#the design is not as creative/unique as Howl but it’s still good quality

[lilidawnonthemoon]

[docholligay]

“Alles gute zum geburtstag woche” from my wife and me!! For our creative ask: We’ve been kind of obsessed with Silver Millennium Senshi designs lately. What are your thoughts on what their armor, fighting style, and social status was during this time?

The original pass of this was twice as long and included all the senshi but I lost it near the end and got really frustrated SO. 

I always love playing around with the Silver Millenium, and the ways that it all worked, and the ways that the ripples of whatever those Senshi were long ago are contained in the power that lives inside our girls now, and how they feel the rippling effects of those creatures inside them today. 

I go pretty hard on the idea that the Moon Kingdom was a conquering entity, and that it brought the Sol System under its heel, and so the planets were expected to send a princess each in tribute and to remind them of who held all the cards. The princesses were meant to protect the one true princess, to give their lives if able and asked, and there was never a Sailor Moon because the moon never raised its own weapon. 

But weirdly, I guess I don’t think much about the armor. The aesthetics of all that aren’t super important to me. If I had to say, and I guess what I do think when I get down to it, is that they look very similar to the senshi uniforms now, with a tweak here or there, but I think it’s very important for me that they all have that quality of sameness, changed only in color. The color is there so the queen and princess can identify them quickly, but other than that, they are soldiers and they are interchangeable. I don’t think a quality of individuality was ever anywhere on the Moon’s mind. In the same way, when the princesses are brought to the Kingdom, they are stripped of their names, only Venus, Mars, Neptune ever after, representatives of their planet. 

Venus is the leader, and she is shrewd and she is as warlike as the rest of her planet. After they were crushed by the moon, there was still the question of which was the superior: Mars of Venus. Venus bested MArs in combat, and the Venusians ripped uniforms from the fallen Martians, using the scraps to tie up their sweaty, dirty hair,k a part of Venusian costume to this day, that Mars might never forget its place. The Moon Family was so delighted that the daughter of Venus would ever after be the leader of the princess’ guardians. 

Venus herself does not even remember what name she had before being Venus, if she ever had one at all. She has been honed like the blade she carries,  Zweihander across her back, from her very first memories. She is harsh and she is rigid, and, like most of the people of her plenty, she has a unique gift for sensing emotions and memories, a bit of color on the very edge of a person, and using it to twist into their soul. She has no tolerance for fools, or for dissent, and she will crush it when she sees it. 

Mina has the hardest time dealing with that small shard of Venus inside her. Not only does she remember what Venus was better than most–Mako and Haruka are lucky that their entire experience of the past seems to be “the Moon Kingdom existed”–and so she knows that bent of cruelty and of ferocity that lurks inside of her, feels that bloodthirsty howl as she barks an order in battle. She has to press it down, the entire point of this cycle is to be better, to take something twisted and make it good, make it worthwhile. She fights for this. 

Mars does not look at Venus the way the other girls do–with respect and fear–but with envy and desire, knowing that she could be leader, that she could bring her planet to glory, of only given the chance. She is petty and vainglorious, seeking the spotlight for herself whether she wants the thing in question or not. As long as she can be best, it does not matter. She is petty and backbiting and angry, and her hope, when she helps the princess see her prince, is that it will be remembered when she ascends to power, and Venus will be placed beneath her. 

On this subject, her archery is most important. She is uncommonly skilled with a bow, and often the queen has her show her talents in an exhibition of her daughter’s protectors when there are dignitaries visiting from outside the Sol System. There is something about the reach of it that pleases Mars, something about the ways he can be nowhere near an enemy and fell them immediately, the look in their eyes, searching for their killer, as they die. 

Rei knows of Mars, but it is with a strange sense of disconnect. She sees what Mars did, and sees the way Mars may sneak out in her, from time to time, and yet it is as if she’s reading a book, something totally passive to her, and whether this is control over Mars or undaunted hubris, even Rei herself could not say. 

Neptune is from a planet of assassins, known for this as Jupiter is known for fine wovens or Uranus is known for its flowered pottery. She is a creature of the shadows and the silence, and she brings death to the privacy and warmth of a bedchamber or a dining hall with a smile on her face. Venus does not trust her, and never will, and Neptune seems fine with this. She does not need Venus leadership, and toys on the edge of what Venus will tolerate from her, knowing that her exceptional skill gives her leave that no other planet can match. Mars is short sighted. Jupiter is careless. Uranus is a coward. What does she have to fear from any of them? 

Her weapon is her dagger and buckler, and she moves in perfect quiet as she creeps to a neck, the last thing anyone ever hears the soft ringing of the steel next to their ear, and she smiles as that cold silence after the heart stops fills the room. 

Michiru is, like Mina and Rei, quite cognizant of everything that happened in the Silver Millenium, and she thinks it so much the better that they agree not to speak of it. When Haruka wonders if Uranus ever loved Neptune, Michiru does not say that she has seen Neptunes’ disgust at Uranus’ softness. When Haruka says its like a Senshi to be brave, Michiru does not tell her Uranus was executed for cowardice. 

And Neptune was always an opportunist. She remembers who let the Earth in the gate. 

Uranus remembers her name, remembers it so well, and begs anyone to use it. Tinia, she says, my name is Tinia, and catches Venus’ backhand for her trouble. Uranus is a planet of peace and of softness and being raised there, Uranus could only ever be that. The Moon is a cold and hard world and there is no tolerance for the kind of planet that lolls about on its side. She finds herself friendless and lonely but for a few brief caresses shared with Jupiter, who seems to have one foot in and one foot out of this world. 

Uranus has a sword, though it would be bold to say she ever uses it, even in training drills so unused to the thrill of combat. When the Moon Kingdom falls, she cowers, and Venus runs her through for her cowardice. For daring to be a weak soldier. 

Haruka knows nothing of any of this, and is much the happier for it. It takes years after they have been fighters to know that anyone knew much at all, and by then she no longer cares what the past said, for she’s made her own future.

[visionhandle16-blog]

how does anime work?

Have you ever wondered how anime is built? For most people, anime production can be all smoke cigarettes and reflectors. The distance between your conceptual art and the concluded masterpiece is the length of time of a typical 12-week season. Typically the truth is, until you communicate Japanese, the production process that governs Japanese movement is shrouded in mystery. Trying to find out there more will make you a new number of terms many of these as essential animator, advanced animator, movement home, episode director, skill representative and even character custom. How cartoons is made in Japan is very various from how you could consider; Frequently , it's a good very much more smooth (read: chaotic) process you might expect. The artwork of movement Animation manufacturing is a new messy adventure. Disorderly preparation, strict deadlines, deadlines and rampant inefficiencies are function hazards that any individual functioning in a small and fresh created environment will be conscious of. The soul is usually the labor associated with love and the ability of many folks, like well as the fortitude of a select few. Following all, it is 1 that needs many, numerous steps. The success of even a single tv show is not any modest feat, and a incorrect stage can have really serious effects for the whole manufacturing. Dig further and you will find production applications and color-coded checklists which might be nightmares. So many spreadsheets, so many validations. anime creation Another normal day at the particular office for the production supervisor. Image by Sentai Filmworks. I will do my personal far better to provide a great review of the procedure, describing this main steps plus the main stars. In this view, We hope to present how challenging it is definitely to create a good cartoons, not to discuss some sort of great 1, as your love for the particular natural environment revives. Above all, we pardon in progress for any errors or even inaccuracies; I am by way of no means an experienced around anime production. This manufacturing process (ie generation difficulties) preproduction This is the planning and financing period. This anime production firm (for example, Aniplex, Bandai Image, Kadokawa Shoten, Horse Canyon, Sony, Toho, Viz Media) is responsible with regard to personnel, transmission and distribution expenses. In essence, they will pay studios to accomplish it, the tv stations to be able to broadcast the idea and to be able to the licensee for you to distribute it nationally and worldwide. Above all, it records profits from income. Occasionally, several production companies will be associated with a good single cartoons. This companies (for illustration, A-1 Pictures, Bones, J. Chemical. Staff, Kyoto Computer animation, Madhouse, Development I. H, Business Ghibli, Trigger) will be the ones that do the job, pay and create often the anime itself. If typically the anime can be an original strategy, the facility will oftentimes help with the cost. Crew assembly The director is definitely the creative director and it is generally responsible for this program. When it will come to staffing, each one facilities works differently. Quite a few have got full-time animators, colorists, authors and production places of work, while others will have some sort of a lot of the time team of primary folks from each division along with a large network involving outsourced helpers. Then there are the reports that outsource the entire work to freelancers. storyboard The representative is in addition commonly responsible for storyboards. In full length TV cartoons, unlike seasons anime, screenplays are typically frame by different screenwriters. Inside a great ideal earth, the scenarios would become completely finished before an episode goes into production. This would give the rest of the staff the option to formulate a coherent and entirely realized history; However, this happens very rarely, and typically the symptoms are often in manufacturing, because the storyboards will be still being worked about. That is a nightmare, definitely. position products watch anime online The following are really the projects. Under the supervision of the director, the episode movie director and at times the particular manufacturer, the layout director will complete this details of the slashes (scenes, normally determined simply by the use of a single background). This specific involves coordinating the key image or living "cells" (displayed in warm colors) on backgrounds (displayed in cool colors), along with descriptions of how the photographic camera should move. In different words, the style director casings each line and seems at the overall structure. anime The example regarding one of a kind cut design. The black color box towards the edge from the paper shows the frame. A layout home ascertains the structure of each lower, only like a movie cinema. Think about by using Nihonden. cartoon Another example of this is definitely in the Howling ADVENTURE. The backgrounds are sunset blue and the skin cells are usually dark orange. That is unusual because typically the clouds are super-hero, not necessarily humans. Image by using MangaUK. animation Once the skins are finished, the development assistant gives the major computer animators. They are the particular ones who present living to images. The finished discounts are taken to this animation director for any event, who checks reliability and quality. If the savings receive the stamp connected with approval, they go for you to the intermediary entertainer. This kind of work is generally outsourced to less experienced computer animators at cheaper prices. Central frames are sent to help often the intermediate supervisor to help ensure they are really consistent using the quality and casings of the key toon. When a cut is turned down at any stage, the idea is returned for review. cartoons creation A key tegnefilmstegner is responsible for the key animation or, in some other words, the primary frames connected with a new slash. Image through Pinterest. digitized Finally, as soon as the animation is performed, the color team, supervised by way of the color designer, digitizes, clears and colors often the cuts. At this stage, the cuts are identified as cells (or digicells). The colorist spots the color tissue inside of the background image (as specified in the designs) and gives any 3DCG under the supervision connected with the 3DCG supervisor. The last stage of production is filming, in which arrangement, effects, and editing may be finished. animated The skill representative, colorist, and representative come together to figure out the particular final shade pattern or perhaps gradient for each character or even each having a cut. Below you can see three palaces of different shades as opposed to the background, called art. Impression from Sentai Filmworks. Write-up generation Along with the end in look, the production assistant sends the ultimate skin cells to the post-production documenting director. The recording movie director runs typically the "duplication" process by which post-production teams add voice working, sound effects, and tunes. End the life pattern of the cut in anime manufacturing. Finally, at typically the end, the manager divides, merges, edits, and evolves all the finished slices. Meanwhile, the tv show overseer and director are tested at each stage to make sure often the completed product meets his or her perspective. The grassroots managing team then reviews the entire event and gives their last opinion or maybe approval. Significant players (i. e. the ideal team) the manufacturer Makers commonly work for the anime manufacturer. They will be the people responsible to get discovering stories with potential, whether it is an original strategy from the mind regarding a creator or an adaptation of an pre-existing do the job (such as the tromba or a lighting novel). That they find together with request projects to the organization. Manufacturers have some sort of whole lot of weight in typically the production approach and for that reason generally have to agree to all important choices. Production business office The development business may be the studio's command center and is comprised of a good Generation Office manager (PM) in addition to numerous Generation Assistants (PA). The Prime Minister is usually responsible for managing often the series' programming, strategies and financing / spending budget. Their own objective is to provide final reductions in time in addition to budget. APs function within the PM together with are generally responsible for one particular or two episodes. Basically, the availability office does the task. This is just what an anime manufacturing show looks like. This can be an example. They happen to be generally far more messy in comparison with that. And much more horrible, proper? Image by means of Reddit. representative The imaginative chief creates, the educator, the evaluate, the tribunal and this executioner. Basically, the particular director is the director of the entire project and oversees the final stages regarding each within the cartoons production course of action. The home also has the final word throughout all creative decisions. They can be directly responsible for often the cases and the closing approval of every episode. The director from the episode. This specific is self informative. At importance, they are the film fans of a unique episode. This episode home works carefully with typically the overseer on all creative and logistical options with regard to the assigned episode.

https://www1.gogo-anime.ac/ Find the correct Black Anime character types The script supervisor Often the writer himself (say what? ). Your job, regarding course, is usually to make typically the characters speak. The particular representative may present often the circumstances, but the script supervisor is responsible for publishing the dialogue and narratives that guide the episode. Fundamentally, the screenplay supervisor provides the characters, settings, and even plot to our life.

