My latest sprite artwork for Era of Four Moons:
Fun News
I updated my website
…So naturally there are a bunch of things that look odd, or don’t work, or whatever. 🙁
I fixed the first one. The card game I coded a while back didn’t work when I first put it up online. Apparently the code snippet I used for sorting your hand neatly by rank and suit works great on my computer, but is too advanced for the server. So for a quick fix I took out the card sorting, and the game now works.
I still have a bunch more to track down and deal with, though.
Wolf!
More sprites for the Era of Four Moons game expansion:
I put the wolf first, because he is by far the best looking. The wolf and beaver are alternate forms of the Shifter (he’s a shape-changer). The Sorcerer and the Leopard aren’t part of the pvp game, but they will show up in the Panther Lord campaign, when that’s completed.
Bounce! Bounce!
I am totally squeeing over my last Black Flag render. But I’m not going to post any pics, because I’m past the climax and into the resolution, and everything’s a spoiler now. So, you’ll just have to take my word for how awesome it looks. And less than two chapters to go! Having the end so close is really exciting (to me, anyway).
Four Moons Additions
I’m back to working on sprite artwork for Era of Four Moons again. Here are the latest two additions:
These are for a Four Moons campaign Ben (Velensk) is currently working on, called The Panther Lord. (Ignore the occasional bits of gratuitous white background. Those are an artifact of the quick and dirty gif conversion software I use to get them viewable on the web. They don’t appear in game.) He also tells me that he’s got players asking for the artwork for factions (armies) five through nine, and I’m not close to finishing the attack animations for the first four yet. I’m never going to catch up!
Too many things to do!
I stopped writing the story I wasn’t supposed to be writing, and started up work on Black Flag again instead. I’ve also been working on a major overhaul of my writing website (it fits fairly nicely into the chunks of time I spend rendering Black Flag art, and I can keep working at it when I’m really too tired to be doing much that is creative). The website work somehow managed to include me teaching my website to play Crazy Eights (or more precisely a game played with the cards from one of my story worlds that closely resembles Crazy Eights/Uno) because my cat was getting dusty (I don’t actually have a cat, but when has that ever stopped me?) and it was New Year’s, which is a holiday, so I wasn’t supposed to be working anyway. The card game page won’t go live until the new site does, though, and at present that seems very far in the future, because…
My daughter has been bugging me about the sequel to Talking With Winds. She doesn’t want to read it on a computer screen, she wants a book. ‘Please’ and ‘it’s for your daughter’ and ‘you have all that free time so why can’t you get it done?’ I can get it done, just not while simultaneously working on Black Flag and a website and getting a novel finished before March. But I have been meaning to get it printed up, along with Pavane, for quite a while now, so…
At least it’s a fairly short, self contained project. I should be able to get it finished quickly, and get back to my other projects. ::crosses fingers::
Pirate Maker updated
I spent all yesterday working on an upgrade for my “Pirate Maker” Digital Paperdoll. It now does female pirates as well as male ones.
Now available…
There is now a computer game based on one of my story worlds. Well, an expansion to a computer game. I’ve added a page all about it to my website, where you can find installation instructions, or just check out all the sprite artwork I made — on display at the bottom of the page.
A little gift for my writer friends.
I made the following image to use for “Pieces of Flair” on Facebook. (It’s a virtual button collecting game.)
To my astonishment, people are actually adding the button I made to their “flair boards” (not just the people I sent it to, that wouldn’t astonish me, but other people too), and so I thought maybe some of my other writer friends might find some uses for it. Freely available for non-commercial use. You can copy it, distribute it, shrink down for avatars — whatever. 🙂
…And, speaking of me being astonished, that little recording of me singing the first verse of the Talon March that I posted for Talk Like a Pirate Day, has been downloaded 72 times this month. ?!?!?! I found the latest two downloads in my “most recent visitors list” and they were apparently made by two different people and both were “direct access” links. That seems a little odd.
Even if you count up everyone on livejournal and facebook, I still don’t think I have 72 friends who actually read this blog, and besides it was posted a while ago. So unless I have a few friends listening to it over and over, that song is loose on the net somewhere.
Income
I made money yesterday.
It was less than two dollars, but who’s counting? I still think it’s cool.
Somebody bought one of my tshirts on Zazzle. This happens maybe once a year if I’m lucky — I’m not actually trying to sell any of that stuff, it’s mostly just things I made for me and my family.
This is the design that caught someone’s eye this time:
My youngest daughter was particularly happy to hear about the sale… that was one of the tshirts I made for her, and she helped me with it.
While I’m on the subject of my zazzle tshirts. This particular shirt gets me a lot of comments when I wear it to cons…