead.  I blame FASS (and so should you.)

And now, on to today's sketchbook entry:

This is a bit of a redesign of one of the characters from the occasionally mentioned Kyoujo RPG.  In particular, this is Mirayrl Aiyew Prurrj Trelarrl, who is basically a supporting, though playable, character.  I seem to have been doing some updating/redesign of some of my FR and related characters of late (especially some of the less frequently drawn ones) so there's bound to be some more of them showing up here in the future.

In other news, FASS is over, I have survived it and life returns to some semblance of normality, whatever that is.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Aaaaaand.... We're Back!

It's Tuesday again which means it's time once again to inflict my peculiar brand of commentary and artistry (perhaps for some loose definition of the word) upon the interweebs.  This also means that there's something new posted over on the Word Smith site and it's an actual new page rather than an interlude.  Enjoy!  In the imperative!

And for today's sketchbook entry... hmmm, well, lets see...  the sketchbook has sadly been a little neglected due to focusing on the comic of late, but there's still a few things to dig out for the moment (though I'm going to have to set aside some time to do some more sketchbook drawing!)

Four different poses for Gillin, one of my recurring FR characters and probably the one I tend to sketch most often, for some reason.  I intentionally left the first (top-left) one a little unfinished as I thought it looked kind of interesting and I occasionally like to see the rough, construction work that leads to the finished drawing - she's not actually a mannequin, automaton, homunculus or anything of that sort.

Anywho, that's all for this week.  Until next time,
Freak Out
-TFitC

Combing the Desert

The exciting (or not) conclusion to episode 3 of The Word Smith is now available.  I am going to try to keep plowing ahead with episode 4 at the same schedule, though I expect there will be some inevitable pauses due to life and the universe in general.

I think I'm going to post a couple of sketchbook pages today, drawn from my current sketchbook and not from the archives like last week.

 A quick sketch of Gillin, one of my FR characters, in mid-stride, who hasn't appeared on this blog in a while.  I misspelled her name on the sketch label (fixed in the sketchbook, but I didn't notice it until after having scanned it in) - I used to spell her name with only one "l" but at some point switched to two.  How's that for some useless trivia?

This is just a bit of a desert landscape.  It started with the swirly spiral in the upper-left and I thought "hey, that could be a hot desert sun" and what does one find in a desert but disembodied robot arms?  There's also some Tim Burton-esque things happening in the background with that one sand dune.

Anyway, that's all for now.  Until next time,
Freak Out

-TFitC

Drawing on the Past

So, it seems that page 5 of the Word Smith, episode 3 is now on-line in the usual place.  Tremble in fear, o mighty interweebs!  Or just go read it, whatever.

In light of last week's sketching exercise, I decided to dig up my original sketchbook an marvel at its terribleness.  It was pretty terrible and I shall spare the internets the terror of it all for I am a magnanimous Freak.  Also, I'd be pretty embarassed to put that stuff in what is basically a public forum (even if there are only a few people who actually read what I choose to vomit onto the internet - how's that for imagery?)

Suffice it to say, my early forays into drawing were somewhat, in retrospect, not good.  I had no sense of proportion at all, or at least very little, and it was all kind of laughably bad.  And whilst I make no claims of being particularly good or anything now, I'm certainly rather better than I used to be, which is a good thing, I suppose.  Yay for progress.  At the very least, I can cobble together stuff that I don't think I'll be terribly ashamed of ten years or so down the line.  Of course, part of the whole purpose of this is to practice and get better.  At least there seems to be some tangible evidence that it's all paying off, at least a little bit.

Even in that first sketchbook one can see some progress - towards the end there's a few things that I don't think are completely terrible.  In fact, I picked one to show in public:

In fact, I think it looks kind of neat, though it probably helps that it's not human.  I'm not 100% sure what this was meant to be (aside from some ridiculously complicated contraption) though I suspect it may have been an idea for the Super Computer (from my FR project).

Until next time,
Freak Out

-TFitC

A Bunch of Stuff

So I thought to myself "Hey, Freak!"

"Yeah?"

"You know, you've got a bunch of pencil crayons you never use."

"So?"

"Maybe you shoud, I dunno, use 'em, or something."

"Why?"

"I dunno.  'Cause they're there?  And it'd be fun?"

