Here’s an Inkscape drawing I completed today:
Nightscape
I am moving my art & design work over to my world design blog and won’t cross-post stuff here much anymore.
Nightscape
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Category Archives: Starving Artist
Cave Drawing
Still experimenting with Inkscape.
It’s very simplistic, but at least it kind of looks like a cave. (And, yes, I know that water doesn’t look blue in a cave, but it’s still the easiest way to get the idea across.)
Ancient Art
I stumbled across some of my old drawings and thought I’d post them – I made these 16 years ago, when I was still in High School:
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- Alien
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- US Colonial Marine
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- Woman
It’s actually kind of sad that I didn’t draw much in all those years – had I kept practicing since 1992 I may actually be able to draw relatively well today. Amazing how time flies. That’s life, I guess.
CD Cover Game
Saw the CD Cover Game on Pedro’s blog. I thought it was a good idea for some quick fun, but it turns out I had to modify the rules: Most of the images Flickr returned were “All rights reserved” or “No derivative works”. So I simply took the first image that I was allowed to use:
The photo is by Calliyan.
WPNJ01 Theme Released
I have released “v1.0″ of this theme. I’m calling it [wpnj01](http://geek.pandemonium.de/wordpress/wordpress-themes/wpnj/). Yes, very unimaginative, but what are you gonna do. There’s probably a million bugs in it, so let me know if you find one.
Project Dragongate and Project Deadland
I couldn’t believe my eyes: I have found a bunch of old screenshots on an ancient CD. First of all there were five additional screen shots from Project Deadland, an attempt to build an isometric tile engine in the style of UFO/XCOM.
But it gets even better: In 1995, two years before I wrote the Deadland engine, I was attempting my hand at an U6 style tile engine. That project was lost a long time ago, due to combined hard disk and floppy-disk failures. There was even a whole design doc for this one, complete with a worked out story and all. It was a really big setback to my game programming ambitions when I lost all of that. Still, it’s cool to have at least some screen shots – I had thought that none survived.
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- Deadlands – Night View
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- Deadland – Map View
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- Another Map View
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- Another Night View
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- Deadland – Map View
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- Deadland – Map View
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- Deadland – Map View
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- Deadland – Map Editor
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- Deadland – Map Editor
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- Deadland – Map Editor
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- Deadland – Map View
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- Dragongate – Map Editor
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- Dragongate – In Game
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- Dragongate – In Game
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- Dragongate – Title Screen
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- Dragongate – Map Editor
Attentive readers (Hi, Pedro) will probably notice that some of the tiles look a lot like the one in U6, and indeed that did serve as the basis for many of them. But already you can see in these screens that I was working on replacing them (the walls, for example).
Lulu.com Test Copy
A month ago I [ordered a test-book](/2007/05/12/book-publishing/) from Lulu.com. Took them about two weeks to produce and deliver the thing – but to be fair there were several holidays in between. I am pretty happy with the result. The production quality is quite okay. Not perfect, but it’s still impressive. It’s basically a normal soft-cover book. The two problems I noticed were a very fine black line in the upper left corner of the cover; and the pages are not exactly symmetrical. That is, I have a line under the page header. If you look at a page so that the printing on the back side of the page shines through, you will notice that the two lines are not at the exact same height.
Still, I consider these minor problems – The whole technology of “print on demand” fascinates me to no end. With it, it is completely possible for anybody to create books. I know there are critics who lament that this just results in a lot of unprofessional, low-quality writing being published (and I will include myself in the group of unprofessional and bad writers; I just do it “for fun” for myself). But is that really an issue? It removes another barrier of entry for those who seek to distribute their writing. It’s sort of like blogs: There’s a lot of nonsense and garbage out there, but there are also many gems. The audience will be the judge of what is worthwhile to read and what is not: It’s the democratization of the printing press.
As for me – I’m now in the process of proof-reading my old stuff, and then I will order a revised copy from Lulu: I made some changes to layout and so on because I was not entirely happy with what I chose the first time around. Lesson of the day: Just because it looks well on the screen does not mean it is necessarily perfect when transferred unto dead trees.
Book Publishing
Many years ago – actually, ten years ago; has it really been that long? – I used to write. Not much, not very well, and just for fun. Never sold any of it, either. With technology slowly changing every aspect of life it shouldn’t come as a surprise that what was once only feasible to do in relatively large quantities can now be made available to small, customized projects. I am of course referring to printing.
[Print on Demand](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print_on_Demand) has been around for a while, but was usually of low quality, very high cost, and had many strings attached. The German “Books on Demand” service, for example, still asks the authors to sign over rights to the book to the company.
A few months ago I found a service called [Lulu](http://www.lulu.com). I’ve checked them out and they seem to be print on demand “done right”. They act simply as a printer. Costs are still high – but that is to be expected when books are individually printed. However, everything else is pretty decent. What matters the most: The two test books I ordered were of excellent quality.
Of course, with the low barrier of entry, and no quality control by any third party, any moron can publish any garbage using Lulu. If you spend a little while browsing their store you will find people selling public domain works (probably ripped from Project Gutenberg) or the worst kind of “how to get rich quick” drivel.
I’ll join those ranks now and add my drivel to the heap. I’m not yet sure if I actually want to *sell* my work, but I thought it would be a fun idea to own my stories in the form of dead trees. I spent some time tonight and converted my *Tales from [Enderra](http://www.enderra.com)* into a pocket book format.
Publishing a book with Lulu is truly easy; you basically upload a PDF, select a cover, enter a bit of data and set a price. Child’s play.
*Tales* is unpublished, that is, only I can access it. I’ve ordered a “test copy” and I can’t wait to see how it came out. It’s one thing to see a PDF on the screen; the actual physical book will likely feel very different.
I expect manufacture + delivery to take 1-2 weeks; I’ll follow up once I get the thing.
Nils on Air
Well, I am back home. If you wish to listen to me “on air” (on wire, really, this being the Internet, but I guess you could always hook yourself up via WLAN if that bothers you), I was a guest on the [Corey and Joel Radio Show Episode #111](http://www.coreyandjoelradio.com/archives/2007/03/corey_and_joel_105.html) and also on [The Funhouse with Upchuck the Clown](http://wfuckoffradio.com/archives/upchuck_the_clown_20070315.mp3) – the later in disguise, however.
Just a warning, these shows are definitely “R” rated, and the [Corey and Joel Radio Show](http://www.coreyandjoelradio.com/) definitely contains very un-PC jokes. It’s a cultural thing with these wacky Americans.
Project "Deadland"
I have unearthed some memories from my early coding days. Back then, I was experimenting a lot with programming, inspired by the heroes of my day – the guys and gals who wrote all the fun games I loved so much. This particular project was named “Deadlands”, and it was basically my attempt at building a post-apocalyptic computer role playing game.