February update. Cuz one can never talk enough about chainmail.

My game:
Skyrim is still my main goto when I flop down after work, but that hasn't stopped me from fiddling with my game this month.  When I'm motivated enough to draw, I'm still working on better chainmail.  After a few more attempts, I started searching around for tutorials.  Found a pretty good one here which walked me through the basics.  I had to start over from scratch, but I think the result is better.  May need to play with the line weight for the links, or possibly try to add some gradients or highlights.  But I think I'm on the right track now anyway.

One more thing I find funny/interesting about this.  It looks pretty good when zoomed out to the normal game size.  As I zoom in, it gets progressively worse.  When I'm zoomed in close to draw, it looks downright terrible.  The picture above is somewhere between the two zoom levels.  Meh, art.  =P


When I'm not motivated enough to draw, I've been fiddling with some of the code.  Did y'all notice how once a grapple starts, all the other monsters will quickly surround you?  Way back when, I tried to slow down this process by having the monsters continue to attack.  That worked for the zombies & pirates, but many of the new monsters in Act 2 actually move faster when they attack (we're looking at you mister elf).  So recently I went back in & tried reducing the movement speed of the non-grappling enemies.  I think there's a balance here that would work - don't want to make it too slow or we'll never see double teams.  I've got their speed reduced by about 50% right now, and I think that's about right.  May need some play-testing to verify.  Walking animations look wrong now because the speed is off, but that's something I can fix once I settle on a speed.


Around the Internets:

Found two games this month that caught my eye.  The first one is called Seduce Me.  The porn in this one is actually kinda bad.  The art is quite good, but the porn events are nothing but a single image, which gets cropped & copy/pasted to make it appear like a full page from a comic book.  I'm no stranger to copy/pasting myself, but this struck me as being too lazy.

The game redeems itself with the gameplay.  Instead of a chat menu & dialogue tree, you play a series of card games to represent how well you sweet talk the ladies.  It's a bit of a stretch, but the games were really fun.  So much so that I found myself replaying the game several times & skipping the porn scenes.  This may simply be because other porn-card games are always either poker or blackjack.  Neither of those games makes an appearance here, so this seemed fresh & novel by comparison.

I'll note that the game was pretty damn buggy.  Had an annoying habit of locking up my whole PC and refusing to let go.  I found that closing the game & restarting after every couple of scenes seems to help tremendously.  FYI.

The second game is still just in demo form at the moment.  Using my amazing translation powers (AKA, reading the English text on title screen), the name translates to "Fleeing".  You're playing a male trying to escape from a lair of succubi, so I guess you could call this reverse run & rape?  You can have sex with the girls, but you have to be careful.  Run out of stamina & it's game over.  If you clear the zone you can level up a bit, at which point you can maybe have a little more sex if you dare.... Anyway, it's a really neat idea, I hope it makes it past the demo stage.

Personal side note - the bad girl in this demo is totally hot (imo).  The artist can clearly draw.  So why does the dude look like a scrawny girl?  Is that the only style the artist knows, or is it intentional?  Would a brawny hero make the game unbelievable?


Anyway, that's all for now.  Working on the floorplan for the new levels at the moment, so expect lots of "I hate drawing sand" from me next month.  haha
DirtyC101