[amandasgeekblog]

BestLuck: Navigating a dreamspace with the right perspective

BestLuck, made by R&D Artist for Riot Games and former Walt Disney Animation Studios employee, Jae Hyun Yoo, is a dreamy Windows and macOS game set to release this summer. The adventure game is being lauded for its style and unique puzzle design. BestLuck’s protagonist’s dreams are visited by the same woman every night. She seems to be guiding you, but why?  Since this is a 10-15 minute demo, this review will contain spoilers for the majority of gameplay. Please play on your own if you don’t wish to be spoiled https://fkkcloud.itch.io/bestluck

Right off the bat the game starts with a couple dialogue choices. This is an easy way to establish the exposition while still feeling game-like. The option to have a few different attitudes toward the girl haunting your dreams helps frame the narrative to fit the player better as well. 

Then the player is in the protagonist’s bedroom. You can walk and interact with objects in the room serving a brief tutorial and to continue informing the player of the setting. The year is 2027 according to a holographic weather update. The protagonist seems to be lonely in his personal life as he has no matches on his dating app. As he interfaces with the bed to sleep, the screen glitches as it announces that someone is connecting...

The player is now in a dark, muted, snowy landscape. There’s snow or fireflies or perhaps just spooky floating motes a la Stranger Things in the air. I should mention it’s quiet. There’s the sound of wind and nature and wolves howling. Every so often there’s a low growl that makes you worry about your safety here. But most immediately obvious, there’s a ghostly woman floating above you. She has a pony tail, red shirt, and a skirt. Her legs sway eerily in the air like seaweed at the bottom of the ocean. And she’s pointing.

As the character, you run out to where your ghostly guide is pointing towards. You follow her and encounter fantastical scenarios like a tree of butterfly leaves that fly away and objects glowing with a special essence. The music for these encounters are whimsical and inquisitive. 

The most important things you encounter though are the doors. The first pair of doors you encounter seem to be to the bathroom. The women’s room is locked, while the men’s is not. There’s three glowing spots behind the men’s door. Once you open the door, you can actually see a glowing capsule object that you must grab and take out through the door. It sounds simple enough, but I literally mean you can only see these objects when looking through the door. Besides keeping the player character in view, the camera is fixed to looking ahead. Objects and clues are revealed when you walk around the scene and look through the doorframe. It’s a great bit of fantasy and surrealism. Once you grab and remove these objects one-by-one, the women’s door is opened. Walking through the women’s door to reach a glowing light causes a corporeal woman in a bright yellow dress to pass the doorframe! It’s a startling occurrence for what so far was a calm affair. This is partially due to a classic horror musical cue, but she doesn’t seem to be malevolent. She actually seems to be a different, solid version of the ghost girl that’s been accompanying you.

I will mention briefly, I did theorize that perhaps this could be a story of a trans woman. She’s going into the men’s bathroom initially but then is able to use the women’s restroom. Going off that theory, grabbing the sparkling essence that seem to fill up the ghost with energy could be the protagonist gathering resources to transition or be her most authentic self. That fact that many of the items are books and bookshelves lends itself well to this theory. However, the prediction begins to get holes in it when you continue further and are introduced to a room that seems to be a library. Going through this door to a wall-less room in the middle of the dream woods, an illustrated image of a young girl and young boy appears to be magically summoned. It seems to be the protagonist and the ghost girl having a “meet cute” moment over dropped books and papers. Is this girl someone forgotten from your past? One could still go with the trans story if this imagery was metaphoric, but remember that someone connected to your dream as you were falling asleep. Perhaps more likely this is a story about friendship or love. Heck, it could be about an imaginary friend.

Back to gameplay, there’s a few other sets of door puzzles in this demo and they’re much more sophisticated and even a little challenging. I don’t know if it was my Mac lagging or the game, but the final set of doors were quite difficult to get done in time because of the movement/controls. 

All in all, there’s was fitting and quality music, a good aesthetic, and creative puzzles based on perspective. While there is likely no dialogue besides the beginning of the game, I feel as though there is room for BestLuck to grow to be a satisfying narrative just based on the mechanics and great artwork. I definitely recommend you give it a download and watch out for the release of the full game!

[chekatpromotions-blog]

An Interview with an Artist-Dawn Boyer, Ph.D. by Candace M.

1. What is your name?

Dawn D.  Boyer, Ph.D.

2. Are you married?  If so, how long have you been married?

Yes, I am married to a wonderful man, James (Jim) M. Stallings.  We met April 2nd, 2005, and have just celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary this last January 6th, 2017.  

3. Do you have children and if so how many?

 I have one biological daughter and two step-daughters, and one fur-baby cat.

4. When did you first become interested in drawing?

 When I was five years old, I started scribbling with a pencil and piece of paper (my mom put that sketch in my baby book). Since then I have not stopped drawing, creating, painting, sketching, sewing, weaving, constructing all forms and types of creative fine art.

5. How did your first beginning drawing propel you to continue with your artwork?

 I am a ‘Type A’ workaholic (my husband calls me “Robot”).  I cannot be still, so my hands must be continuously engaged in something; whether I am drawing, tearing and folding paper for my mixed media paper artwork baskets, or 3-D constructions, crocheting Afghans for family, or sketching and then inking pen-and-ink drawings of historic buildings and old barns, I cannot sit still, so my hands must be continuously engaged in something. I am also a writer and have been journaling my life for 48 years.  

6. What type of training have you had in the art field?

 I have a formal degree – a Bachelor of Fine Art in Graphic Design and Illustrative Art from Radford University in Radford, VA (1985).  I can’t say I learned much about the ‘fine art’ process from this degree; most of the creative art I do now is self-taught.

7. What was the best part of your art education?

 I liked the idea of creating graphic design, but my heart and passion were more into creative fine arts.  At the time I received my degree, the art community was still using ‘press-on lettering,’ and I missed the computer-generated design training I wished I could have achieved today (PhotoShop, etc.).  I did appreciate the multiple drawing classes I had in the program.  I thoroughly disliked the art history classes where we were required to memorize artwork, artist’s, period styles, and dates.

8. Have you attended school for any other types of training and if so, what was it for?

I have not.  I do watch YouTube videos and just started the ‘how-to’ series on Lynda.com (free subscription with a professional paid level on LinkedIn) on how to use the Adobe Creative Cloud (PhotoShop, InDesign, Illustrator) and hope to at least get through that series in the next year.

9. What type of art design most interests you?

I am more interested in taking art types and methodologies (versus design styles) and trying to create and discover more creative ways of using those.  For instance, there are paper crafting methods of Origami, Bubble-Gum Wrapper chain making, football folding, weaving, and quilling, where I use all these methods to create three-dimensional artwork such as weaving the paper chains to create baskets, or using the woven paper strips and ‘footballs’ (those triangular pieces of paper one folded in high school to pass notes or ‘play football’ in the cafeteria when one was bored).  Using these folded paper forms, I create Owls, Peacocks, lizards, wolves, and buffalos in art pieces that build up from the two-dimensional paper to a 3-D form that imitates the real-life form of the creature I am illustrating.

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Dawn, I would love to see your work that you do sometime. This just seems really interesting.

https://www.behance.net/DawnBoyer

https://www.pinterest.com/dawnboyer/dawns-art-projects/

https://www.facebook.com/pg/DawnBoyerArtist/photos/

See embedded pictures at the end of this document for more of the 3-d Type of art pieces

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10. What have been your most proud moments in your art achievements?

I am proud of the series of books I have drawn and published.  I self-publish, and have branded myself as the originator and illustrator of the Fairy Houses and Fairy Doors (series).  I just published my 134th book last week – the newest topic for this coloring book was Fantastic Flora and Fauna – with illustrations of animals in settings full of flowers and/or woodland scenes.

11. Tell me something about your unique style of art that is different from other artists?

I don’t like sticking with one type of artwork. I get bored relatively quickly then move on to another type of artwork, as the mood hits me. What is funny – while I have illustrated over 40 coloring books – I ‘suck’ at coloring myself.  My artistic forte is drawing pen-and-ink (black line) illustrations.  

My favorite topic to draw on is historic architecture from the restored district of Colonial Williamsburg, in Williamsburg, VA. My parents started taking the family to visit there 54 years ago, and I have been visiting no less than once a year since.  What I recently figured out is that all those pen-and-ink illustrations of the architecture I have been creating for years could make a fantastic coloring book for adults, so created one book of my drawings. I am now working on several other books of gray scale coloring books of the same topic.  My second favorite drawing topic is old barns in a state of decay or collapsing old homes or grist mills.  Those seem to have an untold story that creates character into the drawings I create.  

 Dawn, I have to agree with you about old places. They do have a story to tell, and many books have been written that involve these old buildings.

I spent about two years figuring out how to weave the bubble-gum chain wrappers into woven baskets.  First I had to figure out how to create the chains from something other than gum wrappers (to keep my teeth cavity free), so I discovered magazine pages make awesome and pretty durable folding pieces.

I have sewn over 40 quilts in my lifetime and used to sew all my own clothing before my daughter was born.  I have probably crocheted over 100 afghans – I visit the thrift shops regularly for inexpensive yarn packages, sort the colors into groups, then crochet simple squares with single- and double-crochet stitch.

I have painted murals on walls and painted eggs (blown-out) with nail polish to create beautiful Christmas tree ornaments. I love upcycling furniture, also.  I will take a solid wood piece of thrift store or a curb-side rescue and strip the finish, then re-stain it in patterns, swirls, or creative ways (not paint, wood stain only), to create some amazing pieces.  Sometimes I will use stain to ‘paint’ a picture – I painted to two wolves howling at the moon on top of the inexpensive wine & glass stand I purchased for $10.  

