House of Arcane Treasures

The game is live! Ari and I finished it and installed it in the gallery almost two weeks ago, and while there are always tweaks to be made, we are very happy with the finished product.

 

You play as Severine Walker, a girl whose parents went missing when you were less than a year old. On your fifteenth birthday, you inherit the key to their abandoned HOUSE. In exploring the mysterious artifacts scattered throughout the empty rooms, you hope to find some clue as to where your parents might have gone, and why they would have left behind the daughter they loved so much.

It take between 45 minutes and an hour to play, and can also be accessed from my artist website here, where you can also find updated commission info.

We've been getting very positive feedback so far, so thanks everyone for that!

- KP


Quote of the Day: "I abandoned my boy... I ABANDONED MY BOY!"

I was Jack for Halloween! This costume was kind of a pain because it was not only held together by duct tape and prayers, but also because that body paint rubbed off on absolutely every single thing and I was tripping over my boot covers all day, but I think I at least looked awesome so I'm gonna say it was worth it.

We went to Cloor's and watched the first two episodes of Stranger Things, which were super good and I can't wait to see more of it. Good Halloween fare, too.

- KP


Quote of the Day: "Hey, DM, are there traps?"

got an A in my studio art class

Here are some of the pieces I used for my portfolio. 

The Cellar in Winter

The Haunting

Warm Neutral Cool

Briar

The Bone

Never Die When I'm Dead

Not to Be

If You Wait

All Soul's Night

 Breast

Leaving Earth

There are more pieces I was proud of, but I didn't get around to taking pictures of all of them. Anyway, it was a good class in that I turned out a lot of solid pieces, though I didn't really learn too much that I didn't already know. Which is fair, since it was supposed to be a foundations course.

I have so much more art to post! If I don't just sleep straight through the rest of this break, I'll do it.

- KP


Quote of the Day: "We'll use the Force!" "That's not how the Force works!"

Red cosplay

Happy Halloween, poor neglected blog! Man, the last month has been absolutely nuts. This is by far the toughest semester I've had so far in terms of time commitments, but I did make the time this weekend to throw together a quick costume. (Me as Red, Matt as the boxer.)

Transistor is a fantastic game. The art is beautiful, the story is super sad, the combat is unique and cool, and the soundtrack is A+. There's nothing not to like. Go play it!

- KP


Quote of the Day: "Oh yeah, witches!" "Stop sounding so excited about the witches!"

Videos for Anna: masterpost

I'll add each new one as it appears on Youtube!










- KP


Quote of the Day: "So if it catches you, does it eat you?" "No, it kills you."

the useless one

So this is my sketchy sketchy Attack on Titan cosplay. There is no chest harness and there are no swords and the jacket is the wrong color, but considering that the only thing I spent money on for this costume was duct tape, I'd still call that a pretty solid win.

The gear actually didn't bang around as much as I was expecting, although I did have to carry my books under my arm instead of wearing my backpack, and sitting down was quite the adventure. Also, people kept asking which character I was, so I finally decided Armin, because I am useless and I have no swords. (I like Armin though. He's a cutie and he reminds me of Mana from Magical Steampunk Gypsies.) In any case, Ian and I were quite popular and got lots of "for humanity!" salutes from random strangers, which is always the best.

There will most likely be more pictures of this costume eventually, because Ian and I want to drag Alex and his fancy camera down to the Natural Lands and leap around in our 3D Maneuver Gear like a bunch of badasses. 'S gonna be great.

Commander Kip
"So sorry... to attack... from... behind..."
Normal is overrated!

With my freeze ray

I will STOP the world

With my freeze ray I will

Find the time to find the words to

Tell you how

How you make

Make me feel

What's the phrase

Like a fool

Kinda sick

Special needs

Anyway

Thank you ever so much, Brenticus, for making this shirt possible. It's pretty fantastic.

I said I was gonna, and I did.

On another subject, this is Rasputin. Say hi!

Matt was a lifesaver on this one because he let me steal a bunch of his rubber bands and paper clips with which to string the little bugger. Hurray for boyfriends who conveniently let you steal their stuff!

 Rasputin was my final project in 3D Art. We had to make a "performed object" and perform it in front of the class. I made this awkward gargoyle thing and made him jump around for a while until he looked like this:

Yes, he exploded at the end. But he had a good life. It's okay. At least I didn't take Leif's suggestion and give him a gigantic penis. That would have been silly.

So, right now, there's too much Great Con happening to think about much else, but we have managed to finish Season 2 of Avatar, and the finale was epic and depressing, and apparently we're gonna have to do all of Season 3 basically in one sitting because once you start you can't stop. So that'll be happening after the Great Con final next Wednesday.

