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I will be entering this months MAGS.  So watch out, or something.

Here in Sunny Californ-I-A, it is only 20.00.  This means I only have four hours to get drunk, and I've only had one pint!  WHAT SHALL I DO!

I have been notified of something I have not heard of called a "Viking Party."  I believe it pushes anything regarding Norse mythology aside, and is boiled down to simply drinking beer in the woods.  Now personally, I like beer.  I also like being in the woods, so this seems like the thing to do.

I have heard that the Sitar is the single most difficult instrument in the world to play, but that could be false. 

As for easy instruments, I would suggest the Xylophone.

Perhaps the White Witch should have been a single mum on the dole.

Dole?

(Checking the dictionary of British words for the ignorant American.)

Oh, DOLE.  Harr.  Yes.

Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of leaving the lion dead.  I'm not actually talking about the movie persay, but the Chronicles of Narnia story itself.  The story is just a bit too sugary for my tastes.

http://www.gamingw.net has a very vast collection of PNG files which were meant to be used in the program RPG Maker, but they can easily be used with other tile based game engines.

I keep my machine spyware free by regularly updating windows, running Firefox, and running AdAware periodically.  Since I've been doing this, my spyware checks have come up completely negative every time.

It was a passable film, but not something I would call home about.  It was fantasy in the purest sense, which is really what ruined it for me.  I never read the book, but the whole story definately needed that certain touch of gritty realism. 

Merry Christmas my foot.  I came down with the flu.  What timing.

Go Dan!  The best man truly did win.

I don't know if you're allowed to vote and enter at the same time, but if so, I would like to vote for DanClarke.  His comic is superior from both an artistic, and storytelling point of view.  Great job. 

I know it's a wee bit off topic but...


Here ya go! 

ManicMatt, I haven't explored around the livejournal thingamabob yet, I've only used it as a kind of boredom outlet so far.  I'll browse about a bit more and see whats what.

I don't use Myspace, but I do have a blog which can be found in my signature.  It's only temporary, as I have plans for a website in the future.

I vaguely recall a dream a had a couple nights ago that was rather disturbing in and of itself.  It played out much like a videogame, and I was "controlling" a single armed soldier along a winding corridor.  It wasn't just a plain corridor, but a very diverse and interesting one, rife with such features as a break in it's enclosed area, where I had to cross a rickety rope and plank bridge.  The open space was set on a beautiful backdrop of a waterfall.

I wasn't alone as I ran along.  With me were two other soldier types carrying similar weapons but each one at least mostly unique.  Also moving along with my group was what appeared to be a rotting corpse, disembodied from the ribcage down.  He was mostly skeleton at this point, and he was an odd green color.  The strange thing is that this guy could MOVE.  He easily outmaneuvered any of us soldier types, and he would often perform incredible acrobatic feats.

The whole thing wasn't unlike a multiplayer game, where three players were soldiers, and one was the corpse dude.  We were all running from what appeared to be something similar to the sandworms from Betelgeuse.  The worms would "break" before they submerged themselves again, and the broken piece would fold over and back into itself, forming a complete worm again.  It broke the laws of physics, but that's how it was.

Ever seen the Wiggles?  Yeah, this is what happens when the parents aren't around.

Something needs to be done with the monkey's left leg.  It appears shorter than the right one.  Try showing a bit of joint and lengthening it a bit and it should look OK.

The monkey's right hand appears somewhat twisted.  I'm not sure how that would be re-worked.  Get some refrence art/photos and try again.

The man's left hand isn't sitting very naturally on the monkey's back.  Again, get some refrence material for that one.

Aside from those small issues (Mainly perspective stuff really.), the image could really use some shading and highlights, though that's not exactly everyone's strong suit.  I guarantee that with some decent shading, the depth of the image would increase tenfold.  Remember, often times the time spent on an image will directly reflect in it's quality.

If you're going for a cartoonish feel, I would just take the wireframe image and paint over it with something vector based, like Illustrator.  This would especially be important if your characters are hand drawn, because the contrast between the rendered background and the characters would be blaringly obvious.  The only time rendered backgrounds really work is in conjunction with rendered characters, and those are a lot harder to create.

Here is a very early development of a character I'm working on.


Basically, he's evil, and tired.  He wants to take a vacation, and he plans to use the Flux Temporal Transportulator to send him to the future, where he can bask in the post apocolyptic sun and be back in time for lunch.  Unfortunately, something goes wrong, and the machine sends him into medieval times with no immediate way back.  How will Dr. Brainium get out of this one without his body guard Brutus, his right hand woman Seductra, and his army of killer robots!?  Well, I don't know yet.

Keep in mind, this is a stupidly early drawing of this character.  I'm thinking of shifting him less from Dr. Frankenstein, and more towards ex-soviet scientist.  Even his name is up in the air right now.

Comments?  Suggestions?  Constructive critisism?  Thanks.

Greetings comrade. 

After.... (counts on fingers.) seven (Or six?) years, I have returned.  Woah... Has it been that long?  Why, it seems only yesterday that I fleetingly played around with a DOS based program called Adventure Creator on a 486, and never really got anywhere with it, other than a basic room with minimal interaction. 

I remember my old forum name.  But you don't get to know it.  I am considering this a fresh start, especially since AGS, as it is called now, is so incredibly different and advanced now.  Everything I ever learned with AC is now completely obsolete.  I am a fresh green newbie again.  Yay.

So since those rollicking good times in the eighth grade, I have developed both mentally and artistically by leaps and bounds, and I'm full of fresh ideas to put into a game.  I realise that all this time I've been "planning" to build a project, none of my attempts have ever gotten out of the early development phase.  I have this nasty habit of tossing projects away before they can take off and starting fresh. 

Well, no more.  I say here and now that I am starting a project, and I am going to finish it.  (Just let me play around with this nifty new Windows based interface first, maybe build a few resources for someone elses game.  I need to get my sea-legs back.)  Now all I have to do is pick one.  Hmmm...

I have the tools to get the job done.  As I sit at my L shaped glass and steel desk in front of my home-built PC of the gods, I have a scanner to my left, a MIDI keyboard to my right (Though I'm not very good at that aspect yet.), a Wacom tablet on my lap, and several helpful programs including Photoshop 7, and a veritable library of content creation software.

I went to school at the Art Institute of California in San Francisco for a time, though I had to stop for the time being as I realised that I wasn't going to be able to afford to eat.  Now I'm working off a 20k USD student loan, and I expect to do so for the next 5 years or so, after which I'll probably go back and finish it.  I was majoring in game design, and I picked up some very valuable skills that could easily be used in the adventure creation scene.

Basically, I'm hoping that getting back here will shock me out of my current artistic slump.  All year, I haven't been able to create anything.  It's as though I'm creatively broken.  These things pass though, and I'm looking for that spark of inspiration that causes me to just HAVE to act upon it.  I'm still waiting for it.