more moral art
1-6: vanitas
7: pleasant child and horrible child
8: lamassu
9: three owls impaling a naked woman with a sword
11 Likes
still working on this thing although i regret to say i seem to have completely forgotten how to write it - i spent the last two days trying to come up with jokes for the extremely broad prompt that is āmoral art freeportā but couldnāt get beyond netflix original sitcom level. maybe iām dying, no, itās probably just more that a full year of lockdown is slowly turning me into an oblivion npc. between 2 and 3pm i walk to one of the three green spaces near my flat and otherwise you can find me standing motionless indoors or trying to sell someone a sword. hope to keep plugging away even if it cuts into my telling-people-about-the-crystal activities.
have really fallen off engaging with more horror stuff as well of late, but i do keep thinking of the epigraph from octave mirbeauās ātorture gardenā.
12 Likes
doodling āmorality machinesā, king philipās wind-up mechanical monk (stamps feet, claps hands), a mangled version of ramon llullās thinking machine for theological riddles, a diorama cabinet, some inscrutable cartoon device. also a spanking machine, which is one of those byroads of automation history iām really fascinated by - while now itās mostly of interest to certain enthusiasts, the idea of a machine that would both āscientificallyā regulate physical punishment and also act as a labour saving appliance for e.g. teachers worn out from beating up on kids all the time seems to have attracted some level of sincere interest and effort at practical instantiation from people still high on the breakthroughs of the machine age. the dream life of technology!
thereās a funny and horrifying website by ruth tulle which compares her fatherās own sketches of a hand-built punishment machine with those drawn by other family members
5 Likes
almost a month since the last post!! well, i was on break i guess. getting back to things and playing with ideas for a Painting Zone.
i remember hearing about the secret āpainted worldā in dark souls and feeling so disappointed when it turned out to be a fucking ice level instead of a chaotic gloopscape like that one part in The Pagemaster, so wanted to push at least a little further in that direction. not married to the colours or anything yet. the textures are leftover from 10BP and are done using the old free proto version of Sculptris, which idk if is usable for models but turns out to be a great way of churning out prerendered-looking slime textures on the cheap.
10 Likes
have been on a bit of a level spree and am now on the final sections, will be happy to have done since tbh this one feels a little rockier than most of the others - i guess one of the things i wanted to try with this was to have the main character be exploring as part of a group, swapping out the usual soliloquies for dialogues bouncing between different people, but it was both extra work and ended up feeling a bit more relentlessly jokey in practice. it is a terrible feeling to realise you have accidentally committed Banter. well, something to remember for next time. i do feel glad about having even more excuse to keep doing goofy background paintings at least.
11 Likes
Yo holy shit I learned abt and played thru ur whole series of games b4 realizing u were on this forum!!! ur so talented i recommend this to all myfriends who love but also hate horror
4 Likes
hahah thank you!! iām glad theyāre still playable to anyone as unsettled by horror games as i am
2 Likes
looks great
1 Like
thank you! 90% is from wikimedia commons or the british library flickr account but i hope The Hospitals never get on me for repurposing the cover to Hairdryer Peace
4 Likes
new game is out now https://gamejolt.com/games/fleshofthekiller/627901
thankfully my friend who does music for these was able to save my ass with a very good haunted museum type track to cover any pacing issues, hahah
6 Likes
starting on game #6, hoping to go for more of a giallo mystery vibe with this one
10 Likes
I played Flesh of the Killer tonight and was really impressed by it! Felt like a bunch of things from the previous games working individually and together in their best way, so a really strong presentation. I just happen to be reading Dorian Gray right now so I came in with received thoughts about moral art and I found a lot to laugh at while I played through it. Definitely going to revisit this one.
edit: ah! I didnāt play the theatre one. thatās next.
1 Like
really glad you enjoyed it! the uncannier aspects of moral art are something that have been bouncing around my head for a while as someone who makes videogames (thankfully never known to be moral in any form)ā¦ it was a weird accident that midway through that game all the wholesome games discourse broke out though, hahh
getting back to the new one after a while to recuperate shoulder. trying to play around with a bunch of built-in unity stuff i never had much occasion to use, like cookies for spotlight decals, bumpmapped textures for dungeon walls, cloth physics for billowing curtains etc. itās kind of funny to me how this very modern and commercial engine has all these gothic touchstones just built in and laying around for tech demo purposes.
4 Likes
these things rule, they were always underutilized or only showed up for that one stained glass window
inherently theatrical
1 Like
as soon as i tried one out i was immediately shocked i hadnāt seen it used in 100 other small horror games! having fun coming up with my own assortment of shadow play props
have also tried playing with postprocessing but am cautious since that feels like a little more well-trodden ground, outside of the obvious good times of cranking up the bloom lighting setting until things look like an xbox 360 game
always good to send negative inputs to postprocessing and other shaders to see what they do
1 Like
very slowly starting to push on with the new one. itās tricky since for whatever reason i wanted to do a mostly outdoors one this time, set in a small village - but iām still figuring out how to do or fake outdoor areas in a way that looks interesting. at the moment itās very piecemeal as i just throw in disconnected elements until i get something that looks horizon-y or fills the awkward spaces around the levels but hopefully as time goes on iāll be able to internalise the sense of whatās needed a little more. leaving the hills pretty rough for now.
above also includes first attempts at forced perspective in the small buildings at the bottom of the hill.
these two are test maps - for the first one i took a bunch of prefab buildings and tried dropping them around a plain, but it was gruelling trying to structure that or have it look interesting as you were moving around it. the second is just a quicker and more enclosed space but mangled textures aside it somehow did end up feeling more convincingly outdoorsy as a space.
anyway still trying to figure out what are likely freshman-level environment design solutions in the most laboured way possible. itās honestly been pretty helpful to just go look at n64 levels every so often and realise that you really can just wrap an abstract tree/rock texture around things if you really want to.
9 Likes
putting in some cornball omnipresent unity horror game touches as a treat
7 Likes