Another batch of icons

This is my latest batch of icons. I think I'll do a couple more and then work on making some page borders. I think page decorations and borders are important and serve a functional purpose. I've seen some badly done books that wasted a lot of space with extravagant borders, but well done books have distinctive borders that help the reader to navigate through the book (i.e. it's easy to flip to the right section when each section has its own easily distinguished look). I'm getting a lot more comfortable with Bezier curves which is the tool I really need to draw the way I want. Ideally, I'd be able to use some kind of pencil sketching action but I don't have a tablet. Bezier curves offer me the next best thing: I can make a rough outline and then poke and prod it into the shape I want.

Inkscape's growing on me

Just a quick note before sleeping. My first attempt to make an icon with Inkscape took most of a day. Then I made three icons in a few hours. Today, I cranked out several icons (about six or seven), one after another. Some of them are fairly complex below the surface but I could make them quickly. I finally figured out how to use Bezier curves. Previous attempts always resulted in tangled knots that I quickly deleted. This time I got exactly the shapes I wanted. I might have to revisit my first icon and see if I can make a better one in twenty minutes. I'll post some images later. Now it's time for sleep; long day at work tomorrow (and maybe more icons during my lunch break).

Passion Icons

I just came back from a lovely holiday to a tropical island. I relaxed on white sand beaches and swam in blue seas. I climbed up a mountain into the jungle and swam in a grotto under a waterfall. I saw a little baby monkey that grabbed my finger with his little baby monkey hands. I drank wines made of fruits I can't identify. It was nice long weekend. I had one more day before I had to go back to work, so I spent this afternoon working on more icons in the same style as the Rage Passion icon I showed earlier.

I figured out some shortcuts in Inkscape that made the process much easier this time. It's still less WYSIWYG than I would like, but I'm working around that. The program offers total freedom in where to place elements, but I don't want total freedom. I don't need to be able to draw a line anywhere; I just need to be able to draw a line from here to there (where "here" and "there" are specific points such as "tangential to this arc" or "on the point of this angle"). I often found myself zooming in very close to position points manually when I felt that the program should really have a "snap to" option. It seems to allow snapping to a grid, but I haven't discovered any functionality for snapping to other shapes.

I found some shortcuts for doing some of the things I wanted. For example, instead of trying to draw a shape by assembling it's component parts, I found that I could use the drawing tools to quickly overlap some preset shapes, use the Fill tool to outline and color the space where they overlap, and then delete them to leave the filled space. For example, in the Noble Passion icon (the spiral sun), the rays of the sun were made by drawing a star (with the star/polygon tool) with points extending around the central spiral and then a circle (with the circle tool) around the central spiral too. I filled the corners of the star then deleted the circle that formed the bottoms of the rays and the star that formed the points, which left the rays behind. It was much faster and neater than trying to draw and resize and rotate a bunch of triangles. I wasted a lot of time trying to do that before figuring out the shortcut.

In a previous post, I showed the Rage Passion icon that I made. Here are the black and white versions of the Rage icon along with the icons for the other Passions: Fear, Noble, and Focus. In game terms, the Passions represent major facets of the character's personality (what they hate most, what they fear most, what inspires them to be their best, and what do they most enjoy doing). They provide a description of the character's personality and serve as a source of free Drama Points that can be used to boost a character's abilities in a scene. If your globe-trekking archaeologist absolutely hates Nazis and is terrified of snakes, he'll never have to worry about being short of Drama Points when a Nazi with a pet cobra shows up. Any opinions on my artistic abilities?

Rage Icons

I had a lot of free time today so I worked on the icons that I tried sketching out earlier. I have some ideas for icons that I sketched in pencil in a notebook. I did a relatively clean version of one of them on a sheet of white paper and took a picture of it with my phone (Samsung Galaxy SII). After a minute, it had been automatically uploaded to Google+, Ubuntu One, and Dropbox and the latter two both downloaded it my laptop. Then I opened the photo in Inkscape. This is where things got frustrating.

I know that there has to be an easier way to do this and I'm sure I did it the hard way. The icon is made entirely out of circles and arcs. I'm sure I could have just traced the picture automatically (in fact, a tutorial on how to do that is on my to-do list) but I thought it would be easy to just draw the arcs and circles on the photo myself with the Ellipse tool. That's what I did, but I didn't like it much. I don't like the way the Ellipse tool draws circles. You click and drag across the canvas to draw the circle but it creates a circle inscribed inside the square formed by the starting and stopping points that you click and drag across. I would have really preferred to click on a point where I want one edge of the circle to be and then drag to expand the circle. Having to drag a square that contains the circle meant that the circle always ended up in the wrong place so I would have to switch to the Selector tool to move it around and get it into position. I think I eventually got the hang of it but the final product still looks kind of rough to me. This is the color and black & white versions of the Rage Passion icon I came up with.

Redoing Core Rules examples

(I've been having some trouble connecting to Blogger. I can see my dashboard and stats, but I can't see the blog pages (mine or anyone else's) unless I connect with my smartphone. I'm using wifi tethering to make this post from my laptop.)

So, this past week, I didn't have much time to spend on the things I wanted to do. Some nights I only had 20 minutes or so to do some editing. I'm trying to trim the core rules down to be clearer to understand and easier to present. I'm looking at things that I wrote a long time ago when I started. I thought that this section was done but now that I look at it again with fresh eyes, I can see that many of these examples are just terrible. I need to redo a lot of them. They have too much going on; they don't focus only on the point that needs to be illustrated. I think I wanted to show the example cases in a larger context, but now I realize that it's better to have a more focused example to just make the point clear. Also, some of them are just not very interesting situations.

I'm having trouble visualizing how I want to lay this section out. I want to make it a little more graphical rather than just blocks of text. But how do I lay this out to fit everything on the page that should go together? It's hard to do. I'm thinking of using some mind-mapping or diagramming software to try laying things out in a simple flowchart or something, but I might just go completely low tech with it. I learned layout back in the days of light boxes when "cut and paste" literally referred to scissors and glue. I'm thinking of just printing things out, cutting them up, and arranging things on my floor to plan how I want to lay them out before using my layout software to make the digital pages. Doing things fully digitally would be nice, but it's just too hard with a small landscape laptop screen and a touchpad. A big monitor (or two) and a decent mouse (or better yet, some kind of stylus and tablet) would make this a lot easier but I don't have the work space for a setup like that. I don't even have a desk!

During my recent attempt to redo the character sheet, I discovered that I don't like the damage system. The damage system has been there since the beginning in a provisional "good enough for now and I'll sort it out later" form but I don't like it now that I really look at it. I've got an idea forming in my head right now for how I'd like to handle it, but it's not solidified yet. Maybe that will be next on my "To Do" list after I clean up the examples and settle on the layout for the core rules section. I already know how I want to handle healing, but I need to sort out the damage system before I can do the healing in detail.

I'm starting to wonder if I'm just being a perfectionist and fretting too much over little things.