God School: Assignment 7

[thinkslogically]

Assignment Seven



ÔÇ£Excellent work everyone! The plan is coming together nicely! Heh!

ÔÇ£Ok. So this week, weÔÇÖre learning about the path tool which, as you know, is good for drawing curves and curves are most often found in natural settings rather than dungeons and cities.

ÔÇ£Every hill, wave and sand dune can be drawn with the curves of the path tool, and this brings us neatly on to your assignment for this week!


ÔÇ£Last week, across almost a dozen Universes, one little goblin broke into an extremely well-guarded dungeon and escaped with a highly valuable treasure. That goblin is now running for its life to bring that treasure back to safety with all my- <ahem> ITS enemies hot on its heels! So your task for this week is to show us how it escapes across the wild places of your world. Now these guys chasing you are tenacious, so chances are they'll chase your goblin over a LOT of places before you find somewhere safe. What I want you to do is show me the chase and your goblin's daring escape into the wilderness! Ideally, it'll cover 2-3 different types of environment, but see what you can come up with.

"So - get that treasure away from the people hunting it and bring it to some wild, out-of-the-way place that no-one will ever think to look for it. WeÔÇÖll worry about building somewhere to store it next week; this week all you have to do is find some suitable real estate, whether itÔÇÖs the bottom of the sea, in the middle of a desert, on the ice floes or deep in some dark forest. Use your imaginations, be creative and show us your world! Oh - but don't take it to your secret lair unless you want to have angry hordes of adventurers knocking down your door! Good luck!ÔÇØ

-------------------------------------------

Next lesson / assignment will go up in 2 weeks Enjoy!

[Nerre]

There is a bug in the matrix: assignment 7, but still a 6 in the picture?

Also, thanks for the 2 week deadline!

[thinkslogically]

Yeah it's been like that since lesson 3 / 4 I think after Arles split his stuff into 2 lessons. I'll fix it eventually!

[GathersIngredients]

I'm sorry to say so, but I think I can't make this week's dead line. Again.

The weather is so hot here lately (up to 39┬░C - that would be 102,2┬░F I think), it hardly cools down at nights and I sleep very little because of that, too; that I feel like my brains are melting and dripping out my ears, so I am less inclined to stay inside (and turn on something that produces heat, like a PC) longer than I absolutely have to.

So I'll be doing this when/if hopefully soon some thunderstorm brings the temperature down a bit and maybe I can think straight enough again to read and actually understand the instructions here and in the lessons thread.

[LAYF]

And I two, am sorry to say that I wont be able to complete this assignment... I don't know... I... I just feel stuck :S

[thinkslogically]

Fair enough. This is starting to feel pretty lonely in here though... Ill post the next lesson on Sat cos it's written anyway, but I'm probably going to call it a day after that if there's still no interest.

We can pick it up later if there's enthusiasm down the road, but it's a lot of work to keep this up and the next set of things really won't work without at least a few players. No guilt, I know you're all busy, but just let me know when you want to pick this up again.

[LAYF]

Yea.. I understand you.. I think the main problem is that many of the contestants already know most basic stuff.. so its hard to get yourself up and running... making it... you know what I mean?

And.. I am sorry.. cause you do a terrific work Thinks... so... yea

[Nerre]

I had the same problem as gather. To hot to do much work. Was already hard enough to upgrade my game.
On top of that we were renovating our basement. Had to paint many many m┬▓.

[LAYF]

Again.. not the deepest effort.. but... still...

► Show Spoiler

[BeanDip]

Nothing quite like realizing the God School assignment that you've been working on for two hours sucks so many balls. On the plus side, I did redesign the goblin sprite into my own style! Check it out while I redo the entire assignment from scratch.

► Show Spoiler

It's a much better design than my first attempt at spriting. It even has a little rope belt!

[LAYF]

I must say, I really like your ears, But what i like the most is that fact that your face are drawn by hand, that is; you have not used a circle and added two identical ears. but the face is still symmetrical enough to look right. that does give your sprite a unique look, in the good sense of the word

[BeanDip]

So I changed my technique a lot and experimented with this one. You'll notice some evolution as it goes on. Hope you like it. Comments always appreciated!

