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

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:

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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