Blog: Books Read in 2020

Avatar. Academy. Skillz. Truth.

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Blog: Games of June 2020

June was a bit weird. I spent most of it happily playing Animal Crossing and trying to find cool stuff to fit in my other time. I had some work I needed to get done, so I didn't really sink into any "funemployment".

My top five games (by play time) for June were:

1. Animal Crossing: New Horizons - Generally the games that get at least a little bit of play time each day end up pretty high on my play time list. AC:NH is a good example of that. It's been really nice to play slow and enjoy the daily play. I think the game could use a few more features, to catch up to New Leaf and also just to give you more things to do each day.
   
   

   

   A Beautiful Night on the Island

   
   


2. Europa Universalis IV - I decided to pay for the DLC subscription, so I'm spending my current play time realing from all of the things that don't totally make sense. I'm still not sure how I feel about the newest DLC, but I'm still having fun. Currently France keeps throwing me into wars which eat all my man power as Castile, but I'm learning.
   
   

   

   A New Monarch

   
   


3. Wargroove - I skipped out on Advance Wars despite it being a game I would probably have liked. Wargroove has proved to be a great game to pick up and play even if I'm finding the "normal difficulty" a little punishing. The style is great and it's fun.
   
   

   

   A Good Boy's Victory

   
   


4. Secret of Mana (Collection of Mana) - I assume I explain this every year, but Secret of Mana is a game you should play in summer. So I am.
   
   

   

   A Confident Moment

   
   


5. Xenonauts - I wanted some slow tactical gameplay to enjoy, which Xenonauts does give. I'm finding the whole thing needs a little boost to be interesting but generally it's still fun if you want to very slowly march some soldiers across a bunch of squares. I did spend a bit of time looking at the mods and I'm facinated and frusterated by how many popular mods there are to "remove all women from the game". Definetly feeling like that's not a community I want anything to do with.
   
   

   

   Almost before anything goes wrong.

Here's my total play time chart for MONTH:

And here's a chart of how much I've played over the month:

Project 12: Chrono Trigger Sprites - Lucca

Not even a year later ... I finished the next sprite in my Chrono Trigger Perler Sprites. Everybody, let me introduce Lucca.

I managed to work on Lucca much more quickly than I did on Marle so I actually managed to build a bit of a process. I'm hoping I'll be able to quickly move through the rest of the cast. I also got to get a little better at using The GIMP and Omnigraffle, so this feels like a productive project.

The Lucca Sprite

I started by determining all of the colours in the sprite and which sprite colour of Perler bead I would use to match them. I did this by taking the original sprite from The Spriter's Resource and then making a new layer for each colour in the sprite and removing all other colours. I also compiled those colours into the grid below. (I gave them names, but they weren't great names, so I think I'd just use the hex codes next time).

There's a few cases where I don't have a bead that's a perfect match. Particularly, the Dark Green should probably be Olive and the Bright Green, Fern. Apparently it's about time I put in a new order of beads. I also beaded a test block in the same pattern so you can see what does or doesn't match.

I've broken out all the details below so you can see which colours are which parts of the sprite and how I matched them.

Sprite Part	Hex Colour	Perler Colour	Notes
	---	---	The Original
	#302838	Purple	Again I'm using purple for the "deep shadow" parts of the outline.
	#281820	Black	The main outline of the sprite.
	#B86817	Butterscotch	The (single pixel) highlight on the blaster barrel.
	#482830	Dark Grey	Most of the shading.
	#F8F867	Yellow	The (again single pixel) bright spot on the blaster barrel.
	#F8800F	Orange	Highlights in Lucca's outfit.
	#F8E0A8	Rust	The leather bits of Lucca's outfit.
	#F89868	Peach	Main skin colour
	#801800	Creme	Skin highlights
	#586029	Dark Green	Hat and sleeve shadows
	#F8C028	Bright Green	Hat and sleeve high lights
	#f8f848	Gold	Leather High lights.
	#ffffff	White	Highlights and her glasses.

You can also download the my .xcf file.

Process

As with the Crono and Marle sprites I decided to do a little addition to make sure that the fused sprite would be sturdy. I also levelled the bottom so that the sprite would stand up right. The only big change that was needed was filling in a couple of sprites on the right side of her face. I wonder if those were a glitch somewhere in my process or even in the sprite.

