Friday, June 29, 2012

Dwarf Fortress Pixel Background


The other night I decided that I was going to stick with the Superbrothers Sword & Sworcery: EP (Ballad of The Space Babies) style. And yes, that is the full title. Although does it compare with DF's? Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress Histories of X and Y. Huh, DF wins by 6 words.
Anyway, Did this background (1920x1080), used the font. Did all the jobs (not including military occupations) in the order they are found in the Z-Menu.
A spin off conversation had the G+ community chastising me for not originally putting beards on the kids. This lead to a comment about a baby swaddled in its own beard which Becky consequently illustrated. It looks cute as! In a gross way of course.

During the last raid one of my soldiers and a puppy didn't make it to the draw bridge in time, falling straight down into the moat. Suprisingly they both survived after falling a couple stories and then hitting the ice below. They spent the rest of the siege down there until I realized they were still alive. I dubbed the soldier "Timmy" and made him captain of the guard. One day he's gonna have an awesome wardog as well.

Saturday, June 23, 2012

Snow: Episode 12


I managed to do this one while juggling baby sitting my nephew and niece with Becky. It was super hard. The parents stuck 'em in bed and they went to sleep and it stayed that way until our job was over.
Strangely this episode was harder to write than last weeks, which was the most text heavy one we have done so far.
We tried viewing the comic via iPhone. It's a little unwieldy. To make it easier we could stitch an entire episode together rather than having a pile of strips stacked on each other. The problem is that the reading mode where you can click on the top one and scroll through them individually full screened on your desktop would be totally ruined. Hmmm. We'll have to keep discussing it I think.
Oh yes, I totally did some more pixel art last night, I've been itching to do more, but I had to get Snow out the way first. This one is me with a Dwarf to protect me from things that have a weakness against sledge hammers.

Friday, June 22, 2012

Swords & Sworcery

I think I've nailed the style on this one.
If you have steam and haven't gotten or seen Superbrothers: Swords & Sorcery then you're really missing out, it's won awards and everything. I watched Matt play through the entire thing while drawing Snow. It was quite an experience. So much so that I've made some art inspired by it. 
The main driving force behind me drawing these two pieces (so far) is Jim Guthries music. They recently released a remix of the original stuff which is really good.


I also fell over his stuff again while watching Indy Game: The Movie. Which is another thing you can go get on Steam. Yeah, you can buy a movie on Steam. It's totally worth it. It seems as though the internet is full of a lot of good things after all. Jump onto Jims Bandcamp to find his other neat stuff. Makes good background stuff.

This first attempt looks a little shitty.
Oh yeah, one last thing to go check out. I'm doing a choose your own adventure type deal over at G+. If you're familiar with MS Paint Adventures and want to participate in something similiar feel free to post a suggestion!
Edit: As per the request below by Becky, I've done another one as a background for 1920x1080 asect ratios.


Thursday, June 21, 2012

Colour Me Someday & Wellington

Drew this for Beckies Colour Me Monday. Unfortunatly what you see is a screenshot, since it went and crashed at this point. Fortunatly for me I was zoomed out when it happened, so I managed to get a shot of the whole thing.
Back from Wellington! It was rad. Spent a lot of our time on Cuba Street. It's like K Road, except with less transvestites and titty shops. A quick rundown of what happened (since I'm never gonna do an extensive post on what happened, time has taught me this.)
Figuring out that flying domestic takes less ID than buying alcohol. Finding out that having a cold and your head getting compressed by air pressure at the same time is a really bad combination. Taxi drivers talk a lot, lonely bastards. Hotel rooms without microwaves destroys all hope of eating in. Walking A LOT. It's freezing down there, got a new replacement beany, which looks a lot like my last one (so I don't need to learn how to draw a different pattern). Never thought I would come back to Auckland and say "wow, It's nice and warm!" Te Papa has a giant disgusting squid, which was disgusting. Did I mention it was grossgusting? Becky cripples anything that vaguely resembles technology. The sticker/street art down there is sweet! Wholly Bagels suck! Why are there three of them? One barely warrants existence (opinion based off two bagels). Graphic is awesome. Although I was disappointed at the amount of RPG stuff they had. The pile of second hand bookstores helped sate my thirst for bound words. Monday nights at a comedy bar are pretty much dead, but it's fine, since they cater all the jokes to us, cause we're the only ones there that aren't comedians.
Cadbury cream eggs kind of look like baby poo when they have been smooshed into your underwear. Prometheus is a sweet movie if you aren't bothered with things like details and answers.

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Snow: Episode 11


Man, 11 episodes and we only just get to find out Aarons name.

A fun story that culminated while producing this episode: Yesterday Matt gives me a call from the driveway "You coming or what man?" "Oh crap! Hold on, just putting shit in my pockets!" "If you're in the toilet you're not getting in this car." "Ha ha, ok hold on."
Later I'm back at home, it's 2 in the morning and I'm halfway through drawing Snow. I decide to actually properly look at my phone. One text. Its Matt. "So I'm totally outside your house." A chill literally scampers down my spine... Then I remembered it was a text from way earlier in the day.

