What Are You Making?

Judging by the fan art alone, this site attracts some super talented people. So what is everybody working on? I want to see your artwork/comics/games/whatever. I want to hear your music/sound design/etc. Go!

I feel like you can't make this post without offering something of your own first.

Hah, totally fair! I do a lot of weird interactive art and design. Most recently, I've been focused on some sound art apps for iOS called Volotic and Ostinato. I wrote up a blog post with a bit more info and videos of each.

I finally finally managed to get a half playable game put together using scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu/), I'd always wanted to play with something game makey but always put it off for one reason or another. Its pretty simplistic but its got a front page and a game over screen and everything! If anyone fancy's playing its here https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/92916218/

I'd fully recommend anyone having a go with their system, I've heard it's very similar to how stencyl approaches game design but I think it'll be a while till I'm using anything that fancy :)

@birchford: New high score. I am the greatest Pearl Panic player of all time.

@jungalero: I'd like to say I deliberately set a low bar to make people want to play, but I'd be lying...

Nothing, really...

I wanna write a science fiction adventure novel, but I can't decide what about and I always lose interest in my own stories. I just like escapism.

I also write my ideas for a game sometimes, but I'm not planning to make it into an actual game. The software is complicated and it's not a job for one person anyway.

https://bn43.wordpress.com/2015/01/27/my-game/

Really good idea, @jungalero, there's so much talent on the Giant Bomb community that it's nice to check what cool stuff people are doing.

As for me, I'm currently working on some images I can't post online, since it's for a client. I do some photo manipulation and graphic design stuff, mostly for music producers and DJs, here's some of my work.

_

@birchford:I had to do some "games" in Scratch during college for a programming class, they used it as a way to introduce us to programming so we could move to other stuff lately. It's kinda dumb but it's really easy to pick up and make something with it.

My college degree was for Multimedia Design and I couldn't care less about programming but, anyway, Scratch was fun! This is one of the dumb things I did, there's some bugs and annoying sounds but I really wanted to make a Daft Punk Pong game just for the dumb pun "Daft Pong": https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/2860335/

@ezekiel: That's a pretty robust-looking design doc you've got going. Don't sell yourself short on developing a game solo—plenty of amazing games are created by one person and, as with just about anything else, the best way to learn to develop games is probably to develop a game. Or split the difference and go for an interactive sci-fi novel?

I've been very slowly working on an illustration for months of Samantha Kalman, one of my favourite GB guests. It was going to be a surprise but I'm losing confidence that I can finish it satisfactorily. I still really don't like it. Haven't even begun to work on the hair, let alone finish the face. I'm bad at this and I'm also really slow. I may very well never finish it or show her.

@johnymyko: Nice portfolio! But I am the worst Daft Pong player of all time.

@alistercat: You're being hard on yourself. I actually like the hair flat—it doesn't seem unintentional. You say you're bad at this, but I'm certain that in the process of working on it your skills have improved. As for being finished...

In the eyes of those lovers of perfection, a work is never finished—a word that for them has no sense—but abandoned; and this abandonment, whether to the flames or to the public (and which is the result of weariness or an obligation to deliver) is a kind of an accident to them, like the breaking off of a reflection, which fatigue, irritation, or something similar has made worthless.

—Paul Valéry

I'm not sure I've ever "finished" anything in my life.

Super Mario Maker levels.

https://supermariomakerbookmark.nintendo.net/profile/TheMasterDS

Some games can be made by one person, if they're talented. 2D games for example, like Cave Story. Others are unrealistic. I tried using this 3D modelling program, Unreal Engine 4 and briefly looked into a few others and they overwhelmed and bored me to death. Thanks for the idea, but I'm not into visual novels.

@johnymyko: "Daft Pong" is easily the best daft punk/pong related pun I've ever heard.

@jungalero: I am very hard on myself, wish there was another way. I do have a problem with being a perfectionist, and never truly being done, but portraits aren't my thing and I don't think it looks enough like her. I can see what you mean about the hair, and I never intended to shade it or anything, but she also has short hair now so I'm kind of torn between cleaning it up and going with some short hair that I've also drawn.

What will probably happen is I pick at it for another month or so, then like the quote says, abandon it to the public. Speaking of which, Samantha saw it so there goes the surprise XD

What about us untalented asses?

I made a bunch of hard boiled eggs for the first time in like a decade.

I made Omelet rice for the first time ever today. =) Haven't done much since my chibi robo polymerclay figurine.

I made this pizza in a pan thing earlier today. It has pepperoni, sausage, ham, mushrooms, and olives.