"Yeah, I guess."

(Note:  conversation may not have happened exactly as depicted.)

Anyway, for a bit of a change of pace I decided to do a drawing in colour:

And of course, I drew Gillin, probably my most-drawn FR character.  I used a set of Prismacolour pencil crayons (yeah, the brand name is spelled without the "u", but as a card-carrying Canadian, I'm physically incapable of spelling it anything other than "colour").  Not sure if I really like working with pencil crayons or not - it's a bit grainy and I'm not sure if that's the nature of pencil crayons, the texture of the paper I'm using or inexperience (or some combination thereof).  Maybe I'll try again at some point with different paper and see if it makes a difference.

Moving on... we come to another of my FR characters, but one that has not previously appeared in this blog.

This is Merv J. - I've never really decided on what the "J" stand for.  He's a merchant, part-time antique collector and fancies himself something of an adventurer (spoiler:  he's not, really).  The orb-like object he's shown holding is one of his prize antiques.

And lastly for today are some design-type sketches of The Word Smith:

The goals here, more than anything, was to try to establish a bit more of a consistent construction for the character so most of the construction lines have been left in.  Not sure how successful I was in that.  Also, a couple of random hands, just because.

That's all for today.  Until next time,
Freak Out
-TFitC

About Face

It occured to me that "composing" is one letter away from "composting".

Anyway, today's post is all about faces.  I love punny titles, don't you?  Of course you do.  Trust me.  You.  Do.

Be that as it may, I decided it was time to draw another of my FR characters in a semi-realistic style, this time, Kyoujo:

As with my previous effort in this regard, the hair was kind of interesting since manga-style hair tends to be rather gravity defying and Kyoujo has so much of it.  I probably should have toned down the ponytail for this version.

And for door number two, I also decided it was time to try my hand at another self-portrait attempt:

It seems to be a better approximation of me than my previous attempt, but there's still lots of room for improvement.  For this drawing, I took a picture of myself rather than looking in the mirror for reference and I think having a subject that wasn't constantly moving around helped.  It is also a totally random coincidence that I was wearing the same shirt when I took the picture that I used for the drawing as I was when I did my first self-portrait.

And that is all for the present.  Until next time,
Freak Out
-TFitC

Under Cover

Lets just jump right into things today with a potential cover design for my first Word Smith mini-comic:This was a fun one to do, though a bit time consuming (took about three hours). All of the characters from the first mini-comic (including the minor ones) are represented, though the titular Word Smith is only represented through his mask and, I suppose, the croquet mallets.

The next one sees the return of the FR characters that have previously appeared in the blog, this time for experimenting with various action-y poses.
The pose for Kyoujo (top one) I actually tried out in front of the mirror - it's doable, but not particularly comfortable. Both Gillin and Mordel have swords because, well, I like swords.

Next up is a close-up portrait of Gillin, which had the goal of trying to pay a bit more attention to detail than usual.
Turned out reasonably well, I think. The text at the bottom is her name - Gillin Eledhwen - written in Tolkien's tengwar script. For any tengwar purists that may stumble upon this, my no doubt idiosyncratic usage of tengwar is, ultimately, derived from my personal adaptation of it for writing english based on my understanding of how the script worked back when I was in high school and, I expect, probably varies somewhat from other more standard usages.

Anyway... for the last drawing today I'm going to deviate somewhat from my thus far standard practice of posting these in chronological order because the next drawing just fits best as a follow-up to the previous one. It should be obvious that my drawing style is heavily influenced by anime/manga. While I'm generally fine with that (I like the general manga-style look), I nevertheless sometimes think that I should try branching out now and then for practice and diversity and what not. So, I decided to try drawing one of my FR characters in a more realistic style. The natural choice was, of course, Gillin, since she's probably the one I've drawn most often:
Since manga hair tends to be rather gravity defying at times, it was interesting rendering her hair in a way that looked like it could be plausible while still recalling her original hair style. I'm not sure how well I succeeded in that, but it didn't turn out too badly. Also I think her eyes are a little too far apart. Overall, though, I was quite pleased with how this turned out. I may have to try this with some of my other characters in the future.

