#abberant text posts

Knights of Guinevere seems interesting enough. I would be lying if I didn't say I find the premise cool and the characters interesting.

yeah. and we love to see critiques of capitalism.

yeah, KOG, it is kind of shit that Disney's plastic merch just ends up in oceans or goes into landfill

...huh?

you want me to buy your plastic charms...?

uh.

hm.

We fight her, she changes to our whims, then we deny her. We submit to her, we change her, then we break her ego.

She really is just trying to impress that feeling of helplessness onto us, trying to make us see from her perspective. Making us into horrible new shapes, breaking us down as far as we can go, then starting over and finding a new angle.

she couldn't relate to us through fighting, she couldn't by dominating us - we give her a sliver of purpose and take it away.

I suppose it's that pain isn't a pathway to understanding, the catharsis is short-lived, the aftermath is harrowing.

it also assumes something of the player's own agency - that we must have something we're holding over her, something she still needs to penetrate in order for us to understand each other. but this isn't entirely true either.

the Broken (at least the Adversary version) does understand her already. the Cold does, too. neither of them need to be "taught" to understand her by being defiled into submission.

from looking at his videos, I think Frankie uses a 16x16 checkerboard grid to eyeball the size of his sprites

most human adults are about 6-7 tiles high, 8 tiles seems to be the upper range

I think it's a bit clearer to see with a 32x32 grid actually

pretty much all of them fall between 3-4 tiles high in this case

he typically starts off with a black silhouette done with a chunkier pixel brush and roughs out a bit more definition

he really does "paint" with pixels, building up in layers, giving extra attention to the mouth - he also changes the lower body a couple times, so blocking things out in rough strokes gives him more freedom to experiment with the overall shape

it's interesting because you see also in the David sprite speedpaint, after getting a rough sense of the initial shape it looks like the face gets more attention - so he works from head to body, or in this case top to bottom.

as he goes over adding more highlights and extra detail, he uses the opportunity to clean up the outline - all LO sprites have a 1px black outline, but black lines are also used for things like separate limbs, items of clothing and distinctive creases

the legs take their final shape a bit later than the head, and again, the head gets preference for highlights and extra details comparatively.

like ok this is pretty lengthy but it's also interesting to compare the hilariously scuffed rough draft sprites of the Eugestor sequence to the newer cleaner ones - because it's actually Nestor's throat-mouth that gets the most detail in these, rather than his face, and it gives you a sense of how Frankie blocks out colour.

like it's clear that initially, getting the details of Nestor's face exactly precise was less important than conveying the visceral horror of what he does to Eugene, particularly since his face is heavily deformed and distorted anyway.