Hiya, Pal!
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Thanks for joining the Squirmish Email Club! I’m Steven Stwalley, the game designer and cartoonist behind Squirmish, The Card Game of Brawling Beasties. It has been a while since I have sent anything out to this list. How have you been? Still hanging out at the same bus stop? Did you ever finish that enormous pile of mashed potatoes you were working on? Is that rash doing any better? Well, I hope all is well with you. |
I’m going to start sending news out this way on a more regular basis, so tell your pals! Or, if this sounds awful, unsubscribe! I do hope you’ll stay with me, though, as I enjoy your refined digital company, your wit, and the many impressive ways in which you can imitate the sounds of flatulence. |
I have a lot of wondrous Squirmish updates to share with you. Like this: |
Squirmish: The Videogame of Brawling Beasties is Coming to Steam in May 2024!
The first and most exciting update is that the Squirmish Videogame is almost ready to be released! It will be out this May on Steam. It is designed for single player or two-player PVP play. There are a bunch of new characters of varying degrees of brain-smartses for you to do battle against. |
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Squirmish Discord Server
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Squirmish now has a Discord Server! Come and talk with your fellow card-brawlers about the ins, outs and intricacies of the game of Squirmish. Debate the merits of The Wee Admiral of the Sea! Discuss advanced strategies! Post fan art! Share your Killgor the Conqueror fan fic! Report game bugs! I hope to hang out with you there! |
Squirmish Art Process
I thought some of you may enjoy seeing some production art in these emails. I still do most of my initial work on paper like some weird Victorian, if you can believe that. I have a pretty esoteric and probably overly-complicated process for creating most of my Squirmish art. It usually goes like this: |
1: I scribble on paper. Then I let the scribbles inform some rough pencils that I draw. Then I tighten the pencils just enough to feel comfortable for the inking. |
2. I ink on paper, usually using a Pentel Pocket Brush Pen, the single greatest drawing tool ever invented. |
3. I do a 600 DPI greyscale scan the black and white art. |
4. I convert the scan to vector art in Adobe Illustrator, |
5. I paste that vector art into Adobe Animate and clean it up. Then I create three layers. The top layer I leave as black and white line art. The middle layer I color with flat color. The bottom layer I take the shape of all the lines and filled color and make all black to block any potential gaps in the artwork. On the color layer, I generally expand the shape of the color fills by 2 pixels to nest the edges of the color under the lines on the top layer. |
6. Once I’m happy with the flat coloring in Adobe Animate, I export the three layers as three separate .svg files. |
7. I import my .svg files into three layers in an Adobe Photoshop document. The nice thing about this is that it leaves all my color and line art as vector art, which is infinitely scalable if I ever want to change the size for different purposes. |
8. Then I start toning in Photoshop using a stylus on a Huion Kamvas Drawing Tablet. I usually start with the darks. I create a layer between the color and line art and work with black, usually at around 25% opacity. Once I’m happy with the toning, I usually convert the layer to a multiply layer. |
9. Then I start with the lights, adding another layer on top of the darks layer. I usually draw with white at around 25% opacity, and then usually apply a blending mode (often overlay at the end. |
10. Next, I usually another layer on top of that for highlights. For that I use white at 100% opacity. |
11. I sometimes add other layers of other colors, lights and tones to get it looking snappy. |
12. After that, I generally add a simple background behind everything with shadows and light of its own. |
Here is some rough art on paper I used in creating the Squirmish Email Club header at the top of this email. |
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