Well, that is all for the moment.
Freak Out,
-TFitC

Have Some Perspective

Most of what I tend to draw is human(oid) characters, I don't usually draw other stuff like, say, scenery. This was one of the more challenging parts of doing my mini-comics - drawing all those things that I don't normally draw, especially when trying to use some sort of vaguely realistic perspective. So, I decided that I should try practicing drawing some perspective and other things from time to time:
The above is a drawing in two-point perspective. While I don't think that the perspective turned out too badly (given my relative inexperience in the subject), I clearly should not be allowed to design buildings and should stick with reference photos, at least until I get some more experience with these things. My reference for perspective is the book "Perspective! For Comic Book Artists" by David Chelsea. I didn't bother with the full construction for two-point, as it's somewhat complicated and time consuming, rather, I used some shortcuts for people who don't care so much about accuracy and just want something that looks reasonable. Even with those shortcuts, it still took me a while to draw - spread out over three days, though I'm sure part of that is due to inexperience.

The next drawing is another of my FR characters:
This isn't one of the characters that I draw very often and I didn't bother going back to check old sketches for reference since I don't mind exploring alternate designs for this character (though I don't think it's too different from previous versions). There are multiple things wrong with the pose - I was trying to work without a reference but, as will no doubt be a theme in this blog, more practice is clearly needed.

Last up for today is the above sketch which is a potential character design for a character that will show up at some point in my Word Smith comics, presuming I end up doing any more with those. Overall fairly happy with how it turned out. No other comments at this time.

And that's all for today. Hope everyone's brains are still firmly inside their skulls.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

This Reality is Final

Looking through my sketchbook, I noticed its been a while since I've drawn any of my FR characters - the last one appearing in the sketchbook is dated Dec 31, 2009, a little over two years ago! Now, I've doodled some of the characters in various notebooks since then, but I simply haven't done any proper sketches in all that time. So, I figure it's time to correct that and did a couple of sketches to that effect. These are probably the two of my FR characters that I've sketched most often over the years, still, going back to some of my old sketchbooks for reference proved useful (at least for the second one).

First up is Gillin Eledhwen, an "almost half-elf" - specifically, she's 7/16 elf, or something to that effect (I've never really sat down to figure out if that's actually possible). Did one full body pose with a few sketches of the face with various expressions from various angles. Of note, I need to work on my foreshortening, but then, that's what this is all about, after all - practice.

This is Kyoujo (the one on the left) pictured with her friend Megan, both wearing their tour guide uniforms. Kyoujo's hair is a bit shorter than I normally draw it and I don't know what Megan's done to embarass her like that - some sort of practical joke, no doubt. (Mostly I wanted to draw Kyoujo with a different expression that the typical dour one she normally wears.)

Anyway, that's all for today. Until next time.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

A Look at QRT

After threatening several times, I'm finally going to sit down and blog more about my QRT project.

So what is QRT? In short, QRT stands for "Quasi RPG Toolkit" and is a project I've been working at off-and-on for the past couple of years (already? gee...) which will (hopefully) eventually become an integrated set of tools for creating RPGs in the style of what one might have seen on the SNES, back in the day, like Final Fantasy VI, for example.

This makes it similar in its goals to the RPG Maker series of editors, for those who are familiar with them. So why, one might ask, make my own version of RPG Maker? Other than simply "because I feel like it", basically, I have several ideas for improvements over the RPG Maker series that I think would be, well, improvements, especially in the areas of flexibility and customization. I think it's also a good programming and design exercise.

The QRT project also serves as a sort of updated version of my FR project. Not only is QRT much, much, much better designed, it's also much more flexible and, more important, reusable which my much older and inferior FR code-base would not have been.

Without going into too many details, let's do a brief overview of what I've done so far and what I'll be working on in the near future. (Note that the graphics in the screen shots were downloaded for use with RPG Maker 2000 from various RPG Maker fan sites and are serving, for the moment, simply as placeholders. The plan is to eventually replace these with original graphics.)Above is the main editor window. I had a map editor for FR, but it was *only* for map editing. The QRT editor will be an integrated editor for maps, scripting and the like - as one would expect from any sort of modern development toolset.

