Change Is Good
Got sick of managing this project from a loose markdown file and set up a GitHub project . Feels much more… official. Wrapped up interactive fluid layers for now. There’s still some work to do, but most of the worst bugs are fixed. The biggest issue was a case where killing multiple rats in the same vicinity caused spilled blood to multiply exponentially and flood the entire dungeon. It turns out…
Lots done this week! With the holiday's approaching work-work has slowed down and my enthusiasm for game dev has lined up nicely with the additional freetime. I rewrote the water system to be a more generic fluid system supporting multiple layered fluids. Currently the game supports lava, water, blood, and oil. Lava is always on fire and will destroy water and blood - steam hasn't been implemented…
If an entity has material and mass, it has some level of flammability. The flammable component stores entity ignition chance, heat tolerance, and max intensity. It also keep track of fuel, both current and max. There are 10 base materials: Bone Cloth Flesh Glass Leather Metal Oil Paper Plant Stone Wood Rather than real world weights and measures, I use this table to decide the general mass of an…
Wrapping up the fire system is likely more involved than I had originally thought. Isn't everything? I was thinking this morning about making mobs flammable. A rat should avoid fire. This affects pathfinding. A rat that is hunting the player is blocked by fire - but how much fire? Should they risk the one square of flames? Should they plan a route that goes all the way around the dungeon to avoid…
GFX! Got distracted and added graphics. There are bugs that need to be resolved with fire and a lot of loose threads. Why jump in an introduce graphics? Some new shiny I guess. I added sprites from the Kenney 1-bit pack . The idea being, that someday in the far future I'll have an idea of what I actually want to render and can make my own completely custom set. We'll see if/when that ever happens.…
I have made fire! Squid woke me up at 4:30am yesterday, screaming. No point trying to go back to sleep with that racket. The boy is crazy. I made a cup of coffee and sat down in front of the computer. Having punted on doors I decided to try something different and potentially easier. A simple fire system. My first approach was pretty simple. I don't expect the final result to be that much more…
Forcecrusher has doors. If they are open, then can be closed and if they're closed they can be opened, assuming the actor is smart enough. They can also be kicked which makes a loud noise, alerting most of the dungeon. Kick a door enough and it will break, open?, "die". Doors have health like anything else and when that health reaches 0 they die. The sprite is changed to a corpse and they become…
Turned out to be a beautiful day for a ride over lunch. Jerry’s had what I was looking for, a Blackwing pencil extender, but I chose not to spend $10 on a proprietary gadget. I’m liking the Blackwings, but maybe not that much? I had recently bought an extender for normal pencils so I decided instead to just chop off the fancy eraser bit once it gets too small. Works perfect. It felt good to return…
A few weeks ago, while navigating an internet rabbit hole, I came across a week’s worth of visual journal prompts. Breakfast Outfit Book Pet Place Quiet Bedtime (skipped) I enjoyed the exercise but probably won’t seek out prompts again. These pages aren’t for anyone or anything. They go on a shelf and collect dust. It’s not so much the thing but the doing that I find valuable. Sometimes when I’m…
Yesterday, I went to my local Goodwill and purchased a dual cassette recorder. Immediately after I stopped at The Bizarre Bizarre , a used books and music store, here in town. I bought two cassettes, Big Time by Tom Waits and Carrying Your Love With Me by George Strait. Big Time is for listening and Carrying Your Love With Me is for recording. The latter will serve as a donor for my first mix tape…
I am not a technically gifted draftsman. I am not a professional artist. I am not a rock star. I am not a published author. I grew up believing I couldn’t be any of those things. I don’t believe that anymore. I’ve been practicing drawing this week. It’s a lot of repetition as practice tends to be. There’s no finished piece to show off. And most of the artifacts kinda suck. But a wise dog once said…
Summer is over. It technically lasts until September 22, but around these parts summer ends when the windows stay open all day and night. No AC and no heater for as long as we can stand it. Sweater weather is the best weather and I’m here for every bit of it. The following is a riff on and continuation of a comic by Mitchell Volk published recently in his own newsletter. You should read it first.…
Sometimes when you are struggling to craft the words for a newsletter, a baby squirrel might fall out of a tree during a rain storm, crawl desperately onto your wife’s foot, and adopt her. If this ever happens to you, it will quickly become apparent that no matter how you’re feeling in that moment, no matter what you thought were doing, this is what’s actually happening and it’s best to just go…
It’s been a bit. A summer filled with success and also failure. I climbed outdoors for the first time in my life. Learned to repel. Discovered that outside, there are no brightly colored hand holds. It’s a different sport altogether. I don’t think we spent a weekend in July at home. Opting instead to escape to the high country - chasing spring - as a family and with friends. I finished Quad Rock…
I hope you have a wonderful summer doing whatever it is you love doing. I’m going to take some time off from deadlines to recharge by doing whatever it is I love doing.
