Do you ever have one of those days where you find that you are both really inspired and also on a roll at the same time? That’s been today for me. Well, mostly last night. After making my post I put several more hours into game development, and made some real breakthroughs on the project. Of course since I make these posts late at night anyway, that meant very very little sleep.
Overall I’m really enjoying my experience with Unity so far. It’s certainly got its quarks from time to time, and I know that I’m only scratching the surface with its capabilities and have a lot more to learn, but that’s also really exciting because I can already see the progress and the possibilities. It’s possible that if the learning curve continues at this rate I may even have something playable in the not to distant future.
Speaking of possibilities, I’m also fairly excited about the new purchase that arrived today: a brand new, larger drawing tablet. My little Star630 is fine, I guess, but I’ve been having issues with it lately, and I lost the stylus for a short bit there, so when I saw sales for the beefier models pop up on [major online retailer] I decided to go ahead and jump on it. I’m still nowhere near the level of skill or need required to for me to be able to justify one of the really nice ones with the built in monitors or anything, so I picked up a 10″ model, and spent most of today’s thirty minutes playing around with it, trying out some settings, and generally getting a feel for the new hardware. It really does seem to make for a smoother drawing experience.
As far as the actual drawing goes, the part of thirty minutes that wasn’t devoted to drawing random lines and circles, or playing around with the various Photoshop brushes went into this doodle. It’s not without its learning merit, though, for most of it I was paying particular attention to trying to change my go-to style and improve my line art. I tried to stay away from being overly sketchy, and stuck to a single brush size and no eraser. The only line variation is from the pressure sensitivity on the tablet being assigned to the brush transfer, so it’s more or less a standard mechanical pencil.
I wanted to spend some time playing with shape, fill styles, shading, and texturing, while also trying hard to stick with more solid and confident lines. Honestly, I think it came out pretty well.