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wollfling · 3 years

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Hi Allie! I wondered if I could ask you for some advice. I want to draw really badly and create art but I really don't have any skill! I know that in order to get better at art I have to actually do it, but I feel so overwhelmed by how I'm not where I want to be with it right away, and also with where to start with learning to draw. Do you ever feel that way when you draw? And if you do how have you gotten past it?

[I am literally so sorry this is so long oh my God. My mind has been very jumbled lately so I accidentally rambled too much, but I hope it still helps you in any way orz] Oh sweet little anon.. ;^; I do feel that way, a lot of the time if not all of the time! Just recently this week, I felt like I just couldn't draw despite picking up my pencil and scribbling, it just wasn't working partly for that exact reason! Overwhelmed by not being where I want to be with it! These things happen and its frustrating. It's hard for me to imagine as a beginner artist because I've been drawing since I can remember but I will still do my best to offer you some meaningful advice!

But first, to answer your very last question, getting past it can be a little random sometimes. This whole week after being unable to draw, I was laying in bed trying to sleep while reflecting on some heavy feelings ive been having and memories. Suddenly part of an image flashed in my mind and I got up to immediately try drawing it. (The drawing I recently posted and captioned "parade"!) I worked on it completely driven by my heart, and so it didn't matter at the time if it looked good or was anatomically correct, etc. Right now I am working on another heart-driven drawing, but if I tried to work on lets say a study or character drawing instead.. I dont think i could!

My point in all this is that, I think that its important to know/understand why you want to create art, and I think my advice would change slightly depending on your answer. For me personally, I am an emotional artist. I create art that (usually) reflects how I'm feeling or topics I am emotionally drawn to. Illustrations, drawing characters, writing comics, etc.. I think this week, while I'm definitely struggling with my skill level, I was so burdened by some things I've been feeling lately that I couldn't focus on or enjoy anything that I was trying to create, until I was able to release it all in a drawing. (And I'm still not done with them hence why I am now working on another related drawing, but im making SOMETHING and feeling passionate which cannot be said with any of my other attempts this week.) So since these drawings purpose outweigh my current issues regarding my skill, I am able to work on them. If that makes sense?

Okay im sorry with how long-winded this all is so far and all about myself orz but I wanted to give context on how I view art and I think if you asked someone who creates like. Hyperrealistic drawings their answers would be completely different. So! I wanted you to be able to judge if my advice would work for you if that makes any sense at all...!!! Moving on to my actual advice then..!

This is a little general ofc because I dont know what sort of art you are creating, or what your passion behind it is. And if after this you would like to tell me more about your art I would love to hear! 🥺💗 you are welcome to dm me or if you send another anon/ask i think that would be good too since.. well other artists who see can also give their own advice too!

Okay. So anyways lol, first I want to tell you that your desire to create art makes you an artist, despite your skill level. And therefore, everything and anything that you make even now has value. Even if right now you're drawing wonky shaded spheres and cubes! I understand its frustrating when wanting to make something but you feel like your skill isn't "there" and how that can prevent you from making anything to begin with!! But I really want you to try and work through it! Ignore it, disregard it, give your worries about your skill the silent treatment!! And I know its near impossible to do but if its getting in the way of you actually creating well.. thats the worst! We can't have that. If you really want to draw, then you really NEED to draw, you know what I mean? You deserve to draw! The hardest part for like 80% of artists is working around their skill level. I promise you will get there, but for now, you can't let it get in your way. And I realize me saying "oh you feel like you're not good at drawing and its hindering you from doing it? Just do it" sounds like Chad advice but ;---; unfortunately its the reality that comes with being an artist. If you tell me more about what you like to/why you want draw then maybe we can find some alternate lines of thinking that will help you (for example "this tiger i drew looks like shit but drawing all of her stripes was therapeutic and made it worth it!" If lets say you draw as a stim, opposed to "this tiger im drawing looks so bad I can't even look at it anymore " dhsjhd I really hope that this all makes sense lol.)

Moving on, learning how to draw.. this also depends on what you enjoy drawing but my main piece of advice here is study from real life. I grew up drawing cartoons and anime, and now that I want to draw a little more realistically.. its so hard!! If you study real shapes/people/animals/etc it might be easier later on when you understand fundamentals to bend them if you decide to create stylized or surreal art. However if right now you like to draw stylized art, I would recommend to keep working on your personal style while studying from real life on the side simultaneously! Any way you look at it, understanding how shapes, lighting, colour, etc work in the real world will help you out even with the most obscure pieces. And since art is a learned skill yknow you need to build those brain..pathways..and such. Im not a scientist but you get what i mean. Studies are the equivalent to lifting weights! I would recommend the website quickposes (com) they have a library of images that they throw at you at random. The site can explain itself better than I can lmao, check it out!!!

I really hope i was able to offer you something of value here, I didnt mean to ramble so much. I'm excited for you to grow as an artist, I love when I hear about others deciding to learn how to draw ;-; please feel welcome to ask for any clarification (as im having a hard time articulating my thoughts lately) or if you really just want to ask or say anything! ♡♡♡ again sorry if this was more than you bargained for length wise dhsishskshksj

#im wishing you the best anon!!! you can do it!!!#and im 100% serious please feel welcome !!#also if any other artists want to chip in I think it would be fun! ♡

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trevorbailey61 · 7 years

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Kraftwerk 3D

Symphony Hall, Birmingham

Tuesday 13th June 2017

The seventies were grim. A decade of industrial unrest and economic meltdown where bankrupt cities decayed as litter would blow their across deserted streets and those who could fled to the suburbs leaving only the homeless, pimps and drug dealers behind. Even those havens on the edge of town offered only slight relief; Britain was a failed state where power cuts and a three day week were followed at the end of the decade by the winter of discontent. Rubbish remained uncollected and bodies were left on slabs in mortuaries unburied. Yes the seventies were grim, at least that is what we are told. This is the version written by those who were to see salvation arriving in the form of Thatcher, rescuing us from malaise into which we had sunk, a version that emphasises the bad and ignores the good. “Never forget the chaos before Thatcher” greets any challenge to the status quo that sees the stagnating wages, diminishing opportunities and falling standards of living for the many whilst a few take an ever greater share of the wealth. This, we are told, is how it has to be, the alternative is to go back to the seventies and that was, as we keep telling you, grim.

Instead of being a version of history, however, this has become the version, the one that is used as a threat to those who didn’t live through it who have little on which to build their own. Each of us, however, has our own memories that create a different story, one in which the decade was far more optimistic and exciting. My story sees me go from junior school to starting university, a decade of exploration, the excitement of discovery and the intensity of emotions experienced for the first time. My horizons broadened as the boundaries that had once marked the extent of my world were broken forever. A time of long warm summer days, where we could stay out long after the sun had set, and short sharp cold winters, the reality of course was very different but these are the memories. By the middle of the decade, I was at secondary school, old enough to be trusted on a night out with my friends, a regular one I am now ashamed to say was disco at a local Conservative club, and to go to football matches without having to be escorted by my dad. It was also where my unhealthy obsession with music started to develop. From the start of the decade, songs were making their way into my young mind, leaving an impression so strong that I still know the lyrics to “In the Year 2525” by Zager and Evans despite not having heard it for years. A few years later, I acquired my first singles, “Hot Love” by T Rex and “Double Barrel” by Dave and Ansell Collins, played to the point of destruction. More followed, some, “Starman”, “Pyjamarama” and “This Town Ain’t Big enough for the Both of Us“ still seem like cool choices, others, “Son of My Father”, “Tiger Feet”, “Blockbuster” less so. As my physical world expanded, so to did did my musical world, beyond the short burst of pop so that albums began to nestle alongside those early singles; my short attention span, however, meaning that they were rarely absorbed in a single sitting. “Led Zeppelin IV” “Dark Side of the Moon”, “The Yes Album” became my challenges, concentration was needed to unpick them, just playing “Black Dog” then moving onto something else meant that the threshold to the adult world was still out of reach.

