My unfinished video game – a visual novel / point&click adventure hybrid – has been languishing untouched lately. I was seriously ill for a long time and now that I’ve gotten better (since January) I’ve been working very hard to catch up with work. So this meant that the game had taken a backseat… I’ve been feeling really bad about it, to the point where this was actually keeping me from working on the game!

But, but, but I think I’ve found a solution Enter NaNoRenO. This is like NaNoWriMo, but instead of writing a novel in a month, you have to make a visual novel video game in a month. From scratch. (There is also a similar event for finishing previously started games, but I don’t think I would be able to finish my original game in a month, it’s much more complex than a visual novel.)

A visual novel is reasonably straightforward to make, and I managed to come up with an idea for a game that I can hopefully finish in March. I wrote a design document (not sharing it just yet ) and calculated the amount of assets that need to be made, and I think it’s doable… though not easy. (Yes, I could just make a super short visual novel with stock art, but where would the fun be in that?)

I’ve already started working on Amesirun (working title) and there’s a bunch of stuff I managed to finish in the past 3 days. I made the core programming (quite simple, though it is a nonlinear game), wrote the first scene (quite long), and mostly finished two backgrounds.

The whole game is inspired by some concept artwork I did for Emerald Spires (my main game) several months ago, a drawing of a character I really liked, but the whole thing did not fit with the more realistic approach of Emerald Spires. So I cropped the character, who will be used as the main – and only! – character once I finish drawing the different emotions.

Amesirun will be set in the same universe as Emerald Spires, FYI. You can think of it as a teaser

Speaking of teasers, I have two images for you, a background and a (the) character. The game is set in “conceptual space”, so they are quite odd and not what you’d expect from visual novels. But I wanted to get away from realism, which led me to become completely stuck with the character art on my main game. It’s such a relief to be able to draw random outlandish things.

I made the images with ArtRage with some postprocessing using other software. They use some public domain line art from expired patents, and NASA astrophotography for the color overlay. The rest is hand-drawn.

Enjoy:

I uploaded a bunch of old photos from 2005-2007 to the image gallery (and many more are missing *sigh*) I think I’ve given up on uploading the original accompanying text and reposting the original posts, but at least I tagged the images.

I also made a new category “Lolarious” for random hilarity… usually photos snapped with my cell phone (so the quality is not particularly high) or desktop screenshots. I have much more waiting to be uploaded, but first I want to put “prezzey.net” on them, because those kinds of images are stolen all the time. I’m OK with people reposting my work – that’s what my CC license is for -, but not without attribution.

This was originally a series about the many faces of magic. Four images, and the more I think about it the more I realize that there are several equally valid orders. So, in no particular order…

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Traditional Judaism and Hungarian mythology all-in-one feature! Click now ;]

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And after the rambling system rescue post, I know I promised some art… There is one upside to reorganizing your data – namely that your data becomes organized. This means I now have a huge heap of images to upload here!

Just something really small for today’s update because I want to space things out and have something for every day – two sketches made on a Nintendo DS using Colors DS, the great homebrew application.

Images beyond the cut (one was posted on Gémeskút for our Colors DS review, the other is new, I made it on the train a while back…)

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A new entry for my photo blog, I just shot this one yesterday night in Győr. I made a bunch of nighttime photos of the current flood, you’ll probably have one tomorrow too. Special thanks to my mom who thought it would be fun to traipse through town in the middle of the night and accompanied me (it was indeed fun).

I’m back after a lengthy week. More regular updates will resume starting now :] I’m trying to find a good gallery plugin for Wordpress because everyone’s been telling me to post art and not Linux rants something else. Right now I’m fiddling around with the NextGEN Gallery plugin.

I’ll be posting my photo archives 5 pix at a time. These are either currently online somewhere else, or used to be until my previous webserver – actually a friend’s – went down. (No Bryce, it wasn’t yours!) I’ll post new photos when I’m finished with the archives.

I’ll post artwork whenever I’m in the mood. Expect lots of updates about my video game because I’ve finally solved a huge bunch of issues re: character design a few days ago… so there will be concept art and even actual ingame art.

The first five pics from the archives are right behind the cut. I think I’ll put an image tag cloud/list in the right sidebar, too.

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