Fortunately it was just a minor sprain and I didn’t have to hit the SOS button. I’ve heard if you hit the SOS button a helicopter will come and save you - thankfully, I’ve never had to find out if that’s true. Everybody gets one? I feel like the chopper crew would understand…
I’ve been listening to The Essential Guide To Writing a Novel podcast by Jim Thayer. It does a really good job of explaining fundamental techniques that I sometimes recognize but don’t at all understand. In other news, we went camping this weekend. It was a lot of fun! we tried dispersed camping for the first time and it was way better (and easier) than expected. Please enjoy this cartoon about…
This past week I finished reading What I Talk About When I Talk About Running . I’ve nearly finished Novelist as a Vocation and am a good chunk into Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World . I guess I’m on a Murakami kick. The last time I read Murakami’s running book, I started on December 29, 2022. It took 6 days. It was the first book of many and I began to draw again a few months later.…
Within the month of May we did many things. Probably too many things. Mother’s day. A birthday. Girl’s trip to Michigan, Canada, and Ohio. Quad Rock. Family in town for over a week. High school graduation. Read a couple books. Yard work, house work, work work. And somehow in the midst of it all we started rock climbing as a family. It’s been a lot. But it’s been a good lot! And it was that…
This past weekend I went on a 3.5 hour long run. Three times up and down Horsetooth Rock. The first hour I thought of many things. “How long do I actually want to be out today?” “Do I have enough water?" “I’d rather be doing that other thing.” “I should be doing that other thing.” But then, after an hour or so, I leave the place where one thinks about what it is they’re doing and begin to enter a…
Hello! How was your week? What’s the weather been like? It’s spring here (mostly) and it’s been beautiful (mostly). I feel like it’s been a good week - although I can’t quite put my finger on what was so good about it. Just a generally positive vibe. Maybe it’s just the spring in the air. I stumbled on a daily comic substack by that I’ve been enjoying. The author sends out daily single panel…
DO Preserve Human Spirit. What exactly does the Spirit look like these days? What it doesn’t look like is endless productivity. Or content. Instead, it looks healthy. It moves with a familiar cadence. The unsustainable rush of the river has slowed to a more manageable pace. It looks like calm and measured progress. Mostly. Quad Rock is at top of mind. Balancing the volume required for proper…
Why games? Why art? Why any of it? asked a wonderful question yesterday in regards to last week’s post . Do you think the "volume of work" needs to all be the [same] type of work? Could it be a broad creative bridge that is being built to a less specific creative place? I love the idea of a broad creative bridge. We don’t have to inhabit a specific creative place. We can visit many spots along the…
There’s a comic in here. I promise. I have always been a bit of a tinkerer. Some people have no idea what they’ll do when they retire. I know exactly what I’ll do. The same thing I do now - just less of it for someone else. Having a job-job can be a pain but it does force me to see projects to completion. This past week I’ve been working on Skulltooth . Mostly it’s been an exercise in porting old…
Good morning. It’s 3:44am. 40°f with a high of 59. Mostly clear. The valley trails are muddy and closed, the foothills still have too much snow to really run and the high country - well, it’s a couple months before you’ll be able to do anything up there without skis. Horsetooth Mountain Open Space, upper lot, Saturday, March 16, 2024. In just under 2 months I will toe the line at the Quad Rock 50.…
This week I deleted the Substack app from my phone. Despite turning off the alerts I still found myself constantly checking and refreshing. Dopamine, that slayer of boredom, definitely has a hypnotic hold on me and the Substack app is as effective a dealer as any. It’s good for me to remember that it’s OK to be bored. Probably healthy, even. Growing up there was only one screen in our house. It…
In this issue : 95 self portraits, character design morphology, and good advice from an old friend. This whole DoPHS thing started as an attempt to pull myself out of a decade long creative block. The idea was to be honest about the process, and to preserve as much of it as possible. It’s gone well enough that I’m starting to get the itch to work on actual stories. Not just illustrating my own…