One of the ways that I am making QRT more flexible that the RPG Maker counterpart is including a tileset layout editor to allow users to create custom tileset layouts, unlike RPG Makers' pre-defined layout (to the best of my knowledge). It is also possible to use a different layout for each map in a project, if desired. One of the things that I am currently working on is improving the "auto-tiling" feature (used to automatically draw terrain feature like deserts, swamps, rivers or whatnot) to allow the use of animated tiles in all auto-tiling groups. (RPG Maker 2000 only allows animated tiles in auto-tile groups for its special water/shore groups - I don't like the rectilinear shorelines that it limits you to.)

Another customization feature is the inclusion of custom created fonts. Fonts can be created from scratch or can be based on any installed Windows font (though the import function still needs some work).

Scripting in QRT is initially going to be via a point-and-click script interface (as I feel this is easier for novices to pick up), but I plan to eventually include an actually scripting language as well (probably Python, but we'll see when I get to that). Another feature that I'm planning for scripting is a scripting API which I'm calling "Quartic" - QUAsi Rpg Tools Interface Component. The plan is to allow users to develop scripting plug-ins for custom functionality.

Above shows a (very simple) text box showing the font display and colouring at work. This is the (humble) beginnings of the in-game UI. My plans for the UI is to make it highly customizable, including a UI layout editor as part of the QRT editor. I hope to make it fairly easy to create custom game UI (which will help give each QRT game a unique look and feel). While custom UI can be make in RPG Maker, it's very inconvenient, not to mention tedious.

So far, QRT is coming along slowly, but, I suppose, somewhat steadily. As far as important functionality goes, it's roughly equivalent to where I had FR all those years ago but, as mentioned, much better designed and ultimately more flexible, powerful and reusable. At the moment, my focus is on revisiting some of my existing features and improving and/or simplifying them before continuing on with the scripting and UI systems.

I may eventually post more as I continue to progress on the project.

Freak Out
-TFitC

Centennial Something or Other

It appears that this is my 100th post. Considering that I've had this blog for almost two and a half years already, that tells you something about my posting frequency.

Anyway, I'm going to celebrate my 100th post by doing a follow-up to my previous post in the form of a video. Behold! (Or don't, eyes may bleed, I can't be held responsible.)



Hmmm. The default video frame selected by YouTube says it all, I think, and is quite amusingly appropriate.

This is actually why it took me so bloody long to get around to making that post about my FR porting experiment. I had originally wanted to do a narrated video describing things, but never found the time or motivation. Instead, I decided to slap something together, call it a day and inflict it upon my readership, such as it is.

The only thing I'll note is that most of the music in the video (which was added through the magic of video editing) was composed by my brother with one small piece by myself. In order, they are:

Victory Fanfare
Here's the Boss
Walking Around in a Fog
Canackian Theme
New Folk Song
Dungeon 2
Merv's Theme
The Reel of the Drunken Sailor
New Folk Song (again)
Elvis Theme
Merv's Theme (again)
Flute Song (I composed this for a music theory class)
Appliance Theme
Dungeon 1
The Reel of the Drunk Sailor (again)
Substation Theme

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Blog to the FUTURE

With this post we're going BACK IN TIME to late summer 2009 when, on a whim, I decided to port my unfinished game project (from back in highschool) from ancient C/DOS to a more modern Windows-based C#/XNA app. I'd been meaning to blog about the results for some time, but just never got around to it.

Welcome to The Final Reality

The project was (still is, I suppose) meant to be a parody of the Final Fantasy series in particular and of RPGs in general. The graphics were all created by me (and, I admit, they're not particularly fantastic) though were sometimes based on other things. However, I'm not going to talk much about the game itself or its storied history. Rather, I'm going to talk about how much my coding sucked back in highschool and some about the porting process. Though I will include lots of screenshots. Yay!

A googly-eyed alien, though he doesn't seem the friendly sort.

Porting from C to C# wasn't too hard, over all. I had to make some changes to from the DOS-based "I get the whole machine to myself so I don't have to play nice" approach to the multi-tasking based Windows approach, but that went fairly smoothly. I was able to poach some code from my QRT project to handle rendering, so that was fairly easy as well. The first main challenge I came across was that I had the wrong version of the code.

It'll make you glow. Blue magic does silly stuff like that. And yes, the menu is supposed to be aged dot-matrix printer paper.

Somehow, I seem to have lost the most recent version of the code which was missing some things like object animations (which I put back in) and some menu and inventory stuff (which I did not). This caused a problem because the data files were for the most recent version of the code (I still have a working version of the most recent executable...)

