xeneth.design

Despite a little early talent, I was never THAT good at drawing, because I never really went to school for it or focused on honing the ability. For something like the last decade, the only kind of art I've produced has conformed to a pretty specific style that I've been referring to as " MS Paint Card Art Placeholder. " When making placeholder card art, it was important that no one illustration take very long, hence the limiting tool that is the Microsoft Windows 10 era Paint application; because the tool does not support layers or transparency, I was discouraged from attempting to "perfect" any one aspect of what I was doing. The linework being crafted by mouse meant a certain shoddiness that I found was complimented or made to "look intentional" by the included crayon brush; this crackly tool comes in but four line weights, further limiting creative options and focusing me on producing quick and dirty color images that were intended to be replace

     After hearing murmurings from Super Eyepatch Wolf and others, I decided to jump into system_erasure 's latest game  Void Stranger completely blind... This is normally where spoiler warnings would be appropriate, but I'm not sure how much I could possibly spoil given I haven't really started the game yet. That's right; I'm stopping to write this in response to playing the game for all of 5 minutes! + + + Void Stranger appears to be a game about defying player expectations. Before even getting past the title screen, I am confronted with a dynamic representation of the simple controls; Up , Left , Down , Right , A , and Start , in black, white, and gray against a field of rising particles. The interface responds to inputs and makes it clear that my controller is indeed working, but pressing Start simply causes it to light up; it does not allow me to actually start the game... How strange. A bit of thrashing around on the buttons yields a minor discovery; did the

 The intent was to make this round's words a pretty light lift, so I was reaching for immediate associations and familiar patterns. All the recent news/coverage for Super Mario Bros Wonder means I have platformer design on the brain, so from " Houseplant " and " Diet " I immediately pull Little Shop Of Horrors and Piranha Plants...     At this juncture I'd like to detour a bit to talk about one of the many tiny ways in which "the algorithmic gods" like Google are slowly and steadily making the internet less useful. In talking about the above with my partner, the topic shifted to whether or not the Piranha Plants in Mario games were originally inspired by Audrey from Little Shop of Horrors , or if they were arrived at organically via a similar synthesis and monsterization of real life carnivorous plant life. The former sounded more likely to me than the latter, but I typed "little shop of horrors release date"  into Google just to be su

I am haunted; kept up at night by visions of an enormous whale-like creature that certainly will exist, but whether or not being devoured by it will satisfy me won’t be revealed for another two months…      The first time I played the Lies of P Demo, I was duly impressed by the audio-visual design and charmed by its over-the-top premise, but the experience didn’t manage to fully entangle me in its strings; not yet. You see, combat is well over 50% of what makes or breaks a souls-like title, (with the rest being monopolized by level and world design) and when it came to dismantling frenzied puppets, I bounced off; the meta-narrative driving this whole release seems to be “Elden Ring is lovely, but the world wants a sequel to Bloodborne very badly,” and so this vertical slice of a Pinnocchio-based spiritual successor convinced me to play it like one.      Everything about the Victorian steampunk setting told me to find a rhythm of attacking and dodging that would make a hunter of hunte

     Keeping the ETNO random-three-word-prompted art streak alive for another week! This time around, the simian imagery just didn't seem to be getting me anywhere, so I looked closer and latched onto the way the spelling of the word implied subversive military action instead of primates. Unfortunately "Guerrilla" plus "Spirit" immediately sent me in the direction of ghosts on a Vietnamese war battlefield; a huge percentage of my instincts and impulses these days seem to be morbid and negative, but I don't have the energy to fight that too much in the context of what's supposed to be a very light creative lift, so here we are. From there, "Electronics" made me think of a military cellular communications backpack. So the mental image was a radio-wave-ghost hovering over the remains of a Western battlefield comms soldier in a spike trap.     Unless curbed, I can see a natural escalation in the amount of artistic skill and effort that goes into

       You're playing a video game. As you navigate your character through three-dimensional space using the left analog stick on your controller, you're in constant conversation with the level designers; everything from lighting to the density and quality of props is drawing your eye, guiding you toward where the designers want you to travel in order to progress. The well-trodden path beneath your avatar's feet stands out against the more heavily leaf-strewn grass textures and scattered foliage ahead; in the same direction, a break in the fence geometry. Dark wooden slats contrast against the moonlit route forward. This is where they're telling you to go. Except, you've played enough games like this to know that they're NOT actually telling you where you should steer your character, the designers are telling you where the critical path is; where the rest of the level leads. Unintuitively, because the ones shaping the space know that you're aware of this, th