Today Is A Good Day

But not in a Klingon sense.

This morning, I got the results from one of the scholarships that I applied to back in the Fall and, as the Klingons might say: Qapla'! (success!) It's the more valuable of the two scholarships so I'm quite happy about that.

Of course, the best part of this means that I won't have to TA if I don't want to (and I probably won't want to)!

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Under My Thumb

I just noticed that I forgot to commemorate my 111th post. Fortunately, since it was my previous post, it served to point out something suitably bizarre for such an auspicious occasion.

The point of this post, however, is not to dwell on interesting numbers. As I have mentioned previously, my PhD research is related to comics and, as such, it seems that trying my hand at making a comic would be a useful experience. I wrote up a short script back over reading week and this week I have undertaken the first step on that journey - namely, creating the layout thumbnails. Here are the results:

Basically, thumbnails are meant to be rough sketches showing the layout of the panels and also of what will go into said panels. The level of detail in the thumbnails seems to vary widely from artist to artist. The above page of thumbnails shows four comic pages. I hope the division between pages is relatively clear, otherwise the image might seem a bit confusing. (Top left is page 1, top right is page 2, bottom left is page 3 and bottom right is page 4.)

The thumbnails don't include (much) dialogue, so it probably won't be immediately obvious exactly what's going on, though I have sketched in where I think the speech balloons will go. Each page took about an hour to create the thumbnails.

As might be obvious from the thumbnails, the characters look a bit generic at the moment. That is by intent since I haven't actually gone and done any character design yet. I didn't want to be tempted to put too much detail into the thumbnails. So my next step will be coming up with some actual character designs, which I'll post about when they're done (hopefully in a week or so).

So far I'm enjoying this little project. I haven't really done much drawing since when I was doing my Master's degree and it's nice to have something to motivate me to do some drawing again.

Until next time.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Batman Goes Insane

I follow the blog of comic artist Scott McCloud (who has written Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics and Making Comics, amongst other things) and yesterday he had a link to a review/analysis of the first half of what appears to be a recent Batman comic. And O.M.G! It is soooo weird. I just had to share the link with my readers: here it is.

I think it kind of blew my mind.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Marking Still Sucks (Mostly)

First, this week has been, shall I say.. annoying. Gyah. First, Monday night, I had to proctor for the first year course I'm TAing this term. As my readers know (and which they will no doubt be reminded multiple times over the course of my degree) I hate proctoring. Two hours of watching people write exams is worse than watching paint dry because at least with paint watching, you can leave and do something else when you get bored.

Proctoring is also usually accompanied by marking. Yesterday I spent all day marking. ALL DAY! From 9:00 AM to about 4:30 PM, with a short break for lunch. This is horrible! When I mark assignments, I usually only mark for about and hour or so in one go, not nearly eight. Brain... leaking... out of... ear... Gyah...

Ranting out of the way, about two weeks ago we marked assignment 3 for the undergrad graphics course, which I am also TAing this term. This is much more fun than marking stupid first year courses. Assignment 3 is the "puppet" assignment in which students have the opportunity to make interesting character models. This terms models have been posted up on the course website which can be located here. Go take a look! There's some nice puppets this term (most recent are at the top of the page).

Anyway, that is all for the present. Until next time.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Babble, Babble

We want to do some things, that are like things, and some other things, that are more like stuff. When something is done, or when stuff is done, there is a reaction to a perpedicular vector. Or maybe a canteloupe. Regardless, the other stuff is roasting to a sizzling height of consciousness. I know not what that means, it's just all gobbledegook. Where does it all end? For that matter, where did it start? Nothing is the same now that everything is nothing. A dollar bill fell on my head the other day and that causes the wall to collapse, because dollar bills are coins now. Haven't you heard? The eleven o'clock train came by at ten. But that was then and this is not then. Perhaps it is now. Or maybe it will be now later. Whichever is the case, I am wearing socks, and my socks are wearing little velvet hats covered in sparkles. But they don't sparkle because they're defective. I know that because they were made by badgers. Lousy, lousy badgers. My mind reels at the mediocrity of it all. Or it would if there were anything mediocre about, but it's all sauce, sauce covered in noodles and topped with a plate. My glasses are too tight and maybe that's why I'm babbling like this. Er. So, stuff...

Sweet Freedom!

"By Hrothgar, I thought we'd be trapped in that labyrinth until Grendel devoured us..."

FASS of the Titans is now over! The show seems to have gone relatively well and the running time was at about 3 hours (well, except for the Friday heckling show, of course) so I'm fairly happy over all. This also means that my FASS responsibilities are pretty much over. I will still be the past CSW for next year, but as that's mainly an advisory position it will be much less work. I'm looking forward to having more time to devote to my own projects now.

Since the show is over, I have also opened up the FASS 2011 writers' wiki to be world readable, which can be found here, should anyone feel like perusing it.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Stuff I Want to Do

I guess I'm one of those people who never seems to have enough time to do everything that they want to do, though I'll freely admit that I don't always make as good use of my time as I should (or could). It also doesn't help that I'm constantly coming up with new things to work on and never actually finish many of my projects, so things end up kind of piling up. (I am referring to personal projects here, not school or work related things.)