12.  Can you relate something humorous to your adventures in the art world? Please share that with us.

When I first started my formal art degree at Virginia Commonwealth University in the Art Foundation program, they had ‘life study drawing classes’ which, as a naïve 18-year old, I had no idea what that meant. I walked into class first day, put up my easel, got my paper ready, charcoal stick out, then looked around the corner of the easel to see a naked man posing in the middle of the room.  In my astonishment, I immediately blurted out, “Is he NAKED?  Talk about embarrassing!

13. What is the something you would like to see changed in the art world?

I would like to see art galleries stop charging the artists so MUCH to display and sell the artist’s work.  While I perfectly understand that the gallery has to make a profit and has overhead expenses, also, instituting a 45-55% commission on the art work means the artist has to jack up their price by 100% or more to get what they originally want to make as revenue on the art piece. This makes it expensive for the common man to find quality art work they can afford in galleries.  

I do love that social media and the Internet has changed the game for selling artwork – I constantly build a presence for each of my illustrations in my coloring books by posting Works in Progress (WIP) and get my fans excited and ramped up to purchase the book when it is released.  I see other coloring book artists doing the same.  

14. I am sure you have had many challenges in your life, what has been your greatest challenge and how did you get through it?

 I have several challenges I have had to overcome and I am working on overcoming:

I have always wanted a dedicated art studio with lots of space to work on large pieces of art work and several projects at once.  I established one in the den of my last house, then we promptly put it up for sale, and I had to pack everything. When we moved to the current house, I spent thousands on getting the garage fixed up for an official art studio, then we found out we had to sell this house and move again, so essentially, my ‘art studio’ became a small light table bumped up against the hearth in my living room (about six square fee).  I am now back to juggling my drawing surfaces on my lap while sitting on the sofa and finding a space at a small table.  When I permanently move in with my mom, I will be working on creating a full-scale art studio in her sun-room.

15. Where do you see your art taking you in the future?

I cannot wait to reach what my husband and I call, Phase III, which is (after kids grow up and get out on their own) where he and I will start being more creative with art projects, home building (retirement house and 40 acres), and to be able to afford more art tools (like a plasma cutting CNC machine that cuts metals, or a wood routing machine one can program designs into so as to cut huge wooden planks).  

16. How many books do you have published?  How many adult coloring books?

 I have published at least 134 books in total, 114 are on Amazon now, and of those at least 40 ‘Big Kids Coloring Books’ (series name).  Interested readers who want to see the listing of most of my published books on Amazon can find the listing at my author’s page: https://www.amazon.com/author/dawnboyer

17. What is a good quote that you find has helped you through many situations in your life?

 My father had two quips I have always sworn by: 

He would ask my sister and I: “What’s the most important thing?”

And we would always answer: “Family.”

Then he would ask us: “Why?”

And we would answer: “Because they will never let you down.”

When I got stressed about something – money, boyfriends, work, etc. …

Dad would ask: “Well, what’s the worst that could happen about this issue?” I would answer: (with all the worst case scenarios)

Then he would ask: “Can you die from it?” I would answer; “Of course not!”

Then he would respond, “Then it’s not a problem.”

18. I see that you have interviewed other artists.  Is this your first time being interviewed?

This is my second time being interviewed as an artist.  It’s quite flattering to think that someone ‘out there’ is interested in my way of thinking or art style or artwork. I am usually ferociously private about the methods and manners in which I create my artwork – I don’t like sharing anything with others until it’s finished.  Over the last four years, I have learned to adapt to being ‘social’ about my artwork, and overcome someone physically looking over my shoulder (husband) while I work, but also to share works-in-progress (WIP) as I draw, and have even started asking my fans what they would like to see in my illustrations (e.g., cats, dragons, hippos, tarsier monkeys).  I am adding my coloring street team’s cats in my current illustrations as they share their photos of their fur-babies in poses I can use in my next coloring book.

19. What types of artists have you interviewed?

One artist was a ‘beach’ artist originally from Hawaii who focused on waves, and tropical motifs; another artist was a clay sculptress who created huge clay creatures for the garden and welded metal tools and everyday utensils with other found objects to create small, humorous pieces; and the third creates large, hauntingly beautiful pictures of women, using pan pastels as a medium.

20. Where was your most favorite place to interview an artist?

The interviews with these artists were conducted via email by sending them the interview questions, allowing them to be able to answer the questions at their own convenience in their own home or studio on their schedule.

21. Where can your books and PDFs be found?

My paperback books can be purchased from my author’s page listing:

https://www.amazon.com/author/dawnboyer

I also sell Fine Art Prints of some of my pen and ink illustrations at Fine Art America: http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/dawn-boyer.html

I sell page packs of my coloring books on Etsy: www.etsy.com/shop/DawnDBoyer

22. Do you have any advice that you would give an aspiring artist just starting out in the adult coloring world?

For gosh sakes – the best advice I can provide is to BRAND yourself and do NOT ignore marketing, branding, and advertising methods – which most artists totally suck at. 

Use social media to post your works in progress to build interest – and not just one platform. If you don't have accounts yet for the following: Facebook and Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter, Behance and Fine Art America, LinkedIn for networking with other artists and PayPal to accept payments; create them, figure them out, and use them.  ASK others how they use them, and don’t be an idiot and use them ONLY for advertising. You must create a ‘relationship’ with your fans and followers. Provide interesting tidbits to your posts and followers versus constantly blasting them with ‘buy my art’ ads.

23. If you could go anywhere and color, where would that be?

It’s more a mindset ‘place’ I want to visit versus a physical place.  My absolute favorite place to be is sitting at a comfortable table with loads of arm and elbow space, with all my necessary media within arms-reach, and be ‘in the mood’ to do my artwork.  A NetFlix movie or series would be playing on a TV screen in front of me, where I can look up occasionally to see what is happening on the screen. If my husband is in the room, also, that’s a bonus (he would likely be working on his computer on homework or website building).  

3-D Owl, Lizard, Peacock, and Seahorse all created from recycled magazine pages and using paper-folding techniques.

Folded paper sculpture in the works

My current ‘art studio’ created from an old sewing machine table with a LED light plugged into space with a clear Plexiglass cover to use as a light table and drawing table.

My $10 wine rack, with the two wolves barking at the moon.

[gaarfielf]

Reviews for every Ghibli movie i’ve ever seen

Spirited Away - 10/10

The art is amazing, the soundtrack is amazing, the storyline is compelling and I’ve probably cried watching it 100 times and if I talk about it long enough I’ll cry some more. And if it sweetens the deal at all, I know people who literally hate anime and Spirited Away is their only exception because it is THAT good. This movie just retains its quality as a movie for people of all ages because it knows how to tug your heart strings.

My Neighbor Totoro - 6/10

I actually only watched this very recently and its a really cute movie but I think I waited a little too long to watch it. I could tell by watching it that if I was like 10 years old I would’ve been all over it just because of the little soot sprites and the bus that is literally just an enormous cat (what isn’t there to like). My only complaints would be that its a little bit slow moving and I am not patient.

Princess Monoke - 5/10

Personally, I had no clue what this movie was about the first time I watched it and I didn’t find it very memorable. However, you will find that most reviews for this movie are split down the middle between saying “this movie was weird” and “this movie was brilliant” so I very seriously say, do not take my word for this movie because it really is just a hit or a miss depending on who you are.

Kiki’s Delivery Service - 10/10

I love this movie MORE than I love Spirited Away honestly. I’d say the thing I loved more about it than Spirited Away was that it focused on a different problem. Spirited Away was more or less about independence and loss of identity and Kiki was more about finding purpose and having difficulties making friends. So I place these two movies on the same level just because of their similarities, but I like Kiki more just because of how realistic it is.

Grave of the Fireflies - 4/10

It is very hard to judge this movie. I understand it is about war times and it isn’t supposed to be the cutesy fantasy world that Ghibli usually does but...goddamn after you get used to Kiki and Spirited Away you kind of expect some kind of good to happen and I mean very literally not one good thing happens in Grave of the Fireflies. There is a lot of on screen death, extremely morbid images and heartbreaking scenes that in all fairness, I should have expected considering its a movie about war, but its still uncomfortable.

Castle in the Sky - 6/10

Not gonna lie, I haven’t watched this in a few years. It has a special place in my heart as one of three movies I had VHS tapes of when I was a kid, but out of the three, this one was the least memorable. I can’t speak for the storyline because I can’t exactly remember what happened but I really liked the animation and the character design overall was really fun and gave what would have otherwise been a pretty serious movie a bit of relaxation.

Howl’s Moving Castle - 8/10

The movie was really creative and did an amazing job at wrapping up a story that had so many different aspects where there wasn’t really anything left unanswered. Like they had a variety of characters that each had their own stories and character arc and it made it really easy to say confidently that there wasn’t a character you genuinely didn’t enjoy.

Whisper of the Heart - 3/10

Just an incredibly slow moving movie that didn’t offer any sort of heart warming ghibli lesson like I’m used to getting. My general distaste for it comes from Miyazaki saying he was tired of movies geared towards children that were just about girls chasing after boys (which is why he made Spirited Away) but then?? Whisper of the Heart??? was literally that??? I guess movies about romance focused around children is just weird to me.

Porco Rosso - 10/10

Much like Howl’s Moving Castle, the characters were so well done in this movie that there isn’t a character you can say you hate because they are all enjoyable. This movie took a step up by making personal connections. We got to see a side of Porco that you could only really understand by comprehending what the war effort meant to him. Another similarity to Howl’s Moving Castle would be the occasional time Porco returns to being a human (similar to Sophie returning to her normal age) during times that he was being true to himself. Overall really meaningful while still being a traditional Ghibli movie.

The Cat Returns - 4/10

As someone who really likes cats I was kind of expecting more from this movie. It was flat and the whole “cat world” thing was very underdeveloped. I also felt like we didn’t realy get to know the main character very well. It is kind of hard to compare this movie to some of the more well known Ghibli movies (especially considering they actually reused some of the characters from this one in other ones). I liked the animation and the cats were well designed, but I think it wasn’t very coherent.

From Up on Poppy Hill - 5/10

I watched this one a while back when I was determined to watch all the ghibli movies I could get my dirty hands on. From what I remember it was a very simple movie that had a few iconic moments (the scene where Shun jumps off the roof and into the pond by the school). The only part I didn’t like was the plot not very subtly tip toeing around “neither of them knows who their dad is so they might be siblings but they are also kind of in love with each other so?? SPOILER ALERT they don’t end up being siblings but it was still kind of weird.

The Wind Rises - 4/10

EXTREMELY WELL ANIMATED (and boring). Beyond the opening scene with the train just about nothing happens. They sort of hinged the movie on this blooming love story that was kind of shaky and was weighed down by the fact a lot of sad stuff was happening between these supposed “good” things happening. So like his school burned down, his wife has a horrible disease, theres a war going on, and he almost killed somebody with the plane he made but...woohoo he got married. I guess.

When Marnie Was There - 8/10

This ghibli movie is unique in the sense that it’s one of the few that actually subtly deals with sexuality (not explicitly, mind you) as well as one of the few ghibli movies that doesn’t have a male love interest/partner. My only complaint would be that a lot of people misinterpreted the movie and made it seem gross so a lot of people didn’t give the movie a chance even though it’s really heartfelt and sad.

Only Yesterday (Incomplete) - 2/10

I’ve attempted to watch this movie 3 separate times. I keep getting an hour in and closing it because it just really doesn’t interest me. It has A LOT of stunning reviews and I really don’t understand how? I did watch a part near the end that was pretty touching but in my head all I could think was “man I’m glad I skipped to this part I wouldn’t have sat through another hour to see this”. By all means you should try watching it like I did and if you can get past the pineapple scene, then you’ve already passed me.

