corvarrow | Entries tagged with video games

Website Stuff

Got some more character pages up as well as the actual Ahveph City page. Patting myself on the back for pre-linking everything to that in advance because there were A Lot. Ahveph's two main hobbies are Sions and also Buildings. If it is not making sions (which, sometimes it does not), it is making so many buildings.
Curio 2 - Started doing the writing for this, and I could actually probably start piecing things together in the offline version, just with a bunch of placeholder graphics. Again it is not remotely as complicated as Tunnels is, it's just a small silly project. I may or may not put the "coming soon" spot in the actual Curio section just to like. Motivate myself.

Art Projects

Curio 2 - With that said ^^^^^, I am actively working on the "main" big graphic even though I still need a bunch of smaller ones. Like, the sketch and lighting mockup is done and I've already transferred it onto a nice piece of paper. Next is the first pass of lines (for Reasons, I'm skipping the more detailed sketch lineart pass I usually do), and then painting. I really don't think this one is going to take that long. I did end up opening CSP and play around with blocks to get the shot I wanted because otherwise this was going to be a little too intense for me.
Somewhat relatedly, thinking about NOT participating in Artfight this year. I have participated the last 3 years and I'm pretty much always really busy in July with IRL stuff. It's so stressful. I'm also not really amused at the whole "rule update" debacle. Yes I know they are revisiting it. Yes I know "no tracing models" is not a new rule. I wasn't using models for artfight so this doesn't really apply to me anyway. I just think their choices are fucking obnoxious, for multiple reasons. Also, it's a game. For fun.
Anyway for reference I'm open for trades year round, you just have to ask.

Video Games

Was really wanting to replay Shadow of the Colossus again, but didn't want to dig out my PS2, or PS3....then I figured out it was released on PS4! Like 7 years ago! So I was able to get a cheap copy and started playing it again. This release is BEAUTIFUL. It was already a great looking PS2 game but this version is wildly gorgeous. This is one of my favorite games of all time, but I usually forget to mention it because of how much the game is like....vibes. Contemplation and vibes. I don't even know what the colossi are named. Like, I know they have names listed...somewhere, it's just that it doesn't really matter all that much
Also ended up picking up FF14 again. We'll see how long. Working on MSQ NG+ some more. Also decorated my apartment into something kind of respectable now (not just stuff in my inventory I threw out at random), and I finally finished Shadowbringers Shared Fates and got the Amaro minion. This was actually a long-running goal I had and I'm so happy. I need to work on Dawntrail stuff as I have almost nothing post-MSQ unlocked (and I'm still on 7.3 anyway) buuuuut. We'll get to that later.

Current Music: 07022016 by falls

Website Stuff

What did I do this week...uhh...I got a bunch of minor Places pages up, one character page, plus I have some more places in the works.They mostly just need to be pasted into the template and uploaded. After this batch is done the majority of the Place pages will actually be up besides the sentient cities.
Some character pages are also in progress, like Painted Rivers, I just got sidetracked back onto the locations :Va

Art Projects

Beacon Swords - Been doing more research this week and so far I am thinking I am going to draw the handle shapes more inspired by Chinese Jian swords. I was looking at non-European swords that were straight, double-edged swords that were actually used for battle and they fit the bill (being mostly military swords but also had very ornate variants), aaaand the handle shapes look fairly easy for me to draw. The guards are a lot more square and closer to the blade, handle is thick and fairly long, and I'm also seeing a lot of these flat disk-like pommels with stuff on top...which would be great because canonically Aki uses the top of the Great Sword as a platform. I still need to test this out though and kind of visualize what it would look like from a distance.
Chibi Character Art - I didn't forget about this idea, I still want to do it but then I realized I really have not drawn a lot chibis in so long that I'm trying to remember how I did them. Lots of futzing around going on here. So far I think I've determined that my preferred proportions are 3-4 heads tall. I think normally I draw around 6-6.5 heads 🤔
I have a really extensive "Art Ideas" list that has gone back for years but I always have a really hard time deciding what to draw (possibly due to. the size of the list at this point.), so anyway, I do want to do some more "Fancy Art" and I'm trying to figure out what next, and I am SEMI considering picking up an old "playlist art" idea I had. That is, I have a playlist with a handful of songs I get fairly strong visuals out of, so I could do a piece for each song. Still thinking about it, not really committed yet
Still need to work on Curio 2 art as well. One of the main pieces is maaaybe probably going to require me doing minor messing around with 3D models to get some angles referenced correctly. Or not

