Lino VN Graphix and Shitpost Soundpacks
Made another freakin' VN, hell yeah buddy.
To be fair, it's just a demo this time.
Lino Cutties
This time I wanted to experiment with alternatives styles of making visual assets, and while browsing the art supply store near my uni I kind of happened upon linoleum. I had been intrigued by stamps for a while already and I figured lino is kinda just big stamps!
The stamps in question, quite fond of the cuppy especially.
I first started small with very soft rubbery material to make some stamps of my name, my tag, and a little iconographic depiction of Itske. It made me think of how funny it'd be if taggers ran around with big stamps that they stick onto wherever. It'd be very time-efficient!
I found that what you do when gauging out the material is create a sort of negative of what you want. If you're making something line-art-heavy you'll have to get rid of a lot of material (or as I found out later you can just invert the scanned image of the print lol).
Bobby is kind of a bitch but in a very non-malicious way, if that makes sense.
The first actual lino was of Bobby; a female himbo womanizer who struggles to care about others and herself. The development of this characterization kind of came while working on this one, it was done without a preliminary sketch and just followed the material so to speak.
It was a nice first step before doing the mc, Cadence, because for her I'd have to figure out a bunch of expression elements as well. I felt these wouldn't be necessary for the other characters as they have a static shape borne from Cadence's perception of them. She is effectively blind to what others actually look like or express.
Having one sheet for all the character assets is kinda nice organisation-wise.
This time I separated the eyes eyebrows and mouth to make my work a bit easier for myself. In FnP it was really quick and fun to draw up the expressions and as such I could have a fuckton of them, but here I had to be a bit restrained. This handful of eyes and mouths do make for a nice enough variety, though I might want to add a bigger yelling mouth.
Me when a small inconvenience.
I also wanted it to be animated, and what better way to do it than to make multiple prints and having them be variable! Either by underloading the paint roller or doing a bit more or less thorough rubbing of the paper onto the lino. I like when things move around the screen in a visual novel, and since this was the 'noise' jam I could take this to the extreme!!!
I really like how well it fits with the given narrative as well. Lino is carving grooves, much like how vinyl records are made using specialized lathes. It's jagged, messy, often imperfect, and although most of these things are purposefully avoided in most linoprint art I instead sought to make use of these features of the medium. Records are easy to break/warp/damage too, and although heavily undesired this does produce sonic qualities unique to the recording medium. It has its charm I think.
The Shitpost Soundpack Sidequest
During this game jam I also picked up a dynamic mic in a second hand electronics store, with which I recorded Tape Sounds and my partner Two Trannies Doing Home Improvement.
Tape sounds was born from a failure of hanging up corkboard on my wall using double-sided adhesive tape. It kinda just fell off weh. But! Removing the tape did make for very satisfying peeling sounds... It felt kinda lewd in a weird way?
tape15.mp3 - sounds kinda sexyyyyyyy
Two Trannies Doing Home Improvement is a lot more silly. It's a compilation of over 200 sounds recorded and cut from a session of trying to construct a corkboard wall for myself (this time successfully). It features VO, caulking sounds, sniffing, scraping, stroking, and a bottle blowing noise. I honestly love working with Audacity for this sorta thing and I can't wait to get an idea for another sound pack.
Marital dispute.mp3 - Very funny
And I also finally got the corkboard on the wall, hooray! Awesome for putting up sketches n stuff related to whatever I'm working on at that given time.
The final corkboard wall, successfully stuck onto the wall this time!
What's Next?
During this jam I was very very very extremely inspired by all the (harsh) noise things that I came across from other contestants and my personal research. Reading papers like Noise & Capitalism and The Perilous Potential of the Blur gave me some nice insights on what exactly appeals in the given 'roughness' of things that are loud or broken.
Rosa Menkman's A Vernacular of File Formats gave me a nice way into the art of media glitching. How different file formats and codecs can be misused to create distorted imagery. Even if I didn't wind up using any of this in the VN it was still a crucial part of the process, which I think I will revisit for my current work towards my thesis and graduation project.
A self portrait pulled through the corruption of multiple file formats.
PNG, JPEG, GIF, AVIF.
This entire process of glitching, databending, circuitbending, and noise-printing has taken me to a place where I yearn to make something specific, something fun and a bit silly, and I am very excited to start working on it! I expect to write a blog post on this soonish, maybe when I finish my project proposal and thesis outline, when I've got a slight hint of certainty about what I'll be doing.