[scrawnydutchman]

Top 10 favorite Youtubers/online entertainers

The internet has amassed a whole new generation of entertainment unforeseeable by previous decades. Nowadays the average joe can go from an untrained, self taught sketch artist to a mass recognized celebrity that regularly touches the hearts of millions of fans who check in on youtube everyday to see their latest content. Of course just like every medium of entertainment you get some stinkers who exploit some sort of algorithm in place or shoot to the top for content theft or straight up harassment of people in public, but we’re not gonna pay attention to that because frankly the internet is pretty negative by itself. This list is going to be comprised of my top 10 favorite online entertainers!

Now, let me set some ground rules before I go into this list; this list order is NOT NECESSARILY in order of objective quality. It’s more governed by how early I discovered these creators, how long I’ve been fans of their content, how regularly I check in on their channels, how often I rewatch their stuff, what kind of impact they had on me when I first discovered them, etc etc. Pretty well everybody featured on this list has a youtube channel and earned their claim to fame through there but that doesn’t mean they aren’t featured elsewhere as well. Also, being that I am an animator and overall Animation enthusiast (check out my youtube channel @TomboTime for my cartoons and follow me on twitter @Tomjvank) A few of these entries are very animation specific or at least benefit the animation community in some way. I’m not apologizing for this bias as I truely think Animation is the greatest art medium in the world, but just keep that in mind as we go through. Also, you can bet your ass I’ll be leaving links to their channels so you can check them out and subscribe if they sound interesting. Enough jibber jabber, let’s get started!

#10. Epic Rap Battles of History

You know this list is going to be good when we kick things off with the exceptionally talented comedic rap duo of Nice Peter and EpicLLOYD. One of the most highly viewed series of videos in the history of Youtube and rightfully so. An extraordinarily clever idea about pitting two historical and/or culturally important characters against each other executed beautifully through great costumes and props, progressively higher and higher production value and hilarious and clever lyrics written by the duo as well as collaborative recurring artists like Zach Sherwin and Dan Bull. These guys are great rappers, great lyricists, wonderful actors, great directors and overall just charming guys who you can tell put every fiber of their being into this wonderful series of comedic gold. They top themselves every season in production value and creative lyricism, and while not EVERY line of theirs is a winner and often times their videos can have something about them that doesn’t feel right, they are still undeniably some of the best entertainers around for whom I have nothing but respect for. Oh and uh, if you guys are reading this Peter and Lloyd, I humbly request that you guys do Robin Williams vs. George Carlin if you plan on making another season. It would make my life.

Here’s the link to their channel: 

https://www.youtube.com/user/ERB

and here’s a link to my all time favorite ERB video: Steven Spielberg vs. Alfred Hitchcock. I’m a tad biased being a film buff, but I love this video for it’s amazing constantly changing themes, great lyrics referencing the immense history of every director involved, a hilarious ending sequence and the INTENSE attention to detail when they pay homage to each of these directors by imitating their most frequently used camera angles and tricks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wYtG7aQTHA

#9. Jontron

The “Ech” man. The often imitated but never duplicated OG not-so-grump, Jon Jafari. Rather recently breaking the 3 million subscriber mark on his youtube channel (congratulations Jon). Jontron is well known for his excellent line delivery, deadpan expression, facetious demeanor and just shear wit represented in his stature and his video editing. He critiques video games as well as terrible movies, but let’s be honest; that’s not the real reason why we watch him. The real reason we watch him is because we just can’t wait to see what unpredictable response he’s going to have to whatever media he has put up for mockery. Jontron goes in unforeseeable directions with his humor all the time and it makes every video of his refreshing and new. And it never gets stale; his routine only gets better with him. I think he’s funnier now then he’s ever been before. I was heartbroken when he left the Game Grumps as all other fans at the time were, but I’m so glad he went in the creative direction that he did.

Link to his channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/JonTronShow

My favorite video of his would have to be his review of Howling 2: Your Sister is a Werewolf. Particularly the moment where he gets bottles thrown at his head in slow motion and then immediately forgets what joke he was building up to. The guy is a champ who will do anything for a joke and goddam if it doesn’t make me squeal with laughter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2zAR8vbfIw&t=389s

#8. ItsJustSomeRandomGuy

You remember those old Mac/PC commericals? Y’know the ones with the whole “Hi I’m a Mac and I’m a PC” bit? Well what if you took that premise, you replace the computer brands with Marvel and DC comics, and then you have one talented voice acting man deliver it using action figures? This is one of those premises you didn’t even know you wanted until it was explained to you. This channel has been entertaining viewers such as myself since 2007, near the dawn of Youtube, but unfortunately has suffered a lot of undeserved flack along the way. For one, now that the formatting of Youtube has changed quite a bit this channels old videos don’t fit the entire screen anymore and poor Micheal Agrusso has been trying to fix it for a while. For another, this HORRIBLY underrated channel only has a little over 170,000 subscribers despite it being one of the oldest channels around. If you want witty banter between iconic superheroes roasting each other over their cinematic releases, with dozens of unique and different characters expertly portrayed by just one man, as well as stunningly compelling storylines executed through use of action figures and an old camcorder, this channel is for you. Even with the incorrect video formatting on the older stuff I guarantee it’s a good time.

Link to the channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/ItsJustSomeRandomGuy

Not necessarily my favorite vid of his EVER but CERTAINLY a good place to start, check out his vid he made back when the latest releases were Watchmen and X-men Origins: Wolverine. All you need to know is that the guy completely NAILS his delivery as everyone’s favorite Merc with the Mouth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1R5PhReY5k

#7. The Rubber Onion

Here’s our first animation related entry and our first entertainers to broadcast themselves in the Podcast format. A couple of animators (Stephen Brooks and Rob Yulfo) shooting the shit and talking about life making cartoons and watching cartoons, as well as getting some titular guests from the industry including Tomm Moore, director of my favorite movie Song of the Sea , Don Bluth, creator of such classics as Secret of NIMH and and The Land Before Time, as well as a guest coming up later in this list (foreshadowing), these guys not only make stellar podcast hosts that ooze with charisma themselves but they also have very compelling chemistry with each other that’s entertaining to listen to. Chemistry between people is something I’m always really drawn to and has impacted a lot of my choices on this list. Now these guys have the smallest channel on the list with just under 6000 subscribers, so trust me when I say these guys deserve all the love they can get. As always, here’s a link to their channel:

https://www.youtube.com/user/rubberonion

And if you got 3 hours to kill, why not listen to their hilarious halloween special where they go over some “animation horror stories” with many of their guests from 2016? It’s a roller coaster of emotions, some are hilarious, some are uncomfortable, and some you might wanna skip if you’re squeamish.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQ-GPtusFOI

#6. HotDiggedyDemon

First animator on our list and one I have no shame in saying is quite possibly the most talented and exceptional on the site of Youtube! You can tell that creator Max Gilardi LOVES cartoons, not just by his medium of choice but by the familiar tones they carry from some of the most classic tv shows and movies that ever aired. He’s got stills that remind me of those close-up grossout gags from Spongebob, he’s got some wild off model expressions like Ren and Stimpy, he has dark and gritty off the wall humor that feels like Invader Zim amped up to eleven and he has thick linework and character design that remind me of all the great Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network greats. The man can do it all and always puts in a tremendous amount of attention to detail to all his work that does NOT go unappreciated. The man is just shy of a million subscribers on his channel which, for independent animators in this day and age is quite impressive. I say that because due to a change in the Youtube promotion algorithm animators are unfortunately handicapped as a result of not being able to produce long form content and a daily basis and therefore can’t compete with Let’s Players and vloggers, despite undeniably being some of the most talented creators on the site. Luckily, Max had the clever idea of producing “Brain Dump”, a weekly series of movie and tv show reviews he puts together while integrating both 2d and 3d animation alike to keep every episode as appealing to look at as any of his cartoons, which are also packed with witty dialogue and dark gritty implications. It’s propelling his steady climb to a million subs and I say more power to him!

link to his channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/hotdiggedydemon

By far my favorite video of his is “The Greatest Idea ever!” Not necessarily his most well animated (in fact it’s very crude in comparison to his newer stuff), this is a toon close to my heart that is ALL in the delivery. It has a hilarious premise, great buildup, a nice sense of suspense and a hilarious payoff. Check it out!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAr-6VliDBU

#5. TeamFourStar

Y’know, Dragonball is cool and everything, I’m not denying that, but . . . what if we took the most well known attributes of every character, amplified them to a million and integrated hella witty dialogue throughout the whole thing? That’s what you get when you see TeamFourStar’s brilliantly hilarious abridged series of Dragonball Z. These phenomenally skilled voice actors of Takahata101, Kaiserneko, Lanipator and other guest stars are some of the most comedically brilliant people around on the internet. Fight me on this, I dare you. Every episode of their abridged series (including the movie specials, ESPECIALLY the movie specials) are jam packed with effective line after effective line after effective line. They pump out more hilarious material then an entire room of SNL writers, it’s unfathomable. Usually creators track records have blemishes here and there, it sort of comes naturally for creative people, but I can’t think of a single TeamFourStar vid I ever watched that wasn’t just jam packed with great jokes. By the way, their Hellsing Abridged series is hella funny too, but is significantly cruder and off colour in comparison. they more then deserve their fanbase of over 2 million subscribers.

Link to their channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/TeamFourStar

My favorite special of theirs has to be their movie special of Super Android 13. Friend and fellow youtuber  of TFS Lyle Mcdouchebag put it best in saying it’s “Pound for pound the funniest video TFS has ever done”. Also this episode guest stars the also greatly talented Mick Lauer, better known as RicePirate as Android 13.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fH3X2U9t2P0&t=3s

#4. Jacksfilms

Jack Douglass is an exceptionally hard working man. Reading thousands of comments for his daily series YIAY, coming up with original content every week like PMS and YGS, and on some occasions spending days on end editing together huge collaboration videos. It’s a wonder how he pulls it off, but man does it ever deliver. He pretty much always has a clever method on hand for making the current algorithm work for him, and what’s more I appreciate him giving support to Animators along the way, particularly RageNineteen with whom he frequently collabs with. Also he’s made some of the most on point and hilarious satire on the site. It’s just too bad his fiancee (congrats Jack) is funnier them him (sick burn). It took him some time to build up his channel to 2 million subs but I’m glad he finally got what he deserves and then some.

Link to his channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/jacksfilms

For a video to check out I GREATLY recommend YGS 100. It’s an hour long of youtuber collaborations (chances are your favorite is featured) reading some of the worst grammar the internet has to offer. It’s the video Jack put the most love, sweat and tears into and it’s a great waste of your time. Check it out!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEmPk7uAQ34&t=70s

#3. Game Grumps

Once upon a time in 2012 an unexpected coupling of internet entertainers happened. Arin “Egoraptor” Hanson and Jon “Jontron” Jafari. I was well aware of who each of them were at the time but had no idea they were even aware of each others existence, and so naturally I had to check out how they worked together as a duo. They complimented each other greatly with off the wall humor and giggly antics that made you feel like you were right there with him playing some Goof Troop. Eventually Jon decided to leave to pursue his own creative goals in New York and was replaced by the lovable, charming and downright hilarious Dan Avidan (more commonly known as Danny Sexbang), the one half of Ninja Sex Party. What followed was over 3 years of hilariousness, down to earth moments between the two that resulted in some of the hardest moments I’ve ever laughed in my life. They’ve been quickly evolving with all sorts of spinoff shows as well as guest stars (one of which is a later entry in this list) and amassing over 3 million subscribers and countless sold out shows across the states and bits of Canada. They have exceptional improv talent and a charm that keeps them going. Not to mention they are a frequent employer of talented animators whom they get to animate some of their most hilarious moments, which I highly commend them for. Anything that gives talented people work is okay in my book (well . . maybe not anything, but GG certainly).

