Habibi costs €40 – for comparison: I bought two armfuls of remaindered English books earlier today for the same amount of money. I also bought a complete German set of Emma (10 volumes) for €35 – BTW, did the exchange rate have to tank in the past weeks? I’ve been looking for a set for years now. So €40 for a single volume is way, WAY over my impulse buy threshold, and probably even my not-really-an-impulse-buy threshold.

But there’s another reason why I didn’t pick it up. It seemed gorgeously drawn (as can be expected from Thompson), but also very orientalist. In addition to that, I also found myself blinking stupidly and thinking “wow, some his Black characters look like typical Western caricatures, is he trying to pull this off with a straight face? Is this for realz? Are people really selling this stuff in 2011? Are people buying it?!”

Lately I’ve read way too much “Westerners reflect on Exotic Arab Culture” stuff where I felt that as a Jewish person I was closer culturally to the supposedly oh so exotic Arabs than to the authors themselves… which made all their effort to woo me as a reader look really ridiculous. At first browse it looked like Habibi would in all likelihood fit into this trend. Maybe it tries to subvert those tropes, but I’m kind of doubtful about that.  This kind of imagery has a very nasty history, which makes even a subversion tricky; this looked like nothing of the sort and more like “wow, I get to draw naked Middle Eastern chixx! See my sophisticated and progressive story? Here, have a rape scene” on the author’s behalf. For all these reasons, the whole ad campaign left a bad taste in my mouth.

Since I don’t have the book (yet?), I can’t say more, but here is a long and image-heavy review by Nadim Damluji that makes many of the points that occurred to me upon cursorily browsing the book in the bookstore. (Be sure to check out this round-up of Arab comics by the same author.) It also has TUSKEN RAIDERS. Nuff said.

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By the way, I don’t know what’s it about the purchasing habits of Austrians or English-speaking expats… I regularly buy great, recent English-language fiction from the bargain bin, the remaindered section, etc. All that great stuff doesn’t sell? At all?

I love it when people say “you should buy ebooks, they don’t take up space”. Um. In most cases, ebooks cost more than my actual purchase prices… I do actually buy ebooks when they are reasonably priced. Unfortunately several major publishers seem to have strange notions about ‘reasonable’. Today I saw an ad for one of Daniel Glattauer’s recent books (a very slim volume of short essays), only €13.50 as an ebook! Excuse me? That costs more than a paperback edition!

I hate GIMP with a passion. (Yes, I do use it, I only have Linux on my laptop and I can’t live without a bitmap image editor – this is not a case of “I hate GIMP because it’s not Photoshop and I choose to ignore it”, I hate it as a regular user. ) I have to admit that for a long while I did not even try Inkscape because I’ve heard recommendations from people that went like “Inkscape is essentially GIMP with vectors”. It’s not, and thank G-d for that. (Here have a few more essentialist explanations!)

Anyway, so far I really enjoy Inkscape, which has to count for something given my dislike of vector art in general… I thought it’d be interesting to point out a few things that seem to be missing from the usual documentation. (There is a lot of useful documentation, be sure to check out the free Inkscape book!)

You can actually use it as a freehand drawing program. At this point I think it’s the best there is for line-art sketching (especially at the great price point of zero ): your sketches can scale up indefinitely and they do not take up a lot of space in your hard disk because of the vector format. The downside is that erasing is not as easy as with a bitmap program.

The built-in calligraphy tool looks completely useless for serious drawing at first glance, but if you play around with the settings, you can come up with something interesting.

Here are my current tool presets:

Width: 4-6
Pressure sensitivity varies width but not opacity
Thinning: 0.10
Angle: 30 degrees
No angle sensitivity (my portable device does not support this and I haven’t tried it on my desktop)
Fixation: 0
Caps: 2.50
Tremor: 0
Wiggle: 0
Mass: 0.02

Here is a nice tutorial that does a good job at explaining the options, but doesn’t really provide sample presets. I thought I had some of my presets from a different tutorial, but I can’t locate it anywhere (pointers would be appreciated, I’d like to offer some credit). Most of the presets people recommend – and indeed the defaults – I don’t really like and IMO they are not very well-suited to sketching. Give mine a spin if you are a predominantly bitmap artist like me

I have to thank WildGica whose enthusiasm for Inkscape proved sufficiently infectious

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.

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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:

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