Tim makes art

New avatar

I felt it was time to update my branding. My current avatar doesn’t really do justice to my hair situation anymore!

The base for the first avatar came from a daily comic I drew in 2010. I then used it to advertise my font, and soon it became my business card and website header when I went freelance. I updated it once in 2014 to add the beard. Since then I never really looked at it again. I did draw a new version of myself in my daily comics from 2015, but it wasn’t until 2018 that I felt the need to update my official avatar too.

A tradition that has snuck into these avatars is that each new version has the shirt I most like to wear at that time. This year was a bit of a challenge because it’s not as colorful as previous years, but I think the greyish-blue does contrast nicely with the orange.
2018 focus points
In 2017 I stopped meticulously blogging about all the things I do because I simply do not do all that much next to my day job anymore. But for 2018 I’m gonna start again, it’s too easy to lose a year just sort of pushing projects forwards while not really achieving anything.

But this time I’m not setting goals; I’m defining focuses for each month. This is an idea I picked up from Design Life. It’s another way of saying “do this and nothing else for this period of time”. I’ll be picking from this list during the year to set a monthly focus.
- Draw more Off-stage
- Update portfolio
- Improve drawing skill for poses and expressions
- Learn to draw with my left hand
- Release a new game
- And a bonus objective: do something incredible every month.
January has already been dedicated to Off-Stage, and lo and behold, new comic pages have started to appear online! So it’s working.
Things I learned in 2017, part 3: social life

This year I didn’t spend very much time on (new) personal projects, but I had a crazy growth in my professional and personal development, so I thought I’d write about that.

It became a very long post, so I’ve divided it up into a trilogy. Read part 1 and part 2 here. Today, we’re looking at social life:
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Things I learned in 2017, part 2: career

This year I didn’t spend very much time on (new) personal projects, but I had a crazy growth in my professional and personal development, so I thought I’d write about that.

It became a very long post, so I’ve divided it up into a trilogy. Read part 1 and part 3 here. Today, we’re looking at career:
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Things I learned in 2017, part 1: creativity

This year I didn’t spend very much time on (new) personal projects, but I had a crazy growth in my professional and personal development, so I thought I’d write about that.

It became a very long post, so I’ve divided it up into a trilogy. Read part 2 and part 3 here. Today, we’re looking at creativity:
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Media log 2017

Continuing the tradition, here’s my media log of 2017. This year I’m highlighting a few noteworthy entries.

The Kanye West discography

I started listening to Dissect, a podcast about musical analysis. It examined what might be my favorite album of all time, Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. I already loved it for its artistry when it came out in 2010, but diving in this deep and exploring all the artistic nooks and crannies made me appreciate it even more. The way it tells a complex story and references mythology is very inspiring.

It may sound strange to people that know me, but a part of me identifies very strongly with Kanye. And listening to all his albums in sequence really filled up my artistic tank again, made me look differently at the work I do.

Prey + Spirits of Xanadu

I love a good immersive sim. The year started off right with Deus Ex Mankind Divided, I played some Dishonored 2, but Prey really impressed me. It’s a classic formula, but it has just the right mix of setting, art style, gameplay, and level design to make me want to spend hours in that world. It cemented for me the idea that this might be my new favorite genre, and that I want to try and tackle making a game like this, however impossible that may seem.

Then I played Spirits of Xanadu, by the people currently working on the System Shock remake (it’s all connected, eh). It’s basically Prey, but at such a low fidelity that it could have been made by one person in a reasonable amount of time. It was then that I knew I had to attempt this too.

Blade Runner 2049

I saw this one twice in a week’s time. The visuals are amazing (those colors!), but especially the thought that went into each part of this world, from the architecture to the functional UI for an AI companion, I just can’t handle it.

It’s okay to quit

This one’s not specifically about one entry, but a more general feeling that I’ve developed this year: it’s okay to quit. We live in a time where we have access to such an embarrassment of riches, media-wise, that instead of looking for quality we now have to look for time. I would play all the games that look interesting and clear out my Netflix and IMDb queue if I could, but there is simply not enough time.