I’d like to do a deep dive into the process of making a zine. I’ve made a lot of them this year and while they may seem super quick and easy (and in some ways they are exactly that) there is actually quite a bit of effort involved. Even if it doesn’t always seem like it. Below are all the tools, books, notes, and coffee that went into the one zine we’ll be looking at. There are a few more things…
So I spent a bit of this week fretting. I had a post go low-key viral a few weeks ago. It nearly doubled my admittedly, quite modest number of subscribers in a day. Welcome everyone! Very happy to have you. That said, ya’ll are stressing me out! But don’t worry, it’s not you, it’s me. When I started this whole thing I didn’t really have a plan. I didn’t even know what Substack was when I wrote the…
We spent a lovely weekend in Walden, CO. There’s nothing in Walden. Most folks go the extra hour to Steamboat Springs. We just needed to get away and Walden has plenty of that. So we stayed there and it was fantastic. While away, I did very little of the typical routine. It was nice! But it came with the cost of having to get back into it on the other side. Showing up is important. Even if you…
It’s been a wild week. Busy day job. Old friends coming out of the woodwork. Unexpected drama. Death. Navigating the unexpected alongside the everyday is a challenge, especially when it comes in a tidal wave. It’s times like these where I’m especially grateful for a creative practice to recede into. Here are 6 more zines from the week of varying emotional weight. And an emotional support cat. If…
There’s this theory that you shouldn’t keep a backlog - you shouldn’t save the good stuff for later. As the theory goes, there is a river of ideas running through all of us. Holding on to one for too long will block the river and prevent new ones from flowing downstream. It’s best to take what the river gives you, do the what you can with it, and move on. Each work is but a snapshot of a moment. A…
I’ve been able to make at least one zine a day so far this year and am still really enjoying the exercise. Here are three favorites from the past week or so. recently shared some sketches done as part of a 30 day drawing challenge. It was a nice reminder to keep things low key and just draw what’s around. As a bonus it gave me a chance to experiment with two tone lighting. Not a lot of room for…
It’s easy to fall into the expectations trap as an artist. Making things for an audience, no matter how small, is very different from just making things. When something works - you want to do more of that thing. But sometimes, that thing, whatever it is, isn’t what you should be making. Do you make it anyways - to satisfy an audience? I’ve spent the break reading The Creative Act: A Way of Being .…
I used to listen to music to drown out the world while working. It kinda worked but I had to turn it up pretty loud to get the desired effect which wasn’t great for my ears. Not to mention I’d get distracted by a great song or interesting lyric. At some point I realized that often I didn’t even notice the music had ended and I found myself not actually listening to anything at all. That’s when I…
Back in early October I listened to an episode of the Radio Lab podcast called “ The Secret to a Long Life ”. At the risk of spoiling the episode - and you should absolutely listen regardless - it inspired me to take a few minutes to capture some moments of my day, both the extraordinary and the mundane. In doing so I found that what had seemed like a relatively average day was actually one packed…
On July 28th, 2023 I “ran” the Never Summer 60k in State Forest State Park in Northern Colorado. The race takes place between the Never Summer Mountains on the northern border of Rocky Mountain National Park and the Medicine Bow Mountains to the north of Cameron Pass. I’ve run ultra distances before but not like this. I had trained, but it didn’t feel like enough. Having just come off of a…
I don’t know why but sometimes when I’m in a really deep hole I don’t want to get out. I don’t want help. I just want to wallow. I want to listen to the most depressing music I can find, pull down the shades and just soak up the darkness. The worst part of it is when I’m in a hole like that, I don’t see it. The darkness is blinding and as far I know this is how it’s always been. How it’s supposed…
