I should update more often, but I don't because I'm usually busy working on the visual novels that I should be updating everyone on. But here's a list of things from the past week or so that make me happy. I'll post word counts later, in case anyone is actually interested in that sort of stuff. XD

-Deji is safe. I was seriously freaking out when I heard about the earthquakes in Chile. But she's safe and I'm happy. This matters not because she's a great artist (although she is!), but because she's wonderful friend. ::cue dramatic music and sparkles::

-H2 voiced edition is coming soon. The voiced release is long overdue, but it's finally coming. I had a lot of fun working on it, and I truly respect and admire the other members of the cast, so I'm looking forward to hearing everything come together.

-RE:A extended edition is going smoothly. As much as I love RE:A, it's nice to be able to clean all the things we had to cut corners on for our first release. It's not going to be a huge upgrade, but it'll be nice to feel like the game is full polished.

-I'm writing again! I love writing!

-I finally made my own custom yes/no screen (see above). Well, I did make one a long time ago when I was working on Plat du Jour, but it was a makeshift one with messy art, and I didn't actually have a full understanding of the code at that time. But this one is pretty, and now I know what I'm doing! I'm also happy because I figured out how to make decent looking water stains on the paper. I know this is probably the least important of all things that make me happy, but it still makes me happy. So there.

Forums are up.

Someone I don’t even know asked me if I wanted to create one ages ago lol, so I kinda went ahead and just did it.
We’ll see how that goes. :P

I was noted that Mikaela’s legs from my previous post appeared too long.  I didn’t want to mess with her height, so I only re-sketched her legs so they didn’t appear strangely long.

See previous post for before pic.

After (NSFW)  http://gallery.pixaelsoft.com/displayimage.php?pid=36&fullsize=1

Let me know what you think! Better?

I also drew in details of her hands and feet which I didn’t on the previous post.  Zooming in on the Sai tool helps a lot for fine details like that I find…

Richelle (Artist)

I've been wondering for the past few weeks. Is it really worth it to work on Stained One? Would it be giving up if I set it aside for a while to rework on my first kinetic novel that is nearest to my heart?

Stained One is by far a more complex storyline then any ideas I've had. I have a complete outline of what is to happen in all six endings. But now I'm not only stuck writing wise, but art wise as well. It's not that I can't draw the girls or even the guys.

But I wonder if I even had a connection to my characters in the first place. I already had given them personalities, but... Maybe this whole time I thought they were developed fully, but they actually were far from that. I thought about it some more and I realized that the characters with the weakest personalities were the boys, Zac and Aiden. Emily is a dear, I love her character traits, but I never could focus on the boys like I could with the girls. And without a strong cast...

I really am way in over my head.

Ever since I released Phase Shift I've gotten rather positive responses, at least for the story and characterization. Now that I've improved on art, I would love to make a remake of it and expand on the story much more. I read the story on my own and realize how many nuances and little parts that seem to make the story worthwhile, something that will be difficult to reflect in Stained One. So I probably will go back to it and sculpt it lovingly into a more beautiful kinetic novel that I want it to be.

Also from my DA.
Wallpaper versions:

1900×1200

1680×1050

1440×900

1280×800

More and more developers I know are going to move online-only (some have already). But what are the key differences of online vs offline games, both from the developer and the user point of view? This is what I gathered so far. If anyone has any comments/suggestion, is welcome.

Online

Pros:

As developer, you basically eliminate piracy. People making online games in general make MUCH more money than people making offline games. Also, online enable you to use subscriptions, microtransactions, pay per item, and so on.

As player, you can now compete/collaborate with friends. You can have new experiences otherwise unattainable by offline gaming, like new content/leves, updates, bugfixes.

Cons

As developer, you enter a whole new realm. You need to guarantee people are able to play. If your server is offline, your game is useless and this will make people angry, very angry. Also it means you need to learn network programming, which is a pain. There are also increased costs (but as we saw you should also expect increased profits). Usually once you go online, you’ll need to focus on one game. Most online games takes YEARS to make, so be sure to have a backup plan. Also, you enter a VERY CROWDED market: everyone is making MMOs now, so while the potential revenues are much higher, the competition is also more fierce. Online games are mutually exclusive too: people playing WoW are likely to play that for 4-5h a day, leaving no room for other games. This means that if a big player has established a foothold in a certain niche/segment of the market, will be very hard for you to get new players.

As player, you can say goodbye to immersion. Most people playing MMO knows how annoying some people can be. You can meet anyone, from a 60 years old polite university professor to a 16-years old boy always yelling at you. There can’t be a plot in a online game. You’re also going to pay MUCH more, and some games feels more like a scam. With normal offline games you pay a price and know what you get. Online games are designed like mousetrap: they lure you in with the FREE word, and then you get addicted and you’ll end up paying even hundred of dollars for, let’s be honest, what you could get for 1/10 less. You’re also going to spend much more time to a single game and become an addict (that’s exactly what the companies want).

Offline

Pros:

As developer, offline games are much easier to program. Even if you’re not an expert programmer you can easily put a normal downloadable game together. You don’t need to have a dedicated server or be a network expert.

As player, you know what you get. You can have immersive games with wonderful plot and NPCs, like Dragon Age (or any of my games hehe), you can play RTS knowing your ping doesn’t matter, you can play while flying on a plane with a laptop, you can pause anytime, you can play games at your pace (and not be tied to a raid or a online event) and the list goes on. All of this knowing you’re going to pay a FIXED amount (that recently is getting lower and lower).

(Note – I am one of those players. I can’t honestly believe that people pay 15-20 eur a month to play WoW when they can get wonderful games from Bioware for a fixed price!)