So instead of tightly maintaining my ever-growing backlog (which ironically is what generates the data for these posts), I’ve come to terms with the fact that it’s okay to not experience everything. I’m sure the new Marvel movies are good, I can live without them. These games that I played for two hours and enjoyed but have to push myself to finish, I can live without them. There is so much out there now that is good, I’m concentrating on finding the things that are great (such as those mentioned above). Focusing on one thing deeply instead of consuming three things at the same time and not really absorbing any of them. I think this will also give me more peace of mind.

I think for next year I might then transform my media log into an experience log that also includes trips, events, and other things that I find enriching.

See this year’s full list after the break:

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The House On Holland Hill v2

A year ago, I released The House On Holland Hill, a short narrative game built during Wizard Jam 4. In keeping with tradition, I’m now releasing version 2 of this game, on the eve of Wizard Jam 6.

THOHH was never meant to become a highly-polished game, but I found myself still thinking about it after I released it. So a few weeks ago I decided to work on a few upgrades to make it feel less like a prototype.

Here’s what’s new:

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Suit-of-armor up!

One of my recent post illustrations for Yoast. The theme was ‘protecting your site with HTTPS / SSL’. You can see I had Horizon Zero Dawn on the brain when I drew this.
Lights, hair, action

I felt creative this weekend but didn’t know which project to pour it into, so I spent some time speedpainting from photo reference.

Instagram is a great source for crazy colors and compositions. I especially love hair that’s lit from behind or some similarly interesting lighting setup.

I recorded the one in the bottom-right. In the beginning these usually looks like shit, it’s a real process of sculpting with the brush. I wasn’t shooting for a 1-to-1 likeness either, just to capture the light and the wildness of the hair.
Todd

I ate up Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency season 1 on Netflix recently, and it cemented Elijah Wood as one of my fave actors. I tried to capture his likeness here in one of his most confused moments as Todd, but only partially succeeded…
Sketchheads

Sketched some heads.
Media log 2016

Following the example of some friends, I started keeping track of the media I consume. I thought it would make an interesting list to look back on at the end of the year. So without further ado, here we go.

GAMES

The Witcher 3 – epic.
Oxenfree – creepy.
Disney Infinity 3.0 – not just for kids.
Star Wars Battlefront – pew pew pew.
Firewatch – breath of fresh air.
Mad Max – punch punch vroom.
Batman Arkham Knight – too many buttons.
Rise Of The Tomb Raider – masterpiece.
The Witness – pretty.
Adr1ft – keep breathing.
Californium – trippy.
Inside – brutally beautiful.
Abzu – zen fishing.
Virginia – look at all the cooolooors.
Just Cause 3 – EXPLOSIONS!
Kentucky Route Zero IV – too many words.
Pokemon GO – how could you not.
HITMAN 2016 season 1 – finally distilled perfectly.
No Man’s Sky – why?
DOOM – ballet of death.
Astroneer – fun-to-be.
Deadly Tower Of Monsters – king of pulp.
Sky Force Reloaded – one more game.
Assassin’s Creed Unity – they got me back.
Broken Sword 5 – digging through the mud for gold.
Overcooked – friends fun fantastic.

MOVIES

The Hateful Eight – long.
The Peanuts Movie – rote.
Deadpool – fun!
Inside Out – we get it.
Hardcore Henry – Sharlto Copley <3.
The Hunchback Of Notre Dame – about time.
The Man From U.N.C.L.E. – Oof.
The Secret Life Of Pets – woof.
X-Men: Apocalypse – fine.
Captain America: Civil War – muscles.
Dark Shadows – Depp.
Zootropolis – it’s so fluffay!
The Red Turtle – tears.
Cafe Society – the old days.
Star Trek Beyond – … great??
John Wick – meh.
Deliver Us From Evil – deliver me from this movie.
Escape Plan – old gods.
Snowpiercer – Jesus Christ.
Ant-Man – not bad.
The Finest Hours – fuck the sea.
The Signal – wait, what?
Mission Impossible Rogue Nation – return to form.
Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them – magical.
Arrival – headache.
Non-Stop – just stop.
Edge Of Tomorrow – I want to do it again!
Catch Me If You Can – Dicaprio <3
It Follows – surprising restraint.
La La Land – glee.
Rogue One – nailed it.

