Vilya's Workblog

Today I bring to you our first prototype of the giant Thorn-Worm boss!

Of course, the graphics are mostly WIP, and the boss fight won't take place here (we just used this area for testing purposes), but the encounter itself is fully playable and just in need of some minor tweaks:

Remember, this is just the first step of the encounter. Once you've done some damage to this guy, you'll end up with two of these on the playfield! Oh dear..

Man, I had so much fun painting this portrait! I just love painting odd-looking character, where I literally don't have to care how pretty or handsome they are. So this guy works in the monkey laboratory, as an assistant to another scientist (who I haven't gotten around to painting yet).

He's a little strange, but that's OK! :)

A quick post today, featuring a few fixes I made to things I already showed in the blog previously!

Starting with the famous "Granny's house", as you might remember I mentioned that I totally forgot adding cracks and whatnot to the roof. Here's what it looks like before and adding them:

I also remade the interior windows a while back, and hadn't gotten around to adding them to her house yet! In this case, both a past and present state were needed:

Next, some vines growing on the house next to the inn, on the left part of the map:

I might add more - perhaps the entire top side should be covered? What do you think?

Finally, to avoid any misunderstandings about being able to go back into the left house of the first zone, I threw in some rocks blocking your path to the entry:

See you next time! :)

And now it's time to transform the past version of the Inn to its present, abandoned state! My goal here is to make everything look old, as always, but also to make room for a fight (as there will be some fighting taking place here in the future)

The Inn in the Past

First up, I dull the colors of the walls and floor. I also remove the bar, so there will be more space for fighting. The wall decorations have mostly been lost to time, but you can still see where they've been:

Next up, I move the bar stools around, break a few of them, and start working on the tables and carpets. Since there will be a fight here, I make sure you can now walk on top of the tables by removing their legs:

Finally, the shelf and some details. The shelf has become mostly empty, with some spiders nesting where the liquor used to be. Some bottles remain, scattered throughout the inn. There's also moss growing on the wooden walls:

And finally, a GIF of the progress:

Time for another interior! This one is the Inn, one of the buildings on the left side of Tai Ming's second zone. This is the past version, which will feature a bar, some tables and a bunch of guests drinking or eating here in their spare time:

Looks a little empty without the NPCs huh? In another update I'll be adding some more decorations as well - as I uploaded this video I thought it'd be cool to add a flower decoration to the right of the door. The door leads downstairs to a storage area, by the way! It'll be important in your upcoming quests... :)

Sometimes you learn a new way of doing something that makes your life so much easier, and you really wish you knew about it earlier. For me, this is the case with Photoshop all the time (there are so many ways of doing the same thing!!), but even more so lately.

It began with me looking for an easier way of adding more than one image into the same PSD-file. Earlier, when adding multiple artworks to the same image, opened each file in Photoshop and copy-pasted them all, one by one, into the same document. I just figured there had to be an easier way of doing that - and boy, was I right.

Surprised by how much easier it could be, I was encouraged to look for similar solutions to other annoying things in Photoshop. In the end, I had managed to reduce the time it took for me to create a progress GIF by probably 90%, I'm not even kidding.

SO, in case anyone else is interested in this, and happen to not know about these things, here's how I do it now:

Preparing the Steps

In order to make a GIF of the steps, I first need to actually make the image and save snapshots of my progress. Now, I have heard that later versions of Photoshop might have add-ons for this, but I still use CS5 and since I'm really attached to it I don't see myself upgrading anytime soon.

So, instead of having some fancy program saving snapshots for me, I've saved each step manually as a PNG or JPG. And yes, that includes the entire Save-As process, where you have to manually set the file format and name the file every single time.

Well, after some searching, I found a script written by a guy at this forum, which basically allows you to save a JPG automatically when running the script. So, I saved his script to my CS5 scripts folder and assigned a shortcut for it:

Changing a few lines can turn it into a Save-as-PNG scrips as well!

So now, whenever I press ctrl+ä och ctrl+ö (cause I'm a Swede.. ;)) I'll get a snapshot of whatever I'm working on in the same folder as the Photoshop file. I just gotta remember to press the shortcut every once in a while, when I feel it's time to add another frame to a future progress GIF!

Adding the Steps to a Single Document

Now that the steps, or rather, the images that will become frames in our GIF are ready, it's time to load them all into a document. At the same time. Not opening every file one by one and then copy-pasting each of them for like 15 minutes, please!

Okay. So this is built into Photoshop CS5 and I'm sure everyone already knew about it except me. If you look at that list of scripts above, a few scripts above the Save As JPG/PNG scripts is one called "Load Files into Stack". Activate it, select your files and - you guessed it. They all get added to the same file, in order of name.

So with just a few clicks I can now add aaaall the frames I need instead of going through them all manually for hours and hours in total. Can you imagine how stupid I felt when I realized this? Man. If only I had known...!

Making the Animation

Now, Photoshop isn't the best thing out there when you're making regular animations, I'm pretty sure most people agree on that. Making progress GIF animations is something it can do really easily though, especially when you know where to look.

So, you've loaded all your steps into a single file using the Load into Stack script. Now, in order to turn them into a GIF which shows each frame for however long you want, you need to bring up the Animation windows from the Window menu at the top:

Then click the little square in the top right corner of that window to bring up a menu of things you can do - one which is "Make Frames from Layers". This will instantly add each of your steps as a frame in the animation window. If they appear in the wrong order, just click "Reverse Frames" in the same menu!

Now you can set how long you want each frame to be visible. I tend to use somewhere between 0,5 to 1 second for each frame except the last, which I usually keep up for 3-4 seconds. You can hit the play button on the Animation window to give it a test run and see what works for you.

Once you're done, you can just save the whole thing as a GIF, and you're done!

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That's it, guys!! If you have any other (or better?!) Photoshop tips & tricks, feel free to tell me about them! I'm astonished by how much I can still learn about this program despite having used it for years, and I don't intent to stop learning now :)

My adventures with portrait making continues! Honestly, every time I make a new portrait, there's something new I learn or a new problem that appears, it's such a roller coaster. I hope by the end of this project, my skill and consistency will have improved enough that I'll be able to go back and fix or edit the portraits to a decent enough level!

Progress

Some portraits just work out better than others, and some I almost dislike too much to post at all. But I know I can't keep reworking and editing each portrait forever, so the best thing to do is to continue ahead and look back later, when you have more experience.

With that said, this isn't one of my least favorites, though I believe his shoulders look a bit weird (and who knows whether it's apparent it's a guy or not)! ;)

Once again I tried to focus on the Asian theme. Kind of embracing it now before I run out of Tai Ming characters! Unless we come up with more there's 11 left - but at least three of them are visitors from the Flying Fortress, so they will be designed quite differently!

Okay, that's it for this guy, onwards to more portrait practice!! See you later :D

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