It is often forgotten that 1975 was a glorious summer, mainly because it was topped by the year that followed it, but it was during those bright sunlit days that the order started to change, that rather than holding a secret only accessible to a chosen few, these behemoths of prog would start to be seen as being a bit pretentious. For me, the catalyst for this came from a very unlikely source. Then, television was a family experience where after a meal we would all sit around to watch the evening’s entertainment unfold, something that usually involved our parents complaining about our tastes but being selfish and stroppy we usually managed to get our own way. One programme we all watched, however, was “Tomorrow’s World” which one evening included a short film about four smartly dressed Germans striking metal discs with what looked like knitting needles. Playing what we now know to be “Autobahn”, the announcer informs us that they have recently managed to dispense with all recognisable instruments and ”next year, they hope to eliminate the keyboard altogether,” The future will see them wearing jackets with electronic lapels that will be played by touch. Now the clip looks bizarre, Florian Schnieder’s last look into the camera is creepy and the electronic music sounds primitive but then it was revolutionary and that single moment inspired many to give up on trying to contort their hands into forming an Fm7 chord and pursue their rock ’n’ roll dream by programming a synthesiser. The single most important event in the evolution of dance music? - forty years on The Guardian identified it as just that.

They never did get those jackets and of the four who featured in the film, three have now departed leaving just Ralf Hütter as the sole original member. The culmination of those plans outlined the their Dusseldorf studio all those years ago, however, appears towards the end of this intensely absorbing show. With just a logo left on the screen informing us that this has been a “Kling Klang Musikfilm” the stage is left in darkness as the curtain is slowly drawn to hide the four lecterns that are lined up across the front. A deep electronic pulse soon resonates around the hall followed by a few clangs and bleeps, eventually combining to form the recognisable introduction to what will follow. Faster and faster it gets as the curtain opens to reveal the source, four red shirted robots staring vacantly out at the audience. Their upper bodies rotate while their arms make slow dramatic gestures, managing to be in sync despite the slow deliberate movements appearing to be a different dimension to the beat of the music. The instruments have gone, no keyboards, no human presence at all, just technology, a possible glimpse into a future where artificial intelligence will keep the music alive long after its creators have gone, “We are programmed just to do, Anything you want us to”.

It is a tempting narrative but it is based on two myths, the first being that Kraftwerk have always been focused purely on technology and secondly that they have always been about the future. True, they often seem to encourage these easy perceptions but even during “Numbers”, built around counting up and down in a heavily synthesised voice, it becomes clear that the importance is not the technology itself but the human interaction with it. As technophiles, the future they saw was full of optimism but in some cases the music has taken on a more sinister meaning that it never had on release. “Computer World” becomes about the dehumanising effects of big data whilst “Radioactivity” has become an elegy to the victims of the nuclear disasters read out in the introduction. Reworked to a faster pace with a trance like beat, the dispassionate reading out of these disasters and Hütter singing some of the lyrics in Japanese, makes it eerily haunting. “Computer Love” sees the human interface at is most vulnerable, isolated staring at the screen, using the computer as a means of finding love, in some ways one of their most prescient songs.

Whilst Kraftwerk were, and in many ways reman, cutting edge, there was always more than a whiff of nostalgia about their future. The VW and Mercedes cars that drive along the “Autobahn” are those around when the music was created and it is doubtful that even German roads were ever that quiet, but then the song has always been about the ideal of the open road rather than the reality. “Spacelab” could be straight out of a 50s sci-fi movie, the 3d glasses worn by the audience likewise, and the effect of the satellite reaching out into the audience is startling, someone sitting a couple of rows in front of me ducks. It also finishes with the spaceship flying over Birmingham and landing outside Symphony Hall, despite their impassive manner, they always did show a wry sense of humour. The music from “Tour De France” is accompanied by images from the race over the years but with added graininess to give even the most recent images a vintage feel.

