Sweet, Sweet Posters
3 Mar 10
Every once in a while you come across something that reminds you how awesome the intertubes can be. Zazzle is one of those things.
Sweet, Sweet Posters
3 Mar 10
Every once in a while you come across something that reminds you how awesome the intertubes can be. Zazzle is one of those things.
Sure, more people probably know about Cafepress, and this sort of thing has been around for a while already. Making a custom T-shirt or mug with your own artwork is no revelation, for sure. But over the years it has developed into a pretty slick process, and it's pretty cool how easy and fast it is to whip up a prototype of something, order it, and have it delivered to your door. The process has basically become how people imagined it should be. Pick the item you want, upload your artwork, fiddle around with it until it's just right, and order that sucker right up. And the fact that these places allow you to order even a single copy of your item, rather than mandating cartons full of them, opens up the market to just about anyone.
I was going to use CafePress to print some Vespers T-shirts for the crew helping out with the game, but someone recommended I give Zazzle a try instead. They're pretty similar, but there are a few things I like a little better about Zazzle. So I went with them, and I had a few shirts printed up. Small "ORS" logo on the front breast, larger Vespers logo on the back with the blood stain. Simple design, easy to set up, bing, bang, boom. Vespers shirts for all. Yay Zazzle.
You know you want one. Just say the word.
Yeah, I feel a little goofy wearing this around, but hey, it's my own freaking shirt, you know? (Funny story about the tag line. I think it was Jason, the game's author, who felt we needed to have a tag line to go along with the blood stain logo, but none of us could come up with something that didn't sound embarrassingly bad. He finally came up with "Say your prayers" which, I have to say, is both incredibly corny and perfectly brilliant. Get it? Say your prayers? See the double meaning? Awesome, right? No? Meh, never mind.)
By the way, if anyone out there feels the aching desire (without the accompanying embarrassment) to wear one of these around town, let me know and I can make it available on the Zazzle site. Ponder for a moment how much coolness awaits you.
Anyway, this isn't about the shirt. It's about the posters. Ah, the sweet, sweet posters.
One of the cool things I always liked about Jason's Vespers is how many of the items in the church morph over time as the monastery sinks into evil darkness. One of the best: the frescoes painted on the church ceiling. They aren't described in much detail in the game, starting out as follows:
>EXAMINE FRESCO
The soaring vaults are as vast and open as the arms of God. Frescoes depict the fall of Satan, with angels singing as they cut down the wicked.
That left us a lot of room to interpret, but you get the picture. As the game progresses, the image changes, reflecting the worsening struggle between good and evil, angels and demons. So for instance, at some point in the middle of the game (not really a spoiler):
>EXAMINE FRESCO
The Fallen are overrunning the angels, climbing through holes in the ground and spreading across the Earth. An angel's eyes meet yours and do not break. He is coming.
So this presented an opportunity and challenge for us in depicting the fresco and the changes that occur over time. Part of the problem is that we couldn't realistically put the frescoes on the church ceiling, since it's just too high up to see very well in the game. So we came up with an alternative, which was to have the frescoes painted on the walls of the church foyer.
Behold, the fresco. Click to enlarge.
Anyway, the big challenge, of course, was to find someone who could actually, you know, make a fresco. I mean, that's not easy. People don't make frescoes very often these days. You don't want someone just whipping together a little somethin-somethin and calling that a fresco. It has to be at least partially convincing. If I had the big AAA budget, we'd be looking for someone to research the artwork of the time in order to make a historically accurate rendering. Since it was just me working with the C- budget, I did most of the (hack) research on my own–using works by Giotto and Signorelli as a guide–and gave the information to a few prospective candidates from the most excellent ConceptArt.org, crossing my fingers.
The call was answered, quite impressively I would say, by Régis Moulun, a French artist. Here's his gallery site, if you're interested.
The art majors out there may look at these (eventually, when the time comes) and argue about the stylistic accuracy, but in my decidedly unartistic view, the frescoes he created simply kick ass.
Not to give too much away, but there are a half dozen of them. The one you can see in the image above is the first fresco, the one described as "angels singing as they cut down the wicked." It's beautiful, but it's the tamest of the lot. They get progressively more disturbing, and I love it. Here's a better view of the first fresco in full, with an additional shot of some of the close-up detail.