TV SHOWS

Mad Men (rewatch) – still unbeatable.
Fargo season 2 – afro on point.
A Young Doctor’s Notebook – more Draper.
Breaking Bad (rewatch) – I AM THE ONE WHO KNOCKS!
Stranger Things – nostalgia.
Mr. Robot season 2 – wait what?
How I Met Your Mother (rewatch) – old friends.
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – baffling, but in a good way.

BOOKS AND COMICS

Jerusalem, Guy Deslile – oh man.
Naamloos, Pepijn Lanen – eat sleep rave repeat.
Delilah Dirk And The Turkish Lieutenant, Tony Cliff – adventure.
Released: The House on Holland Hill

After two weeks of intermittent development, I finished my gamejam game (late) last sunday! I’ve polished up a few bits since then, and aside from the save system that doesn’t work yet, it’s become a pretty solid offering. And more tweaks and polish are probably coming in the next few weeks.

You can download the game from https://hedgefield.itch.io/hollandhill. Let me know what you thought of it if you play it!
Live from the Wizard Jam front, episode #2

Hey there! This is my second missive from the WJ4 front – read the first one here.

I spent last weekend finalizing the geometry so I could turn it into a prefab and use it across all scenes. It mostly came down to adding some final furniture and building out the surrounding terrain and forest. About halfway through, I realized I was putting way too much effort into it, and it served its purpose just fine the way it was. So I packaged it all up and finally started the first story scene.

Unfortunately, it turned out that Adventure Creator was not 100% foolproof in turning everything into a prefab. The common interactions (opening and closing all the doors in the house etc) were especially dire; they turned up blank after being imported into a new scene, so I had to go into each of the associated objects in a new scene and hook them back up. Not great. Lost a lot of time troubleshooting that. But in the end I had a basic scene that I could duplicate, a sort of prefab if you will, so at least I could now set it and forget it.

Mid-week I finally had some time to dedicate to the game again and I set up the first scene’s logic, which went pretty quickly. That offered some hope for the remaining days. I got started on character sprites too. I wanted to try a more detailed style with thinner lines, like Californium, but in the interest of time I went with my go-to art style. I’ll fix that in post, as they say.

Once I got them in the game and had a few expressions to play with, things really started to come together. I also made a menu that displays which delivery you are embarking on, like the splash screen for the days in Firewatch. Then it was just a matter of knocking out more scenes and more character sprites. Which I did on friday.

I skipped after-hour drinks at the office to get into THE ZONE, and by midnight I had set up about half of the game. Granted, those scenes were the easiest to make and contain very little pithy gameplay, but it was nice to be able to punch those out real quick. I might still make the sunday night deadline with something half decent! It doesn’t help that there are a national holiday and a concert in-between me and that moment though, but oh well…
Live from the Wizard Jam front, episode #1

Hey there dear reader!

The last time I did a live devlog was when I was making 15 Minutes, my 24 parody game. And that was back in 2011! I’ve moved on to Unity since then and made a bunch of games, but I don’t often participate in jams. The last time was ol’ Wizard Jam 1, the Idle Thumbs community game jam. But this time around the planets and stars aligned and I had enough time and a good idea, so I’m participating in Wizard Jam 4.

I got a bit of a late start as I was at a conference on the island of Texel last weekend, but I managed to catch up in the free moments throughout the week.

The concept

A few weeks ago I had a dream. In it -among other things- I biked to a villa in the forest and met the man of the house and his maid. I don’t know why, but when I woke up that image stuck with me. I wanted to go to that place and look around more. So, in keeping with me basing games on dreams, I thought it would be a nice thing to make for this jam.

The groundwork

I wrote out some details about the game and its events in the past week, so I had enough to jump right into Unity. I decided to use my trusty Adventure Creator plugin, and since I’m not very good with 3D modeling I’m going for a 3D world/2D characters style like The Tell-Tale Heart / Californium / Trackless.

The player character will be a pizza delivery guy, so the first thing I wanted to get was a little scooter, and I found the perfect one on the Asset Store. And together with a first-person character I was testing last week I had the basics of the first scene. Next was greyboxing the essential geometry. I used assets from the Stylized Jungle Pack I purchased for Reconquista in combination with just regular grey cubes.

