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By N2H
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Book cover for A Theory of Fun for Game Design, by Raph Koster

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Art Archives

Quick dragon sketch

August 23rd, 2008
Quick dragon sketch

Quick dragon sketch

Was noodling around with a dragon to add to a Metaplace world I was fiddling with, and sketched this. Then I ran it thru a few Photoshop filters. Been a long time since I put a doodle up on the blog, so here it is.

This was done first with Adobe Sketchbook Pro on my tablet, using “pencils” “airbrush” and “paintbrush.” Then I brought it into Photoshop and filtered one layer with charcoal, another with craquelure, and blended the two together with around a 60% opacity. For comparison, the dragon’s head used to look like this.

His wings don’t line up. Oh well. :)

Posted in Art | 21 Comments »

Sweeney

May 17th, 2008

Sweeney Todd disposes of Pikachu

We watched Sweeney Todd tonight. The kids had my tablet PC in the room, so I grabbed it and doodled a bit. Then they got ahold of it. It was a bad end for one Pokemon who got the closest shave of his life, and perhaps ended up in a meat pie.

Was a bit disappointed that “More Meat Pies!” wasn’t in there. Or this lyric, which has stuck in my head ever since some of our friends in college staged this musical as their senior project.

Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd

He served a dark and a vengeful god

He shaved the faces of gentlemen

Who never thereafter were heard from again

We’d been telling the kids for weeks about those two bits, singing them over and over…

So, why can the kids watch this with us, but not GTA? Good question. Perhaps because Rockstar just isn’t Sondheim for me yet.

Posted in Art, Watching | 23 Comments »

Gorgeous retro arcade images

February 23rd, 2007

Rosemarie Fiore has some really beautiful time-lapse sort of images of old arcade games. I am particularly taken by Gyruss, Tempest, and Qix. I want!

Posted in Art, Game talk | 2 Comments »

The journey is the reward is a f—–g lie

May 19th, 2006

The journey is the reward

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Art, Game talk | 79 Comments »

New t-shirt: Games Ate The World

January 21st, 2006

I tossed a new shirt design up on Cafepress. I figured, hey, it’s likely to be the poster for the PARC Forum talk, plus also it was the main cover for the Korean edition of the book. Might as well have it in some other fashion.

Oh, and Alice: I specifically thought of you — there’s women’s styles. :)

Edit: Well, there was drama. It got yanked from CafePress on Sunday, with trademark being cited. Today I got the official email confirmation that the images are OK — and people have been buying the shirts, so… go for it.

Posted in Art | 1 Comment »

Another year, another website redesign…

November 26th, 2000

I hope you like the new artwork. That’s what happens when I take my first vacation in a year. I had meant to also do some recording this week, but I didn’t get around to it, unfortunately.

So what’s changed? Let’s see… first off, this (News) is now the front page of the site. This should make it a little easier to find out if I’ve bothered to update lately. The Guestbook is still around, but you have to go to the Main section to reach it. I also got rid of the old Bio section and old front page and moved that content into Main under About. I tried to save all the guestbook entries, but if you entered a message right when I was putting up the new site, yours may be gone.

Under Gaming, there’s plenty of new content. For a while now, I’ve been working desultorily on a book on online world design. Some excerpts were published at The Rantings of Lum the Mad a while ago, but now I’ve decided to go ahead and toss up more here on my own site. Look under the “Book” section for that. Also, I’ve been working on a breakdown of typical design patterns for online world design (mostly extracted from the book, actually) for a GDC presentation next year. So that’s up there under Essays as a set of Powerpoint slides.

Under Writing, I finally went ahead and put some actual content in under Poetry, Fiction, and Genre. Hope ya like it. If you’re an editor starving for an author, lemme know. In fact, out of all the stuff in the site updates, this is the area that I’d most like to see comments on. I don’t write much anymore, and the stories are mostly a decade old, but I started out as a writer and I am sure that someday I will go back to it.

I reorganized the Music section. I recently wrote a guitar instrumental that I titled “Alice” after the character in the comic strip, and I’ve put up the sheet music and guitar tablature to it. There’s also another small guitar instrumental piece there called “Memorial,” with sheet music and tab.

I got rid of the Teaching Materials section under Books. I can’t locate any of ‘em (somewhere in the garage no doubt). But I did add a new page on what I’m reading lately. Only four books there right now, as that is all I got to over the holiday.

There’s a couple of new images under Art; a new doodle and two ink pieces from over ten years ago.

In other news, I recently did an interview for Joystick101.org. This site is devoted to academic critique of games, developing a critical vocabulary, etc, and the folks who run it are all involved in academia. Check it out, leave a comment, support the site, whatever. :)

Posted in Art, Game talk, Music, Reading, Writing | 1 Comment »

Artwork update

July 1st, 1999

It’s been a while since I touched the Artwork section. So I figured I’d toss up some of my recent doodles (under Artwork/Pencil). No, really. They are fairly elaborate doodles. Plus some of them have tentacles.

Posted in Art | 1 Comment »

Laws Updated, Computer Art Section Added

October 12th, 1998

Added Computer Art to the Art section, and updated yet more Laws.

Posted in Art, Game talk, Writing | 1 Comment »

Academic Papers Added

August 29th, 1998

I added academic papers to the site. Other active areas include art and gaming.

I launched the site in October of 1998. A previous site tied to LegendMUD still exists.

Posted in Art, Game talk, Writing | Comments Off