Hey, I managed to not drop an ellipsis at the end of the blog title!

So, I haven't blogged in a while. It gets difficult to write blogs when the only things you want to write about are of non-general interest. Because be honest, how many of you want to hear a five-page tirade about OS development? (Almost wrote one).

I'm probably going to make most of my blogs here about art and music, with a few games sprinkled between. I'm taking my coding rants to Tumblr. Or Wordpress. Or something.

Anyway, have some concept sprites:

Every time I sprite, I try to challenge myself a bit more. Now I've moved onto nearly-fighter-character-sized sprites. This one is 48x96.

Animating it is a pain, but I'm using a proven method. I first drew the first pic, cleaned it up, then imported into GraphicsGale. From there, I painted 'mass zones'. Hence the multicolored figure in the second image.

And then the animation began. Onionskinning is a really useful feature. First I did four keyframes, named "Legs Tgt. Right", "Right Leg Fore", "Legs Tgt. Left", "Left Leg Fore", and then I tweened them. So it's an 8 frame walking animation, looks smooth, and took me a whole day to make.

Of course, I'm putting off the real work: Painting the details back on, all while making it look consistent between frames. Still, it's easier than trying to animate a fully detailed sprite. Because I tried that first.

This is all a major step up from using recolored Megaman sprites, and from there onto the very simple 16x16 sprites I favored. Took me ages to be brave enough to try a full-tilt running animation (Epic Christmas was where that started, I made the player lean into the run a bit, changed the profile a bit, made sure the arms were moving, the legs were moving more like a pendulum than a piston, etc).

Anyway, this art is for a collaborative game I'm working on. Kinda. Somebody in Germany. He wants to use Unity. I want to kill Unity with fire. I'd rather be using GM for this, as it's a 2D project with some minor 3D elements (Some terrain). Also, Unity doesn't know how to draw my sprite nicely. It doesn't know the meaning of "Linear Texture Filtering", nor does it want to.

Right, enough about that… onto:

Music

My forays into music began when I started banging away on a MIDI keyboard a few years ago. My mom was learning it. And so was I, when she wasn't looking. I just skipped the whole 'reading sheet music' thing and focused on the best ways to render the Dr Wily theme tune from Megaman 2 with the Distorted Guitar sound… Yeah, I was only 14…

Thanks to Stevenup, I have a rekindled interest in the theory behind music, and I've been studying several books he recommended. Good stuff, and I can now read sheet music (Albeit slowly, but I commit the important bits to memory).

At the moment, my only instrument is a guitar I was given for my birthday a few years ago. I get in somewhere between 1 hour to 2 hours of practice a day. A guitar is apparently the nearest best thing to a piano if you don't happen to have the latter, as it's range is pretty high.

Maybe one day I'll write a piece for my guitar, record it, and upload it. Also, maybe one day pigs will fly.

On the chiptune front, I'm working on a new minor 'album', and specifically running away from anything I've done before (Starting off in different keys, using upbeats, different timing, different or unusual 'instruments'). I've made a good start so far, and we'll see where it gets.

Anyway, since I have no new music to present right now, listen instead to this: