I’ve already had some reactions to this comic that people think it’s a bummer. It is and it isn’t. I guess I’ll talk about this here now.
I’ve been haunted by bad vibes most of my life, and they got worse after my mom died. I have genuinely thought something might be medically wrong with me, and the lack of luck I was having in the job search was just reinforcing the worst ideas that my life was over and I deserved to be abandoned in a homeless shelter.
Having a medical professional say “Actually, it’s not that bad, and you scored really high on a lot of good stuff” is really nice! And I believe them! The tests they put me through to determine where my deficiencies were was very comprehensive. Seriously, I checked into the neurologist at 8:30am and didn’t get out until 4pm. They put me through six and a half hours of tests for cognition, memory, dexterity, reasoning, language, and intelligence. The diagnosis report they gave me was 28 pages!
Being able to put a label on these things is a huge weight off my shoulders. Because what mentally healthy individuals may not realize is that a non-trivial amount of feeling like this is questioning it. There’s a part of you that knows you’re having irrational thoughts but you can’t explain it. And not being able to explain it just makes it worse. You begin to feel like a monster.
Having someone who is literally trained in mental health issues say with total sincerity, “you are not a monster” is a big deal.
The comic is about how I am literally receiving nothing but good news. Obviously in the comic I’m still bummed out, which is a little true. I wanted a silver bullet for this stuff, but it doesn’t work like that. But I know a lot more about what’s going on in my brain and a plan can be formulated now on how to deal with it.
If you think the punchline here is sad then, well, oops! I think it’s funny and that’s what matters. I hope that some day you also get the help you need, if you need it.
And if you’re reading this and you have questions about my neurology appointment or my report, throw me some asks! Talking about these issues also helps a lot and I’d love to share more.
With Maddie’s work I feel like a vet day is a given. The Wachowski boys probably all aren’t used to getting taken care of, so I bet this is a nice change of pace. (Maddie would definitely keep lollipops and superhero bandaids around for whenever the boys come in for a check up)
You ever think about how when some furry animals get injured they have to get that part of their body shaved for wound care?
So if Tails ever needed a real bandage of any kind it’d probably look more like
Any good advice for spritework, tilesets and pixel art? Looking to start making a small game with them.
Anonymous
One: contrast is your friend. The lower resolution you go, the more contrast you need to define shapes. The weird thing about pixel art is that when you’re talking NES, SNES, even PS1 games, generally you don’t actually need more than 16 colors per object.
You certainly can use more than 16 colors if you want, but the more colors you use, the more skill you need in shading and detail. Keep it simple.
I find that drawing something big first and then shrinking it down is a good way to get started. So for example, there was a cheetah robot I was designing for a Sonic fangame once, and I drew the cheetah out on paper, scanned it in, and then shrunk it down.
Same thing with this elephant:
And this dragon:
With the dragon in particular, I tried to draw it in pixel art first and for whatever reason I couldn’t wrap my head around the body shape in a way that made me happy.
Something about drawing it big size, by hand, and then using that as a reference for the sprite helped me understand the shape of the body and legs. And this is something others have done, for example, here are images from the production of Donkey Kong:
Some of this is due to the limitations of development tools at the time (you had to plot out pixel art on paper before entering it into the PC), but as you can see, there are also times where they just straight up drew characters normally first.
Good luck on tilesets. I keep meaning to buy something like Aesprite which I think has tile tools to make it easier to see how tiles… uh, tile, but I’ve always just eyeballed it and it can kind of suck.
Hi! This is mainly an ask blog, but I usually update it with one post per day. Feel free to ask me about nearly anything, though most of my posts tend to be about video games in particular. Don't worry if I don't answer you right away, it could take a week (or two!) before your question comes up in the queue.
Anonymous
