I finally got around to putting my scrap paper character sheet onto a PDF document today. I used Inkscape to draw the lines and boxes and insert the SVG icons that I made and a few creative commons icons that I got from game-icons.net (made by Lorc of lorcblog.blogspot.com).
This version of the sheet is rather generic. I don't expect many campaign settings to have a use for everything at once. Particular settings could have more specific character sheets that eliminate unneeded Skills and Facets and add that setting's specialties. Check it out and let me know if you see room for improvement. I'll also be happy to answer any questions about what's on the sheet. Sometime soon, I'll post an example or two of a filled out character sheet.
Impressions Character Sheet (December 12, 2012 revision)
Showing posts with label technical. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technical. Show all posts
Thursday, December 13, 2012
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
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.
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
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?
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?
Friday, August 10, 2012
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.
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.
Thursday, July 5, 2012
Cleaning up some loose notes
I use Linux for my computer (specifically, a Gnome 3 desktop environment on top of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS for those who are interested). Linux has a nice little note-taking program called Tomboy that makes it easy to cross-reference notes because it automatically creates hyperlinks to other notes when you mention them. For example, I have a note called "layout" where I put all my ideas for page layouts; when I type "layout" in another note, the word "layout" automatically becomes a link to the "layout" note. I stopped using it because the Ubuntu One cloud service (similar to Dropbox) stopped supporting Tomboy's online syncing. In addition, the only app for my phone that could sync with Tomboy would only allow reading notes and not editing/creating them. I found that to be only slightly better than useless.
I started using Evernote instead. Evernote doesn't automatically link your notes together like Tomboy, but it does have some other useful features. It's available as a desktop app (which I have installed on my Windows 7 partition for when I need to boot into Windows for something) and as a web application (which I have pinned in a Chrome tab so it's always at hand). It allows the use of tags to make it easy to categorize notes and sort them later. And it has a very neat browser extension that allows you to select part or all of a webpage and save it as a note. I've clipped a lot of interesting snippets with this feature: online articles, forum posts, pictures, or other things that sparked an idea.
I didn't have a lot of time to work on the game this evening, but I did try to do something useful to keep my promise. I exported my Tomboy notes to .HTML and put them into my cloud folders for safe keeping. Then I opened them in Chrome and clipped their contents to Evernote. My next project will be to use the Evernote app on my phone to sort through and upload scans of my loose paper notes and tattered notebooks. This will let me put everything in one place to more easily sort it out and put things together.
In the past, I always wanted to have hard copies because I've lost files in the past to hard drive failures or lost USB drives. Using paper notebooks felt safer to me, but now I'm satisfied that I have enough redundancy to go completely digital. I've got all my files backed up in several places at once (Evernote, Dropbox, Box, Ubuntu One, Google Drive, and--on the rare occasions I boot into Windows 7--everything gets backed up to Skydrive too). I've even got a portable 1TB hard drive for back ups too, so I'm not really worried about losing my files anymore.
I started using Evernote instead. Evernote doesn't automatically link your notes together like Tomboy, but it does have some other useful features. It's available as a desktop app (which I have installed on my Windows 7 partition for when I need to boot into Windows for something) and as a web application (which I have pinned in a Chrome tab so it's always at hand). It allows the use of tags to make it easy to categorize notes and sort them later. And it has a very neat browser extension that allows you to select part or all of a webpage and save it as a note. I've clipped a lot of interesting snippets with this feature: online articles, forum posts, pictures, or other things that sparked an idea.
I didn't have a lot of time to work on the game this evening, but I did try to do something useful to keep my promise. I exported my Tomboy notes to .HTML and put them into my cloud folders for safe keeping. Then I opened them in Chrome and clipped their contents to Evernote. My next project will be to use the Evernote app on my phone to sort through and upload scans of my loose paper notes and tattered notebooks. This will let me put everything in one place to more easily sort it out and put things together.
In the past, I always wanted to have hard copies because I've lost files in the past to hard drive failures or lost USB drives. Using paper notebooks felt safer to me, but now I'm satisfied that I have enough redundancy to go completely digital. I've got all my files backed up in several places at once (Evernote, Dropbox, Box, Ubuntu One, Google Drive, and--on the rare occasions I boot into Windows 7--everything gets backed up to Skydrive too). I've even got a portable 1TB hard drive for back ups too, so I'm not really worried about losing my files anymore.
Monday, May 28, 2012
Scissors and Glue
Wow! Has it really been three months since I last updated this blog? The time really flew by. I was too busy with my regular job to do much work on the game, but in the past three months I have managed to get a few pieces of art together (although still quite short of what I'd like to get for a final product). I also have a week off and a few leads on where to get more art, so hopefully I'll have some good news on that front soon.
Today I also fired up my copy of Inkscape and played around for a while to test different layout patterns. This is going to be a digital release so landscape orientation might be easier to read on a monitor (especially on a laptop), but portrait orientation feels more like a book to me. One thing that always bothers me about reading PDFs on a laptop is when the page is laid out for reading when you see the whole thing at once. I hate having to constantly scroll up and down to follow the text down one column and then back up to the top of the page for the next column. If you zoom in (or fit the page width to the window), you usually have to do that and I want to avoid that. I think I've settled on a three section page that seems to avoid all that scrolling up and down.
The typical page will be divided horizontally into three sections each about 10 cm high. These sections will be used in various ways to break up the block of text:
Today I also fired up my copy of Inkscape and played around for a while to test different layout patterns. This is going to be a digital release so landscape orientation might be easier to read on a monitor (especially on a laptop), but portrait orientation feels more like a book to me. One thing that always bothers me about reading PDFs on a laptop is when the page is laid out for reading when you see the whole thing at once. I hate having to constantly scroll up and down to follow the text down one column and then back up to the top of the page for the next column. If you zoom in (or fit the page width to the window), you usually have to do that and I want to avoid that. I think I've settled on a three section page that seems to avoid all that scrolling up and down.
The typical page will be divided horizontally into three sections each about 10 cm high. These sections will be used in various ways to break up the block of text:
- two columns of text for easy reading
- a chart
- a callout box with commentary on the rules
- examples of the rules in use
- illustrations
- one column of text and a small illustration or graphic
- Etc.
Tomorrow, I'll get my copy of Scribus out again and review some tutorial videos on how to use it, then I'll try putting together some "lorem ipsum" pages to see how well the format works.
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