► Show Spoiler

Obviously, there's still room for improvement (and for correctly placing my commas...) but I really enjoyed doing this one and I really like this new style, especially the speech bubbles. I had them round originally but switched to the square style about halfway through and I prefer it. I realized pretty early on that I didn't need to lead the speech bubbles to who was speaking; the color and placement was enough to indicate who was talking. So yup... any other thoughts or questions?

[thinkslogically]

Bean that's awesome! The new style works great and it seems like you're a lot more comfortable with it. Your sprites look great and the backgrounds are lovely (I especially love the rainforest!) and I really like the details you've added (the dust swirls in the dunes for example). The speech bubbles work great and are completely clear, just watch out for which font colour you use - the bright green is fairly hard to see against the white (though not enough to make it illegible). If you were running a game you'd need to make sure they didn't cover up anything important in the background that your players might want to use, but for 'cutscenes' it's pretty perfect.

The only thing I'd say is that your underwater bit looks a little plain when compared to the more detailed forest / desert areas, and for some reason in panels 2-4 there are squares in the background where I guess you've cut the speech out and patched a bit of sky over the top? If you keep your speech bubbles as separate layers you can avoid the 'blocky' look.

Otherwise, it's really nice. Thank you for sharing it!

[BeanDip]

The only thing I'd say is that your underwater bit looks a little plain when compared to the more detailed forest / desert areas, and for some reason in panels 2-4 there are squares in the background where I guess you've cut the speech out and patched a bit of sky over the top? If you keep your speech bubbles as separate layers you can avoid the 'blocky' look.

That's exactly what happened, I wasn't using layers at first and just pasted a square of sky over the text bubbles. I couldn't undo the text bubbles without undoing a bunch of other changes so I was stuck with the blocky sky. No big deal, learned my lesson. I just couldn't get the underwater scene to look how I wanted it to but I liked the idea of a cigar-smoking, mustachioed, sushi-serving octopus too much to cut the scene.

[thinkslogically]

For sure! There's no reason at all to cut it, but what did you want the scene to include? Maybe we can figure out a way of doing it.

[LAYF]

So.. finally took the time to look it through

Looks great Bean
As Thinks says, nice new style, fits you.
I like how you are not afraid to change "zoom" and "view angle" and thus have to create whole new sprites of the same objects/creatures, that's a thing a always dread, not because I have to make a new sprite, but because I have to make a sprite that others know how it "Should look" giving they know the object in advance... but you dig great... 3 thumbs up for you

only one thing I noted.
In the first frame inside the big space fish thingy, the chest suddenly gets transparent in its lid and looses its outline.

My guess is that you copied the chest from the previews image, and when removing the black background, you lost the outline and those black lines by the lid that was connected to the BG.

one solution to this is to newer use "real black" in the images, but uses something like 010101 or the like... same goes for white, use FEFEFE instead of FFFFFF.
another is to ALWAYS copy from a sprite sheet...

personally, I mix the two... but I try to go for the later, because that way I also always update my sprite sheet if I make new positions.

Your speech bubbles, while they work nicely as they are.. I'd say you should add an outline to them... its no problem in the involvements you've used so far, but in snow, a salt mine or some other thing (plane of pure energy?) it might be hard to see who talks....
one easy way to make the outline on the "directors" is to draw a medium small black line and then draw a small white line inside....


All in all, really good effort Beans And I look forward to see more

[Borys]

OK, now I'll upload this pic, by pic, so I'll not loose it again... and yes this was a lot better, before...

[Borys]

I was in a good mood today...
here is pic 2/3 assignment 7:
http://i.imgur.com/TcMqiEM.png
Oh yeah, I know it's empty as fuck. But once again, I'm really lazy, when it comes to recreating pics I've one already.

[Nerre]

Just red this, beandip, your adventure is really great and long.