HOW THE GRINCH SHOULD HAVE ENDED — Out Now!

Made a free little holiday game about how Dr. Seuss’s Grinch should have actually ended: https://yossarianiii.itch.io/how-the-grinch-should-have-ended

Hello, New People!

What’s up?

So there’s been a modest spike in traffic here since the Qabara the Artist announcement and trailer, and I just wanted to welcome anyone who’s here for the first time!

I considered upgrading to a prettier website so that I could pretend to be a business instead of just one person on the Internet who chose a blog platform that hasn’t been popular for almost a decade.

But I am just one person. And I don’t think most people come to my games looking for a clean-businesslike experience.

I don’t have the time put out vast amounts of content, which is why I put so much focus on trying to make the games themselves an enjoyable experience (or at least memorable). I like mess and rough edges, but I also believe in not wasting people’s time. I hope you enjoy Qabara when it comes out. In the meantime, here’s everything else I’ve done.

If you need screenshots or other press stuff for Qabara, you can find all that on this linked page.

Welcome (Back) to the Site!

Hey, just wanted to put up a quick update for anyone who’s been following my games or who’s discovering this website for the first time through Steam. You might’ve noticed some stuff on this site is out of date. I’ll still update this site periodically, but if you want the latest news about upcoming games, your best bet is probably to follow me on itch.io (https://yossarianiii.itch.io) and Twitter (@yossarianiii)

Also, if you’re interested in the essay-type stuff I used to post here, I have good news: as of today, I’m launching a new weekly irregularly-released newsletter about indie games, culture, and writing called Glass Canon. You can read the first issue (which looks at how to make money developing visual novels) and subscribe here.

Highway to Harrisburg Out Now!

The Highway to Harrisburg expansion of Sex Robot Road Trip is available now on itch.io. If you already own the base game, it’s a free download.

Also, the game is available for the first time on Steam!

NaNoRenO Game Jam, Day 16

 

Do you want to turn this…

 

 

into this?

 

For Banality Man, I wanted the backgrounds to look like Pop Art silkscreens. I figured since the campy 60s Batman is one of the game’s design inspirations, doing something kind of Pop-Art-lite would fit the theme. (I’m also a fan of the Pop Art style in general, and in particular consider the Who’s The Who Sell Out one of my straight-up favorite albums of all time.)

A lot of the preset filters that you can use to distort photos in GIMP are pretty good, but if you want to really control the color scheme, it’ll take a little extra work.

After re-sizing the image to the dimensions I needed, I started by using GIMP’s “Cartoon” filter, which is a pretty cool effect all by itself:

The problem, though, is that because my sprites have black outlines, I can’t have a background with so many black lines in it.

This is easy to fix, though. Just use GIMP’s Select By Color tool and be sure to click on a black pixel in the picture. (You may have to adjust the threshold, depending on how thick you want your outlines to be.)

Once you’ve selected all the black in the picture, switch over to the Bucket Fill Tool and choose a color that you want to replace all the black (in this case, I wanted pink). You need to make sure the bucket is set to “Fill Whole Selection” rather than “Fill Similar Colors.”

If everything goes well, it’ll look like this:

 

Now comes the one potentially time-consuming part (depending on how meticulous you want to be), although it’s still much faster than drawing something from scratch. Switch the paint bucket back to Fill Selection, adjust its threshold, and begin using it to change the colors of the rest of the image. (You’ll probably also want to use the Pencil tool to fill in areas with lots of detail or to prevent the Bucket from spreading out too far.)

This process will get rid of shading, changing the image into something more flat and abstract. Here’s a recreation I did of about what the process looks like midway through:

Once you’ve painted everything the color you want, you’re nearly done.

There’s no need to worry about small details with this method. For example, you can see that there are a lot of little dark spots on the roof where the shingles are, but they’ll all get wiped away in the final step when you apply Gimp’s Oilify filter to the whole image.

And that’s pretty much it! I like that the whole process feels kind of mechanical, since that’s central to a lot of Pop Art. It’s not Andy Warhol, but it gets the job done for a game on a tight schedule and (IMO) looks sufficiently different from the preset photo filters to stand out.

NaNoRenO Development Jam, Day 2

Yesterday was about creating a bunch of colorful, shiny stuff to show people what Banality Man would look like — the rest of this week will be about nailing down the basic script.

Before getting the script, though, I took some time to adjust the mix and master the theme song I recorded yesterday to play on a loop for the title screen. Here it is:

For anyone who makes music and is curious about how to get that vocal effect, you just have to use a pitch shifter plug-in to raise the vocals by 5 semitones. There’s one complication, though: you can’t just sing a song normally and raise it 5 semitones because then it’ll be out of tune.

What I did was to create a buss (group of tracks) that contained all the instrumental parts of the track, then pitch shift them all DOWN 5 semitones. That way, a vocalist can sing along comfortably in a voice that is 5 semitones lower than it should be. Once you’ve done that, you can return the instruments to their normal pitch, then raise the vocals by 5 semitones and it will all (hopefully) be in tune.

This trick was inspired by musicians like Ween and Grimes who distort their vocals, and I think they use a similar technique.

 

 

NaNoRenO 2016 Day 1

I started the NaNoRenO game jam at midnight on March 1st with no outline, no character sketches, and only the vaguest idea of what to write a visual novel about.

I had this idea about Banality Man, a Batman-type superhero who fights regular problems instead of super villains. But somewhere in the process of actually sketching a character, “Batman-type” turned into “boxing neon cowboy with a cape and a cummerbund” — basically a cross between the Lone Ranger and Pimp Lucius. I guess that’s what happens when you design a character at 1 in the morning…

Made some good progress on the script and theme song tonight. Excited to see what some of the other entries will look like this year!