Well I'm in Wellington at the moment. But I can't tell you what it's like, since I'm not actually there while I'm typing this. But by the time you read this I will be. Unless you're a late bloomer and aren't reading this till 2013, in which case I'm probably in Auckland or something. When I get back I'm sure I'll have all sorts of fun doodles to show you of our experience down there.

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Dwarf Fortress Misc Stuff



Things have been piling up on G+ about my many adventures in Dwarf Fortress land. So I decided I better put them all in one place before things get out of hand. Itoneddud is my third fort started in the year 257 (thank goodness my dwarves went and carved it down, I wouldn't have remembered otherwise.) It started off pretty shakey when I thought I'd be clever and drop a huge piece of land through the aquifer. Unfortunatly I wasn't very smart about it and neither were my dorfs. They sank to the bottom along with all the available picks, leaving the whole fort paralysed for a year or two since I was unable to expand. Their ghosts still haunt the living, bugging them about not being properly buried. Probably doesn't do a lot for morale.
The comic at the top highlights the dwarves list of priorities in stunning detail. I used Beckys "Colour Me Monday" Palette. You know how you get those little day planners in the mail from real estate agents who want to advertise on your fridge all year round? Well if those things got delivered to a fort the top most priority would already be preprinted for their convenience. "More beer. More excuses to drink beer."


This was the reason I made the font in the first place. Seems as though I went to a whole lot of effort for nothing doesn't it? Cats aren't very welcome in the fort, since I heard they spread like wildfire. And the frame rate of my game is already starting to chug with 200 dwarves under my command.



So this guy has been wandering around for a while. I took pitty on him and removed a lot of his job obligations, but he still insists on dragging his guts all over the fort. He's super slow as well. I thought that if I gave him a desk job that might keep him busy, but apparently he still prefers lugging rocks around.

I originally thought that he had  found a new carting system, like sleds or something, until I checked out his health state. It's ok, he's gonna live... Forever apparently. After you get your guts falling on the floor people just start to assume that nothing can kill you. Cause you're probably undead anyway.


 Drawn by Becky. I got some Drakes for a mean bargain from some traders. This was going to be my secret weapon, I was going to train them to rip my enemies apart, Itoneddud wouldn't suffer the fate of Archcrafted! With bated breath I released my drakes into the paddock. Then I found out drakes are actually male ducks. Man eating ducks would be kinda rad though...

Sunday, June 10, 2012

Snow: Episode 10


This took way to long to do. Also there's been two new panels added to episode 5. The first of many tweaks I think.
Edit: Speaking of which 25/6/12 this episode got a slight art edit. Totally forgot The Slyer of the Seven Winds satchel thing he has strapped to him.
I guess that's what I get for drawing this episode at a party. Totally got help doing purple hair guys thought bubble. I couldn't stoop to such a level.

Saturday, June 9, 2012

Dwarf Fortress TTF Font Download


So yesterday I wanted to make a joke regarding slaughtering kittens in Dwaf Fortress. But I wasn't gonna settle for just a screenshot of the text. So I went off to download the DF font. What I found was that it didn't exactly exist in any typical sense, and that it was based off Code Page 437. Jack_Bread on the forums mentions that the closest you could probably get to it was Fixedsys. Not close enough for me!
I also found some converter thing that looked far to convoluted for my interests, So I decided to go make it myself using BitFontMaker2.
Now we can finally have the font in a format that is actually useful to us. If you think the font is rad, go give Tarn some money for making such an awesome game. If you see this floating around somewhere else being sold or something, tell them that the wrath of Armok is going to be called upon them.


For all you web designers out there, feel free to embed it into your sites as well. You can use @font-face or any other method you can think of to get it up.

P.s. The wall tiles are totally messed up. It was a real fudge fest. The font itself is based off the 800x600 tileset that comes with the game. the glyphs ©® make the dwarf faces.
If you see any errors in the font send me a comment and I'll fix 'em up.

P.p.s If you do anything with it be sure to throw me a link. I'm keen to see what people do with it.

Edit: 10/6/12 Added the other two versions of the dwarves, bearded filled and regular filled (aka the warrior icon)

Sunday, June 3, 2012

Snow: Episode 9


To be dreadfully honest with you, I have no idea what an unprocessed wolf pelt even looks like. I know. I know. It's something everyone has had experience with and I'm totally missing out.
Now I'm going back to my boring job of cleaning crocodile teeth and turtle therapy.

Bad Taste Comic Idea

Snow is gonna be late this week, but to make up for that I've drawn this. It was pulled directly from a conversation I had. Everything in there relates to true events.
Oh yeah, if you're a gamer / sci fi person go check out Quins blog. If the first two posts are anything to go by, he will be a worthy addition to your list of blogs. I partly inspired him to start up! But don't blame me if it gets bad, 'cause I really had nothing to do with it. Unless it gets really big in which case I totally was his mentor and I actually wrote it all for him.