Tag: DIY

Stamp Making

The completed FalseLogic stamp print

Remember in Art class in high school the unit you did on prints? The teacher stood at the front of the class and talked a little about print making; she made sure to mention woodblock prints and silk screening, the fact that woodcuts are reversals of the image you want and that you need to cut out the negative space… She might have mentioned something about good design. At the end of the lecture though the teacher handed out something she called linoleum but was really E-Z-Cut and some sharp objects with which you could carve it up. You then did so and at the end of class you rolled some ink on the block of E-Z-Cut and made some prints. It was a lot of fun and educational. What?! You didn’t take Art in school? Too bad. You could have learned a lot in an art class. Welp, now you know just some of what you were missing! (we also did a nude study and played with oil paints!)

Sketching out some ideas for my first stamp. The one on the bottom left is the one I decided to go with

I was thinking about art class last weekend and about those old print lessons. My town has a decent art supply store and on a whim I decided to make myself a stamp. At first I thought I’d do something fancy like a hanko seal but then I realized I didn’t have the delicate carving tools necessary for one nor did I really want to spend the additional $ to get them. I can always make one later, as the E-Z Cut blocks are quite large. I decided a simple stamp would be best to start with, especially so because I only had an x-acto knife to work with. The first step was to get some ideas on paper. I decided to do a 1-inch square stamp and because I couldn’t think of anything to do I just did an ‘f’ and an ‘l’ (for FalseLogic). After I sketched out a couple of variants I picked one and went over it with black marker. You really have to lay the ink on thick if you’re going to get it to transfer. Once you’re stamp design is drawn and inked press it on to the block and rub it in, without moving the paper around.

The stamp cut out and the design transferred over to it. Once the design is on the stamp you can go over it again. Make sure the lines are all clearly defined. You don't want to accidentally cut any parts out because of a faint line...

Now comes the hard part! Well, the hard part if you only have a razor blade, box cutter, or x-acto knife. If you have some actual lino-cut tools you’ll be in much better shape. I didn’t and I ended up cutting out part of my border and had quite the time removing the cut portions of the block. The actual tools are U-shaped and remove the block as you cut it. I had to get creative… Anyway. You want to cut out all the parts of the block that you don’t want to hold ink. For my stamp it was the white area. I carefully began cutting out the block, being especially careful between the border and the top of the ‘F’ and between the two letters. This step is by far the most time consuming; You want to go slow and not making any mistakes though. One bad cut and you’ll have to start all over.

The completed stamp. As you can see the top part of the border got cut off. I used some modelling glue to re-attach it. I admit it isn't very pretty and the cross on my 'f' is barely visible.

After I cut out all the white I went back in and tried to clean up all the lines and increase the depth of the cut. I wanted to make sure that the only thing that would transfer ink would be the black marked parts of the stamp. It didn’t take long and I only cut off one tiny part of the stamp (easily fixed.) Once that was all done I cleaned up the stamp removing any excess black ink and all the little bits and pieces of E-Z-Cut block. Then came the moment of truth. I didn’t have any of the fancy print inks (their quite thick and you’re supposed to roll them onto the stamp block.) I did have an ink pad though and it worked fine, the stamp came out a little more textured than I thought it would; I suspect that is because the stamp block doesn’t absorb any of the ink as a normal stamp would. I think it turned out good, you’ve seen the end result at the top of this post.

I’m hopeful about my next attempt. I might even attempt a more complicated design or one that at minimum more people would recognize.

 

Mind Sweep: Actions

A list! Everyone loves lists!

Once you’ve winnowed your tasks down to the ones you are actually going to do, discarding or putting into the “Nice to do sometime folder” the rest, the next step is to break the project down into it single tasks. This can be difficult and might seem ridiculous but it’ll save you time in the long run. While it seems ‘moving furniture’ doesn’t need to be broken down into steps. It does. Will you need someone to assist you? Is the area you’re moving the furniture to clear? Will you need tools? Are they out? Thinking all of this through now will make completing the project/task much quicker and organized.  The list above is all the projects that made it through the winnowing process. I’ve also lined out the first task and the one following. Some of these projects will be completed in a single action some require many.

Current Progress

You can see the updated list above with the progress I’ve made on these projects. At this point you just need to keep track of new projects and to break them down as they come in and make sure you continue to work on the next tasks for your existing projects. A simple list like this on paper, or on your smart phone is sufficient to manage your projects. Though there are a number of fancy ways to go about it. Just remember that your wallet can’t help you be a better organized person when it comes to productivity products…

Designer Diary: De-making King’s Quest: Maps

That's more fitting for IF, don't you think?

Making rooms is the easiest thing you can do in Inform 7. the code consists of nothing more than: “The Castle is a room.” That single short sentence after being compiled will create a single room in a very simple and very boring IF game. Add this to the end of that sentence: “”Your view is dominated by a large, weather-beaten castle.”” and now your room has a description. Add “It is north of the Road. It is east of the Mountain Pass” and now your IF has three rooms and if you were playing it you could freely move between the them. The entire program would look like this:

The Castle is a room. “Your view is dominated by a large, weather-beaten castle.” It is north of the Road. It is east of the Mountain Pass.”