Then I started looking for forest villa reference photos.

This gave me the idea to add a driveway and carport around the side of the house – a nice hidden area you’ll only stumble upon if you go snooping around. And of course, a carport isn’t complete without a car. Then I got a little carried away… but hey at least this confirms the interaction system works!

I fiddled with the camera some more after that. It was really jittery, so I imported the First Person Drifter Controller, a neat little plugin I keep around for prototyping these kinds of games, and pulled the mouse smoothing script out of it to integrate with my player prefab. The result is really smooth!

Next was setting up the interaction system and UI, and I hollowed out the cube I had used to represent the house. I built some rooms and a glass facade, and then I really needed furniture. While browsing the Unity Asset Store I found some really great assets by OneSquareFoot. Their furniture mega pack was perfect to furnish the house with. And a nice opportunity to re-enact the Matrix.

I tried a few interior layouts and eventually settled on something that felt logical and looked good. Then I moved the sun a few degrees so that it would shine on the terrace for a longer period of time each day, justifying the reason the house was built at this angle. Would that I had such powers in real life.

I was getting antsy to try the character style so I added a quick 2D guy. I should really work on the gameplay a bit at this point, but I wanted to have the house ready so I can turn it into a prefab and use it across all scenes without cutting into my own fingers later. So I spent some time adding collision to the interior, interactive doors, a staircase into the cellar, curtains, outside lights that react to motion and a functional doorbell that summons the man of the house. Just a bit more sprucing up and it should be ready to go.
Reconquista 2.0 – revising a released game

When you’re making games on your own, finishing a project is already a pretty big milestone. But chances are you had to cut some corners to get it done. There are usually a few features that fall by the wayside depending on time, energy, or technical complexity. But how do you decide to either write off those ideas or keep them stored away for a potential version 2.0?

Since Reconquista was my first 3D game, I had to cut a lot of corners, so when I finished v1.0 I did not feel fulfilled. There wasn’t much to do outside of make a beeline for the temple, and the enemy AI was pretty rudimentary – it didn’t really reward exploration or experimentation. So when I released the game, I knew that I would someday revisit the game design. And I did.

I came back for three reasons; I wanted to:

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By the numbers

The demo for Last Voyage of the Orlova has been running for two weeks in a corner of VondelCS, and in that time Unity Analytics has been quietly tracking some key events in the game. Here’s a quick breakdown of those numbers:

It’s hard to say exactly how many people played the game, but I know 107 made it through the first few minutes and fired up the lighthouse.

77 hopefuls then entered the derelict ship floating through the mist.

41 of them figured out how to open the engineering deck and end the lockdown.

35 then made it to the front deck and found the axe.

They swung that axe 708 times, altogether. Wowzers.

And finally, 23 hardcore problem-solvers made it to the end of the demo.

These numbers are pretty impressive considering it’s running on an unattended fully-functional windows machine in some cafe hallway, away from any kind of gaming expo context, and without any strong tutorial content. It also shows that I could do some stronger foreshadowing in certain areas, but it might as well be that people had to move on or weren’t invested enough to explore further.

All in all, I’m glad I added the analytics in last-minute.
Firewatch Dutch translation

TL;DR: Download link.

As a little passion project I’ve been translating the game Firewatch into dutch in the off hours of the past two months or so. It was a bit more work than I anticipated but I had a good motivator: my girlfriend. I wanted to play the game with her but I knew she wouldn’t fully understand it if it was in english. Plus I like translating things, and this would be a good addition to my ‘portfolio’.

I had previously translated Gone Home, but Firewatch was a whopping 6827 strings, topping out at 53220 words. Transifex made it very easy with an excellent online editor though. Part of it had already been translated by other people but, nothing against them, it lacked a consistent tone, and some bits were just translated incorrectly. So I went through and reviewed everything, tested it in a full playthrough last week, and I’m ready to release it out into the wild now. There might still be some small errors or typos, so if you find those: let me know. And otherwise: enjoy!
How to do datamoshing in Photoshop

Datamoshing is “the practice of intentionally using compression artifacts in digital video and animated GIFs to create glitch art”.