Link to their channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9CuvdOVfMPvKCiwdGKL3cQ

If you want a dosage of everything great about the grumps, watch this first part of their Wind Waker playthrough. Wind Waker is one of their best examples of just how goddam funny they are so I can’t recommend it enough.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjShcaf9jOY

#2. Super Best Friends Play

I just love everything about these guys. I love their chemistry. I love how ernest they are. I love how smart they are. I love how witty they are. I love Matt’s derailing one liners and his perpetual Simpsons references. I love Pat and his proneness to anger as well as his deadpan delivery. I love Woolie and his exceptional knowledge on gaming and insightful commentary on what makes a game or movie interesting. And I love Liam (who will be missed) and his sudden but explosive wit that leaves the rest of the room dying with laughter. These guys are everything I love about the Game Grumps, only they’ve been around for way longer (and I’ve been a fan off them way longer) and they tackle way more then just games. They do entertaining podcasts, streams, and their skits are delightfully awkward. They’re just immensely charming dudes who did the premise of a comedic gaming duo before the Grumps made it cool. Plus they give talented animators frequent work, most notably 2snacks. They promote independent games and developers and often times play huge parts in their success (like Shovel Night, T.E.C 3001 and Skullgirls). They may have less then a million subscribers, but make no mistake: they are absolutely the hypest gameplay on youtube (also they’re the whole reason I say “hype”).

Link to their channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheSw1tcher

My favorite video of theirs is their bloopers/outtakes of Punch-out (a blooper reel of another video they released on Machinima). I can’t help but get caught up in their giggly attitude and, quite honestly, the jokes they come up with here are way funnier then anything they put in the official release (but the official release is still really funny).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOwQXNxcRRM

before we get to number one, here are some honorable mentions: Ten Second Songs, Peanutbuttergamer, The Rageaholic, The Nostalgia Critic, JelloApocalypse, Rooster Teeth, Ninja Sex Party, Egoraptor.

#1. Harry Partridge

All of my entries are people who have greatly entertained me over the years, but only one has impacted my life in a way I would never undo. Here we have the man who inspired me to take up animation as a career and to whom I owe for everything I know and all the success I’ve had thus far; Harry Partridge. Harry Partridge is a masterful 2d hand drawn animator with stunning angles, fluid character motion, great lighting, theater like poses that read so incredibly well and sort of a disney afternoon or 80s ninja turtles-esque charm with a dark adult twist. I’ve always admired his work and immense skill not just in animating, but in directing, writing, music and voice acting. He’s a jack of all trades and always has high value in everything he does, even if he doesn’t update nearly as frequently as he would like. His online animation tutorial series “Happy Harry’s Hu-Ha 2 How To’s” , is tremendously helpful in that it allowed me to see for myself how truly easy and accessible animation is for someone like me in a very humorous way. I have the utmost respect for this guy, and when he complimented my demo reel on twitter I fanboyed like you wouldn’t believe.

anyway, here’s a link to this channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/HarryPartridge

and here’s a link to my favorite cartoon of his, “Irving the Socially Awkward Bee”. It’s definitely not his best in animation quality or sound or anything like that; it’s very crude. But much like HotdiggedyDemon’s “The Greatest Idea Ever!“ it’s all in the execution. It’s a hilarious joke that makes me bust a gut every time I see that poorly drawn bee gently float on screen. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m353UIbP5cU

so there you have it. My top 10 favorite online entertainers. I hope you enjoyed it, either because some of your favorites made the list or because you want to get into some great new content. I promise all of these channels are worth a look.

[peachesandscreamsguidereviews]

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[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include the art behind Thimbleweed Park, the rise of RimWorld, and much, much more.

For anyone counting, this is week 31 of picks, and I'm still managing to keep up the weekly pace - primarily because my regular social media trawls during the week allow me to stack up links to post at the weekend! And this is still without regular RSS feed checking - so there's got to be a bunch more stories I'm missing. Ah well.

So much good stuff out there - and I really enjoyed some of the more esoteric stories in this week's set, including the piece on Tamagotchi collectors and the visually impaired Roguelike players. There are all kinds of unique, wonderful video game nerds under the sun, aren't there? Until next time...

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

The Stress of Game Development - Tips for Survival (Extra Credits / YouTube) "Making games is hard. You need all kinds of technical and creative skills, but most importantly, you need to know how to manage the many kinds of stress that come with it."

Game Design Deep Dive: Watch Dogs 2's Invasion of Privacy missions (Christopher Dragert / Gamasutra) "In this article, I will describe some of the technical challenges and design decisions that drove development of the Invasion of Privacy feature in Watch Dogs 2. Areas of focus will include managing branching scenarios, motion capture challenges, controlling NPC state, maintaining dialog flow, and NPC coordination."

Video Games Aren’t Addictive (Christopher J Ferguson & Patrick Markey / New York Times) "Is video game addiction a real thing? It’s certainly common to hear parents complain that their children are “addicted” to video games. Some researchers even claim that these games are comparable to illegal drugs in terms of their influence on the brain — that they are “digital heroin” (the neuroscientist Peter C. Whybrow) or “digital pharmakeia” (the neuroscientist Andrew Doan)."

The Job Simulator Postmortem (Alex Schwartz & Devin Reimer / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 postmortem, Owlchemy Labs' Alexander Schwartz and Devin Reimer analyze the challenges of building, sharing, shipping, and sustaining Job Simulator on multiple platforms with examples showing both successful and less-than-successful design prototypes and how iteration led to the final product."

The Underground World of Tamagotchi Collectors (Alyssa Bereznak / The Ringer) "On October 26 of last year, a user named “psychotama” made his first entry in what would become a detailed online diary, otherwise known as a “Tama log.” “I’m not quite sure how to begin,” he wrote in purple Comic Sans. “My journey with Tamagotchi began about 13 years ago.”"

'Make me think, make me move': New Doom's deceptively simple design (Kris Graft / Gamasutra) "Doom is known for its speed and straightforwardness – move fast, shoot demons. It's a seemingly simple combination that, at the franchise’s best, evokes an ultraviolent cognitive flow. But Doom’s apparent simplicity belies a core design that is difficult to achieve."

From 'Zelda' to 'Witcher 3': Why We're Still Talking About 'Skyrim' (Alex Kane / Glixel) "How Bethesda's 2011 masterpiece – and the colossal online culture of fan art, memes, and music surrounding it – forever changed the game for fantasy RPGs."

Precious Moments, Hype and High School: A Conversation with 'Persona 5' Director Katsura Hashino (Sayem Ahmed / Waypoint) "Hashino tells me that seeing the anticipation for the game build, as previously announced street dates passed and more information on the game crept out via the press, was both "encouraging and scary.""

How Uber Uses Psychological Tricks to Push Its Drivers’ Buttons (Noam Scheiber / New York Times) "The company has undertaken an extraordinary experiment in behavioral science to subtly entice an independent work force to maximize its growth. [SIMON'S NOTE: you may have seen this, but thought it particularly interesting that GDC board member Chelsea Howe was also quoted in here re: F2P-style coercive psychology evils.]"

Why games like 'Super Mario 64' had terrible cameras (Mike Rougeau / Mashable) "The camera is the interactive window through which we experience video games; the term describes not just our perspective and view of a digital space, but the freedom of or restrictions on how we as players control that viewpoint."

A Year after Firewatch (Colin Campbell / Polygon) "With sales of more than a million copies, developer Campo Santo is now working on its next project: unannounced as yet. I sat down with writer Sean Vanaman to talk about the direction he wants to go in next, and how he feels about Firewatch one year after its launch."

Kevin Horton Is a Cryogenics Engineer Turned Retro Gaming Savior (Nicholas DeLeon / Motherboard) "By day Horton, 43, is an engineer at a cryogenics company (he's worked at the same company since high school). But online, he's better known online as Kevtris (in reference to a Tetris clone he developed in the mid-1990s), where he is the brains behind a series of critical technological breakthroughs that allow gamers to play classic video games like The Legend of Zelda and Metroid on modern televisions."

Interactive Fiction Appears at the Whitney Biennial (Chris Klimas / Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation) "The 2017 Whitney Biennial has something curious to offer fans of interactive fiction. Among the works shown this year are With Those We Love Alive and howling dogs, Twine works written by Charity Heartscape Porpentine. [SIMON'S NOTE: short article, but great news, & the linked interview is also notable.]"

From Rational to Emotional: Designs that Increase Player Retention (Jim Brown / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 session, Epic's Jim Brown provides specific examples of design techniques that encourage the formation of enduring emotional ties that could enhance both retention and enjoyment for players in game design."

A Brief History Of Speedrunning (Kat Brewster / ReadOnlyMemory) "A good speedrun is hypnotising to watch – this goes for ones showcased at GDQ, or the ones which get circulated around the internet for their insane jumps or cutscene skips or lightning fast movement. They’re a dizzying show of hard won skill and palpable effort. The video of a world record time which knocks an hours-long campaign into minutes can be jaw-dropping."

In Their War With The Wall Street Journal, Top YouTubers Just Played Themselves (Patricia Hernandez / Kotaku) "Over the last couple of weeks, anger has been bubbling on YouTube over the news that major brands pulled advertisements on the platform in an effort to avoid being matched with objectionable content. The reports, which were published by the Wall Street Journal, were met with such skepticism that they sparked scandalous conspiracy theories among YouTube’s top creators."

After tragedy strikes, a dev's friends strive to complete his game (Chris Priestman / Gamasutra) "Former Harmonix programmer Roger Morash had been working on his passion project, a co-op platformer called Shard, for years before he died in January of this year. "

Inside the Shady World of PlayStation Network Account Resellers (Patrick Klepek / Waypoint) "A few weeks ago, Mic Fok got a weird email. The person writing it claimed they'd been playing Overwatch on a PlayStation Network account for more than six months, but the password had changed recently. But why would Fok know anything about this random dude's account?"

(Not) a Thimbleweed Park review (Matej Jan / Retronator) "Thimbleweed Park started as a spiritual successor to Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island. “It’s like opening a dusty old desk drawer and finding an undiscovered LucasArts adventure game you’ve never played before.” [SIMON'S NOTE: mainly linking this for the amaaazing vintage Mark Ferrari art linked within, tho the whole thing is cute!]"

Playing roguelikes when you can’t see (Kent Sutherland / RockPaperShotgun) "For most of us, traditional roguelikes are intrinsically inaccessible. They’re notoriously difficult, their design is complicated and often opaque, they can have more hotkeys than there are keys on the keyboard, and their ASCII-based visuals mean that it’s often unclear what’s happening on the screen. It’s these exact qualities, however, that ironically make roguelikes accessible and even appealing to blind or low-sight players."

The Game Beat Weekly: Digital Foundry and Microsoft make it "exclusive" (Kyle Orland / Tinyletter) "That kind of server-melting traffic shows why it would have been somewhat crazy for Eurogamer to turn down Microsoft's invitation to see Scorpio up close at their Redmond headquarters last week. But agreeing to an exclusive of this magnitude also risks coming across as a mere mouthpiece for a company you're supposed to be covering with a kind of detached objectivity."

