learning – SwiftThought

OK so i lost a few days to kids, illness and a mini-vacation to PAX South (which was awesome!)

But none the less, scribbles were made, but i’m having a hard time ‘finishing’ even these things. So I’ve been making myself to more and more thumbnails to just start being able to see the composition before starting on the actual drawing. And i feel that it’s been improving my sense of wholeness of each thing, if that makes any sense. That and watching The Hair lessons on the Magic Box there was a total ‘ah-ha’ moment, where talking about visual rest and the need to NOT render something felt like it clicked. ( see the goblin girl’s hair below)

But finally I’ve watched a bunch of other artist talks and one struck me as particularly poignant, essentailly you should be able to describe your painting in 5 values. Which I did below and a couple of them are fairly successful. Now I used the full range and the same 5 values across the board instead of selecting high key / low key values specific to each thumbnail which was probably a mistake, but I’m actually pretty happy with the graphic result.

Other misc thing a days, that were more of a mental check out rather than focused on actually learning something.

Ok Failing to grasp cloud structure was kinda fun.

Other than the overworked face and broken neck structure.. this was actually much nicer looking 45 min earlier.

Time for a little progress update, eh?

Ok so some more sheep have been done but it’s time to assess the situation and get a firm grasp of where exactly I stand. But first a picture of the prototype tuckbox that the game will be shipping with (some assembly required)

Why Include something as silly as a tuckbox, when it will surely impact the bottom line One might ask. Well the answer is simple, with the last couple playtests it’s become obvious that the system of green tokens to track the value of the current place is massively cumbersome. So I decided to put in a little track sheet that you can just put a couple counters on to track the value of the current place as it is eaten. And the price difference between a 4×4 board and a board big enough to have a tuckbox to be cut out is negligible. So the tuck box is almost free.

But anyway… back to the current state of the game development process. So it turns out that 85% of the time it’s taking is art. That’s right. It’s taking much much longer to draw silly sheep than it is to creating the game and the cards and exporting them and uploading them and writing / editing the rules etc. etc.

Crazy eh?

As of RIGHT NOW, I have Drawn and Painted 60 of 125 sheep. Of those 50 have been placed into their final art location in the inDesign files that are the decks.

I have 65 sheep left to Draw, ink, and paint. A happy estimate would be that if I totally buckle down I can probably do a sheep every 2 hours, maybe a bit more. So let’s call it 90 min. So that’s just a hair short of 100hrs of ART work left to do. Not too terribly bad.

Other than that I probably have 6 hours of editing and tweaking on the cards’ text to make sure they’re clear and are easier to understand.

Then toss in the other little things like re-writing the rules and finalizing the web and packaging art, realistically it’s probably closer to 120 hrs of work.

That’s some really long weekends in my immediate future if I’m to hit my goal of having it launched by my birthday.

Time to buckle up, it’s gonna be one helluva ride to see if I can do this.