It’s an effect popularized by Kanye West in his video Welcome To Heartbreak, but it’s mostly been an effect exclusive to video. There are a few crazy ways to get this effect on images by editing them with text or audio editors instead of image editors, but it’s hard to find a straightforward way to just do it in Photoshop. But, there is a fairly simple way to emulate it with a few filters. Here’s how:
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5 simple tips for demoing games at events

As I’m getting ready to demo Last Voyage Of The Orlova at the Opium Torenkamer Festival, I’m adding some extra features to the game to make my life easier during the two weeks it will be there. Demoing a game at an event may seem like a simple errand: put the executable on a computer and let people go wild. But there are a few things you can do to make everything go smoothly:

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Scratching that itch

Hey there blog denizens!

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of itch.io, thé online marketplace for interesting indie games these days, but I never added ALL of my projects before. And it would have been weird to upload unfinished games to a webstore, but itch has evolved tremendously lately, offering support for limited betas and early access games. So now you can find all of my personal projects of note at hedgefield.itch.io.

But wait, there’s one more thing.

Last year I stopped blogging weekly about my indie escapades and created a once-in-a-while newsletter, but I noticed that I then also shared less little gamedev insights, something which the blog was perfect for. So I’m bringing that back. As I wrap up work on the first Orlova beta for an upcoming event, expect more work-in-progress posts. It’s time to turn this place back into a proper devblog.

Starting with the new title screen for Last Voyage of the Orlova.
A little more conversation,

My friend Alper is working on an ebook about Conversational bots and UI, something we worked on together at Hubbub too. It seemed only fitting that I drew the cover for his book. So I did. You can preorder it here.
Idle hands

I want to practice more and do more anatomy and gesture drawings, but this one here was a quick exercise in hands. Particularly the perspective when facing the palm with the fingers bending in is hard to do.
My workflow – exporting multiple images

I thought it might be fun to share some tips and insights about my workflow on here, so here is the first post about that.

I’ve been working with Photoshop for years and years, and I’ve picked up some cool tricks along the way. But Photoshop itself keeps changing too, so today’s tip is cutting-edge, using the latest features in CC 2015.1 to export images in multiple sizes with one click. This uses two great new features, namely Artboards and The Generator.

Artboards are old news for users of Illustrator, but in Photoshop they can really enhance your workflow too. I wasn’t a big fan at first, but using it in conjunction with the Generator makes a strong case in their favor.

The Generator is probably a feature not many people know about. Exporting multiple layers in the past was mostly the domain of Export > Layers To Files, or using Slices in Save For Web, but The Generator is the next evolution; all you have to do is turn on Image Assets under File > Generate, then append .png to the names of the layers you want to export, and when you save your PSD, it automatically crops and exports these layers.

I found this extremely useful for exporting character limbs for game development, but it has its uses in webdevelopment also. I’ll show you how I use it at my job to export different sizes of the same illustration:

The source file is very high resolution, obviously, and when it’s done, I have to export into two 1200×628 pngs – one with a text banner for Facebook, and one clean one for the blogpost itself – plus a cropped 700×628 version for Pinterest and Instagram.

Resizing and cropping manually is a small pain, but a pain nonetheless, especially when you have to go back and change something later.

So, what I do is make an artboard at the size of the original illustration and convert all the layers in it to a smart object. Then I make three extra artboards at the size I want the exported images to be, copy the smart object into them, and add .png to the artboard names. This way, whenever I make a change in the original illustration, the change is propagated to all the other art boards, and when I hit Ctrl+S it automatically saves them out to separate pngs, ready to go onto the site (well, after they go through ImageOptim).

Using this setup as a template whenever I start a new illustration saves me a bunch of time otherwise spent exporting images by hand. Hopefully this is useful to some of you too.
Haphazard Photography – Kaleidoscope

All the colors of the rainbow
Hidden ‘neath my skin
Hearts have colors, don’t we all know
Red runs through our veins
Feel the fire burning up
Inspire me with blood of blue and green
I have hope
Inside is not a heart
but a kaleidoscope

The Kanye West discography

Prey + Spirits of Xanadu

Blade Runner 2049

It’s okay to quit

GAMES

MOVIES

TV SHOWS

BOOKS AND COMICS

The concept

The groundwork

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