The Sourcerer

Tale Update

I'm not exactly on schedule for Tale (I intended to have a playable alpha this month), but here's your consolation prize: art updates.

I recently added Fire Drakes and ducks to the Tale managerie. You'll encounter varous breeds of Fire Drake Elementals and Alloyals throughout the eastern face of the world, Oria. The brave and, more importantly, resilient will eventually encounter FrancisDrake, the drake leader.

Additionally, those daring to travel south to Austra will eventually encounter first patrols, squadrons, platoons, companies, battalions, regiments, brigades, divisions, corps, and eventually hordes of penguins. The penguin collective recently added an air-force to their numbers with propellor-beanie sporting aerial grenadier penguins, Aero-pengins, and ballistic-missile ground forces, Rocket-penguins.

The penguins appear to be gearing up for war with Borea, however, the red mage of the North will not be caught with his snow-pants down. The elves have recruited the not-so-friendly poler-bears to introduce penguin to their rich baby-seal diet. The narwhal claims neutrality and you're not likely to find him unless you dive in the frigid Boreal Sea.

Plans are under-way to populate all of the evil faces of the world with popular open-source mascots. You can expect to see the BSD Daemon in the hell-world of Dysia, and maybe even Fire-foxen in Oria. Drop me a line if you think of an appropriate mascot for the /East, perhaps involving fire or ducks, especially if it continues the theme of rougue operating systems.

On a completely different topic, there is new art for Tale accessories including a morning-star, the brick-of-power, and the iTome for manic fighters. These items will be available on the ever-popular face 5, Occia.

That gives me a good an idea. Perhaps there should be an operating system for every face! Faces 6, 5, and 4 (good) would be commercial operating systems while faces 1, 2, 3 (evil) would be open-source. Face 6 will obviously be blighted with drafts; does anybody have an idea for Borea, the north pole?

Also, there's a new item for your initial inventory when you start the game in Euia, a spork.

Glorified

My High School friend Bob Ennis got in touch with me again recently. Bob and I shared German classes. While I'd love to take credit for this, Bob's antics were likely the primary cause Frau Gunn's loss of sanity. Bob later worked on "The Bunny Movie" project, playing the role of Darth Hare.

So, Bob has gotten into graphic design. Bob offered a free sample of his work, a "glorification". This is the result:

Chimaera Mount Art

Kathy has volunteered some concept art for the game. They speak for their selves.

Inkscape

I put Inkscape on my Linux box at work to play with it some time ago, but on account of that machine being particularly slow, I haven't gotten much use of it. Today I installed it on my Windows box and am shamed for my lack of interest. I went through a couple of the program's tutorials (basics and calligraphy) only to find that I'd been missing out on quite a bit.

I'm not very familiar with Illustrator, after which this program ostensibly takes, but I do have extensive experience with Macromedia Fireworks and some with Adobe Photoshop. While I will probably still use Fireworks for web graphics development because of its slice exporting features, Inkscape supports a stunning array of features that should have been with us from the beginning. For one, you can manipulate paths as sets, merging them with union and intersections, allowing you to carve and build shapes. This is a feature I've long hoped to see. If Illustrator has these features, I never found them, and in Inkscape, they figure prominently in the interface, where they belong.

But this is a trifle compared to what I discovered with the calligraphy tools. Inkscape parameterizes your mouse gestures with "mass", "drag", "thinning", "angle" and "fixation". These permit even the least steady mouse hand to make stunningly smooth gestures. Mass and drag add inertia and friction to your stylus, making it steady; thinning decreases your pressure when you move quickly; and fixation determines how freely the angle of the stylus will follow the direction of your stroke. Fixation is particularly interesting because it makes light the difference between eastern and western calligraphy. Also, you can change the angle and width of your stylus with arrow keys, even while you draw.

Here's a graphic I made in the small time I spent playing with it.

Behold, Duckfang!

(Full scale duckfang.png)