Weep at the beauty of the first fresco. (Click to enlarge)
A closeup shot. (Click for a bigger closeup)
So like, these are really nice pieces, the kind I think would look great up on a wall. Slapping up a set of the original images might look a little odd, though, but that's where the whole poster idea comes in. A little creative clipping, some small, well-placed logos, and a little Zazzle, and we have ourselves a pretty nice set of posters. To wit:
Your wall is begging you for this. And the other five.
We're currently doing some renovations to our house, and when it's finished we'll have a new office with, I'm excited to say, a lot of empty wall space. I've got all six of these things printed up and ready for framing. I'm really looking forward to seeing them all framed, hanging side-by-side. Is that excessively geeky?
Now, I could show you the other five frescoes, but that wouldn't be any fun, would it? Suffice it to say that I love the first fresco, and it's probably my least favorite of the set. But if there are enough requests, sure, I can show them. And if people think this is something they might be interested in, it might make a nice gift, say, for those who pre-order (when that time comes). What do you think? Posters, anyone?
In Backups I (Should) Trust
22 Jan 10
I never was much of a backup person until I started on the Vespers project. As things progressed, I realized how much content there was to manage, and how important it was going to be to protect it from loss. So somewhere along the way I became a backup fanatic. By my count, I believe I now have somewhere around six active backups of my data, some full backups, some partial. Let me see if I can remember them all.
In Backups I (Should) Trust
22 Jan 10
I never was much of a backup person until I started on the Vespers project. As things progressed, I realized how much content there was to manage, and how important it was going to be to protect it from loss. So somewhere along the way I became a backup fanatic. By my count, I believe I now have somewhere around six active backups of my data, some full backups, some partial. Let me see if I can remember them all.
My main backup is a clone of my desktop development machine. I use an awesome program called SuperDuper! for this. It basically just makes an exact clone of my computer's internal drive onto a secondary internal drive. I have that running nightly, so at any point in time I have an exact clone ready to go, losing at most a day's worth of work.
In addition to that, I also use Apple's Time Machine software to create hourly backups of the main internal drive to a separate partition on the secondary internal drive. So if I somehow do lose a day's work and it's something I really need, I can access the Time Machine backup and get what I need. So in this case I would lose, at most, an hour's worth of work. Not that I think I'll really need a backup of that frequency, but that's how Time Machine is set up, and that's good to know.
Those are two pretty good backups to have, and that alone would constitute a decent backup system (except for the fact that they both backup to a secondary internal drive). For Vespers data specifically (and really, that's the stuff I care about the most), I also create a few mirrors.
I use another nice program called ChronoSync to create scheduled nightly synchronizations of Vespers files to other drives. One copy is kept on my external FTP file server (the one my artists use for uploading and downloading), and another on a separate external drive I had hanging around looking for something to do. I also keep an up-to-date copy of the latest files on my remote MobileMe file space, so I'll always have an off-site copy of things available in case of disaster.
Because I often work remotely on my laptop, it's also nice to have a copy of the most up-to-date build readily available. So for this I use the excellent DropBox. That keeps a local copy of the latest build on my laptop, which is a mirror of the version on my desktop. So any time I make changes to the desktop version, it's automatically updated on my laptop. It's mirrored through a version stored on the DropBox servers, so there is also always an off-site copy available. I could easily do the same thing with my existing MobileMe storage, but DropBox is just exceptionally cool, and works a bit better (and faster) than MobileMe.
Of course, that's kind of overkill. But once you get into backup solutions, it can get a little addicting. Once the home renovations are done and I'm back in the new office space, I'll probably consolidate these a bit, but since they're all managed automatically with scheduled sync's, it's not like it interferes with anything or is troublesome in any way. It's good peace of mind.
The interesting thing comes when the backups are put to the test, as I am experiencing today.
When I woke up today, for some reason my main desktop machine was running, when it should have been asleep after the previous night's backup routine. That's never a good sign. It turns out there was an error during the cloning process, with a dialog box telling me that the main internal drive was full. I knew that there should be somewhere around 20-25 Gb of free space still available, so this was perplexing. After some poking around, it did appear that the main internal drive was being interpreted as completely full, for entirely unknown reasons. Where those available 20-25 Gb of space went is a complete mystery. And although the machine still appeared to be functioning normally, some weird issues started popping up -- for instance, I couldn't open my e-mail program since it could no longer find the designated "temp" folder. I ran some disk utility programs on the main internal drive, but no errors or abnormalities could be found.
