I had this idea in my head a few weeks ago that I could keep up an insane programming pace for 2 months or possibly forever. That is how I feel when I'm doing well. Well, starting last friday, I have been in a slump just like all the times before. In fact, my programming zone lasted exactly 2 weeks. The 2 weeks before it were a major slump. The 2 weeks before that was a programming zone which netted me $2000 (but I only worked ~4 per day). 2 weeks before that was yet another slump. Do you see the rhythm? Yeah. I'm going to try to do a lot of work tomorrow. If I keep up that rhythm, it'll take twice as long as full speed. And full speed may not be fast enough. I'm thinking about all the work this will be and there is little chance that I can do all that I have planned in 3 weeks even at an amazing pace. So I'll try to find out what I can do in 3 weeks and do it. If I can make a very good demo in 1 week, I can make a small game in 3 weeks. I probably wouldn't want to sell it. That would mean another month to do the work which wouldn't be bad except that I have not figured that into my plan.

There is the possibility that I could release the game and release new stories along with patches. That would add value to it over the long run. But releasing an unfinished product is kinda silly.

What is the lesson for today? It is about today's picture. Who is that in today's picture? It's a character from Hack Mars, but you probably should know him if you are looking here at "Javantea's Fate". It is none other than 'Broken Jav 2034'. He is the connection between Javantea's Fate and Hack Mars. You may or may not know that JF is a fictional future (2016) autobiography of Javantea, the author. Hack Mars is a continuation, but far into the future (2034). Of course, Jav is not the main character in Hack Mars, the player's character is. Jav is a secondary character rather than a tertiary character. Below is a plot giveaway if you like.

So there you have it. But the lesson is important. I scanned Broke Jav 2034 from a decent drawing I did sometime during this fall. One thing I wanted from the picture was the messy hair. You can see how messy Jav's hair is in the high res png version. How did I do it? It was actually pretty cool. I took the vector graphic which is just a traced outline. I selected the hair with a wand tool in The GIMP. I copied it and pasted it into the hand drawn picture. I inverted the selection and filled the image with black except for the hair. I selected the black region and I pasted it into the hand drawn picture. That gave me a picture with only the hand drawn hair in the shape of the hair in the vector graphic. I then inverted the selected black region to get only the hair. I copied it and pasted it into the vector graphic. It showed up in the exactly correct place because the hair was already selected. But I want the hair to be blue instead of grey. The vector graphic of the hair was filled with the correct shade of blue, so I simply went to the Layers, Channels & Paths window and changed the mode to Value instead of Normal. You can test this out yourself fairly easily:

1. Create a new image with a white background.
2. Draw a blue area on the left.
3. Draw a bunch of lines in many shades of grey on the right.
4. Select the lines on the right.
5. Drag them over to the right.
6. Change the mode to value.

There is a problem with this method, though. It can be easily solved. If the value of the blue is darker than the value of the white background, the blue will be lightened to the value of the white background. So then a person must select the area and use the brightness tool to darken it to the shade of the original value of the blue. This is sometimes a pain, but should only take a minute or two. Happy CGing. Happy V-Day, my preciousss.

Permalink