I may have committed Ninefox Tarot art since I’m going to need to wrassle pixel “card art” down the road. From left to right:
- Art Toolkit‘s Demi Palette, for which I use eighth pans for preference (I usually have to fill them myself as eighth-pans aren’t standard most places). I don’t do a ton of watercolor, sadly, so I don’t use up pans quickly. My big maximalist palette is a Robax, but for my backpack I want something tiny. ๐ The watercolors are:
- First row: PR144 (Roman Szmal azo red), PR254 (Greenleaf and Blueberry pyrrole red), PO65, (Old Holland Golden Barok Red or benzimidazolone orange), PV19 (Greenleaf & Blueberry quinacridone magenta; I like the Daniel Smith PV19 for this too).
- Second row: PBr7 (Daniel Smith burnt umber), PO49 (ProdigalSonsPigments [Etsy] quinacridone gold; no, that pigment code is not a typo), PY154 (Winsor & Newton Winsor yellow), PB16 (Greenleaf & Blueberry phthalo cyan).
- Third row: Daniel Smith jadeite, PG7 (Greenleaf & Blueberry phthalo green blue shade), Daniel Smith amethyst (we all know it gets its tinting power from something like PV23), PBk26 (MaimeriBlu neutral tint, which is an odd name for an extremely inky black in mass tone).
- Lebenzon Paintbrushes‘ 1″ silver fox wangji brush because I have a twelve-year-old’s sense of humor.
- Knight of Wands: General Shuos Jedao.
- Queen of Cups: Captain Kel Cheris. I’ve decided her animal is carp/dragon instead of raven, not least because carp and dragons are much easier to draw and it works better elementally since I associate Cheris with the sea.
- Magic: the Gathering card for scale.
- Sailor x Ca Crea Pro Gear Slim Starry Sky fountain pen, although I ended up inking with a Papier Plume “The Blues” fountain pen with Stylosuite Xwing Harpoon XF flex nib mod. Both are loaded with De Atramentis Document Black, which is my go-to for ink-and-wash work for fountain pens. I need to get my Waterman 52V fixed again as the sac died, which is the issue with old-school lever fillers!
You could not unreasonably conclude that I hate blue! In reality, it’s one of my favorite colors but when I’m out and about I just don’t reach for it often. If you’re wondering about the weird placement of the eight-pans, especially the right side, that is designed to put the CMYK-ish pigments in easy reach of each other (PV19 for magenta, PB16 for cyan, PY154 for yellow, and PBk26 for black). On the other hand, I rely on red (and own more red watercolors than this…).
I prefer doing tiny art to larger art because I’m lazy. /o\ Signed, I realized that instead of angsting over MOQs at a card printer, if I only want one (1) fake DIY Tarot deck and I prefer natural media anyway (I love watercolor!), I…have a paper cutter and some Arches paper that needs to earn its keep? When I’m done, I figure I’ll fake-gild the card edges using that Kuretake mica paste I have lying around.
things accomplished:
- card art (see above) since I’ll want it for the battle system, and cards seem doable for 2D implementation. (Placeholders will be regular Tarot card art and/or standard poker cards.)
- paper prototype of battle system: more progress. I see how to screw around with affine ciphers. I’m still mulling Vigenรจre ciphers and/or some kind of asymmetric encryption, likely RSA [PDF] for simplicity since we’re…not going to be working with cryptographic-strength integer sizes lol.1 I may have messed with random.org for testing even though it’s overkill because it’s funny. ๐
- asked my husband Joe about Monte Carlo simulations for the battle system and he confirmed that implementing that in Python with one’s (pseudo)RNG of choice would be pretty straightforward.
Also he’s great for tech support!๐ That’s probably next, just to test the subsystem. - Learn GDScript to acquaint myself with Godot (I installed Godot 4.4 yesterday). I got past for loops in the intro to CS 101 and basic control structures, and have moved on to arrays. ๐ Fencepost errors, I did not miss y’all!
- VN opening prototype ported to Ren’Py just to refresh my memory of the scripting. I literally got stuck at “no really, how do you include ฯ as a text character without crashing the interpreter?!” :p
- reading: Gabe Barrett’s Find the Fun: Learn How to Go from Idea to Published Game. (Yes, Gabe Barrett of Board Game Design Lab!) This is terrific, and slow going only because I’m taking notes as I go as that helps me retain the information better. I almost never go back and look at said notes; it’s the act of note-taking that’s most helpful. This is aimed toward board game development, but game design is game design! I am, admittedly, skimming some of the words of wisdom regarding e.g. physical component layout in boxes since it’s not immediately applicable for this use case.
1 I reiterate that I will worry about the sky falling with regards to Shor’s algorithm when someone verifies having reliably factored a number larger than 21 with a quantum computer without classical preprocessing or other chicanery! Realistically, even if that were a thing right now, I personally am in zero position to make a useful contribution.
I’m currently ping-ponging between Unity, Ren’Py, Godot in between working on CROWNWORLD, and likely to attempt bare-bones implementing the battle system by itself in Godot to see how that goes. Rather than implementation specifics, getting the core design up and running from an algorithm standpoint for testing is more important right now. All three themselves run on macOS and Windows so I’m set there.
Pros and cons as I see them at this point, having delved slightly deeper:
Godot: The newer kid on the block. Open source and free for commercial use (MIT license). At this point, there are resources for Godot, but there’s also a very “DIY” vibe, so it’s much likelier that if you want something specific, you’ll have to roll your own. There are dialogue management packages (e.g. Dialogic) that ease the work on the VN end. The node system is new to me and takes some getting used to. On the other hand, could be a great opportunity to dive in, learn the system, and do something customized.
Audio: I’ve seen people say FMOD works well with this. Haven’t heard of people using Wwise?
Builds for: Windows, macOS, Linux; secondarily, Android, iOS; in beta, web/browser in HTML5 (but right now Godot 3.5 is recommended itself if specifically targeting HTML5?).
Ren’Py: Designed specifically for VNs, and probably the most common engine for English-language VNs. Open source and free for commercial use. Also pretty mature with a ton of resources for learning. Hooks into Python for other game things; I only have beginner familiarity with Python specifically, but guess who has been coding Python for decades for work! :beams at beloved husband: This does mean that the VN stuff is super easy to script but other game things are more of a PITA.
Audio: built-in audio; theoretically supports Wwise via Python via WAAPI, although I haven’t tested this yet.
Builds for: Windows, macOS, Linux; secondarily, Android, iOS; in beta, web/browser.
Unity: There are a ton of assets and resources for learning for this, including e.g. Naninovel for VN work. Commercial framework; that said, it’s unlikely I’m going to get anywhere near the sales threshold where I’d have to care about paying lots of money. It’s pretty mature! It’s not designed specifically for VNs, but by the same token, other game things will be easier to implement.
Audio: built-in audio; supports Wwise and FMOD.
Builds for: Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, WebGL (I’m told there are, unsurprisingly, efficiency issues), and pretty much everything.
Yours in calendrical heresy,
YHL