“Tour De France” also shows that despite producing little in the way of new material for over a quarter of a century, they have continually reworked their music to adapt to changing tastes, the availability of new methods of producing their sound and their own, mostly Hütter’s, relentless quest for perfection. It is “Tour De France” that has changed the most since I last saw them four years ago, becoming a montage of man and machine, trance like rhythms and swirling melodies, it was almost possible feel the sweat. The clear acoustics of Symphony Hall meant the low bass of “Man Machine” vibrated every muscle, so much louder that it had been last time. There were some shouts for the volume to go up but it seemed right to me, loud when it needed to be but also providing quiet moments, the dynamics showing the grasp they always had for the feel of the music. No where was this better illustrated than on the delicate beauty of “Neon Lights”. The pounding bass and crashing metal on metal of “Trans Europe Express” again seemed to leap out of the speakers with more force than before but “The Model” was pretty much as it has always been, perfection needs no reworking.

The last time we saw Kraftwerk was at Latitude festival four years ago, I loved them but many there, including my wife, were soon complaining that they were a bit boring. In fairness, a Suffolk field is not the best place to be drawn into a spectacle like this and seeing them amongst their most dedicated fans in a more enclosed space made it all the more special. Hütter’s never ending quest is to bring music and visuals into one completely coherent work of art, hence the shows being presented in art galleries, and this leads to his constant reworking of the music to achieve the perfect marriage. This does have the advantage of refreshing those songs recorded over forty years ago, making for an exhilarating ride that has even converted my wife into a fan. As for me, I will be doing it all again on Sunday - “Musik - Non Stop”.

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ciathyzareposts · 4 years

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Kickstarter Special – Summer Daze At Hero-U & Interview with Corey Cole

By the TAG Team

It’s no secret that here at “The Adventure Gamer”, we have a soft spot for the Quest for Glory series and the works of Corey and Lori Cole. Three of their games are on our Top Ten! Although we are a retro gaming establishment, we reviewed Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption last year and have received a ton of positive feedback about the decision. That review (and the accompanying interview) are among the most popular posts on the site. We can only assume that you, like us, are fans!

We have been exceptionally selective in terms of what recent projects we feature, but we’d like to direct you to a kickstarter by Corey and Lori Cole’s Transolar Games: Summer Daze at Hero-U. This game is a prequel to the previous Hero-U title and explores a shift towards more narrative storytelling by integrating visual novel elements. It looks like it’s off to a good start. Summer Daze lets you play as either the mischievous female rogue or a studious and introspective male wizard with his meerbat familiar.

The campaign’s funding goal is $99,999 because as Corey points out, “we’d hate to come up $1 short.” At the moment, they are just over 70% of the way to their goal with less than a week to go. We’re really love to see this game get funded and hope you will check it out if you are a fan of the series.

As an added bonus, Corey Cole has agreed to speak with us and answer some lingering questions that your humble admins had about the development of his games. Even if you aren’t into his kickstarter, I encourage you to scroll down!

Tilly Appleberry, Disbarred Bard

What we know so far is that Summer Daze will be a less complicated game than the Coles’ others, with much of the gameplay consisting of choosing dialogue options.

“Summer Daze at Hero-U is a new direction for us. We’ve crystallized the story and characters into a fast-paced illustrated adventure that can be played anywhere.” – Corey Cole

The game is described as part adventure game, part visual novel, with a dash of light RPG. Of course, the demo contains the Coles’ strength of punny humor.

Ripping through the English language like a bull in a china shop.

If you feel you might be interested, you can check out some details and download the demo of Tilly’s first day at the Summer Daze website here.

Or you can follow the half-elf’s advice and check out the kickstarter over here!

You can also visit Transolar Games on Twitch. You can check out their previous broadcasts, and this Halloween they will be playing through Quest for Glory IV!

That’s enough with the marketing, let’s get on with the interview!

Interview with Corey Cole

You mentioned Summer Daze in our interview back in July last year. Is the game in its current state much as you envisioned it back then, or has it evolved into something different?

Summer Daze at Hero-U is fundamentally the same game as we talked about it last year. Lori has been writing dialogue and working with the team for the last year to get art assets and a prototype for the game. Anyone may download the prototype for free from https://transolar-games.itch.io/summer-daze or by clicking the “Download Demo” button on Steam – https://store.steampowered.com/app/1139490/Summer_Daze_at_HeroU/. The prototype covers day one (of twelve) for one of the two playable characters.

