#pippastrelle

Look, on the one hand, it’s understandable, because people have absolutely gotten burned by creators shitting the bed before. Just ask any fan of Sherlock, or Game of Thrones, or Star Wars, or The Promised Neverland. 

aaah gosh thank you, that’s very kind of you! i’ve always been quite insecure about my art for various reasons but slowing down recently has meant i’ve been enjoying it a lot more, sounds like that’s coming over in the pages a little, which is pleasing. 

Ohhh, okay. For some reason I forgot that Tyrian’s an asshole, and I thought he was trying to give them serious advice. In his own crazy way.

Silly me.

Honestly, since the reveal was pretty obvious I was expecting more moments of Desmond letting slip some Descole moments but they didn't really happen :|

Right? Like, I opened this game thinking “Aw, I feel kinda bad that I’m spoiled for Desmond’s true identity, it’d have been cool for it to have been a surprise,” and then Raymond is there in the very first scene and I’m like “...Okay, maybe it wouldn’t have been that much of a surprise.”

There’s only a couple of Descole-esque moments that I can remember. Like when he’s being smug about his superior translation expertise behind Layton’s back, or the fact that he rolls up to the confrontation with Bronev with sleep grenades he made himself, because that’s a thing normal people do. Ooo, or the best one: When Emmy and Luke are trash talking Descole and Desmond’s like “Well, let’s not assume he did it! We don’t have all the facts!”

I used to use a program called FontLab Studio 5, and now I use FontLab VI. Before that I used a program called TypeTool, which is by the same company. They all have the same basic drawing features. With a brush, you can specify the width, the angle, and the shape of the terminations, as well as the body shape. With Kamakawi I was using the older version, so there was a preset brush that looked the way I wanted it to (I modified it slightly). If I were to redo it, I’d do it differently. Specifically, I’ve actually got a brush set that produces the effect I want with Kamakawi’s script, so what I’d do is produce enough characters by hand for me to get the idea and then modify the brush in the program to make sure it works the same way. Even then, I do a lot more adjustment by hand now (i.e. actually finding the nodes and moving them point by point, or figuring out mathematically where they should be and entering those coordinates).

The nice thing, though, is with copy and paste you only have to get a few characters and/or shapes exactly right, and then you can copy and paste the rest together. Like with the Roman alphabet, deciding on your is essentially, because you can use pieces of it to build , , , ,

, , , etc. So you need your straight piece, your serif (if you’re doing a serif font), your , a diagonal, etc., and then you can copy and paste pieces of these to produce all the other glyphs so you’re not individually creating each one. All scripts (or natural scripts) end up having similar shapes like this, even if the shapes (or pieces) themselves aren’t actually glyphs, but just pieces of glyphs.

This is all just for creating fonts, as opposed to writing systems. The skills are different and don’t necessarily overlap, but I worked at glyph creation with the same font interface (over three different applications) for about 16 years now, and I’ve gotten a lot better, so I really think it’s a learnable skill. FontLab products are pretty expensive, so you may want to start with a free app first until you’re sure you want to get into it. (Over the years I’ve just realized I’ve spent over $1,000 on font software… Yikes. Worth it, though.)