Nuggetty Goodness

"The JRPG protagonist is just a convenient placeholder for a dynamic group of resolute individuals who are greater than the sum of their parts. The player isn’t controlling one hero with several non-playable sidekicks. They’re guiding the whole. As each member of a party gains levels and becomes stronger, each character’s role in combat solidifies, and they specialize in a given class, while the story brings the characters closer together as people."

"The (often silent) protagonist isn’t there to keep conflicting personalities in check. They’re just an excuse to bring them together. They’re a body to hold the adventurers in while they adventure. In these games, the player doesn’t have a virtual surrogate through which they experience the world; the player is the group. All control that the player has over the game is blanketed across the whole party. Cooperation is built into every layer of these games."

- We Are One: JRPGs, the Group Journey, and the Mechanics of Cooperation, Mark Filipowich, Gamasutra

...it's also why I loathed Dragon Age. Dragon Age, for me, was like being stuck in a bad PUG and being forced to use Ventrilo by a bunch of whiny poopheads. I did like the dog, though.

I love calligraphic cards, posters, and logos. My handwriting's pretty bad though, so I've always ended up looking enviously at the work of those designers who can do such things, and wishing that my feeble attempts would turn out as well.

Enter Livebrush, the cheat's way of creating beautiful, hand-drawn, flowing calligraphic text.

While I don't think Livebrush was actually made for this purpose, it is *amazing* at it.

Me of the horrible scribbly writing came up with these bits of 'calligraphy' just by using a Wacom tablet, and the settings I've shown above.

Oh, and Livebrush is available both as a free, and as a commercial (but cheap!) version.

If you've ever drooled enviously over the work of leet calligraphers, go and play with Livebrush. Do eet nao.

Sooo.... I discovered no-churn, no-ice-cream-maker icecreams over the weekend, and promptly went a bit mad. :( Now my tiny freezer has 5 types of icecream in it! 2 store-bought, and 3 nugget-crafted.

You only need 3 ingredients and it's incredibly easy to make, because you just whisk them all together until they become fat and fluffy (form soft peaks).

1st Experiment: Dark chocolate icecream with raspberries and dark chocolate chips
Nice, but with an oddly chewy, grainy texture. I think it's because the dark chocolate had to be melted, and despite my mad whisking, it didn't all incorporate fully.

2nd Experiment: Green tea icecream

Ooooh. This turned out PERFECT. Similar in texture to the green tea icecreams I've had at Japanese restaurants - and as good as / indistinguishable from store-bought icecreams.

Ingredients
3 parts thickened / whipping cream
2 parts condensed milk
Umeshu to taste (and to make it stay nice and soft once frozen)
Green tea powder to taste (not instant stuff - use the stuff the ninja tea ceremony assassin chicks use)

Steps

1. Put it all in a bowl together
2. Whisk until soft peaks form
3. Transfer into an airtight container
4. Plop in freezer for 6+ hours
5. Serve and eat while squealing madly

3rd Experiment: Vanilla icecream with lemon curd ripple

This. This is like a soft, fluffy vanilla cloud had a massive orgy with a creamy lemon curd friend. Make eet. Make eet nao. (It's the cream coloured one, if you hadn't guessed.)

Ingredients
3 parts thickened / whipping cream
2 parts condensed milk
Vanilla essence (just a leetle bit)
Some kind of drinkable alcohol (To make it stay nice and soft once frozen - I used chinese cooking wine cause I ran out of everything else.)
Lemon curd to taste (I used a nice store-bought brand)

Steps

1. Put everything but the lemon curd in a bowl together
2. Whisk until soft peaks form
3. Transfer a third into an airtight container
4. Glop in lemon curd in a quantity that makes you happy
5. Transfer the next third into the container
6. Glop in more curd
7. Transfer the last third
8. Stir the whole thing with some kind of stirring implement. The more you stir, the less big and fat your ripples of lemon curd will be
9. Plop in freezer for 6+ hours
10. Serve and eat while squealing madly
    or
    Make someone else eat it while squealing madly
    or
    Do it together!

Tera Online
Combat is as good as outfits are silly - feels like the gorgeous lovechild of Guild Wars and Torchlight. On level of combat 'funness', this is up there with Street Fighter and Infinity Blade I & II.

As I ran around (badly) whapping things, it struck me with a pang that *THIS* is what I expected GW2 combat to be. Especially since Tera has collision detection. Collision detection is one of those things that you don't realise how much you love until it's taken away.

Tera is also the only reticule-based game I've played that doesn't give me motion sickness.

Age of Wushu (Pure open-world PvP, no PvE servers)
Waddling around Age of Wushu is like being in a wuxia epic - other than the fact that the entire area chat is filled with goldbot spam.

Combat feels like virtua fighter, the combat animations are all based on motion capture from real martial artists, making it look incredibly realistic and beautiful.

Environment is extremely true to culture, right down to how the non-quest NPCs talk about their lives when you poke them! Oh and buildings have insides. ALL buildings have insides. I don't think I've ever seen that in an MMO.

Oh yes, and they're both beautiful games. Screenies to follow.

Unfortunately, Posterous can't handle SVG conversion (lol). So if you wanna see the SVGs, poke meeeeee.

Icons inside the applications themselves should be simpler and more graphic rather than realistic, like so:

Update:
BLAH! So it turns out WPF can't easily handle raster images, so the in-application icons cannot be the style shown above. The style shown above requires pixel art...which is, by nature, raster.

I also tried redoing a raster in pixel style (eg. 1x1px squares...) but that still doesn't look good, and apparently takes quite a bit of processing power to render.

Vector vs Raster Icons at Small Sizes (original file cabinet icon)

More details on why this happens can be found in this great article. There are lots of comments from what I presume are non-pixel-art-creators that still manage to miss the point. Since comments aren't working there anymore (lol the post IS 7 years old...), here's the point that the comments in the article miss...

Pixel Art Requires a New Level of Abstraction
This is something that doesn't seem to have been covered in the comments, that anyone who does pixel art at the tiny sizes it's ideally suited to knows.

When you go to 48x48 and below, the level of abstraction required to make an icon APPEAR like something to the naked human eye entirely changes the way an icon has to be designed.

Simply shrinking a detailed high resolution vector into 48x48 and lower doesn't work because even if the vectors were somehow able to magically keep their detail and proportion, our eyes start to interpret things differently at those sizes and below.

Tiny sizes demand visual abstraction that does not scale, and pixel art is the way to go with that. Sure, you could draw it in vectors, pixel-art style, a 1x1px block at a time, but it would take a quite a bit of processing power to render, and still doesn't look as good (see above).

Guess I'll Make 'Em Fancy Vectors
Sooo... in-app icons will have to be fancy and realistic too. Oh well, at least there aren't many of them. At least, I'm planning them not to be. Not too fond of icons inside applications that scream LOOK AT MEEEEEE.

Here's a LOOOKATMEEEE icons so far. ._.

Final 'now-that-I-can't-use-pixel-art' file cabinet icon.

It's so cute I can even forgive the 'comming'.

(Just to be clear, that is their default hint text - I didn't type it.)