Hahaha, The Ocelot Frame Is Great!!!

Reblogging the devblog from my non-MGS life!

Running water turned out to be tricky to animate!  We needed a suitable background for the waterfall level in our game, but it needed to be a small enough number of frames, be looping, and also not be too distracting from the action in the foreground. 

I’ve spent a lot of time drawing things OTHER than water most of my life, but luckily we have a lot of streams and rivers near our home, so I went out to do some sketching and observe the flow.

Some time recently I got an iPad with a pencil, so that allowed me to work with color and maybe get some of the subtle changes.  But I’m not a painter by trade, so these clumsy attempts are more about observing and trying to intuit what color should feel like when you see it onscreen.

At first I thought this rushing river would be really cool!  But I had the scale all wrong.  There’s so much motion happening, and at the scale of the gameplay the animation looks choppy.  It would distract from the motion of the action in the foreground, and would make the whole scene look way too messy.  Back to the drawing board!  

I’ve settled on this calmer scene, which isn’t the rushing river I really wanted, but it won’t compete with the foreground sprites for attention.  The animation is much smoother too, except for the waterfalls which still may need work.  Making animations for Unstable Scientific has been one of the most challenging experiences I’ve had as an artist so far, but I feel like I’m learning so much in the process! 

Trans person in the US. Bust some of the doomerism for me? Tell me it's going to be okay?

Hi Anon

Usually, I have boundaries for myself about keeping this blog focused on environment-related issues, because there are limits to what I can speak knowledgeably about. But now doesn’t feel like the time for that.

Anon, I will tell you that I live in the US, I am queer, my spouse is trans, and we have two young children. I am sitting right there with you in the fear and grief and every day when I ask myself “is there still hope” I find reasons to say “yes”.

They want us—all of us, not just queer folks—to feel overwhelmed and hopeless, because despair is a tool that keeps people from realizing their power and taking action.

They want us to feel so afraid that we lose our faith in other people and withdraw from our communities, because we are easier to conquer alone.

Do not give them what they want.

Hope is most necessary in the bad times. The ability to imagine a future that is better than things are now is exactly what gives us the power to begin making things better. Our community has been through terrible things before, and they did not lose hope or give up—otherwise we would not be where we are today.

When you start to feel like all the light is being blotted out, turn off the news, put away your phone, and go get in touch with something you love. Go outside and look at the sky, talk to a friend, listen to music, do some small thing to make something better even if it’s just cleaning your kitchen or picking up some litter around the block or returning an extra stranded cart in the grocery store parking lot. Remind your brain that you have agency to make positive change in the world through your actions.

I know it is really hard to pull out of the darkness sometimes. I know there will be days that hope seems like a foolish, naive thing, that despair and distrust seem like the only rational options. But hope is what keeps us alive. Hope is what allows us to save each other.

I wish I could give you a specific article or other source to reassure you that everything is going to be ok, but things are still too in flux day by day. I can tell you that people are already fighting back, in big and little ways, all over this country and the world. These orders and bills are being pushed by a loud but small minority—this is not how the majority of the country feels about trans rights.

Make a plan for staying safe. Reach out to your community. Find music, activities, podcasts, movies, whatever helps you feel uplifted and take mental breaks from dwelling on the news. If you can, find ways to get involved in making things better in whatever big or small way feels doable for you--it may help push back on the doomerism more than you think. And my inbox is open if you need to talk.

I wish I could invite you over for dinner. I wish I could look into your eyes and tell you that things may get hard for the next few years but that does not mean that your life can't still be full of joy and beauty and fulfillment in spite of that.

I’m right there with you. Let’s make it through this together <3

via indiarosecrawford

Frog Paints a Water Lily Pond 🪷🎨🐸

𝑓ₒᵣ ⲕᵢ𝑛𝑔 ₐ𝑛𝑑 𝑐ₒ𝑡𝑡ₐ𝑔ₑ

being a self-taught artist with no formal training is having done art seriously since you were a young teenager and only finding out that you’re supposed to do warm up sketches every time you’re about to work on serious art when you’re fuckin twenty-five

Oblivious guard (and an actual guard tower!) Both Glowdust and I got really sick this week and couldn’t work on the game too much. :-(  And the stuff that we did accomplish is all unfulfilling back-end stuff like smoother flow, one-way platform physics, and a lot of animation that isn’t quite done yet.  I want to get more stuff done, but I’m just feeling a bit ~blergh~ still.       

“There are other forces at work in this world besides the will of evil.”

Anyone who's ever done anything creative needs to fucking see this.

(Can’t get the damn gifs to play so I’m using video!) Game Debug Mode! Glowdust just put in the new (larger) background, which caused the mines to end up in the air.  This happens on startup now!

Snake: “Shit-shit-shit-WTF seriously?!”

This is the best tutorial for something I’ve always struggled with in pixel art! It’s really useful conceptually for painting in general.

🌿 How to draw simple grass for a game

Thank you kind asker I will make a tutorial below for grass. I'll do shrubs and trees in another one, because it's a different method and it got pretty long.

🌿 How to draw grass tiles: step-by-step

Each box is 16x16, the same size Stardew Valley uses. Make it tile (how to do it depends on your software) so we can see if our edges match up nicely.

Draw 1 simple blade of grass. Many options for shape but I like this one. Feel free to copy me directly

2. Give it a shadow. Wow !!!

3. Give it a highlight! OMG!

4. Add another grass

5. Do it over and over and over and over and over

Literally just do the same or similar blades of grass, give them all little shadows, highlight a few if you want and there you have it! So easy.

It looks really complicated like this, but its literally just a few steps, repeated over and over.

Many games use this technique and it would be perfectly serviceable for a base grass tile.

Personally, I prefer lower contrast grass. This tile will likely be used for large areas, so ideally you don't want it to be too busy or eye-burning to distract from the character.

🌿 I'll show you how to do a different type of grass now that is a little more complicated.

Midtone grass colour

2. Add some lighter and darker patches touching each other (not too high contrast!)

3. Use this shape (or your preferred, but this is how I did it) on the top edge of your patches. Colour them with the middle colour from each patch.

4. Do it again a lot (this is very tedious)

5. Add some highlights

6. Add some fun extra stuff

We're done! Have fun everyone, show me if you try it!

Pixel Art guide by me: link

hellooo