A witch-scholar who fights with the rolling fury of fire.

I got my game's engine to start making hitboxes. They don't (yet) generate collisions, nor do they expand to specific creature sizes or such.

However, I think the witch portrait that follows is much closer to finished, so if you're a professional artist or art critic, just close the browser window now if you don't wish to hate me forever. (A more serious fair warning: an even longer post than my penultimate, complete with headings even, but one that I think is very necessary to explain the portrait's roots and jot down some of my own life so I don't forget it, follows first.)

Waking up and smelling the coffee (which is bad because I hate coffee and prefer tea).

Recall the FAQ teaser, in which I write:

Other games that inspired me here include Mega Man 2, Chrono Trigger (probably the first to make me think about elements and resistances, with Spekkio and all), the Final Fantasy games, Elona, Artix Entertainment's games, and others that I forget at this time.

See, way back in Ancient Times—some time after September 14, 2001, apparently, and before I was game kid, definitely—certain Very Close People showed me Newgrounds; the very first thing I remember seeing there was Bad Dudes vs. Bin Laden (rated M, for ages 17+). Some time later (I've long forgotten how much later) I visited there again and noticed games financed, promoted, what-you-will by Games of Gondor (now Armor Games). I was at first a bit disturbed because I had seen many Newgrounds games but few if any that were sponsored by a site that offered money for Flash game developers.

Ooh, magic!

That feeling wore off and I went to Armor Games (GoG's name changed by then) and noticed lots of games (I've not played anything remotely close to "all of them") and started seeing their (many) ads, including several for their pick-a-class-then-click-and-walk-around-and-oh-yeah-fight-monsters-and-stuff RPG DragonFable. I started playing that and AdventureQuest in 2008, while I was still active on YTMND. In both games I made a guy character very imaginatively named Bob, and a girl character named Lindsay because, well, you know.

Anyway, by 2009-ish I stopped playing—I was again put off by their requests for money (hint: try playing either Artix game for a week without seeing an offer for a Dragon Amulet, the benefits of being a Guardian, and other such perks). However, I started playing Elona some time later and liked how at least some magical attacks (like its Magic Missile) never missed, and that combined with Gandalf's "YOU SHALL NOT PASS!" made me really interested in magic and elements and such. I stopped going to YTMND around August 2010 (partly so I can try to make a game in the first place), and on November that year I went back to those Artix games, partly out of boredom and partly because I remembered that they had what I thought were reasonably nice elemental systems— you know, fire versus ice, light v. darkness, all of that. Then I noticed a week or two later they made AdventureQuest Worlds.

Bad Things™ happened.

I loathe the core concept of MMORPGs like that one in general: all-but-endless games that require or at least strongly suggest a subscription fee to keep the servers (let alone your characters!) working. (Yes, the fact I want to make an arcade game, where many if not most others are world famous for repeated coin insertions and insane difficulties, perplexes me a bit.) I was bored, though, and decided to make an account if only to reserve a name and see how a character looked. Their character creation page specifically asked for "a unique and cool" name, and after a few Google searches to make sure it was never used (and because I prefer short simple names over stuff like xXrandomwordXx or Gandalf9376492639 or ~*./S_o_m_e_G_u_y_F_r_o_m_A_n_A_n_i_m_e\.*~), Vralanea was born.

I gave her a crazy-long password (thank you, KeePass) to be safe, and was about to head right to the account management page to delete her real quick like, but that page didn't work! I won't give details here, but it had to do with the password, so I fired off a quick message to their bug-report forums (bad idea for account issues!), then to their help pages (good idea!). As I waited for a response, I played the character (no password problems when actually playing the game), and after I got a new word I kept playing anyway. I even went on to get premium stuff for her, my pretty-much-ancient-now DF girl character, and a newer AQ character (my 2008 ones were deleted for inactivity), but strictly with their special-ad-offer pages (by then I was pretty much dead-set against paying my own sparse money for a game I couldn't take with me if, say a "cloud" crashed or an activation server didn't respond).

In AQW (as that game's often called), I almost always dress her conservatively, often in witchy garb, and pretty much always with red hair and green eyes. Since my game is most certainly not AQW (at least until their lawyers decide to wrongfully cease-and-desist me for using some generic RPG element like witch hats or hit points), I decided to give her a last name, try to make my own outfit for her, and generally push the envelope a bit.

[2013-05-20: The latest source SVG (92.83 KiB) is now posted on Dropbox.]

As you may suspect, I thought editing this was awesome.

By the way, I make the SVG version available under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 or later. Here's a copy of the license on my site—please read it carefully before investinguse.

Version control!

Thanks to not-so-creative use of TortoiseHg, I can give something of a history behind the final product. Sure, she may look like a travesty and insult to the visual arts now, but when I started drawing her, she looked even more garish and gaudy. By 3 days ago, I gave her a body, applied better shading, and she pretty much took her current shape. I actually liked the face of that one better—something about her lips and the eye contact— but I rejected it because the long flop of hair in her face (which I drew to avoid making a second eye, hehe) felt too "emo" and even more because it made her look too much like certain AQW characters and I'd rather not step on copyright toes. (It's bad enough that she has bangs and a robe with shoulder pads as my character there does.) So I straightened her head (more heroic that way, I think), mirrored the eye, lifted the bangs, gave her a sideways smirk thing as a tribute to Brian Williams, and added some other stuff to make Vralanea look more like she does now.

Here's how part of the witch selection screen looks like, at the moment.

(The beige part on the left is actually outside of the SVG viewBox. My plan is to make the actual game screen square, despite players' preferences for a wide or tall screen, and use the outside areas to draw "cabinet" art on the sides, and something of a marquee and "control panel" or instructions, on the top and bottom for those who play in a non-square browser window or frame. Think of how MAME displays those elements if you play a game there with the relevant images—I hope to do something like that.)

This project will probably produce a short arcade game (arcane game? Hah!), but it is a very personal one that I badly want to see to the end before I'm forever lost in the dull and soulless world of Real Life™. Whether you like me for what I've made or how I've commented on sites, or scorn me for talking about Cut(ey|ie) Honey or playing a girl character in an MMO or saying "something something B button blah blah" or "gamekid would hit it." so often, you'll just have to deal with me a bit longer because I have a game to develop.

Have fun.