The Witness - Noclip Documentary (NoClip / YouTube) "What lies at the heart of Jonathan Blow's island of mystery? We talk to the famed indie designer about how one of his earliest design ideas blossomed into The Witness."

A Pioneer Story: How MECC Blazed New Trails (Joe Juba / Game Informer) "Decades ago, as computing migrated from research labs and universities and into the mainstream, one company in Minnesota was instrumental in bringing technology into classrooms. Thanks to its focused mission and talented staff, the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) used exceptional software like The Oregon Trail to engage and educate a generation of students – and establish an unforgettable legacy."

Inside 'RimWorld', the Cult Sci-Fi Hit That Just Keeps Growing (Chris Priestman / Glixel) "Since its earliest public release on Steam Early Access in July, RimWorld – a sci-fi space colony sim – has amassed more than 600,000 players, and it's not even a finished project."

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include the art behind Thimbleweed Park, the rise of RimWorld, and much, much more.

For anyone counting, this is week 31 of picks, and I'm still managing to keep up the weekly pace - primarily because my regular social media trawls during the week allow me to stack up links to post at the weekend! And this is still without regular RSS feed checking - so there's got to be a bunch more stories I'm missing. Ah well.

So much good stuff out there - and I really enjoyed some of the more esoteric stories in this week's set, including the piece on Tamagotchi collectors and the visually impaired Roguelike players. There are all kinds of unique, wonderful video game nerds under the sun, aren't there? Until next time...

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

The Stress of Game Development - Tips for Survival (Extra Credits / YouTube) "Making games is hard. You need all kinds of technical and creative skills, but most importantly, you need to know how to manage the many kinds of stress that come with it."

Game Design Deep Dive: Watch Dogs 2's Invasion of Privacy missions (Christopher Dragert / Gamasutra) "In this article, I will describe some of the technical challenges and design decisions that drove development of the Invasion of Privacy feature in Watch Dogs 2. Areas of focus will include managing branching scenarios, motion capture challenges, controlling NPC state, maintaining dialog flow, and NPC coordination."

Video Games Aren’t Addictive (Christopher J Ferguson & Patrick Markey / New York Times) "Is video game addiction a real thing? It’s certainly common to hear parents complain that their children are “addicted” to video games. Some researchers even claim that these games are comparable to illegal drugs in terms of their influence on the brain — that they are “digital heroin” (the neuroscientist Peter C. Whybrow) or “digital pharmakeia” (the neuroscientist Andrew Doan)."

The Job Simulator Postmortem (Alex Schwartz & Devin Reimer / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 postmortem, Owlchemy Labs' Alexander Schwartz and Devin Reimer analyze the challenges of building, sharing, shipping, and sustaining Job Simulator on multiple platforms with examples showing both successful and less-than-successful design prototypes and how iteration led to the final product."

The Underground World of Tamagotchi Collectors (Alyssa Bereznak / The Ringer) "On October 26 of last year, a user named “psychotama” made his first entry in what would become a detailed online diary, otherwise known as a “Tama log.” “I’m not quite sure how to begin,” he wrote in purple Comic Sans. “My journey with Tamagotchi began about 13 years ago.”"

'Make me think, make me move': New Doom's deceptively simple design (Kris Graft / Gamasutra) "Doom is known for its speed and straightforwardness – move fast, shoot demons. It's a seemingly simple combination that, at the franchise’s best, evokes an ultraviolent cognitive flow. But Doom’s apparent simplicity belies a core design that is difficult to achieve."

From 'Zelda' to 'Witcher 3': Why We're Still Talking About 'Skyrim' (Alex Kane / Glixel) "How Bethesda's 2011 masterpiece – and the colossal online culture of fan art, memes, and music surrounding it – forever changed the game for fantasy RPGs."

Precious Moments, Hype and High School: A Conversation with 'Persona 5' Director Katsura Hashino (Sayem Ahmed / Waypoint) "Hashino tells me that seeing the anticipation for the game build, as previously announced street dates passed and more information on the game crept out via the press, was both "encouraging and scary.""

How Uber Uses Psychological Tricks to Push Its Drivers’ Buttons (Noam Scheiber / New York Times) "The company has undertaken an extraordinary experiment in behavioral science to subtly entice an independent work force to maximize its growth. [SIMON'S NOTE: you may have seen this, but thought it particularly interesting that GDC board member Chelsea Howe was also quoted in here re: F2P-style coercive psychology evils.]"

Why games like 'Super Mario 64' had terrible cameras (Mike Rougeau / Mashable) "The camera is the interactive window through which we experience video games; the term describes not just our perspective and view of a digital space, but the freedom of or restrictions on how we as players control that viewpoint."

A Year after Firewatch (Colin Campbell / Polygon) "With sales of more than a million copies, developer Campo Santo is now working on its next project: unannounced as yet. I sat down with writer Sean Vanaman to talk about the direction he wants to go in next, and how he feels about Firewatch one year after its launch."

Kevin Horton Is a Cryogenics Engineer Turned Retro Gaming Savior (Nicholas DeLeon / Motherboard) "By day Horton, 43, is an engineer at a cryogenics company (he's worked at the same company since high school). But online, he's better known online as Kevtris (in reference to a Tetris clone he developed in the mid-1990s), where he is the brains behind a series of critical technological breakthroughs that allow gamers to play classic video games like The Legend of Zelda and Metroid on modern televisions."

Interactive Fiction Appears at the Whitney Biennial (Chris Klimas / Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation) "The 2017 Whitney Biennial has something curious to offer fans of interactive fiction. Among the works shown this year are With Those We Love Alive and howling dogs, Twine works written by Charity Heartscape Porpentine. [SIMON'S NOTE: short article, but great news, & the linked interview is also notable.]"

From Rational to Emotional: Designs that Increase Player Retention (Jim Brown / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 session, Epic's Jim Brown provides specific examples of design techniques that encourage the formation of enduring emotional ties that could enhance both retention and enjoyment for players in game design."

A Brief History Of Speedrunning (Kat Brewster / ReadOnlyMemory) "A good speedrun is hypnotising to watch – this goes for ones showcased at GDQ, or the ones which get circulated around the internet for their insane jumps or cutscene skips or lightning fast movement. They’re a dizzying show of hard won skill and palpable effort. The video of a world record time which knocks an hours-long campaign into minutes can be jaw-dropping."

In Their War With The Wall Street Journal, Top YouTubers Just Played Themselves (Patricia Hernandez / Kotaku) "Over the last couple of weeks, anger has been bubbling on YouTube over the news that major brands pulled advertisements on the platform in an effort to avoid being matched with objectionable content. The reports, which were published by the Wall Street Journal, were met with such skepticism that they sparked scandalous conspiracy theories among YouTube’s top creators."

After tragedy strikes, a dev's friends strive to complete his game (Chris Priestman / Gamasutra) "Former Harmonix programmer Roger Morash had been working on his passion project, a co-op platformer called Shard, for years before he died in January of this year. "

Inside the Shady World of PlayStation Network Account Resellers (Patrick Klepek / Waypoint) "A few weeks ago, Mic Fok got a weird email. The person writing it claimed they'd been playing Overwatch on a PlayStation Network account for more than six months, but the password had changed recently. But why would Fok know anything about this random dude's account?"

(Not) a Thimbleweed Park review (Matej Jan / Retronator) "Thimbleweed Park started as a spiritual successor to Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island. “It’s like opening a dusty old desk drawer and finding an undiscovered LucasArts adventure game you’ve never played before.” [SIMON'S NOTE: mainly linking this for the amaaazing vintage Mark Ferrari art linked within, tho the whole thing is cute!]"

Playing roguelikes when you can’t see (Kent Sutherland / RockPaperShotgun) "For most of us, traditional roguelikes are intrinsically inaccessible. They’re notoriously difficult, their design is complicated and often opaque, they can have more hotkeys than there are keys on the keyboard, and their ASCII-based visuals mean that it’s often unclear what’s happening on the screen. It’s these exact qualities, however, that ironically make roguelikes accessible and even appealing to blind or low-sight players."

The Game Beat Weekly: Digital Foundry and Microsoft make it "exclusive" (Kyle Orland / Tinyletter) "That kind of server-melting traffic shows why it would have been somewhat crazy for Eurogamer to turn down Microsoft's invitation to see Scorpio up close at their Redmond headquarters last week. But agreeing to an exclusive of this magnitude also risks coming across as a mere mouthpiece for a company you're supposed to be covering with a kind of detached objectivity."

The Witness - Noclip Documentary (NoClip / YouTube) "What lies at the heart of Jonathan Blow's island of mystery? We talk to the famed indie designer about how one of his earliest design ideas blossomed into The Witness."

A Pioneer Story: How MECC Blazed New Trails (Joe Juba / Game Informer) "Decades ago, as computing migrated from research labs and universities and into the mainstream, one company in Minnesota was instrumental in bringing technology into classrooms. Thanks to its focused mission and talented staff, the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) used exceptional software like The Oregon Trail to engage and educate a generation of students – and establish an unforgettable legacy."

Inside 'RimWorld', the Cult Sci-Fi Hit That Just Keeps Growing (Chris Priestman / Glixel) "Since its earliest public release on Steam Early Access in July, RimWorld – a sci-fi space colony sim – has amassed more than 600,000 players, and it's not even a finished project."

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include the art behind Thimbleweed Park, the rise of RimWorld, and much, much more.

For anyone counting, this is week 31 of picks, and I'm still managing to keep up the weekly pace - primarily because my regular social media trawls during the week allow me to stack up links to post at the weekend! And this is still without regular RSS feed checking - so there's got to be a bunch more stories I'm missing. Ah well.

So much good stuff out there - and I really enjoyed some of the more esoteric stories in this week's set, including the piece on Tamagotchi collectors and the visually impaired Roguelike players. There are all kinds of unique, wonderful video game nerds under the sun, aren't there? Until next time...

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

The Stress of Game Development - Tips for Survival (Extra Credits / YouTube) "Making games is hard. You need all kinds of technical and creative skills, but most importantly, you need to know how to manage the many kinds of stress that come with it."

Game Design Deep Dive: Watch Dogs 2's Invasion of Privacy missions (Christopher Dragert / Gamasutra) "In this article, I will describe some of the technical challenges and design decisions that drove development of the Invasion of Privacy feature in Watch Dogs 2. Areas of focus will include managing branching scenarios, motion capture challenges, controlling NPC state, maintaining dialog flow, and NPC coordination."

Video Games Aren’t Addictive (Christopher J Ferguson & Patrick Markey / New York Times) "Is video game addiction a real thing? It’s certainly common to hear parents complain that their children are “addicted” to video games. Some researchers even claim that these games are comparable to illegal drugs in terms of their influence on the brain — that they are “digital heroin” (the neuroscientist Peter C. Whybrow) or “digital pharmakeia” (the neuroscientist Andrew Doan)."

The Job Simulator Postmortem (Alex Schwartz & Devin Reimer / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 postmortem, Owlchemy Labs' Alexander Schwartz and Devin Reimer analyze the challenges of building, sharing, shipping, and sustaining Job Simulator on multiple platforms with examples showing both successful and less-than-successful design prototypes and how iteration led to the final product."

The Underground World of Tamagotchi Collectors (Alyssa Bereznak / The Ringer) "On October 26 of last year, a user named “psychotama” made his first entry in what would become a detailed online diary, otherwise known as a “Tama log.” “I’m not quite sure how to begin,” he wrote in purple Comic Sans. “My journey with Tamagotchi began about 13 years ago.”"