This was clearly just one of those days. Nothing went right and every new wrong thing just compounded on the last. Eventually I had to give in to the chaos, accept my lack of control over literally anything and go for a run. Afterwards I quickly scribbled down this script and worked through the illustrations for a bit of free therapy. It helped! Things mostly end up ok. I figured out where to pick…
Jared’s video below was a key stepping stone on this latest creative journey. I’ve known him for a while and it’s been such an inspiration seeing his technical skill as an artist explode over the years. He wasn’t born a draftsman or expert painter. He became one over years of intentional practice. I’m still working out what my current goals are and becoming an expert draftsman likely isn’t one of…
It’s been four and a half months since I drew those pages - so much has changed since then. A lot of life happens in that time. My process has has gone through many iterations. As have the concepts and motivations behind this project in general. Doug and I don’t run as much together these days. We still hang out with the kiddos at the park pretty regularly but our running goals have changed. He…
Ever feel this way? I’m a reasonably successful person. I’ve more or less “made it”. I have a family, I have an interesting career, we own our house, we chose to live in this specific city. We are extremely fortunate. Perhaps it’s the knowledge that so much of this good fortune has been outside of my control. I’ve had good luck at just the right time, advantages and privilege not available too…
I’ve been a bit reluctant to share these. Something about revealing my inspirations leaves me feeling a bit exposed. I’m not really sure why. Why did I rearrange the stacks of boxes in the garage so I could reach the heaviest on the bottom? Why did I spend all night sorting through cables to find the matching adapters from a bygone era to spin up hard drives from 15 years ago? Why did I think I…
So, this went about as well as expected if not quite as planned. The route from Bear Lake to Flattop had way more snow than I was prepared for. I made it to Flattop but opted to turn back before Hallett. I’m not experienced enough traveling alone in the high country and wasn’t wearing the right gear (shorts?!) to be traversing an icy rock field in blowing snow. After an amazing time on Flattop I…
We all have our vices right? A few beers, an entire frozen pizza, and a couple hours of completely pointless youtube videos is pretty high up there on my list. In the end it’s all a balance and I can’t expect to be “good” all the time. Maybe I shouldn’t give myself so many guffins. Regret’s probably not the healthiest thing either. I love process. My favorite Disney movie is “The Many Adventures…
I’ve always ridden the waves of a moderately manic personality. It’s nothing serious, and certainly not on par with those diagnosed with actual manic personality disorders. But I definitely find myself surfing high on creativity from time to time. Unfortunately the crest of every wave is balanced out by a trough of equal and opposite magnitude and if I let myself climb too high I risk a…
There’s definitely a bit of a struggle to figure out exactly what this project is. There’s the general thesis that this is in some way an effort to “Preserve Human Spirit”. But what does that even mean? There’s this opposing push/pull of putting things on the internet where one is supposed to add value in some way. Does everything need to add value? How many tutorials does the world need anyway?…
What a weird morning! Kiddo was sick all night, but just fine the next day. She stayed home from school but clearly could have gone. Are you sick or not? Pick a side! If you find your life is a bit too structured, try having a kid. Little chaos factories that do a great job of always keeping you on your toes. I’ve been trying to read more this year. Or rather, read at all. The internet and all of…
That girl is gonna be a trail runner! Or could if she wants to. Who knows where her whims will take her. But at least for now, any hint of competition provides a boost of energy powerful enough to get her over any challenge we throw at her. This one, with the zombies, and running 2 miles back to the trailhead? That challenge was all her own. Speaking of challenges, spent some time trying to wrap…
There’s this thing cartoonists do called hourly comic day. They draw a comic for every hour they’re awake. The official day for this event is February 1. I’ve never remembered to start on time or at all really. Same with Inktober where they draw and presumably ink something everyday for the month of October. I did do 24 hour comic day a couple times. That’s where you draw a 24 page comic in 24…