Hi there!
It's already September and it feels like the summer went by terribly quickly. Also it feels like I didn't do much this summer??? I know I spent a good chunk of it being lazy, which is good because I haven't been this lazy in an awfully long time.
What I've been working on
Mostly art these past few weeks! I somehow got really deeply into Fire Emblem again, and ended up participating in the Fire Emblem Compendium. The compendium is a project where a different artist draws every (named) single character in the Fire Emblem series, no matter how minor. I signed up pretty late...so I got a pretty minor character.
Here's my entry.
I drew Lester, from Fire Emblem 4. He's...not very plot important. I also have no idea how his armor works.
Most of my other drawings have been me playing around with different art programs, since I don't want to be reliant on Photoshop forever (mostly because Photoshop is a recurring cost). I ended up using the trial versions of Affinity Photo, Clip Studio Paint, Paint Tool SAI, as well as the free programs Krita and Medibang Pro.
In the end, they probably all work for art. I tend to prefer the default round brush when painting, which is perfect because it exists in all programs. Even so, no matter what I use, I probably can't abandon Photoshop entirely. Photoshop lets you write scripts that can automate a lot of operations, which I use when drawing game art. For example, to create the sprites for Farsider, I draw each body part on a different layer in Photoshop, then run a script to save each body part to a different image file before assembling in-game. I don't think any of the other programs can replicate that functionality, sadly.
Farsider Corner
Wow, I actually have not much to show. The bulk of the work was done on allowing the game window's resolution to change smoothly: Farsider is designed at the base screen resolution of 1920x1080, but some monitors (and most laptops) don't have that many pixels, and some people have monitors with more. Game Maker has a default scaling algorithm to make the game fit on multiple screens, but it's still a good idea to go over and make sure that the resolution changing looks right. Also, because I'm a master of doing unnecessary graphics programming, I implemented different scaling algorithms to optimize scaling at different sizes. (Some algorithms work better when scaling down, and some scaling up, so it's nice to be able to switch.)
Misc. Rambling
I've been procrastinating pretty hard on Farsider's writing, so I'm going to be getting back into it now. Let's see if I can actually finish a draft of the script, which I've wanted to finish during July :'D.
Also, I'm still playing lots of 0 AD and other strategy games. I only play against the very easy computer opponent so I can do whatever and still win. :D :D :D
Doodlin'
I was going to do a comparison of all the art programs, but my art looks the same in all of them because I only use round brushes.
So have a Roadsign (name still TBD).