Somebody seems to have left their tie hanging on the wall of this cave.

This caused a problem because, in the main program file, there is what is called a "magic number" hard coded telling the game the position in the data file where it should start loading from when the game first starts and, because the version of the code I had was out of date, this number was wrong, thus resulting in reading essentially random junk from the data file.

The Tower of Harmony: what's with all the musical instruments laying around?

Fortunately, once I'd diagnosed the problem, I had enough of my old notes from highschoool sitting around (I am something of a pack rat) that I was able to deduced what the correct magic number was supposed to be. But this is a somewhat extreme example of one of the things that was horrible about my coding back then: way too many things hard coded. I've gotten much, much better about this over the years.

The clinic in the Elf Town. The names of the Elves in the clinic were taken from Tolkien's elvish languages and all mean things like "sickly" and so forth.

Other problems with my code were, perhaps, less severe but still annoying. My style was poor, formatting was bad, comments were lack luster or missing altogether, things were not nearly as organized as they should have been. Again, I've improved greatly in these areas over the years. I think switching to object-oriented languages like C++ and C# have helped tremendously and, these days, I put a lot more effort into structuring and organizing my code well.

In the music club The Wailing Cat. For some reason, the idea of cats being famous musicians amuses me.

As mentioned, some restructuring of code needed to be done in moving from a DOS to Windows based environments, but I was able to borrow some of my code from my QRT project so that made the switch fairly easy. However, since in C#, everything has to be in a class (unlike C/C++ which can have free floating functions), some extra restructuring was needed. I had originally thought of actually reorganizing everything so that it was actually well coded, but quickly decided this wasn't worth the effort. Essentially, each code file became its own class with all public members for easy access. (Don't worry if you don't understand the programmer-speak, the main thing is I took the easy way out since I wasn't going to do anything with the code beyond a simple port.)

The Dwarvish Pizzaria. In FR, dwarves are master chefs. Note the menu says "FR Combo" and the tray (lower right) reads "Quasi". I put several tidbits like that into the graphics.

Back when I was creating all the graphics, data files and whatnot, I had several independent tools for creating various resources - a graphics editor, map editor, item and dialog editor (which I think were just programs with the data hard coded that then wrote data files) - which I then assembled via a semi-automatic resource compiler (I still had to input several things manually). It was all rather archaic. This is one area where the QRT project is definately going to improve upon by having a whole integrated IDE and overall much more data driven approach which will make creating RPGs much easier (not to mention everything will be much more reusable).

Spelunking in an ancient mine.

One other thing that did give me a bit of a problem when porting was with text and dialog. Back in the DOS days (and even up until more recently), text was commonly just 8-bit ASCII by default. In C#, everything is unicode by default. This caused a bit of a problem because I was using certain ASCII codes to represent special symbols (item icons, for example) which didn't always translate as expected in unicode. So I had to put special checks in for some symbols, but I don't think I caught them all because the port occasionally crashes when opening certain treasure chests. Oops.

The graphics for house interiors were based on the house I lived in at the time. That's the clock I made in shop class.

That's really all I have to say about my little porting project and the crappiness of my coding back in highschool. As I've said, I've improved a lot since then (lots of additional experience under my belt) and my QRT project, as a result, will be much better designed and will be much more flexible and will be capable of a lot more overall.

A multi-layered tech dungeon. I liked multi-layered maps. Note the Star Trek styled replicator thing.

Hopefully I haven't bored anyone who's bothered to read this too much (I hope the pictures helped!), I've blathered on so long basically as an excuse to use as many screen shots as possible. I've mentioned QRT a few times and I'm still planning on blogging specifically about that project, eventually, whenever I get around to it. Until then, I'll just leave you with a few more screen shots.

In town, even pedestrians have to obey stop signs. Anachronism? What's that?

In the tech dungeon it's Quasi Cola! One of those little tidbits. Not sure why since I don't actually like cola that much.

A hallway in The Wailing Cat. The picture on the left is supposed to be me. The other picture says "Quasi".

Again in The Wailing Cat. For some reason, I seem to have made a point of including bathrooms in the game.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

(I should probably say something about images being copyright by me, yada yada, wheretofore and hereunto.)