Since making maps was the simplest part of designing the game I decided to start there with the KQ de-make (KQD). I printed out a copy of the the map for KQ1:

Daventry as designed by Roberta Williams

I figured I’d just make a copy of the map and be done. It’d be super easy because I didn’t have to do anything but cut and paste. As I started to do so though and I as I looked at my map in Inform. It didn’t make a lot of sense. The map for KQ has a lot of unused space in it. Daventry is a 6 x 8 grid with 48 screens in it. Of those 48 at least 20 of them have nothing in them that the character can pick-up or interact with. In some of them random creatures might pop up but there is nothing for the player to do but admire the primitive computer art and read a couple of boxes of short, descriptive text. While this seems like bad game design, and it is, at the time what KQ was doing was completely new. This was the first PC adventure game that allowed players to walk through a world and just look at the surroundings with their eyes. Before KQ you had nothing but descriptive text. If I did copy the map as is, I’d be creating rooms in which there was nothing for the player to do. Some empty rooms make sense to create atmosphere, but having nearly half of them was too much.

Another thing you’ll notice is that the maps consists of screen capture each area of the map consists of a single image that filled the computer screen. The player moved from screen to screen traveling left, right, up, or down. This makes a lot of sense for a grid-like world. IF though doesn’t have screens and therefore is not based on a grid, the convention in IF is that the player can move in not only the four cardinal directions (N,S,E,W) but also the four ordinal directions (NE, NW, SE, SW.) If I were to use the original map in IF and add in the ordinal directions nearly every place would be accessible from the other  and mapping as well as memorizing routes would become overly complicated.

I’d like to say I noticed this almost immediately and quickly corrected the problem… I was done with about 1/4 of the map before I realized I was making useless rooms and over-connecting them before I realized that this wasn’t a “good” idea. I took out the printed copy of the KQ map and started mashing rooms together, deleting others, and incorporating some rooms into larger regions (important for things later.) I went through four of five iterations of the map before I settled on the one below. As I move forward though there is no guarantee that further changes won’t be made.

King's Quest De-make map

The second level up is the Cloud Kingdom, the first is the mountain stairway between Daventry and the Cloud Kingdom (as well as the upper reaches of a single tree) The starting level is Daventry. CS is the Castle where the player starts. The Castle and the tan colored tiles around it were where I started making the map and still have the cardinal directions as the means of passage, this is the “developed” part of Daventry and have the right-angled roads would show that. The blue and pink regions are the two rivers in Daventry (here named Leams and Nene) the river in the east is where the gnome is located the one in the west is where the hole to the Leprechauns. GH is the witches’ gingerbread house, GP is the Goat Pen, and CF is the clover field. That should be enough to orient you. While the original game contained 48 rooms (not including interiors and the cloud kingdom) KQD only contains 34, a reduction of 31%.

With the map done the next step will be adding descriptive text to each room. I plan on ripping much of it from the original and then populating the rooms with objects and characters. Once that is done, and that is a lot. I need to create the code that will allow for the solving of puzzles, the interaction of various objects, NPCS,and the ability for the players to interact with said NPCs.

I got a lot of work ahead of me.

If you have any questions, comments, criticism, help, etc. Please do leave them in the comments I’m very new at this and I’m interested in whatever you have to say.

 

Mind Sweep: Next Step, Winnowing Tasks

I talked a little last week about Mind Sweeps and my most recent attempt at getting all the tasks that were taking up my mental real estate onto paper and out of my head. On paper where I can deal with them and they don’t prey on my unconscious. If you haven’t read that post go ahead and click on the link above and read over it. The post is very short so it will only take a minute… Back? Okay, as I stated back there sitting down and spending the five, ten, twenty minutes you need to get all the tasks you think you have to do onto paper. Doing that though is just the first step in the process, the next step? Is winnowing that giant list down into something workable.

My Mind Sweep after winnowing through it all

What is winnowing? It’s an audit of your tasks. An honest audit, lying to yourself isn’t going to help complete any of these tasks. First, go through the list and do all the tasks that can be completed in the next two minutes (if you’re familiar with GTD, you know what this is.) Second, consolidate any of the tasks that are part of a single project into said project. Third, eliminate any of the tasks that you know you’re never, ever going to complete. Fourth, if you absolutely can’t part with a task despite knowing you don’t have the time or inclination to do, put it into a “Nice to do some day” folder.  As you can see from the above image out of an entire page of tasks I’ve eliminated most of them, consolidated some, and moved others into the “Nice to do some day” folder. At the end of it I’m left with fifteen odd tasks.

After winnowing down the list the next step is creating tasks for them, which I’ll cover in another post.

Question: Does everyone already know this stuff? Am I the only person interested in this kind of task, mind, information management stuff? Let me know in the comments below!

 

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