A small portion of a screenshot from PAWS! :D I don’t think I described the PAWS team in detail before, so in brief: Lemmy is handling the coding, while the art is a mix of work from Captain Binky and myself :)
[the screenshot seems to have been lost in the server change :( ]
And there are more awwws to come! ;) (and wheeees once you play it!)
12th March, 2009 - Posted by MashPotato - No Comments
There may have seemed to be a considerable lack of updatage concerning Hatmaker lately, and I’m happy to be able to announce the reason why :D
Yep, it’s a screenshot from a game in the works with the lovely Lemmy&Binky! We’re keeping details under our hats for now, so I’ll just say it’s multi-player, and the characters will put a smile on anyone’s face :D The goal is to have this finished in 2-3 months, so expect more news soon!
Yay!
6th March, 2009 - Posted by MashPotato - No Comments
Imagine a book written about a book written about a non-existant documentary filmed about a house… yep, this is House of Leaves ;) (more…)
27th February, 2009 - Posted by MashPotato - No Comments
I’ve recently been taking some art classes, and we started work in pencil crayons (which I’ve used before, but only as opaque blocks of colour). Anyway, we made portraits of a live model, and I was pretty pleased with how it turned out :) It’s neat learning to use other media, as I’ve been almost entirely digital for the last while.
Pic’s after the jump because it contains nudity (*shock, horror*! ;) ) (more…)
22nd February, 2009 - Posted by MashPotato - 4 Comments
I’ve never really been “into” zombies, so while I was interested in the sound of this book, I didn’t really expect too much… I was pleasantly blindsided by the awesomeness :D (more…)
14th February, 2009 - Posted by MashPotato - 2 Comments
Entitled “I” because as much as I dislike drawing self-portraits, I’m working on a portfolio and I’m usually the only model handy ;) (speaking of hands, I’ve drawn many).
A reasonable facsimile of me working from a mirror:
14th February, 2009 - Posted by MashPotato - 9 Comments
A description I’ve never used for any of my games before, and quite possibly will never have occasion to use again, but which I can use today: “award-winning”! :D
My OROW entry Beauties and Beasts has won the 2008 AGS award for Best Short Game! It was honestly a surprise and honour, as there were many quality short games last year. Thanks to all people who voted and played, played without voting, voted randomly without playing, and of course, lovely beta-testers Captain Binky and Nickenstien, AGS-maker Chris Jones, miscellaneous helpers Lemmy101 and Buloght, and The Ventures and DeVotchKa, whose music I stole ;)
If you haven’t tried it yet, why not click over to the games page and give it a download? Oh go on, it’s award-winning ;)
11th February, 2009 - Posted by MashPotato - 4 Comments
It’s a little known fact that the high mortality rate of princesses kidnapped by dragons is not due to burns, being eaten, or as collateral damage from rescues gone awry. No, the majority of princesses die from acute cases of boredom, as dragons insist on playing chess until they win, and dragons, even Shrewd ones, are incredibly poor players ;)
A late bday gift for my buddy Buloght :D It’s been a long time since I worked on a complex pixel piece, and it was fun to do.
Shoutout to Captain Binky :)
16 colours (I have to admit I’m pleased with that ;) )
9th February, 2009 - Posted by MashPotato - 6 Comments
I gave fair warning a few weeks ago that I will write my oft-rambling and seldom-insightful thoughts on books I’ve just read, and the first one’s a doozy: Infinite Jest ;). A monster of a book at 1079 pages, it is at times daunting to read, and even difficult to describe. Sure, I could tell you that it’s about a young tennis star-in-the-making at a prestigious tennis academy beginning to mentally unravel; that it’s about a counselor at halfway house for recovering drug addicts wanting more than anything to stay clean; that it’s about a film so entertaining that anyone who sees it becomes fatally addicted to it; that it’s about the groups who want that film for their own purposes, including a militant Quebec separatist group of wheelchair-bound assassins. I could say that the book’s about all that, and, somehow, how they all connect, but Infinite Jest is not so much about the story as it is the telling of the story. (more…)
7th February, 2009 - Posted by MashPotato - No Comments
Well, here we are a week later, and already I’ve fallen behind my pseudo- schedule of updates ;) Part of the problem is that while I’ve made my site more blog-oriented in order to be able to keep development entries, I’ve realized that I don’t really know what goes into those! While I figure it out what to do, here’s a small update (which I know belongs here) and spiel (which I suspect belongs here ;D) about talking portraits.
One of the things I wanted to do with Hatmaker is to make the characters memorable, and one of the key visual ways I’m trying to accomplish that is to have them show emotions that complement their dialogue. It’s mainly for this reason I decided to go with the Sierra-style of having a large talking portrait rather than the Lucas-arts style of dialogue appearing above the sprites, even though LucasArts is more near and dear to my heart. When sprites are only about 50 pixels tall (including antennae), and their face occupies only about 8 of those pixels, it helps to have more space to work with.
Another good point I find about the talking portrait is that it allows the player to read conversations easily without having to shift their focus to another location when another character starts talking. However, this good point also highlights one of the best points of the LucasArts system: that the player follows the action. By being able to place dialogue wherever you want on the screen, it gives a more comic-book, lively effect, whether it be the back-and-forth nature of regular conversation, or placing dialogue in a particular space. For example, a voice from off the screen can be put to the screen’s side, clearly indicating where it’s originating from. In the system I’ve chosen (which is also limited by my lack of scripting expertise) this wouldn’t be possible, and would have to be conveyed more subtlely (eg. the character turns toward the voice), or perhaps more hamfistedly ;) (eg. “Someone’s voice is coming from my left!”). It’s a tradeoff.
Hmm, I wonder if anyone read all that ;)
Anyway, after that long ramble, here are some talking portraits to pretty up the post!
Tom neutral: 
and Tom sad: 
Note that these are not exactly the same animations in-game, but they’re made up of the same frames which I mocked up quickly for the purposes of this post.
31st January, 2009 - Posted by MashPotato - 4 Comments
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