Other Stuff

Video Games - Been hitting my FF14 playlist since the announcement of Evercold and I got all pumped about Shadowbringers again...I love Shadowbringers so much...I picked up my NG+ a bit this weekend as I was at ARR NG+ 6/6 and I forgot how ungodly long the post ARR patches were. It's okay though, because the story is still interesting (as I can now remember what these characters were about), and I'm still salty that the cutscenes, camera angles, overall composition etc are still better than Dawntrail's. Anyway I still remember the first time I watched the Shadowbringers trailer (while I was still in Stormblood) and it being like complete NEURON ACTIVATION sooo yeah. Kinda want to play Shadowbringers again.
Watched the Exit 8 movie yesterday, based on the game of the same name. IDK what I expected, because the game does not have a plot, but actually it was pretty fun! better than I expected. I would say its one of the better movies based on games. Perhaps because it is free to just do whatever. You can also kind of play along with 'spot the anomaly' and it's not obnoxious about showing you what you missed!

Website Stuff

Got the plane pages up but they took a little longer than expected as I kept getting sidetracked by other things and I have like 0 energy for anything at the moment. I'm doing my best. We're in the loooow energy zone
Did pull up my plane maps though and spent a bit adjusting them. Renamed some stuff and added the locations for Kelcher's End and Twelve Winds Over Stone Over Sea. Even though it required a lot of pondering and the maps are ultra zoomed out, has been incredibly helpful. Originally I was not going to make specific art pages for these but I decided that I had a lot more to say than I thought so now that is the current project.
The next pages after this probably arrrree going to be some of the simplier locations to describe

Art Projects

Community zine piece still progressing and still looking fabulous. I really should have started loosely plotting out big pieces way sooner than this last year; it makes things go sooooo much smoother than just 100% winging it 😂 No guessing where I wanted lighting to go. Anyway I got the first layer of paint (acrylic ink) on this thing, and need to do maybe a little more before moving to the details and final linework
Still a little head empty about other art though 🫠

Other Stuff

Played through Call of the Sea last weekend. Really short, has a couple technical issues (all dialogue resets if you save halfway through a level and you get to listen to everything again next time), but overall I liked it! It's a Lovecraft inspired story but for ONCE it is not a dark story, so that was refreshing
I want to do another round of commissioning people but it's so hard between the shyness and kinda wanting skeb style/artist choice stuff. I have no idea what to tell people for poses otherwise 😭 I can barely handle stuff I want to draw myself LOL

Website Stuff

Mostly only did some minor things in the background the last week. More formatting updates, removed the Misc directory page for now (zero plans atm so it was Bothersone)
Uhhhhh I'm preparing to add the pages for the Planes of reality soon so I made a little template for that. I don't think (?) these pages are going to be terribly long (??) but you never know. It is going to be another multi-page update though.
Oh on that note I have been meaning to rename one of the planes for a while and finally came up with something satisfactory, so I need to remember to update any pages that have the old name too. Memory Plane --> Echo Plane, as after all the updates over the years I think this is more accurate as to what is going on now
Curio #2 - Did some more testing and I THINK I am finally, mentally set for how the pages are going to work. If I'm feeling particularly industrious I might start putting them together soon and just use placeholder images until those are done (it's only going live when it's actually all complete though lol)

Art Projects

Transferred the lines for my zine piece to a nice piece of paper and did the initial inking! Now I just need to nail some stuff, tape it down, and start painting. That might be a task for next weekend though. Although the due date isn't for another month and a half I am not sure there has been much action from other people on this so 😂 We'll seeeee
Still wanting to do some chibis for my character pages so I'm trying to psych myself up for that. Started the week off really tired

Video Games
Ahhh video games.

Got all the knickknacks in Lushfoil Photography Sim. You're supposed to relax and just walk around and take pretty pictures, but you have to do some collecting in order to unlock locations as well as accessories (such as the drone for aerial shots). So now I can actually relax! hahaha. though what sucks is I didn't get credit for completing 2 levels so I'm missing achievements. Like it gave me the full game 100% one but it bugges out on giving me 2 of the level specific ones. Really weird.
Also beat HiFi Rush! I have some really mixed feelings on this. I REALLY liked the characters and the design of it all but really struggled with the combat needing to be on the beat. I don't think my rhythm is actually that bad but 🤔 I suspect the issue is a combo of it being new songs that I don't know the beat of, and the rhythm bar looking like a steady beat when it's actually dynamic. I did way better on the songs I was already familiar with (like the NIN tracks) than the original ones. But I mean like. Ignoring the combat, the game was great.