Of course, games never stay static. As she works on the game, sees the art, and so on, Lori constantly comes up with new ideas, puzzles, and other ideas. The Kickstarter will also have some influence. If we reach stretch goals, we’ll be able to add more mini-games, animation, and so on. And if we somehow fail to reach the base goal, we’ll zero in on half of the game – Tilly’s story – and make that available on early access to fund Ifeyo’s half.

There is quite a contrast between them. Tilly is a mischievous, (and let’s face it, cute) rogue who never takes life too seriously. Ifeyo is the opposite, a dedicated student who is trying to prove to his family that he can be successful as a Wizard. Some of the events in Ifeyo’s story are also darker and more serious. If we’re able to fund adding some combat to the game, it will mostly be in Ifeyo’s game.

How do you block out your story beats and how has that changed from the early games to Hero-U and beyond?

Our stories start from the characters – not just the hero, but everyone he or she meets in the games. We think about each character’s needs and desires, and where they might be getting blocked from them. Then we go back to the player character and ask, “Why might players want to help this character? What can they do to help?” Those become many of the “puzzles” – or “problems” as I like to think of them – and also the main story beats. “My husband is missing. I haven’t seen him since he left to visit the store last night. Please see if you can find him.” – That could lead to any number of story situations, depending on what happened to the husband and who (or what) else is involved.

Players have their own problems as well – “I need to get out of my room at night without being spotted, because that’s the only time I have to get into the dungeons.” But we think that solving problems for others often gives players more motivation.

The major difference in how we plot our stories now vs. thirty years ago is that we have much more memory, and better ways to illustrate events in art and animation. We’ve also developed techniques over the years to make our games more responsive. For example, when Shawn talks to Ifetaya in Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption, the game has information about whether Shawn has previously had a run-in with a ghost. If so, we add lines about talking to ghosts to Ifetaya’s script. If Shawn has no reason to ask about something, that choice does not appear.

We may have taken this to an extreme level. Hero’s Quest had a 50,000 word script. Quest for Glory IV ballooned to 180,000 words, mostly because of dialogue changing due to previous events. The game might take the same amount of time to play, or at most double, but there is much more replayability and variation between plays. With Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption, we really went crazy with a 450,000 word script – 2-1/2 times the size of Quest for Glory IV – full of branches that you could only see in some playthroughs, invisible in the rest.

In general, the concept of a “story beat” is very different in a game from a film. Screenwriters have full control over what viewers see at each point in time. Their responsibility is to make each scene compelling, and to maintain the flow of the story. In games, it’s much more complicated. The software development cliché is that managing programmers is like herding kittens. That’s even more true in a game – Imaginative players will go anywhere at any time. They might not intend to break anything, but they’ll contort and twist the story by missing an important clue or dialogue setup, or by stumbling on a scene they weren’t supposed to reach until later.

Adventure game writing consists of creating thousands of “snippets” of text and dialogue, then trying to nudge players in the direction of encountering those tidbits in a reasonable order. One of the ways we do that now is by making much of the dialogue conditional – When the Warrior Drats invade Hero-U, that’s what most of the characters talk about. When a student is missing, that’s the main topic. This even applies to minor story events – If a character likes the hero, they’ll have different dialogue than if they don’t like him. If you’ve been studying Mozart in music class, your fellow students might talk about that. The idea is to try to make the game dialogue feel natural.

Hero U: Rogue to Redemption has had a positive reaction both in the press and among players. Was this surprising or were you reasonably confident that your style of adventure game would still resonate with people?

We never actually know how people will react to our games. We just make them as good as we can, and try to make games we would like to play, then we release them and see how people react. That’s an exaggeration, of course. We did ten months of outside Alpha and Beta testing on Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption, so we had a great deal of player feedback before the live release. And, of course, many complaints and suggestions that we handled as best we could.

We expected a positive reaction to the game because we knew we had been true to the spirit of our previous games. Plus the art and music were beautiful. So in that sense, we were pleased, but not surprised.