EDIT: Oh, and I also wrote a song like two weeks ago: Swindler's Skank.

@hamst3r That's the thickest pizza I have ever seen!

I've been working on a small local multiplayer game that is played on the same controller. The project has been really off and on but I would like to finish it someday soon. The problem is making art, it takes forever and I suck at it.

Here's a gif I made from a play test a few months back:

Well, there's politics

An awesome thread idea, really love seeing what the community is dabbling away at!

As for me, as a writer, I have two big projects working in the pipeline. The first is creating an entire new world for the D&D campaign I run for my friends. Its a real time consuming process, especially at the moment; designing the people/places/random events of a big city. Its a lot of fun, just time consuming.

The second is a new series of short works called "Tales from the Phone". Basically, I travel a lot and that's made me miss out on some very important events in my life. So, I am using the phone conversations/text conversations I've had during these events to tell the story of modern communication. Working with a few other writers on it, hoped to get it shipped out and readable soon.

@thdemn: writing D&D campaigns takes FOREVER. The few times I've done it they were really short with a lot of "improvise here" scattered throughout. The phone idea sounds cool, how big of a project is it?

@alistercat: I typically can't stand a project when I'm wrapping it up and have to look at it months later to realize it wasn't completely terrible. If portraits aren't your thing, what is?

@hamst3r: So good! (The song, I mean.) And I'm glad you took the time to put together the studio page on you site. Learning about people's process is super interesting to me.

Recently I started working on a fan edit of Persona 4: The Animation and Persona 4 Golden: The Animation.

For those who are not familiar with it, P4 The Animation was a straight adaptation of the show, with a few twists and an occasional new storyline to help condense a 60-80 hour game while still being faithful to the story. With P4G The Animation, it is focused on the extra content added to P4G, primarily new Social Links with Marie and Adachi, new events like winter vacation, scooters, the Junes concert, etc. Meaning, P4 The Animation goes from month to month and jumps past winter to cover the last days of the game, while P4G The Animation starts in April, jumps all the way to June, and bounces around to events which are loosely connected to Marie, and then has a pretty good chunk of content with winter and the show's ending. P4G is still good, but it is definitely meant to be complementary to the first Animation and doesn't make a whole lot of sense on paper.

What I'm trying to do is to combine both shows together in chronological order and turn them into a series of movies. This is just a way for me to help consume both shows, so the story isn't broken up between the two shows with their own different arcs. So far it is working out well. I haven't put a ton of work into it, but here's what I have right now:

1. First Movie: Yu arriving to Inaba and bumping into Marie. First day of school, the first couple of murders, Yu gaining his Persona. (From P4 The Animation. Some of this is covered in P4G, but it is kind of poking fun at some of this stuff, like this is Yu's New Game+) Yukiko thrown into the TV. Rescuing Yukiko. The movie ends with Margaret introducing Yu to Marie and the two of them walking around Inaba for the first time.
2. Second Movie: A couple of random Social Links. Kanji is thrown into the TV and then rescued. Yu and Yosuke getting scooters. The movie ends with school camping trip and Yu coming home.
3. Third Movie: This is the one I'm currently working on. I only have a couple of scenes put together, but it opens with Rise quitting showbiz and going to Inaba. I'm not sure if it will have the Mitsuo stuff, but it will at least have all of that Rise arc.

I don't know how many movies I will end up having. The first two are kind of in the normal movie length, but down the road it might make sense to have some shorter, 60 minute movies, while towards the end of the game could have like a 2+ hour movie.

Anyway, it's been fun so far. Some stuff is straight forward, while some things provide interesting problems to solve. My other video projects have recently been unleashed on the Giant Bomb community, so that's about what I have going on right now.

@jixashauser: Somewhere on this forum is someone good at making game art and bad at making games. That person is your soul mate. Find that person.

@thdemn: "Tales from the Phone" sounds cool. I once spent time on an extended trip writing letters to myself at different points in the past. I eventually released it as a little book called Letters to Myself with illustrations by Maré Odomo.

@giantstalker: You know what? You're right!

BallsLeon 2016! Hey, at least I'm not Trump.

Designing a research proposal for a undergrad research grant. I'm working on a proposal that I can get the grant, then apply for a cross continental grant to study in Taiwan. I could just write two different proposals over different topics but thats hard. All my summer will be spent doing this research so I gotta make sure it isn't shitty

I work as an animator for a children's show on Disney XD as my day job, (look up Kirby Buckets if you're interested, it's a super bizarre kids show). But during my off time I make some shorts, comics, and do a lot of writing! You can check out my animation at My website and my tumblr. I have a new short coming out soon and am writing new sketches to work on as well!