Website Stuff

In the middle of reuploading my Lost Kingdoms 2023 art challenge! Took a while to get the pages staged but finishing them off and posting is going fast
Also doing a general maintenance update and fixing all internal references to relative rather than absolute. Basically the headers and navbars were hard referencing the neocities.org pages and there's no reason to do that. I work on my PC and then import them, and the folders have the exact structure as the live site so. Doesn't need to be looking at online stuff until it's actually online.
Got ANOTHER curio idea... this one is probably the easiest on a technical level but it would be one that would basically go up and be ongoing/open forever. (I will spoil it slightly and say it's basically "where selected writing snippets go and where future ones would be stored")

Art Projects

Managed to color in Thynarail without ruining the drawing (which was an actual concern) aaaand now I'm back on the "What do I draw" path. I did at least determine that Thynarail is kinda rancid LOL. Kind of dig it because I don't have a lot of shit personality characters. Not a full antagonist (I get bored of Big Bads), just a rude-ass person.

Other Stuff

I got an extremely Big Brained idea last night. I have tons of writing stored online between Ellipsus and LegendKeeper. I also now have the power of HTML and CSS. There is really nothing stopping me from making an offline worldbuilding/story website for my use only with full details and organization. (as opposed to the stuff I pick and choose to put online). BUT DO I HAVE THAT KIND OF MOTIVATION....? that is the true question.
Video games! Playing two at once right now. #1 is Boyfriend Dungeon, which is...okay. I like the characters for the most part but the pacing is strange as fuck. There are three dungeons, I'm not even done with the second dungeon, but it seems like I can go see the final boss now, on the overworld, if I want. okaaaay. Game #2 is Lushfoil Photography Sim. Basically several locations IRL have been recreated in LAVISH detail, and you just walk around in them, taking pictures. There are challenges where you are presented with like 6 pictures and you have to go find those spots and take the picture, but really the main point of the game is just wander around and try to get pretty shots. I had bought it to take my own "reference photos" where I can control the lighting, but it's just very relaxing.

Current Music: Brand New Phone - New Arcades & The Bad Dreamers

Website Updates

In an attempt to """procrastinate""" the sion info pages I ended up writing all the other initial species pages...it was like 8 of them in a couple days.
I did end up STARTING working on modern sions today and ooohhh boy. I have pages and pages and pages worth of notes so I was just going to do a summary. I thought I was going to be clever about this though, because MANY years ago I did a little species sheet which summarized them at the time, so here I was thinking I could just crib my own old summary. It turns out, because I'm not super precious about my lore and revise stuff that I don't like anymore or doesn't work, it has been revised so much that barely any of the original ref sheet is usable. Whoops.
Oh Well. I'm looking at this again and I agree with all the stuff I dropped, lmao. They are much more interesting now, to me. Just stinks that I am going to have to freshly attempt to summarize things without getting too far into the weeds or like, spoilers. There's so much stuff that I just have to dodge writing about. Like a couple extra secret subtypes besides just Architects! I just hope that I can drop enough hints throughout the whole website for people to pick up what is actually going on as far as Ahveph and modern sions go

Other News

Well In other news I have been working at it all month (January) but I finally finished BALL x PIT and got all the current achievements! It just got a free DLC update with new characters, but there aren't any cheevos tied to them.....yet. I played them a little bit (Falconer is S tier omg) but I don't think I have the strength to go through all the levels again right now. Great game though
Need to finish Lies of P next. I got mostly through the DLC but stopped at the secret boss to obsess over BALL x PIT. I am not super thrilled by that boss so I might just skip it. Otherwise I think its a cool game. Really dig what they have going on with the narrative and can't wait to actually finish the game just to see where it goes.
Unknown what game next! I want to work through some of the stuff I already have installed but I already forgor

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: ラブレスナイト (Loveless Night) by Dan Mason

404 Image Progress

Completed, final title is "Are You Lost?"
Cleaned up, prepared for website

Banner Image

Worked through a couple different thumbnails, think I have one that's going to work.
Ideally I'd like to be able to resize/reuse it for multiple places (DA banner for example)
Trying very hard not to overcomplicate it though. It is probably going to have a bunch of leaves on it; even more so than the 404 image lmao

Other news

Apparently my salt was so great that I started on and off playing NG+ on FF14, starting with ARR. Yes, all the way to the beginning lol. Actually, its extremely enjoyable at x10 speed when you can fly everywhere and solo all duties they give you in 3 min or less. I now remember why I liked this game. I feel like I can focus on the story more, they really throw a lot at you while expecting you to Vibe for a bit on the different maps.
Felt like playing an FPS so I picked out Singularity from my backlog. Aside from no subtitles and some weird control mapping (which you can rebind), I like it a lot so far. Too bad it undersold when it was released!

Current Music: Peacefulness ~ Sibewest

Alright, some background, I played FF14 for about two years straight, then burned myself out at the beginning of last year. I have still been playing attention to updates though, and resubbed for the latest moogle treasure trove because I really wanted two of the TT cards. I then decided to go through Dawntrail while the sub was still active because, you know, I paid for it.

Anyway I finished 7.3 last night and here are a couple thoughts on the experience as a whole

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