eskelley.com/blog

eskelley.com/blog http://eskelley.com/blog/ en-US Copyright 2008 Mon, 12 May 2008 06:00:00 -0600 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification Rocket Man
It's been a busy week, so the only progress I have to show for Starlight is actually zathras' progress. You may recall I mentioned zath would be doing the music for my game, and in addition to a couple previous pieces that I've repurposed, he sent me this piece the other day:

shell.mp3

It's exactly the kind of creepy, psychologically affective music I had in mind for the abandoned spaceship (or space station, I haven't decided yet).

Don't expect much of an update next week--it's hard to work on a game from a hotel room in Simi Valley.

]]> http://eskelley.com/blog/2008/05/rocket-man.html http://eskelley.com/blog/2008/05/rocket-man.html Gruedorf insomnia lame move music Mon, 12 May 2008 06:00:00 -0600 Not Late, Am I? Gruedorf, this week. It ain't much, folks, but it's something. It's a sprite, in fact. Specifically, it's a Nazi truck with a flat tire.

There. Now I can sleep "the sleep of the just"--the just barely posted in time to save his 0% loss standing on the Gruedorf scoreboard, that is.

]]> http://eskelley.com/blog/2008/05/not-late-am-i.html http://eskelley.com/blog/2008/05/not-late-am-i.html Gruedorf art insomnia sprite Sun, 04 May 2008 23:59:59 -0600 Swimming Pools, Palm Trees and Cockroaches
Gruedorf after the jump.
]]> http://eskelley.com/blog/2008/04/swimming-pools-palm-trees-and.html http://eskelley.com/blog/2008/04/swimming-pools-palm-trees-and.html Gruedorf lame notepad Sun, 27 Apr 2008 23:59:59 -0600 Into the Void Core long, strange day.

Speaking of, I took a walk tonight and the moment I stepped out of my apartment building, I noticed something odd. There was an enormous house drifting slowly down the street. Today is, of course, the 20th of April, a date of some significance, especially in a college town like Madison, WI. There were maybe a hundred people standing along Broom Street, staring at the two halves of a big, old, blue house moving along at one mile per hour. They looked predictably bewildered.

Gruedorf after the break. ]]> http://eskelley.com/blog/2008/04/into-the-void-core.html http://eskelley.com/blog/2008/04/into-the-void-core.html Gruedorf insomnia lame Madison Sun, 20 Apr 2008 23:59:59 -0600 Bride of Re-Animated

As I mentioned in last week's entry, when Starlight's heroine needs to retrieve a useful object from the floor, she doesn't so much bend down to get it as, well, squat unceremoniously over it. Even if she hasn't had contact with another living being for over 300 years, that's no reason for her to forgo all decency!

So now, by popular demand, this silliness has been remedied with all new bending animations for the up- and down- facing directions. The up-facing animation is actually not quite finished, so here's the down-facing animation.

Wish me luck today!
]]> http://eskelley.com/blog/2008/04/bride-of-reanimated.html http://eskelley.com/blog/2008/04/bride-of-reanimated.html Gruedorf art DC silliness sprite Sun, 13 Apr 2008 23:59:59 -0600 Re-Animated
The animations that follow are scaled by half.
]]> http://eskelley.com/blog/2008/04/reanimated.html http://eskelley.com/blog/2008/04/reanimated.html Gruedorf art insomnia sprite Sun, 06 Apr 2008 23:59:59 -0600 Frankenstein's Karaoke Phonics The Video Game Name Generator. I had to pry myself away to write this week's Gruedorf entry, but not before coming up with a few dozen genuinely good ideas for short video games (thus the title of this post). But before I start making "Morbidly Obese Dessert Assassins", there's work to be done on Starlight.]]> http://eskelley.com/blog/2008/03/frankensteins-karaoke-phonics.html http://eskelley.com/blog/2008/03/frankensteins-karaoke-phonics.html Gruedorf art random starlight video games Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:07:07 -0600 And the Bridge Will Bring Us Back Together
I'd like to start off by apologizing for last week's terrible post. No, please don't go back and read it to see just how terrible it is. My only excuse is that I had a migraine and only 30 minutes remaining before the Gruedorf scoreboard deemed me a capital-L Loser. The pressure got to me! As of this post, I maintain my 0% Loss, 0% Lame standing--I think that means I win, or something! Wait, no, I probably have to finish a game first.

Well, McGrue gave me a pass, this week, to fulfill our ancient pact instead of showing progress on my own game, Starlight. You heard me, an ancient pact. Is your interest piqued? Read on to discover how I can stretch out an entire blog entry about a pixel-bridge!
]]> http://eskelley.com/blog/2008/03/and-the-bridge-will-bring-us-b.html http://eskelley.com/blog/2008/03/and-the-bridge-will-bring-us-b.html Gruedorf art bridge fleetwood mac pixel tutorial Mon, 24 Mar 2008 00:10:47 -0600 Lovecraftian Steampunk Western... with Nazis! ]]> http://eskelley.com/blog/2008/03/lovecraftian-steampunk-western.html http://eskelley.com/blog/2008/03/lovecraftian-steampunk-western.html Gruedorf Lovecraftian Horror Steampunk Tue, 18 Mar 2008 19:37:16 -0600 "It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue." http://eskelley.com/blog/2008/03/it-is-pitch-black-you-are-like.html http://eskelley.com/blog/2008/03/it-is-pitch-black-you-are-like.html Gruedorf adventure starlight Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:37:30 -0600 Gruedorf, meet Starlight Gruedorf, as I so foolishly did yesterday. No, you have to prove that you're making progress on your project. Well, I was making progress up until last night, when I realized that I was going about it all wrong. I was trying to make a Puzzle/Adventure game in RPGMaker VX, which is somewhat like trying to make a sandwich in a blender. Sure, it'll probably taste fine, but the texture will be all wrong, and in the end people will just point at you and tell their children not to do what that man over there is doing. Okay, lets retire the sandwich-blender simile.