I rebooted into the clone, and all appeared as it should. It still had the appropriate open space on the drive, and e-mail was working fine. So it would seem like the best option would be to revert to the clone. Who knows what other weird things will pop up with the main internal drive? And besides, I don't know how I would go about finding where the missing space went and how to get it back.
Still, that would mean erasing the main internal drive and repopulating it from the clone. Cloning back from the clone, so to speak.
I'm not sure why, but that makes me a little uneasy. It shouldn't—in fact, that's entirely what the clone is there for. But I guess I'm just programmed to question what might happen when you lose the original and start working from a copy of a copy. It's one thing to lose a file, or a folder of files, and to just recover a new set from a backup. It's another to restore a complete system from a clone, or at least it seems that way. Still, it's nice to have options.
Kind of interesting to think that my DirecTV receiver's hard drive failed over the weekend, and now this. We'll see if things really do happen in threes.
Riding The Wave
17 Jan 10
Things have been relatively quiet here on the Brew lately, particularly with respect to Vespers. I don't generally post very often, averaging about one blog per week, but even that is being stretched lately, and this is the first blog of the new year. Oftentimes silence reflects little to report from lack of progress, but in this case it's actually a Pretty Good Thing.
Riding The Wave
17 Jan 10
Things have been relatively quiet here on the Brew lately, particularly with respect to Vespers. I don't generally post very often, averaging about one blog per week, but even that is being stretched lately, and this is the first blog of the new year. Oftentimes silence reflects little to report from lack of progress, but in this case it's actually a Pretty Good Thing.
Game development often goes in fits and spurts, especially if you're a small (or solo) team. This has been especially true with Vespers, particularly on the animation front. N.R. has been steadily productive over time with all of the models and 2D art, which has helped us maintain at least some momentum over time. But, as I've blogged many times, it's the animation work that has held us back for so long.
The two main reasons for this are (a) it takes time and effort to orient new animators to the project and bring them up to speed, and (b) for a variety of reasons, animators only seem to stay with the project for a short period of time, forcing me to find new ones and then go through the orientation process again and again. That's been mighty frustrating. But with each new animator comes a renewed sense of hope and purpose, and so we end up with this seemingly endless cycle of disappointment and hope.
And so, as we start yet another year on this project, we enter the next cycle of optimism and anticipation. My latest call for character animators was met with a nice response, and I was able to work it out so that we actually have three animators currently working on different parts of the game. What's especially nice is that two of them have good experience with the Torque system, so I've been able to skip that part of the orientation with them. While it's exciting, it has also meant a good deal of work getting them all up to speed with the project, and getting them the necessary materials so they can start working on things.
So I have some very experienced hands working right now on finishing up the animations for Act I, which means making some final adjustments to Drogo's animations and getting things started on Cecilia's. The work on Cecilia is a lot more complicated and challenging than the work on the other characters, for a number of reasons, so it will be nice to finally get that out of the way. And since there are three animators, we're at last beginning to tackle some of the first animations for Act II which, even though we're not yet finished with Act I, is an exciting and rewarding feeling.
In the meantime, N.R. continues to plug away at the remaining content, working through the list of objects for Act II and beyond. One big milestone was reached this month as he finished up the last of the stained glass windows, which is huge. Because the four windows change six times over the course of the game, 24 different designs were required, eating up a big chunk of his development time. Now that that's out of the way, he can concentrate on the numerous other church objects that change over time, as well as the objects in the cellar and the other objects from later in the game. One interesting challenge was how to design a lock for the calefactory door for Act II -- given the design of the doors, with the ring handle in the center of the door, it wasn't a simple matter to come up with a makeshift lock that Constantin could quickly put together and look like a convincing means of keeping the door from opening. I think the design he came up with should do the job well.
So if development goes in waves, I'm definitely riding the wave right now. Still lots left to do, but we're creeping ever closer to the finish of Act I and the demo, which means we'll be open for some testing soon. Very soon.
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Welcome to Vespers!
Vespers is an independent game currently under development by Orange River Studio. It is an adaptation of Jason Devlin's award-winning interactive fiction (IF) work of the same name. It is an experiment to discover what kind of horribly disfigured offspring might result from the mating of an IF engine with a 3D first-person graphics engine. For more details about the game, click here.
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