Outstanding! Do you ever do any background or character work for games?

@jungalero: Aw geez thanks! I haven't yet, but I'd be really interested in working in games both as an aniamtor/artist and as a writer, as I originally got into animation because I was very bad at game design :P

@pajamuraix: I may have to bug you for art at some point. I have a very rough game framework based on a story called Bartleby, the Scrivener. It's an adventure game in which the main character refuses to do any quests and eventually refuses to even follow commands from the player. It will be very deliberately unfun, but hopefully still funny and interesting.

Lately I've been working with LibGDX and the Csound API in Java in Android Studio. I'm making a physics action game I call "Orbitrary". It's been in the works for months and has gone through some major revisions. Including the addition of the Csound API (with which I made the title screen a theremin) just because my main interest is music and sound synthesis and I wanted to see if I could get the Csound libraries working in LibGDX. Hey, I don't do this stuff for a living, I'm allowed to do whatever I want.

You can see the games I've made on Gamejolt and the one I made for the previous Giant Bomb game jam on Itch.io.

You can hear my music on Soundcloud.

Also, I'm not "working" on this, but I have been thinking more and more about trying to make a visual novel. I'm a big fan of narrative in games and over the past few years I've played some really great visual novels, like Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward and Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc.

Right now I'm sort of figuring out the scope of the idea I have in my head, but I might try testing something out, just to see what the programming would be like. As in having things like:

<Sample Text 1>

<Option A or B>

<Sample Text 2A>

@sinusoidal: Cool! What software/setup did you use for the work you have on Soundcloud? I haven't done much with Csound other than poke at it, but I've recently been looking at new ways to tie libpd into Unity to make some noise.

@clagnaught: Maybe you could start with existing tools? Totally out of my realm of experience, but I did see this thing. I'm sure there are others.

@jungalero: Yeah if I were to mess around with something it would be with Renpy.

My tale is long and full of sighs... No actually it's more like I use to run a homebrew table-top game with friends way back in elementary school, simple dice rules, not much story, mostly just spur of the moment story, and over the years tried honing the rule-set, changing time periods, styles, setting, etc., etc. Nothing could quite get the feeling of that original game, which allowed for instant access and fun, no matter who I threw it in front of. It was all on paper, to this day, none of it survives except a character sheet.

Years later, in middle school, probably 20 some rule sets later [no joke] I started writing the rule sets in a way that would convert to being a video game, so that sometime later when I learned to program, I could make it with little hassle. I never learned, and have trouble even finding a how-to that doesn't straight up confuse the hell outta me. Please don't bombard me with sites, I've done a lot of looking around, even Comp Sci Major wasn't much help for me.

High school happens and I'm now 33 rule sets in [lucky me dating all my work and actually keeping it organized somehow...] and I'm back trying to get it to work as a table-top again, but with the amount of numbers and stats and beasts and story [of which I'm horrible at, really really bad...] I decide, hey take a rest, that'll help me figure this goddamned thing out.

College time I let it just simmer, keeping a notepad to jot down ideas, change ideas, etc. [I looked like mad scientist making plans to rule the world mind you] I sorta just let it all sit hidden within a folder tree on hard drives.

Now 23 and I have seriously gone through 48 rule changes, of which only the first 4 - 5 have ever been played. I currently sit down every night and look at my text documents and plan what to do next. I wouldn't mind linking them, but they are just made in Textpad, and I shiver at the thought of converting them into Google Docs or some other program with standard page sizes compared to the page sizes that I default to...

Essentially what it is, what it has been, goes like this, and this is still just all a rough idea. It started as Javamander [don't question my 9 year old brain's naming conventions] it was classic fantasy, very similar to FF style worlds, then came Neomander when I decided to make a more modern campaign [most everything I did after this was based on Neomander rules] Xekomander was the future-scape stuff that never went anywhere and was usually dropped as soon as I started it. Neomander, or as it is currently called, Silver Solstice, is a combination of TWEWY, Persona, Earthbound, younger people with super powers/psychic abilities dealing with things normal kids shouldn't be dealing with. Whether it be demons, aliens, shadows, creatures made from data, bad people, they used their VIBE to fight. VIBE being the "magic" of this system, you could equate it as Karma, chi, Feng-shui, magic, mental power, and it not only was magic, but also the experience system. Your VIBE would increase by doing things your character liked [food, music, activities, clothes] and would go down when bad things happened [or ate things of a different vibe, etc.] Demons/Data, known as DNX, would transfer to Reality through a cloud of static brought about by negative VIBE, much like noise in TWEWY. Players could also push their way through into the otherside by finding a gate and eliminating the culprit responsible [games were essentially a villain of the week leading up to the BBEG]

Hopefully there isn't a text limit I hit or anything...