We did get some criticism as well. One common complaint was that it took too long to get places. What happened there? As we did at Sierra, we locked the player animation speed to make the walking animation look good. But it had some problems in this game. Part of that is expectations after playing modern games. Nobody ever walks in World of Warcraft except for role-playing. You run everywhere and fly where you can. Players are more impatient than in the early 90’s. Also, the sheer size of Hero-U is an issue. We’re proud that we were able to use 3D scenes effectively to make the castle feel huge. But the side effect of that is that it takes a long time to get places.

We added a “fix” for Shawn’s movement in a later game patch. That’s a nice thing about releasing our games online – We can go back and fix issues that players find. The less-nice thing is that we feel obligated to do that, which can get in the way of making the next game. Anyway, we now have a slider that lets players speed Shawn up – or slow him down. The animation doesn’t look as good at hyper-speed, but it’s a more comfortable play experience for many players, and that matters more. (As with story beats, player experience and interactivity are king in computer games.)

The other common criticism was that some players didn’t like the pressure of our “time as a currency” mechanic. That “feature” was a central element of our design throughout the project, and not something we could change without breaking many other game features. The idea is that Shawn is a student and has a schedule – breakfast, class in the morning, a little time to practice skills or visit the library, elective class in the afternoon, supper, free time in the evening, then bedtime. With that somewhat-enforced schedule, it can be a challenge to find time for exploration, monster slaying, relationships, and earning pocket money.

In addition, dialogue changes constantly throughout the fifty days of a Rogue to Redemption game. That was a huge challenge for Lori as a writer, and it means that players can’t just skip days or complete the story in 5 or 10 days. To make this work, we chose to gate Shawn’s time with all those mandatory activities. Otherwise players might exhaust most of the exploration and practice content in a few days, and be stuck waiting for story events the rest of the game. That can actually happen in the last ten game days. We scheduled fewer story events there, and some players have told us they didn’t have enough to do in the late game. That could be because most of our players are elite, experienced adventure gamers who burn through the secondary content quickly. Or it might just mean we should have tightened the script to 40 days.

Is there anything else you think our readers would like to know about Summer Daze or Transolar in general?

We have been trying to manage expectations on Summer Daze at Hero-U, at times emphasizing that it’s less ambitious than Rogue to Redemption, or that it was inspired by visual novels and dating sims. But adventure game fans should know that Summer Daze is actually a full adventure game. The script might weigh in at a “tiny” 200,000 words… but that’s still longer than the script of Quest for Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness. If you think that game is quite large enough, you’ll find just as much in Summer Daze.

At the same time, we’re trying to keep a laser focus on what we think makes our games great – the story, characters, and player choices. We’ve solved the problem of taking too long to walk through endless hallways by taking out the hallways. Instead, we’ve gone to still background screens and menu interactions. That’s what I did with Castle of Dr. Brain, and is similar to how Shannara played, as well as to the vignette scenes in Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption. (That’s so cumbersome – In the future we’ll just call it Hero-U 1 or maybe Hero-U: Rogue.) You move around by “fast travel” clicking on the interior and exterior maps, not by walking through hallways for five minutes.

One of Summer Daze’s Travel screens – I think it was Professor Plum with the Rope in the Library

There is also no “hunt the pixel” – Interactions are by menu, and designed to work as well on a tablet or phone as on a PC. The puzzles and problems are Quest for Glory style – helping other characters and yourself – rather than by figuring out arbitrary combinations of things to make a fishing pole or a disguise.

Coincidentally, taking out those dubious features is also making Summer Daze a more affordable game development project. We lost a lot of money making Rogue to Redemption. But we don’t think we’ve taken anything out that hurts the game. Instead, we have a tighter, more focused game that concentrates on the story and characters. If you like our other games, *or* visual novels, *or* games like Dream Daddy and Magical Diary, we think you’ll love Summer Daze at Hero-U.

And as someone who loves adventure games and wants to keep them alive, please pledge to our Kickstarter campaign so we can finish this game without going farther into debt. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/transolargames/summer-daze-at-hero-u is the place! Also check out our content on https://www.twitch.tv/transolargames and our personal Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/coreyloricole. The adventure game community is small, and that means each of you is important to keeping adventure games alive, and not just an artifact of the 1990’s.

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/kickstarter-special-summer-daze-at-hero-u-interview-with-corey-cole/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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