More after the jump. Oh, god.. I can't believe I just said that.
]]> http://eskelley.com/blog/2008/03/gruedorf-meet-starlight.html http://eskelley.com/blog/2008/03/gruedorf-meet-starlight.html Gruedorf ags gruedorf sprite starlight Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:58:20 -0600 Stealing is the Sincerest Form of Imitation 0x22.com was one of my more ambitious coding projects / timesinks. It has since fallen by the wayside, and even spent the better part of last year offline. So imagine my surprise when I stumbled across this site. Look similar? It should! It's identical, but for its (eye-melting) color scheme.

Now, I should mention that Overkill (the blogger in question) is an acquaintance of mine, so this isn't totally random. (We hang out in the same IRC channel, as do most of the Gruedorf competitors.)

But this situation raises a few questions. Is it imitation? Is it parody? Is it outright theft of my clearly-copyrighted HTML and CSS? As SDHawk pointed out, my design was generic Web 2.0 to begin with, from its rounded corners to its 'beta' tag, so how much is he really stealing? Where do you draw the line?

Well, I say the line must be drawn here! This means war! I'm throwing down. I'm throwing my hat into the Gruedorf ring. It's on, baby. It's on.

]]> http://eskelley.com/blog/2008/03/stealing-is-the-sincerest-form.html http://eskelley.com/blog/2008/03/stealing-is-the-sincerest-form.html 0x22 gruedorf insomnia piracy Mon, 03 Mar 2008 02:51:27 -0600 Everything I Need To Know I Learned from Digg Diggers are the ever-vigilant watchdogs of the internet, always ready to correct you when you're wrong. Never fear, gentle reader, for enlightenment is a mere five steps away!

Global warming is a vast left-wing conspiracy perpetrated by the greater scientific community for the sole purpose of scamming more funds. And of course that funding comes from your taxes.
Taxation is how the government steals hard-earned money from its citizens without providing any benefits (such as infrastructure, education, or defense) in return. Your income would be better spent on campaign donations for Ron Paul.
Ron Paul is the only candidate worth supporting in 2008 because he will eliminate taxes, legalize marijuana, encapsulate the contiguous United States in an impenetrable bubble and launch it into a low Earth orbit. Plus he won't censor your violent video games.
Video games aren't as great as they were back in the good old days of [insert console you grew up with here]. The Xbox 360 has a 99.9% failure rate; the Wii isn't truly "next gen"; the PS3 has no worthwhile games and costs more than you make in a month. Thankfully you can still emulate Super Mario Bros. on your iPhone.
Piracy is cool, honorable, and absolutely justified. Johnny Depp wouldn't mislead you, would he?

]]> http://eskelley.com/blog/2008/02/everything-i-need-to-know-i-le.html http://eskelley.com/blog/2008/02/everything-i-need-to-know-i-le.html digg global warming piracy ron paul satire taxes video games Wed, 27 Feb 2008 02:01:27 -0600 Artificing on the Cake

"Namtar" is a name I give to any number of current projects. This is for no other reason than that I own namtar.com and feel it is, at present, a waste of a perfectly good six-letter domain name. And should one of my projects pan out, I'd have a URL ready and waiting.

Namtar was an ancient Mesopotamian god of death and pestilence. Also it spells "rat man" backwards. This is mostly irrelevant.

In years past, I worked on a short-lived webcomic called- what else? -Namtar. It wasn't well received, because people expect a webcomic to be funny and here I was trying to tell a story. The only positive comments I ever got on the comics was that they were pretty.

And so my new plan is to tell a story through pretty pictures, alone. I'm a bit out of practice with the whole art thing, but I'm fairly happy with how Namtar #1 (see above) turned out. I started on it around 2:30am and finished not twenty minutes ago. Insomnia has a use after all!

If this should turn out to be an ongoing thing, I will start posting these images on namtar.com. Until the then, the domain remains in a sad state of disuse.

]]> http://eskelley.com/blog/2008/02/artificing-on-the-cake.html http://eskelley.com/blog/2008/02/artificing-on-the-cake.html art insomnia namtar Mon, 11 Feb 2008 07:27:06 -0600 A Return to Greatness
So here it is. My blog. If not a return to greatness, then at least a return.
]]> http://eskelley.com/blog/2008/02/a-return-to-greatness.html http://eskelley.com/blog/2008/02/a-return-to-greatness.html Tue, 05 Feb 2008 12:57:00 -0600