BJ @bj@xeno.chat

🐾 Him. Place number eight on the council of twelve. August.
⎉ …I have questions.
🐾 Yep. He's confusing.
⎉ This looks like math. What does this have to do with finding whimsy?
🐾 August is the master of abstraction. Of pure ideas that represent reality without being weighed down by it.
⎉ Ideas unconstrained by reality, huh?
🐾 That's why you need his help, not mine, but he hasn't been seen in ages.
⎉ Didn't I meet—
🐾 That was his assistant. Filling in.
⎉ Oh.
🐾 He only left this behind. "1+1=3".

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I might make a habit of posting my work doodles as a warmup. Having a few minutes between test runs or waiting for a package upgrade to finish is a good excuse to get something done, and it lets me emphasize speed and control instead of having to obsess over details. Patch in winter clothes (and big ear covers), a lineup of Delyria folks with their continents' emblems, and a pika with an abacus. What his deal is might be revealed later, but for now he's just a doodle.

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Bonus Bitkin sketch tonight. This is Viento, whose arms contain spinning propellers - they don't do much good in the air, but he can use them to zip through water at surprising speed. His part of the Lower System is the Spiral Coast, where liquids from everywhere in the System drain to in order to get filtered, sorted into useful parts, purified, and recycled back out. It could've been a grimy cistern, but Viento's much happier dressing it up as a tropical beach.

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Novenna and Vidrio had a talk earlier about what he can do to follow that tiny dragon-thing back to its own world to help its people out. She's a good person to ask when it comes to what kind of shapes can exist in what kind of worlds, but her answer was unexpected.

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Vidrio has been wandering around between worlds, trying to find interesting new experiences to bring back, but often the experiences come find him instead. Whoever this tiny dragon with unusual crystalline floaty wings might be, they're desperately in need of help. They've come to the right place.

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Just another quick sketch I drew some time ago and only got around to uploading. Fala and Elfilin (of Kirby and the Forgotten Land) have a little chat over tea, swapping stories and comparing their experiences. They have more in common than it might appear at first.

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I liked the Patch and Glitch sketches enough that I decided to try a few more. These would make pretty good Telegram stickers - I might extend this to a full set and color it when I've got the time energy.

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Assorted Patch and Glitch doodles. These were done at work, so I'm not counting them as tonight's post, but I really like the expressiveness here. Glitch is just so grouchy and sour about everything.

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Clio, a bat/spider clothling, mostly keeps to herself off in the lesser-populated areas of Elseways. She and Geo López are friends of a sort, but since they're both loners, they don't mind not seeing each other that often. Her own history is long, though, and something she only dimly remembers herself. Her spirit is centuries old, and she doesn't remember what bound her to a foot-tall body made of cloth and wire, but it's low-maintenance and doesn't age, so she doesn't mind all that much.

Playing with pixel art wasn't a total loss tonight, at least. I made Patch more proportional to how they are in my head, and changed the color palette around to match the NES one (because why not). This is the version I'd be animating.

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Since animation isn't going well, I decided to draw this character inspired by some ideas from @spottyfox and @evelyn - Feta Roquefort, mouse reporter for the Underville Herald. Because Underville is so vast, they need ways to communicate what's going on, so they have a huge network of news centers set up to inform everyone of important goings-on everywhere they can put reporters. The mic is a heavily modified earbud (functionally reversed), and she's recording to a flash drive on her back.

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When in doubt draw deertaurs, I guess? I had a long day at work today and it took me a while to work up the energy to draw anything at all, but in the end I decided - sure, this'll work. They're fun to draw, anyway, and this one is loudly annoyed at something off-panel to the left.

The colors are a bit off, which I'll deal with later (although the sort of cheetah look isn't a bad one on Patch). Patch is scaled to fix inside a 32x32 pixel box, and so is a bit over 2 full tiles tall.

Don't worry, Patch, you're just in a testing room. There's nothing there for you to fix, just a floor made of alphabet blocks and a weird blocky sky.

Okay, animation is hard, but here's a pixel Patch at the right size for the game. Now, importing this bitkin into the engine should be simple...

Here it is in animated form; apologies for the extremely loud colors. I marked it sensitive because it really is pretty garish.

A hoard of colorful spinning coins go spilling across the tilemap, demonstrating a couple new things Xenia is now doing. One is that the sprites are no longer constrained to square; these are 8 by 16. Also, dynamic colors can now apply to multiple pieces of a sprite independently. These coins only have two colors, but in principle the only limits are memory space and how much work a sprite artist wants to do.

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Just felt like drawing Vesta again; she's dancing here around a set of symbols, but these particular ones don't have any actual meaning. She's still looking for the correct ones, but in the meantime she can enjoy what her brother's found and brought back. It's more fuel for the flames, and Vidrio depends on her being able to tend the furnace back at home so he can keep going out wandering.

One nice thing about the Xenia engine is that it's very easy to add more fonts in the form of "chips". Tiny one-bit images that define 96 characters each. This is one I made tonight for "circled" characters, useful for © or ® symbols, or, as you see in the example picture, button labels.

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Returning to Delyria briefly, just because I felt like it. This Xeraphandi dancer is showing off how wild their plumes can get, especially if they take advantage of cosmetic enhancement magic that will grow them out into wild and elaborate displays.
As avian as they look, the Xeraphandi are technically among the reptilian peoples of the land of Zem, but nobody really treats them that way. They've got feathers instead of scales and they've got beaks, so they're birds to any reasonable mind.

More messing with sprites. They're just as easy to color as the tiles are (and you can see the little eyes on them better now).