@jixashauser:Not entirely sure yet, still in the very early stages. Could be a quick month long project, could be my life's work (have a lot of different things to pull from)

@jungalero: This looks really cool, I will give it a read.

So Google Docs actually just let me save the files without needing any sort of editing, so whoever is any bit interested can view this in all their glory.

TEXT WALLS

Note: a lot of what you read within is hot garbage, as it contains ideas and other such things brought from the late 90's early 00's. I'm sure there are a few references and such, also many bad spellings and grammar?

@jungalero: this thread, and Samantha, inspired me to put some more time in to it today. Longer than the 5 minutes once every few weeks or so I had been doing. I think it's almost done.

@jungalero said:

95% of the music I've made was done entirely in Csound on PCs of various hardware configurations. I did all 45 tracks of "Heat Death of the Universe" on a shitty netbook. The title track is on my Soundcloud which is basically a huge mess of noise put through a dozen filters and parametric EQs. Some of the oldest tracks on my Soundcloud were done on a Pentium running Windows 98 and Cooledit Pro. If hardware synthesis is like having a whole bunch of usable sounds a knob-tweak away, using Csound is like having an infinite number of any sound imaginable a whole bunch of trial-and-error away.

Joke answer. Excuses. I am making excuses. Ha Ha.

Ok serious answer, since people are pointing out D20 stuff, I've got plenty of written or thought up material I've created over the years but I'll bet no one can top this for, as my friend put it 'the saddest thing ever".

I've been making up adventures for myself to play-though..by myself.

Yes really.

Ok, here is how. First, the Mythic Roleplaying System. Second Game Table and Third, Solo RPG. And finally..a lot of free time and enjoyment of creative writing. As, at its core, that is what I am doing. Also helps to know some system (d20 in my case) well enough to generate things on the fly.

So, details. The mythic system gives you answers to yes or no questions based on probability, and answers to complicated ones based on random tables, designed to inspire creative responses. For example, is there anyone in this room I enter? Determine your own probability, role it, move on. yes or no questions are fairly easy. Complex ones take more creativity. For example. What is in the room? Ok, complex description time..and at random I get "Ruthlessly Fadeded" So it would appear I've just stepped into a religious or political location that was trashed by the opposition, in a very violent and extreme manner.

See how two random words can spawn a big answer..but its basically creative writing?

Ok so how about a even more complicated question. Why did they destroy the organization I've stumbled into the old headquarters of? Complex Question I get "Harm Wishes" Hmm..Either the people who did the damage destroyed the area because it was granting the wishes of the down trodden and in need..or it it was the harmful wishes the buildings former inhabitants were granting others that brought the wrath of..

Man, on man, is that some bad fan fiction. But hey, I don't write it for anyone but myself (and I only give rambling examples it in this post to give people some idea of what the heck I mean).

It has served however to scratch my "man I wanna play some dnd at 3 am with no one about" and my "man I like to write, but what about?" Its also produced about 150 pages worth of material I am sure are absolute garbage, since i only do this for my own enjoyment and not the consumption of anyone else.

Also, props to The Lone Crusader As well who first keyed me in to how best to go about the process, and to the fact that hey, I can actually play all those old modules I have sitting around!

There you go. That's not the only thing I've been doing with my time. But its certainly the most personal/potential embarrassing/but maybe helpful for others who chance upon it.

Quick aside. The mythic system isn't solo-only. Its also served me well for inspiration in campaign generation, character creation and "uh crap i need to run a game tonight but have nothing prepared, lets wing it!".

A couple of weeks ago I suddenly had a vision of a game about climbing up your phone's screen instead of scrolling down. It's called To The Heights and I have a very basic playable prototype. Currently there are no real challenges or puzzles or fun (?), but if you'd like to try out a beta on iOS, you can sign up here.

Lately I've been working on self driving cars. One of them is all set up and I'm just adding functionality. Right now I need to add wireless communications and data logging. After that is vision. I'm programming it all myself because I don't see the point in doing it if I'm just putting the pieces together. If that's what I wanted I'd buy legos. The other one is a much faster car. I've mainly just added a GPS unit and I log the max speed which is about 35mph. Once the other car is working sufficiently I'll move it all over to the faster car to really test it. I don't get alot of time to work on them but I do what I can when I can.