'Make me think, make me move': New Doom's deceptively simple design (Kris Graft / Gamasutra) "Doom is known for its speed and straightforwardness – move fast, shoot demons. It's a seemingly simple combination that, at the franchise’s best, evokes an ultraviolent cognitive flow. But Doom’s apparent simplicity belies a core design that is difficult to achieve."

From 'Zelda' to 'Witcher 3': Why We're Still Talking About 'Skyrim' (Alex Kane / Glixel) "How Bethesda's 2011 masterpiece – and the colossal online culture of fan art, memes, and music surrounding it – forever changed the game for fantasy RPGs."

Precious Moments, Hype and High School: A Conversation with 'Persona 5' Director Katsura Hashino (Sayem Ahmed / Waypoint) "Hashino tells me that seeing the anticipation for the game build, as previously announced street dates passed and more information on the game crept out via the press, was both "encouraging and scary.""

How Uber Uses Psychological Tricks to Push Its Drivers’ Buttons (Noam Scheiber / New York Times) "The company has undertaken an extraordinary experiment in behavioral science to subtly entice an independent work force to maximize its growth. [SIMON'S NOTE: you may have seen this, but thought it particularly interesting that GDC board member Chelsea Howe was also quoted in here re: F2P-style coercive psychology evils.]"

Why games like 'Super Mario 64' had terrible cameras (Mike Rougeau / Mashable) "The camera is the interactive window through which we experience video games; the term describes not just our perspective and view of a digital space, but the freedom of or restrictions on how we as players control that viewpoint."

A Year after Firewatch (Colin Campbell / Polygon) "With sales of more than a million copies, developer Campo Santo is now working on its next project: unannounced as yet. I sat down with writer Sean Vanaman to talk about the direction he wants to go in next, and how he feels about Firewatch one year after its launch."

Kevin Horton Is a Cryogenics Engineer Turned Retro Gaming Savior (Nicholas DeLeon / Motherboard) "By day Horton, 43, is an engineer at a cryogenics company (he's worked at the same company since high school). But online, he's better known online as Kevtris (in reference to a Tetris clone he developed in the mid-1990s), where he is the brains behind a series of critical technological breakthroughs that allow gamers to play classic video games like The Legend of Zelda and Metroid on modern televisions."

Interactive Fiction Appears at the Whitney Biennial (Chris Klimas / Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation) "The 2017 Whitney Biennial has something curious to offer fans of interactive fiction. Among the works shown this year are With Those We Love Alive and howling dogs, Twine works written by Charity Heartscape Porpentine. [SIMON'S NOTE: short article, but great news, & the linked interview is also notable.]"

From Rational to Emotional: Designs that Increase Player Retention (Jim Brown / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 session, Epic's Jim Brown provides specific examples of design techniques that encourage the formation of enduring emotional ties that could enhance both retention and enjoyment for players in game design."

A Brief History Of Speedrunning (Kat Brewster / ReadOnlyMemory) "A good speedrun is hypnotising to watch – this goes for ones showcased at GDQ, or the ones which get circulated around the internet for their insane jumps or cutscene skips or lightning fast movement. They’re a dizzying show of hard won skill and palpable effort. The video of a world record time which knocks an hours-long campaign into minutes can be jaw-dropping."

In Their War With The Wall Street Journal, Top YouTubers Just Played Themselves (Patricia Hernandez / Kotaku) "Over the last couple of weeks, anger has been bubbling on YouTube over the news that major brands pulled advertisements on the platform in an effort to avoid being matched with objectionable content. The reports, which were published by the Wall Street Journal, were met with such skepticism that they sparked scandalous conspiracy theories among YouTube’s top creators."

After tragedy strikes, a dev's friends strive to complete his game (Chris Priestman / Gamasutra) "Former Harmonix programmer Roger Morash had been working on his passion project, a co-op platformer called Shard, for years before he died in January of this year. "

Inside the Shady World of PlayStation Network Account Resellers (Patrick Klepek / Waypoint) "A few weeks ago, Mic Fok got a weird email. The person writing it claimed they'd been playing Overwatch on a PlayStation Network account for more than six months, but the password had changed recently. But why would Fok know anything about this random dude's account?"

(Not) a Thimbleweed Park review (Matej Jan / Retronator) "Thimbleweed Park started as a spiritual successor to Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island. “It’s like opening a dusty old desk drawer and finding an undiscovered LucasArts adventure game you’ve never played before.” [SIMON'S NOTE: mainly linking this for the amaaazing vintage Mark Ferrari art linked within, tho the whole thing is cute!]"

Playing roguelikes when you can’t see (Kent Sutherland / RockPaperShotgun) "For most of us, traditional roguelikes are intrinsically inaccessible. They’re notoriously difficult, their design is complicated and often opaque, they can have more hotkeys than there are keys on the keyboard, and their ASCII-based visuals mean that it’s often unclear what’s happening on the screen. It’s these exact qualities, however, that ironically make roguelikes accessible and even appealing to blind or low-sight players."

The Game Beat Weekly: Digital Foundry and Microsoft make it "exclusive" (Kyle Orland / Tinyletter) "That kind of server-melting traffic shows why it would have been somewhat crazy for Eurogamer to turn down Microsoft's invitation to see Scorpio up close at their Redmond headquarters last week. But agreeing to an exclusive of this magnitude also risks coming across as a mere mouthpiece for a company you're supposed to be covering with a kind of detached objectivity."

The Witness - Noclip Documentary (NoClip / YouTube) "What lies at the heart of Jonathan Blow's island of mystery? We talk to the famed indie designer about how one of his earliest design ideas blossomed into The Witness."

A Pioneer Story: How MECC Blazed New Trails (Joe Juba / Game Informer) "Decades ago, as computing migrated from research labs and universities and into the mainstream, one company in Minnesota was instrumental in bringing technology into classrooms. Thanks to its focused mission and talented staff, the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) used exceptional software like The Oregon Trail to engage and educate a generation of students – and establish an unforgettable legacy."

Inside 'RimWorld', the Cult Sci-Fi Hit That Just Keeps Growing (Chris Priestman / Glixel) "Since its earliest public release on Steam Early Access in July, RimWorld – a sci-fi space colony sim – has amassed more than 600,000 players, and it's not even a finished project."

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include the art behind Thimbleweed Park, the rise of RimWorld, and much, much more.

For anyone counting, this is week 31 of picks, and I'm still managing to keep up the weekly pace - primarily because my regular social media trawls during the week allow me to stack up links to post at the weekend! And this is still without regular RSS feed checking - so there's got to be a bunch more stories I'm missing. Ah well.

So much good stuff out there - and I really enjoyed some of the more esoteric stories in this week's set, including the piece on Tamagotchi collectors and the visually impaired Roguelike players. There are all kinds of unique, wonderful video game nerds under the sun, aren't there? Until next time...

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

The Stress of Game Development - Tips for Survival (Extra Credits / YouTube) "Making games is hard. You need all kinds of technical and creative skills, but most importantly, you need to know how to manage the many kinds of stress that come with it."

Game Design Deep Dive: Watch Dogs 2's Invasion of Privacy missions (Christopher Dragert / Gamasutra) "In this article, I will describe some of the technical challenges and design decisions that drove development of the Invasion of Privacy feature in Watch Dogs 2. Areas of focus will include managing branching scenarios, motion capture challenges, controlling NPC state, maintaining dialog flow, and NPC coordination."

Video Games Aren’t Addictive (Christopher J Ferguson & Patrick Markey / New York Times) "Is video game addiction a real thing? It’s certainly common to hear parents complain that their children are “addicted” to video games. Some researchers even claim that these games are comparable to illegal drugs in terms of their influence on the brain — that they are “digital heroin” (the neuroscientist Peter C. Whybrow) or “digital pharmakeia” (the neuroscientist Andrew Doan)."

The Job Simulator Postmortem (Alex Schwartz & Devin Reimer / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 postmortem, Owlchemy Labs' Alexander Schwartz and Devin Reimer analyze the challenges of building, sharing, shipping, and sustaining Job Simulator on multiple platforms with examples showing both successful and less-than-successful design prototypes and how iteration led to the final product."

The Underground World of Tamagotchi Collectors (Alyssa Bereznak / The Ringer) "On October 26 of last year, a user named “psychotama” made his first entry in what would become a detailed online diary, otherwise known as a “Tama log.” “I’m not quite sure how to begin,” he wrote in purple Comic Sans. “My journey with Tamagotchi began about 13 years ago.”"

'Make me think, make me move': New Doom's deceptively simple design (Kris Graft / Gamasutra) "Doom is known for its speed and straightforwardness – move fast, shoot demons. It's a seemingly simple combination that, at the franchise’s best, evokes an ultraviolent cognitive flow. But Doom’s apparent simplicity belies a core design that is difficult to achieve."

From 'Zelda' to 'Witcher 3': Why We're Still Talking About 'Skyrim' (Alex Kane / Glixel) "How Bethesda's 2011 masterpiece – and the colossal online culture of fan art, memes, and music surrounding it – forever changed the game for fantasy RPGs."

Precious Moments, Hype and High School: A Conversation with 'Persona 5' Director Katsura Hashino (Sayem Ahmed / Waypoint) "Hashino tells me that seeing the anticipation for the game build, as previously announced street dates passed and more information on the game crept out via the press, was both "encouraging and scary.""

How Uber Uses Psychological Tricks to Push Its Drivers’ Buttons (Noam Scheiber / New York Times) "The company has undertaken an extraordinary experiment in behavioral science to subtly entice an independent work force to maximize its growth. [SIMON'S NOTE: you may have seen this, but thought it particularly interesting that GDC board member Chelsea Howe was also quoted in here re: F2P-style coercive psychology evils.]"

Why games like 'Super Mario 64' had terrible cameras (Mike Rougeau / Mashable) "The camera is the interactive window through which we experience video games; the term describes not just our perspective and view of a digital space, but the freedom of or restrictions on how we as players control that viewpoint."

A Year after Firewatch (Colin Campbell / Polygon) "With sales of more than a million copies, developer Campo Santo is now working on its next project: unannounced as yet. I sat down with writer Sean Vanaman to talk about the direction he wants to go in next, and how he feels about Firewatch one year after its launch."

Kevin Horton Is a Cryogenics Engineer Turned Retro Gaming Savior (Nicholas DeLeon / Motherboard) "By day Horton, 43, is an engineer at a cryogenics company (he's worked at the same company since high school). But online, he's better known online as Kevtris (in reference to a Tetris clone he developed in the mid-1990s), where he is the brains behind a series of critical technological breakthroughs that allow gamers to play classic video games like The Legend of Zelda and Metroid on modern televisions."

Interactive Fiction Appears at the Whitney Biennial (Chris Klimas / Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation) "The 2017 Whitney Biennial has something curious to offer fans of interactive fiction. Among the works shown this year are With Those We Love Alive and howling dogs, Twine works written by Charity Heartscape Porpentine. [SIMON'S NOTE: short article, but great news, & the linked interview is also notable.]"

From Rational to Emotional: Designs that Increase Player Retention (Jim Brown / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 session, Epic's Jim Brown provides specific examples of design techniques that encourage the formation of enduring emotional ties that could enhance both retention and enjoyment for players in game design."

A Brief History Of Speedrunning (Kat Brewster / ReadOnlyMemory) "A good speedrun is hypnotising to watch – this goes for ones showcased at GDQ, or the ones which get circulated around the internet for their insane jumps or cutscene skips or lightning fast movement. They’re a dizzying show of hard won skill and palpable effort. The video of a world record time which knocks an hours-long campaign into minutes can be jaw-dropping."

