BTW – I’m looking for venues interested in buying photos, let me know if you know of any. I’m not interested in microstock at this time.

*

I also updated my Hungarian articles page.

The main script is finished, I’m working on the endings right now (you can look forward to some strange stuff!). Because of the delay I’ve decided to make the endings lengthier and much more complex, and to add extra art in the form of “sketches” from the player character’s memories.

I still need to make a bit of art and the main menu, hopefully soon, and then it’s closed beta and release time!

More teasers, click on the images to enlarge them…

Here is a strange symbol! (I turned off floating images because the image size is quite big this time.)

If you click on it, you can see a cryptic inscription in the top right corner. If you remember the previous teaser, that one also had similar elements… if you wait patiently, I might tell you where they come from and what they mean.

I finally had some time to try out ArtRage 3… I bought the new version with the upgrade discount when it came out, but I was just too busy to install it. Most of the time I draw stuff on my tablet PC, but I run Linux on it and that means I have to mess around with Wine to get ArtRage running (it’s worth it if you ask me). 2.5 is very stable right now, which is why I didn’t feel pressed to install 3.0 right away, even though I bought it and it was a bit more expensive than expected! I mention this because I just tried it out on my Windows desktop (easier install) and used the new watercolor emulation to produce the vertical lines seen in the image. So that was a new feature, and one I’ll be using excessively from now on, especially if I can get 3.0 working under Wine!

In other news, the game is progressing nicely, more than half of the graphics and the script has been made (I think I should also post a story teaser…). This means 40k of script so far, so there will be about 80k of script altogether. You can look forward to lots of branches, points-based scoring and more endings than you’d expect I hope I’ll manage to finish producing the assets and testing everything before Pesach!

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 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.

Again, these were all drawn with ArtRage, with the exception of All Around Me, which is about half PS and half ArtRage.

These had longer writeups but I don’t feel like digging them up from the depths of the digital abyss. The first one is inspired by Jewish Kabbalah – “Sod” is the most esoteric of the four levels of Torah interpretation. It means “secret”. And what does the guy hold in his hand? Um, I guess that’s the Sod ;]

The second is more controversial… basically I got fed up with the fact that Hungarian right-wing extremists were taking everything that was traditionally Hungarian and claiming it to be their own. This in turn led people who refused to share their political views to feel a certain disdain for these symbols, which I personally found – and still find – alternately saddening and infuriating…. so this is a kind of attempt both to reclaim these symbols and to express my rather conflicting feelings associated with them.

The Turul is the mythical bird that’s the national animal of Hungarians. The Hungarian Runes simply say “Turul”. Red and white stripes – here red and black stripes – were on the original flag of the House of King Árpád in its latter years. I preserved the red-and-white color scheme in the background, and if anyone notices, um, more familiar historical allusions… oh well.

(And yes, the Hebrew is not accidental either.)

Both images were drawn in ArtRage on my tablet PC running Debian Linux. (ArtRage runs under Wine just fine, in case you were wondering.)

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…)

The one for Gémeskút (OK, a bit egomanic…):

And the scary ship that looks like a floating castle:

]]> http://www.prezzey.net/2009/sketching-with-colors-ds/feed/ 0 http://www.prezzey.net/2009/flood01/ http://www.prezzey.net/2009/flood01/#comments Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:33:30 +0000 prezzey http://gemeskut.net/prezzey/?p=66

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’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.

These photos are from 2005 when I started my photo blog at Livejournal. I love ranting about photos, so each photo had a quite long bilingual writeup. In retrospect, the Hungarian version was completely unnecessary, since pretty much anyone who was interested in my photos spoke English anyway, and it was very time-consuming to write descriptions twice.  After a while I got annoyed and just dropped the whole thing due to lack of time. It was also very annoying to try to keep some semblance order among the pictures, but I think the tag cloud now might just do the trick.

I think I like NextGEN Gallery’s default settings, they are sufficiently unobtrusive for my tastes… but I think I need tags to be displayed under each image popup, I’ll have to find a way to do that.

I’m pasting the original writeups here. My new comments are in square brackets.

Rumbach Street Synagogue:

This amazing facade is hidden in a narrow alleyway. Worse still, the actual building behind the facade is crumbling away even as I type this, because of an ownership debate. The huge synagogue is empty (save the debris) and unused. One party claims ownership but wants the state to restore the building, the other wants to purchase it from the state and restore it using its own funds, while the state… erm, does nothing. They say the two parties – two Jewish communities – should agree on matters first of all. [Reconstruction has been in progress since 2007, I haven't seen the results since I've moved away from Budapest... but if you're there, the Budapest Urbanist Association has an exhibition about the reconstruction.]

Rabbi Shlomo Köves:

This photo was shot at the circumcision of Bálint Nógrádi’s son Yosef Yitzchak, nine months ago, where Shlomo doubled as mohel. Action shot!! ;]

Vote!

The poster is a voting announcement from a 2004 referendum regarding the Hungarian citizenship status of Hungarians living abroad. (I made this photo back then.) The thing to the left is a selective trash collecting tray used for collecting paper – every house in our district has one. They shouldn’t be stored on streets but rather inside the house, but no one really cares and they linger on the streets, getting filled up with assorted yuck day after day.

What on earth is this?

It’s a piece of exterior decoration I’ve found in an alley in downtown Vienna. I wanted to post something abstract for a change, and, well, you don’t get more abstract than this LOL.

I have a pile of Vienna photos, too. I’ll upload one every once in a while but I’ll be concentrating on Budapest for the time being. I have taken a few photos in the new mikvah, and I’ll start posting them tomorrow. (I hope those of you fasting have had an easy fast today! I have survived, in any case – the weather has been fairly cool compared to the usual run this time of the year.)

The Seat of Prophet Eliyahu:

This photo was taken on the uppermost floor of the old mikvah (Jewish ritual bath) which is practically in ruins. Let me explain: the building on Kazinczy street which houses the new mikvah used to be filled with mikvaot but that is no longer the case. Only the new – women’s – mikvah on the ground floor functions, and there is also a men’s mikvah that is still used but is in rather bad shape, on the first floor. This image shows the second floor that hasn’t been used since the war.

Tomorrow you will see what the brand new mikvah looks like.

Eliyahu has nothing much to do with mikvaot, BTW. On every circumcision there is an empty chair that is traditionally reserved for the prophet Eliyahu’s invisible presence, so seeing this empty chair amidst all that rubble (there is even worse stuff, not visible on the photo) reminded me of that.