With less than a week until FASS is over for another year, I expect to be having at least a bit of extra spare time to do stuff in, so in an attempt to focus my efforts on a small number of projects I thought I'd try blogging about them. Not that I really expect this to make me get stuff done, but at least it'll give me something to write about (and my small number of readers something to read about) other than the usually complaining about TAing and marking and stuff.

Anyway, on to the stuff! (In no particular order.)

QRT

My current programming project which I blogged about in my previous post. There's not really anything to say about it at this point beyond what I've already said about it so I'll just say that I plan to continue working on it.

Writing

I do like to write and I sometimes think that I'd like to try my hand at writing a novel - not that I really care if it were to get published or not, but I'd like to at least write one! I missed NaNoWriMo due to being embroiled in FASS edits, so I'm planning on picking a month (likely March) for my own personal NaNoWriMo. We'll see how that goes. Though I'm going to continue beyond just one month if necessary.

Comic

I'd also like to try my hand at making my own comic. This is something which will also be a useful experience for my research. I've got some ideas for a short 3-5 page test comic which I will probably get started on shortly after FASS finishes. I plan to document the process so there's bound to be more posts on this topic in particular on my blog. I also want to get back into the habit of drawing more so this will give me a nice focused outlet for that.


Those are the main projects I'm planning on focusing on, in addition to my PhD research, of course. Expect to see posts on these in the future, depending on progress.

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

My Year as CSW

As my readers probably all know, I spent April through December of 2010 serving as the Chief Script Writer (CSW) for FASS, a local, annual, amateur theatre production that I am involved with. I haven't blogged much about it because, well, for the most part there isn't really all that much interesting to say - I ran weekly meetings where script related stuff was discussed (brainstorming, scene & song writing, editing), took notes, and sent regular reminders to my writers to tell them to make sure to send me stuff by established deadlines. Oh, I did some writing too, but then, so did a bunch of other people. Overall, it was largely a bunch of administrative type stuff that isn't really all that interesting to write about nor, I suspect, to read about - at least not on a regular basis.

I was fairly heavily involved in writing the previous year's script as well (for the 2010 show) and being CSW didn't really feel all that different, except for the added administrative tasks and the fact that as CSW is wielded supreme veto power. The main difference was that I had more to do for the last couple of months during editing.

Overall, being CSW was an interesting experience. Were I to go back and do it again, I would probably approach a couple of things differently. I would probably swap the focus on a couple of the plot lines during the second act and I would probably also spend a bit more time thinking about specific characters that we wanted to use and potential character arcs back in the brainstorming phase.

Now that my work is done, I'm planning on how to use my new extra free time, though as I am still acting in FASS this year I will still be somewhat preoccupied through to the first week of February so I won't be able to go full tilt on my various personal projects until then.

Anyway, until next time.

Freak Out
-TFitC

Final Fantasy Tactics: A War With Lions And Stuff

I first played Final Fantasy Tactics on the PlayStation, shortly after Playing FF7. I bought it used whilst I was in undergrad, not really knowing anything about it, mostly on the Final Fantasy name. As it turned out, I ended up liking Tactics a lot. The plot was a lot heavier on political intrigue than most Final Fantasies, though there was of course some fantasy-esque stuff going on in the background. I ended up sinking quite a bit of time into the game, especially exploring the "Deep Dungeon".

I really liked the battle system which was more involved than most FFs and based on the job system used by several of the other games in the series, though it alsa was more detailed bringing a wider array of abilities (for the most part) and greater degree of flexibility in character customization.

So, when a PSP port was released (subtitled The War of the Lions) I knew I would eventually end up getting a copy. It was, in fact, my main motivation for getting a PSP in the first place. Had Square done nothing other than a straight port of the PlayStation version, I'd still have gotten it because, hey, it's a portable FF Tactics, which in itself is awesome. However, the PSP version saw several improvements and addtions.

For one, it received an all-new translation since the original one was, to put it kindly, less than stellar. This also fixed some naming issues with some of the jobs. For example, in the original, White Mages were called Priests, despite the fact that they were clearly the White Mages of Final Fantasy tradition. The PSP version also added a couple of new extra characters and a couple of new classes. There was some rebalancing of existing characters and classes, such as the Arithmetician (formerly Calculator) which was slightly harder to unlock, but not by too much. Math Skills are still overpowered though, and as always quite fun and potentially self-destructive to use :) There are also a couple of new multi-player modes which I have not had the opportunity to make use of yet.

Overall, I've quite enjoyed playing through The War of the Lions, just as much as I did the original. In some ways, the new translation makes it seem like a new game, while at the same time having a familiar, nostalgic feel to it.

Anyway, my "not so short" plot summary is in the post below this one. Perhaps I shall do a summary for FF 12 next, despite not originally planning on doing one since it was released after I started my FF series replay.

Freak Out
-TFitC