 

The sprite was pretty easy to build. I did make a good choice in laying out all the necessary beads in the same pattern as the blocks above in a project box.

I found the easiest way was to work from the top down doing a few beads of each colour at a time. 

Success of the Sprite

I'm exceptionally happy with how this sprite came out. Part of that is the improved process I've used, so I managed to go from sprite to fused within a week. That definitely kept my the whole project in brain which made it much, much easier. 

I definitely need to put in an order to get the beads I'm missing. I generally think Lucca looks good, but a little bit off from how she'd normally look. Olive and Fern beads might have helped with that. Overall I don't think she looks completely off from the other two though.

The one thing I'm not sure about is using purple as that "deep shadow" colour. Given that I *have* dark grey beads now, it seems like it might make more sense to use those in the future. I started with the purple for Crono, which I think worked because there were fewer deep shadow pixels. I'm going to keep on with the purple / black arrangement for the rest of this batch and then I'll come back for a second and see what overall changes I made.

The next sprite is Robo and I'd like to wrap it up by July 15, 2020. (I was thinking Frog, but I'm going to wait until I buy a few more green beads.)

Blog: Books Read in 2020

Involuntary. Trust.

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Blog: Books Read in 2020

Self. Affordances! Machinations. 

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Blog: Books Read in 2020

Village. Reminder.

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Blog: Games of May 2020

Later stage quarantine, not actually employed, it was an interesting month for games.



My top five games (by play time) for May 2020 were:

1. Animal Crossing: New Horizons - I don't really know what to say about this one. It's a great refinement of the last main series Animal Crossing and it's very hip. It's easy to pick up, always has something interesting to see and is exactly the right game to have on hand when you have a moment. Definitely a happy place game.
   
   


2. Europa Universalis 4 - Remember in history class when the House of FitzGerald won the war of the roses? I think that's the part of EU4 I like the best when you're able to play with different events in history and look at interesting `ways things could be'. I played my first ever game to completion and did okay. I manage to sprawl The Ottomans across the middle east but got hung up on late game great powers. I ended up pincered between Russia and Venice and couldn't really overcome them. Still lots of fun and I'm looking forward to the next expansion.
   
   


3. XCOM: Chimera Squad - I wasn't particularly sure what to think when they announced this. My memory of XCOM 2 is being perpetually frustrated by turn limits and not quite as drawn into the story (both written and emergent). Chimera Squad seems to fix a lot of that by making the game a series quick and interesting battles. I think the game skews a little bit simple, but I also like that when I do make a mistake it's not a huge reset. I'm having quite a good time with this overall. The game does seem to have some technical problems which they'll hopefully patch up at some point.
   
   


4. Super Mario Odyssey - I love how easy it is to pick this game up and jump into something interesting. I'd love more to do and home there's some Super Mario Odyssey 2 floating around in someone's mind somewhere.
   
   


5. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate - Given that my preference is usually to play games on my own, it's a bit weird to pick this up. But I wanted something a little different than my usual set of RPGs and tactics. I'm enjoying, trying to undo my half-remembered muscle memory from Melee and actually git a little good.
   
   

Here's my total play time chart for May:

And here's a chart of how much I've played over the month:

Blog: Books Read in 2020

Secrets. Details.

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Projects Update: May 2020

What happened to May?

Just at the end of April I finished the coaster project and I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. I didn’t get quite through everything I wanted in April, but I was pretty happy. Then it was halfway through May and I had no idea where I was or what was going on. I will say I’ve been enjoying spring for the most part, although there’s been some quarantine weirdness kicking around my brain as well.

I'm really happy with the new coasters.

I haven’t made a lot of progress on the game tracker and I’ve found it pretty hard to sit down and write, so I’m behind on both of those for now. I’ve also picked up an academic thing I need to finish fairly quickly, so I’m thinking about that too.

Since I haven’t made much progress I’m just going to slide my goal for the game tracker back to June 30. The goal is to have remote storage of data working by that point (along with having tutorial myself on various build systems and remote storage solutions.

I also want to push forward on my Chrono Trigger sprites so I’d like to get Lucca finished by June 15.

Blog: Books Read in 2020

Nu. People. 

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