Cons:

As developer, expect to make much less money: except very rare cases, a offline game is always going to earn less than a online one, since you can’t bill multiple time the same person (selling him subscriptions or items for example).  Also you have to deal with piracy which is a real pain and will seriously hurt your business.

As player, I am not really sure what are the cons of offline games. I guess stupid/paranoid DRMs are the worst thing you can experience. Apart for that, I can’t really think about any cons, except if you like competition, ladders, etc. But then you wouldn’t be playing offline games at all

That is. As you can see there are several things to consider, both for the developer and the player. I also think that the age influences what people play: I used to play EQ1-2 when I was younger, and had more free time than now. As I grow older, I found I hadn’t time anymore to invest HOURS in a character, or pay for a monthly subscription when I wasn’t sure I would be able to play the game. About the new free to play games, I honestly think it’s plain stupid to pay $5 “for a sword” when you can get complete new games for the price of 2-3 swords Also I like games with plots and writing, so that’s not really what I want. But know many devs making a fortune with free to play / MMO games.

Will I be making a online game? No, not really soon. But who knows, maybe one day…

As I’ve mentioned before, March is the month where a bunch of people at the Lemmasoft message board try to release a game in 31 days. I was planning to participate myself, so I produced these sketches of the main heroine.

(warning: Nudity inside. Click to continue)

Well, they’re certainly far from perfect, but I knew from prior experience that I could fix them up on the computer and make them at least acceptable. Besides, since I only had 31 days to put something together, it wasn’t exactly realistic to expect flawless art.

Since I do have a manga professor now, I went to his office and asked what he thought of them. And then he metaphorically whacked me over the head with a massively over-sized paper fan (I do live in Osaka now, after all) by telling me that I was just too slow.

It seems that a talented doujin artist would have been able to make one of the above sketches in less than five minutes. That’s pretty embarrassing, considering that it took me over three hours to make those two sketches. And even then, he told me that most manga or galge publishers generally do not recruit artists at Comiket or other doujinshi conventions because they know most doujin artists can’t keep up with the insane speed required to meet deadlines. Releasing just a single doujin manga a season really is unacceptable, even if the said manga has flawless art, because most mangaka need to pump out 180 pages of manga a week just to make a bare living.

What’s more, he said that my line art was too strained, mostly because I was drawing too slow. I needed more smooth, flowing lines, rather than the frustrated lines present in the above sketches.

Now eager to improve, I immediately slapped together a sketch in 15 minutes in a wild frenzy.

Well, that was pretty much a disaster. It’s like a 9 year old’s interpretation of what would happen if the artists at Shaft made Hidamari Sketch while drunk.

My professor then told me that many manga artists begin as assistants to other mangaka, so I should try to pretend that I was somebody’s assistant and try to copy his/her art style. Well, it sounded like a good tip, so I decided to pretend that I was an art assistant at Leaf for a bit.

What followed was pretty much an amazing improvement. The above pictures don’t look that impressive, but once you consider that I made those four pages in the same time that it took to just make a single one of the sketches at the beginning of this post, you can see that my draw speed was actually four times faster than what I thought it was.

I presented these four sketches to my professor and he was impressed enough to call it a “breakthrough.” He did add quickly afterwards that I still needed quite a few more breakthroughs however. Hah…

Reassured, I produced some more sketches at full speed ahead.

Well, it looks like all those hours of painful practice was worth it after all. All this time, I could produce pretty good quality sketches four times faster than what I normally could. It’s just that I never actually tried to draw faster because I thought I’d mess up. ._.;

I must admit, drawing all of those sketches was pretty fun too. I was working in the main lobby of my school. Gradually, one after another, more and more aspiring manga artists who came to Japan to improve their skills showed up and we began to work together. Then the other students who were also manga fans showed up and watched us work. That was the first time in a long time that drawing was entirely enjoyable without any frustration.

Now, the next big breakthrough I need to make is learning how to make original characters. All of my sketches so far have been of other artists’ characters, so I’ll have to learn how to make my own soon. But I’m pretty optimistic that things might actually turn out well for a change.

The only problem is that through all of this, I completely forgot that I was actually supposed to be working on a visual novel that I was going to release at the end of this month. Well, so much for that!

Filed under: Art, Japan

I like putting pictures in my blog, so I'll put up pictures that I've been able to work on. My CGing has gotten WAY better.



Old character of mine that I wanted to doodle. She has a twin...



Who I frankly did not give any justice to. ;;



Quickly colored in this lineart I had months ago.



Gift for a friend.



An updated version of this picture. My first attempt at using a tablet. It hasn't even been a year since I've gotten my first tablet and I was able to improve leaps and bounds from that point.

I'll have another spam dumping tomorrow.

My brother came over to help me brush up on some basic photoshop editing for my sketches.   So far, just to outline the sketches I did on paper.

I’m having so much fun creating my sketches on my tablet.   It definitely beats creating them on sketching paper as far as finalizing it to be a clean look.

It took me between 15-30 minutes to outline one figure.  It took some time getting used to, but I’m getting more and more comfortable with the tools.  Drawing on photoshop seemed to me a bit more wobbly than using the SAI tool to smoothly follow outlines.

Anyway, here is a sample outline I did using the SAI program and Wacom bamboo tablet

(NSFW)  http://gallery.pixaelsoft.com/displayimage.php?pid=35&fullsize=1

I am open to any comments or suggestions from artists who are experienced or also getting started like me drawing using a tablet.  I would love to learn more

Enjoy!

-Richelle (artist)