gh0stly interactive

Image: The initial concept for the character in my animation course, turned into a cowgirl for the purpose of this course.

The main focus this week has been diving into the world of Magic: the Gathering and researching what different guilts and mana pairings we wanted to go with.

For the previously mentioned Crimson Vow set, I actually sat in class and made myself a deck, taking time to read each card and really try to understand what I was doing. I think I did an okay job, albeit with a bit of handholding from the cards themselves and being able to ask questions to nearby veterans. I hope that it'll end up working out for me. I also went ahead and took what I understood to help two of my friends build decks with the cards we had bought from the new Baldur's Gate set. I have a Halsin card that I wanted to build around, giving me a reason to work on a green deck as well.

Image: This week's notes.

For the first and second weeks of our advanced game design class, I've been preparing myself for the steep learning curve of Magic: the Gathering. While I've mildly played some card games in the past, MtG has always been intimidating to me. After starting my initial notes for week 2 (having skimmed over the videos from week 1), I realized my mistake in jumping in the deep end.

Over the weekend, the motivate myself to learn, I went out and purchased some cards for the Crimson Vow set (which is one of two sets that I've always wanted, but could never justify purchasing). I also used my printer to print out images used in some of the reference videos provided in our weekly lessons guide. My only plan right now is to take my time with learning the game as best I can, and then I should be more acclimated towards building a deck for my project.

Image: Table of contents, minus the pages that need to be re-routed due to how Homebrewery works.

Image: Last drawing on the white board of all our team members; we are alien blobs with little antennae.

Well, my plans were going to be that I doodled everyone as the little aliens or something, but unfortunately nobody got back to me over the weekend, so I wasn't able to do it. We had our group meeting last week as well, and I did make some alternative sprite edits for Madison's dialogue if the boxes were displayed in the middle of the screen after I saw that there were changes. That way, the sprites weren't cut off so tough at the end. I thought they looked bad when they were shown in the game, so I made the changes.

Image: Act 1 of my Campaign; labelled 'Dispatching the Night'

As the end of the semester is rearing it's head around, I'm getting the remainder of my project finished up; while I don't think I'll have the capacity to get it to the quality I put my personal standards to, I think the project overall has gone fairly well and I'm rather proud. After all, I've done an entire team project and have 90% of it completed while being a single person. I've put a lot of work and effort into this project and I'm hoping that in weeks following the final one, I can clean it up further and get it portfolio-worthy to where I think it should be.

This week I finished up the remaining sprites with the time I had allotted myself, and they were put into the drive. I worked pretty late into the night to get the final touches done on what I could, and did the same process of saving time that I used for the Mother on Syd's sprites. I think the decision is helping me in the long run, as drawing for long periods of time even with stretches and breaks is still rather painful if I'm not careful. On the downside, I have come to realize that the quickest I can get a sprite rendered for this game is approximately 30 minutes. However, this number becomes closer to 40 when I have to create a new sketch from scratch as opposed to the sprites that already were sketched (as I seemed to have missed a few in the early process and some sprites were added to the list later in accordance with the script).

Image: Veteran archetype for one of my custom classes, the Operator.

By Thursday, I wasn't as bedridden and sickly as I had been on Tuesday, but I was still feeling pretty icky and not the best. I'm glad that it was subsiding quicker than it usually was, but that doesn't mean I was happy with being sick, either. Besides that, I was lightly working on documents.

Image: Upset Mother sprite, rendered. As is the pattern with me, I caught some sickness from Game Club last week and was unable to really work this week as I was bedridden. I'm trying to perceive it as for the best, as I was running on fumes and the grief was still kind of floating around due to my workload. Thankfully it's not nearly as upsetting anymore, and by now I am more upset over being sick than anything else.

Image: Screenshot of the Vetuli page of the Codex.

Week 13 was a bit rough, as I was spending Week 12 distracting myself by getting enveloped in my project. I was able to get out quite a lot in my document, mostly the Foreward, Credits, and Introduction.

Image: Angry Nico sprite, rendered.

This week was spent rendering out the placeholder sprites that were sketched and in the build, slowly replacing them over time. I managed to get all of Nico's sprites done, along with getting the line art done for the Mom's sprites. Apologies for the short update, as things have been tough on me outside of project work, so my work has been slowed down quite a bit.

Week 12 has gone by well; the only requirement this week is to continue work, turn in some final documents from the playtesting and start working on the codex book. I'm excited!

I got this art drafted to make the 'cover' and I actually unironically enjoyed the style of it.. So, I'll probably be taking a sketch-like art style going forward as a lot of the big details in my project are more whimsy and conceptual in nature. I also made the official, printed name 'Promises of the Forgotten', to sound more D&D-esq.

(I forgot to grab a screenshot of the WIP, sorry!)

Overall, I have been working on finishing the rendering of those end screens requested by Evan, and they should be done by this week. I'm having a lot more fun taking my time with this, so I'm planning to use the time over spring break to get these rendered so they look nice and match all the other assets I have submitted so far. Thankfully, I also heard back from Madison about the dialogue tool; she combed through all her dialogue and thought about which sprites would work best for each scene, and then tallied them into a collective list of sprites we'd need to convey their conversations. Having worked on projects with Madison before, I'm confident that her list was comprehensive, and I trust her narrative skills with my life.

Week ten and eleven will be mashed into one blog post, as I technically did them together! I'm fairly certain this is alright. It will just be extra long.

I ended up finishing up everything I needed for my campaign day. A lot of pieces of the project will not come into play until the latter half of the campaign's open-ended plot and planning, so I left them out of the workload for now. They are, however, planned and in the overall outline for the campaign and I have addressed them so I am not shooting into the dark. As for playtesting, I think it went swimmingly, and two of the three players were completely new to Dungeons & Dragons. They found my version to be a bit easier and enticing to approach, and with the pre-made characters, they found it was fun and were interested in pursuing the game once they were done with our campaign.

Week 10, I know most of us were kinda running like headless chickens, but I think we're okay in terms of the project. I continued working on some sketches in the meantime, as I was running out of things to busy myself with that were productive, but thankfully a team member reached out to me to get some art for the project.

Week nine, I was busy getting ready for Spring Break coming up. Due to my sickness from before, where I'm behind in the submitted paperwork, I discussed with the professor to push my project submissions to after Spring Break. This time break, paired with Spring Break being the only time I can playtest while everyone is free, works out perfectly in my favor to get caught up with everything. So, with that being said, I was finishing up the polishing of my base game ideas, so that I can play the first two or three campaign days with the players to get feedback and then pivot my ideas for the fourth.

Overall, the first day and mission of the campaign is being assigned to investigate and solve an issue with creatures crawling around the entrance to the Claustra Swallet (an area in my lore and world). The party will be given plenty of chances to explore this area and gather information, as well as detailed stores that they can buy from to prepare for their task. This will open up a lot of questions and thoughts on what is happening in the world, and the protagonist party will be thrown right into the middle of an ongoing invisible war, essentially.