In Their War With The Wall Street Journal, Top YouTubers Just Played Themselves (Patricia Hernandez / Kotaku) "Over the last couple of weeks, anger has been bubbling on YouTube over the news that major brands pulled advertisements on the platform in an effort to avoid being matched with objectionable content. The reports, which were published by the Wall Street Journal, were met with such skepticism that they sparked scandalous conspiracy theories among YouTube’s top creators."

After tragedy strikes, a dev's friends strive to complete his game (Chris Priestman / Gamasutra) "Former Harmonix programmer Roger Morash had been working on his passion project, a co-op platformer called Shard, for years before he died in January of this year. "

Inside the Shady World of PlayStation Network Account Resellers (Patrick Klepek / Waypoint) "A few weeks ago, Mic Fok got a weird email. The person writing it claimed they'd been playing Overwatch on a PlayStation Network account for more than six months, but the password had changed recently. But why would Fok know anything about this random dude's account?"

(Not) a Thimbleweed Park review (Matej Jan / Retronator) "Thimbleweed Park started as a spiritual successor to Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island. “It’s like opening a dusty old desk drawer and finding an undiscovered LucasArts adventure game you’ve never played before.” [SIMON'S NOTE: mainly linking this for the amaaazing vintage Mark Ferrari art linked within, tho the whole thing is cute!]"

Playing roguelikes when you can’t see (Kent Sutherland / RockPaperShotgun) "For most of us, traditional roguelikes are intrinsically inaccessible. They’re notoriously difficult, their design is complicated and often opaque, they can have more hotkeys than there are keys on the keyboard, and their ASCII-based visuals mean that it’s often unclear what’s happening on the screen. It’s these exact qualities, however, that ironically make roguelikes accessible and even appealing to blind or low-sight players."

The Game Beat Weekly: Digital Foundry and Microsoft make it "exclusive" (Kyle Orland / Tinyletter) "That kind of server-melting traffic shows why it would have been somewhat crazy for Eurogamer to turn down Microsoft's invitation to see Scorpio up close at their Redmond headquarters last week. But agreeing to an exclusive of this magnitude also risks coming across as a mere mouthpiece for a company you're supposed to be covering with a kind of detached objectivity."

The Witness - Noclip Documentary (NoClip / YouTube) "What lies at the heart of Jonathan Blow's island of mystery? We talk to the famed indie designer about how one of his earliest design ideas blossomed into The Witness."

A Pioneer Story: How MECC Blazed New Trails (Joe Juba / Game Informer) "Decades ago, as computing migrated from research labs and universities and into the mainstream, one company in Minnesota was instrumental in bringing technology into classrooms. Thanks to its focused mission and talented staff, the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) used exceptional software like The Oregon Trail to engage and educate a generation of students – and establish an unforgettable legacy."

Inside 'RimWorld', the Cult Sci-Fi Hit That Just Keeps Growing (Chris Priestman / Glixel) "Since its earliest public release on Steam Early Access in July, RimWorld – a sci-fi space colony sim – has amassed more than 600,000 players, and it's not even a finished project."

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include the art behind Thimbleweed Park, the rise of RimWorld, and much, much more.

For anyone counting, this is week 31 of picks, and I'm still managing to keep up the weekly pace - primarily because my regular social media trawls during the week allow me to stack up links to post at the weekend! And this is still without regular RSS feed checking - so there's got to be a bunch more stories I'm missing. Ah well.

So much good stuff out there - and I really enjoyed some of the more esoteric stories in this week's set, including the piece on Tamagotchi collectors and the visually impaired Roguelike players. There are all kinds of unique, wonderful video game nerds under the sun, aren't there? Until next time...

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

The Stress of Game Development - Tips for Survival (Extra Credits / YouTube) "Making games is hard. You need all kinds of technical and creative skills, but most importantly, you need to know how to manage the many kinds of stress that come with it."

Game Design Deep Dive: Watch Dogs 2's Invasion of Privacy missions (Christopher Dragert / Gamasutra) "In this article, I will describe some of the technical challenges and design decisions that drove development of the Invasion of Privacy feature in Watch Dogs 2. Areas of focus will include managing branching scenarios, motion capture challenges, controlling NPC state, maintaining dialog flow, and NPC coordination."

Video Games Aren’t Addictive (Christopher J Ferguson & Patrick Markey / New York Times) "Is video game addiction a real thing? It’s certainly common to hear parents complain that their children are “addicted” to video games. Some researchers even claim that these games are comparable to illegal drugs in terms of their influence on the brain — that they are “digital heroin” (the neuroscientist Peter C. Whybrow) or “digital pharmakeia” (the neuroscientist Andrew Doan)."

The Job Simulator Postmortem (Alex Schwartz & Devin Reimer / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 postmortem, Owlchemy Labs' Alexander Schwartz and Devin Reimer analyze the challenges of building, sharing, shipping, and sustaining Job Simulator on multiple platforms with examples showing both successful and less-than-successful design prototypes and how iteration led to the final product."

The Underground World of Tamagotchi Collectors (Alyssa Bereznak / The Ringer) "On October 26 of last year, a user named “psychotama” made his first entry in what would become a detailed online diary, otherwise known as a “Tama log.” “I’m not quite sure how to begin,” he wrote in purple Comic Sans. “My journey with Tamagotchi began about 13 years ago.”"

'Make me think, make me move': New Doom's deceptively simple design (Kris Graft / Gamasutra) "Doom is known for its speed and straightforwardness – move fast, shoot demons. It's a seemingly simple combination that, at the franchise’s best, evokes an ultraviolent cognitive flow. But Doom’s apparent simplicity belies a core design that is difficult to achieve."

From 'Zelda' to 'Witcher 3': Why We're Still Talking About 'Skyrim' (Alex Kane / Glixel) "How Bethesda's 2011 masterpiece – and the colossal online culture of fan art, memes, and music surrounding it – forever changed the game for fantasy RPGs."

Precious Moments, Hype and High School: A Conversation with 'Persona 5' Director Katsura Hashino (Sayem Ahmed / Waypoint) "Hashino tells me that seeing the anticipation for the game build, as previously announced street dates passed and more information on the game crept out via the press, was both "encouraging and scary.""

How Uber Uses Psychological Tricks to Push Its Drivers’ Buttons (Noam Scheiber / New York Times) "The company has undertaken an extraordinary experiment in behavioral science to subtly entice an independent work force to maximize its growth. [SIMON'S NOTE: you may have seen this, but thought it particularly interesting that GDC board member Chelsea Howe was also quoted in here re: F2P-style coercive psychology evils.]"

Why games like 'Super Mario 64' had terrible cameras (Mike Rougeau / Mashable) "The camera is the interactive window through which we experience video games; the term describes not just our perspective and view of a digital space, but the freedom of or restrictions on how we as players control that viewpoint."

A Year after Firewatch (Colin Campbell / Polygon) "With sales of more than a million copies, developer Campo Santo is now working on its next project: unannounced as yet. I sat down with writer Sean Vanaman to talk about the direction he wants to go in next, and how he feels about Firewatch one year after its launch."

Kevin Horton Is a Cryogenics Engineer Turned Retro Gaming Savior (Nicholas DeLeon / Motherboard) "By day Horton, 43, is an engineer at a cryogenics company (he's worked at the same company since high school). But online, he's better known online as Kevtris (in reference to a Tetris clone he developed in the mid-1990s), where he is the brains behind a series of critical technological breakthroughs that allow gamers to play classic video games like The Legend of Zelda and Metroid on modern televisions."

Interactive Fiction Appears at the Whitney Biennial (Chris Klimas / Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation) "The 2017 Whitney Biennial has something curious to offer fans of interactive fiction. Among the works shown this year are With Those We Love Alive and howling dogs, Twine works written by Charity Heartscape Porpentine. [SIMON'S NOTE: short article, but great news, & the linked interview is also notable.]"

From Rational to Emotional: Designs that Increase Player Retention (Jim Brown / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 session, Epic's Jim Brown provides specific examples of design techniques that encourage the formation of enduring emotional ties that could enhance both retention and enjoyment for players in game design."

A Brief History Of Speedrunning (Kat Brewster / ReadOnlyMemory) "A good speedrun is hypnotising to watch – this goes for ones showcased at GDQ, or the ones which get circulated around the internet for their insane jumps or cutscene skips or lightning fast movement. They’re a dizzying show of hard won skill and palpable effort. The video of a world record time which knocks an hours-long campaign into minutes can be jaw-dropping."

In Their War With The Wall Street Journal, Top YouTubers Just Played Themselves (Patricia Hernandez / Kotaku) "Over the last couple of weeks, anger has been bubbling on YouTube over the news that major brands pulled advertisements on the platform in an effort to avoid being matched with objectionable content. The reports, which were published by the Wall Street Journal, were met with such skepticism that they sparked scandalous conspiracy theories among YouTube’s top creators."

After tragedy strikes, a dev's friends strive to complete his game (Chris Priestman / Gamasutra) "Former Harmonix programmer Roger Morash had been working on his passion project, a co-op platformer called Shard, for years before he died in January of this year. "

Inside the Shady World of PlayStation Network Account Resellers (Patrick Klepek / Waypoint) "A few weeks ago, Mic Fok got a weird email. The person writing it claimed they'd been playing Overwatch on a PlayStation Network account for more than six months, but the password had changed recently. But why would Fok know anything about this random dude's account?"

(Not) a Thimbleweed Park review (Matej Jan / Retronator) "Thimbleweed Park started as a spiritual successor to Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island. “It’s like opening a dusty old desk drawer and finding an undiscovered LucasArts adventure game you’ve never played before.” [SIMON'S NOTE: mainly linking this for the amaaazing vintage Mark Ferrari art linked within, tho the whole thing is cute!]"

Playing roguelikes when you can’t see (Kent Sutherland / RockPaperShotgun) "For most of us, traditional roguelikes are intrinsically inaccessible. They’re notoriously difficult, their design is complicated and often opaque, they can have more hotkeys than there are keys on the keyboard, and their ASCII-based visuals mean that it’s often unclear what’s happening on the screen. It’s these exact qualities, however, that ironically make roguelikes accessible and even appealing to blind or low-sight players."

The Game Beat Weekly: Digital Foundry and Microsoft make it "exclusive" (Kyle Orland / Tinyletter) "That kind of server-melting traffic shows why it would have been somewhat crazy for Eurogamer to turn down Microsoft's invitation to see Scorpio up close at their Redmond headquarters last week. But agreeing to an exclusive of this magnitude also risks coming across as a mere mouthpiece for a company you're supposed to be covering with a kind of detached objectivity."

The Witness - Noclip Documentary (NoClip / YouTube) "What lies at the heart of Jonathan Blow's island of mystery? We talk to the famed indie designer about how one of his earliest design ideas blossomed into The Witness."

A Pioneer Story: How MECC Blazed New Trails (Joe Juba / Game Informer) "Decades ago, as computing migrated from research labs and universities and into the mainstream, one company in Minnesota was instrumental in bringing technology into classrooms. Thanks to its focused mission and talented staff, the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) used exceptional software like The Oregon Trail to engage and educate a generation of students – and establish an unforgettable legacy."

Inside 'RimWorld', the Cult Sci-Fi Hit That Just Keeps Growing (Chris Priestman / Glixel) "Since its earliest public release on Steam Early Access in July, RimWorld – a sci-fi space colony sim – has amassed more than 600,000 players, and it's not even a finished project."

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]