Oh hey, it’s been about a month.  Guess we better put something here.

Our backgrounds always used trace elements of 3D design for the sake of making sure our proportions and angles were correct.  Recently Curchack has been playing with using more fleshed out 3D environments for the sake of better backgrounds without sacrificing any of that hand-drawn style we’ve been working with.  We figured it might at the very least be a bit neat to see the steps involved.

The bare minimals are put in first off, though that should sorta be obvious.  Just a matter of making sure that the frame is set correctly, the angle matches the perspective of a character at eye-height, etcetera.

From there the image is fixed as needed (in this case, the building and the light post are swapped) and the image is detailed further.

At this point the base of the background is more or less complete so we move onto filling it out properly with miscellaneous details and begin the process of painting over it to seem more like a painting than a 3D environment.

After a bit more effort the background is starting to look a bit more prim and proper.  Some filtering is applied to it isn’t so dreary, and it’s close to being completed.  There are still some obvious 3D elements such as the building and to a lesser extent the light post.

After a while we have our finished result.  Everything is painted over, some extra details are added to flesh out the scene a bit and the entire thing gets a slightly browned filter to give an Autumn-y impression.

And poof: a shiny new background, ready for use!  I hope it’s been at least a little bit interesting.

I’m sure it’s still Halloween somewhere (and if it isn’t you can always just pretend).  We hope to have an actual update in the realm of soon-ish, but until then have a picture with some ~brand new characters~ (beware giant image size)

Happy Halloween from the ST team!

 Hello there! Dani here, Director of Dischan Media.

The Salty team have been quite busy lately working on… uh… that thing they’re making… uh… what was it called again…? Salty Something.

Ah, whatever. Anyway, turns out writing blog posts takes a lot of work and creativity, and since they’ve been working so hard on their thing and trying to keep you guys updated so diligently (and because I also happen to be friends with one of the devs), I offered to write a guest post to help them out. They accepted.

So here I am! And what am I going to talk about, you ask?

Unfortunately, not about anything Salty Gears related, because I don’t know anything you don’t already know. I’m just like you: an outsider looking in. Instead, I thought this post could be a nice mini-leadership lesson for those of you who hope to lead in the future. Actually, there’s only one particular point I want to focus on in this post. It is, at least in my opinion, the single most important quality in a good leader: the ability to swallow your pride. That’s right, one of the most important qualities of a leader is the ability to back down. Let me give you an example.

Let’s say you get in a fight with your team member over the color of a character’s hair. You want it blue, and they want it red. You fight for hours, and it looks like there is no end in sight.

How do you proceed? Well, if you agree with my philosophy, you back down. You tell him or her that maybe red isn’t so bad, that maybe you just haven’t been coming at it from the right direction. You try to make yourself like red.

The other person calms down, and why wouldn’t they? You are finally starting to see the superiority of red hair. The conversation resumes in a more calm and productive manner. Hopefully, your teammate will appreciate your new flexibility on the matter, and may even admit that perhaps blue would be fine as well. In the end, maybe red is chosen, or maybe blue. Which it ends up being is not important, what is important is that you defused an argument that could have turned personal and destructive, and opened an avenue to a productive resolution.

People sometimes confuse being a leader with always getting what you want. A person who always gets what they want is a tyrant, not a leader. A leader is not simply a person who tells you what to do. A leader is more like a guide, a person who carves a path and directs a team toward a common goal. Certainly, there may be times when you must put your foot down, but I have found those to be extremely rare.

There have been many contested topics I have backed down on during my time at Dischan. Some of those things I was likely completely wrong about, for others it’s hard to say. The point is that the sky never fell on our heads, the project is still trudging along, and everyone is still relatively happy to be a part of the team. Sometimes there is just more than one right way to do something.

I hope you enjoyed this mini-lesson, and that it will be of some use to you. If you’ve never heard of Dischan before, I encourage you to check us out. If you liked this post, I talk about some similar stuff on my blog. You may want to check out that as well.

Thanks for reading! I hope you’re all as excited for Salty Tears as I am.

Stay salty,

• Jeremy “Dani” Miller Friend and leader, Dischan Media

Oh hey, a new blog post! It feels nice to have something to show everyone again. Coincidently, today also marks the 6th month anniversary since Salty Tears started development. Remember when it was going to be done in a month? ME NEITHER.

In any case, today we’re going to be looking at our upgraded in-game UI. We’ve gotten a bit of feedback noting that even with a name in-place, it wasn’t immediately obvious who was saying what. Our solution: After a lot of different drafts, we settled on a speech-bubble type of design. Readability would no longer be an issue, it fit our art style well, and it has a bit more character than a semi-transparent jagged box.

The problem with this, of course, is that you can only do so much with a static speech bubble. Things like moving and flipped sprites would be an issue, which is why we took it a step farther and made it so that we could change where the bubble’s tail leads off.  Finally, we needed a way to identify when Oliver was speaking as well as when it was standard narration. And that is that. We’re happy with what we ended up doing to address the problems our UI had and hope you’ll agree.  We ended up going through 16 variances before we settled on this final design, three of which you can see here.

Concluding our “let’s-post-things-that-are-not-art” roulette, this week we’ll be showing you a small writing sampler as written by Mehkanik, Caprice’s route main writer.

… at least, that would have been the case had we started on time and weren’t in a hurry to finish and proofread it before our ‘holy’ weekly deadline. Which brings me to the actual main point of this post: we’re not going to do weekly updates anymore, for various reasons:

1. They have become a forced routine nobody really likes.

2. They take away time from precious development.

3. Expanding on point 1, sometimes it’s just hard to crank out a blog post, thinking what to write about this week. While we love to keep everyone updated, this is probably not the right way for us.

Blog posts should come intuitively, when you feel you actually have something to write about. It makes for far better blog posts and far less frustration on the team’s (our) side.

That said, the whole reason why we forced blog posts in the first place was to not end up in development hell. Which is why we’re obviously not abandoning blogging regularly entirely, we just feel like it’s better if we can actually blog when we have something interesting, new or fascinating to post. You’ll obviously also always can poke us on IRC (we’ve got a nifty menu button leading you directly to our channel), Twitter, Steam or what-have-you. We’ll likely respond with something useful. Probably.

Expect our next post to have some substance, and the actual writing sampler soon™.

- Shiz

PS: I manually wrote this post in raw HTML on a cell phone.