Some of us have also found time to start up a Kildahl D&D campaign on Sunday afternoons. You'll be hearing about my new character. Her name is Valandra, previously known as Exhibit 39, and she's a hippie wind elemental with sort of a "don't step on the grass" attitude. In D&D-speak, she's a Genasi Warden who was kidnapped by fortune hunters and sold to an arcane academic facility, where she was imprisoned and studied for several hundred years, watching the creatures in the cages around her getting hauled off for dissection. She eventually escaped by turning herself into a shifting whirlwind of sand and pouring through the keyhole of her cage. Now she's joined up with our ragtag band of adventurers on her way to find the sacred grove she had sworn to protect. I suspect if she runs into those fortune hunters, she wouldn't be averse to taking a few chunks out of them, but we'll see. For the record, I'mma always play tanks from now on. It's fantastic. I do actual damage when I hit stuff. I love it. Although it is weird to have such a low Charisma stat - Ileana could seduce her way in and out of anything, but Valandra can barely keep up a civil conversation. Should be interesting. Good thing we have a sexy Cleric on the team, as well as a Dragonborn with ridiculous Charisma. We'll just leave the seducing to them, I suppose.

Back to the friggen Jesus paper! Hurray, Jesus paper. *dies*

Commander Kip
"I do hope I'm interrupting something."
Normal is overrated!

birthday, hobbitgasm, & other news

All right. It is actually, officially, and unfortunately my birthday. I'm getting sick of aging now. Can't I just be nineteen indefinitely? That would be a pretty nice indefinite age. 

So, I've seen the Hobbit twice, once at school and once at home. And OH. EM. GEE. I can't even. What. It is so friggen fantastic. Check it out, there's my friend Elinor in front of the hobbit door at the theater.

I shall make sure to always sit next to Leif in movies now, because the entire time he kept flapping his hands and whisper-shrieking things like "HOBBITGASM" and "DWARFGASM" and "ELFGASM" and "WIZARDGASM" in my ear. It was the greatest. But seriously, have you seen Thorin's FACE? He has, like, the best nose ever. He comes in the door of Bag End and he's all like "I am Thorin Oakenshield" and I'm all like "Good gracious. Since when are dwarves allowed to be hot?" Apparently, ever since Thorin and Kili showed up onscreen. Who'd 'a thunk?

Remember that snippet-of-a-thing I showed you several posts back? This was the thing. It's a forty-foot Smaug made out of cardboard and zip ties, jointly created by my sculpture class for the Hobbit-themed dinner in the Caf. Boy, did we have a blast putting that beast together.

There he is lookin' saucy amidst the Caf tables.

Hello, handsome. My art professor stuck a fog machine in his schnoz.

And there's me in my elf costume. Classy, I know. See, I knew I'd have a use for my pointsy earses in college!

Also, we had a bit of snow on campus right before finals week. Anna, JC Aly, Lil'nea and I built a snowman. The snowsquirrel on his head was Anna's idea, and a brilliant one at that. We also had a pretty epic snowfight once the rest of Kildahl got back from lunch. Lol, I think I had a studio class that morning that I didn't warm up for because I was too busy playing in the snow. Also didn't eat lunch, but that's nothing new. That's Aly in the picture. She's spectacular.

More snow pictures.

Because we live on a hill and the winds are of the prevailing variety, every snowman on campus was listing rather severely by midday.

We also went midnight sledding on appropriated Caf trays and acquired a nice assortment of minor (and less minor) injuries. Poor Sarah went home with a concussion and missed all her finals. Nothing that drastic happened to me, although I did come down with a cold.

Got a Barnes & Noble gift certificate for my birthday and spent it on pretty books, including The Fire Ascending and Rain and Fire by Chris D'Lacey and Princess Academy: Palace of Stone by Shannon Hale. I also discovered that there are apparently six more Merlin books (T.A. Barron) that I didn't know about, released after the original five? What? Can has?! Anywhoo, I continue to sneak more books back to college by wrapping them in clothes and stuffing them waaaay down in the suitcase. It's the bringing them back home in the summer that's going to cause problems, because I'll clearly have way more than I initially took with me in the fall. Whatever, we'll deal with that later. Oh, I'm reading Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell at the moment, in anticipation of seeing the movie eventually, and it's pretty fantastic. I'm enjoying the timeskips rather, although not so much the devastating cliffies.

In other, less celebratory news, my poor dear dog died two days before Christmas. It was sudden and horrible. None of us were expecting it. The emergency vet said it was probably an internal blockage, as if he swallowed something and it completely stoppered up his guts. In other words, his own dumb fault. He was whiny and smelly and stupid, but I'll miss the wooly lunatic all the same. He loved us. We loved him. Even my dad admitted it.

Back to cheerier fare. The Doctor Who Christmas special was, in a word, fantastic. I made the questionable decision of watching the tail end of Angels Take Manhattan right beforehand because that's what was on the channel, and I definitely watched the first few minutes of The Snowmen through a wretched trickle Pond-related tears. Also, disillusioned Eleventh Doctor is so very painful to watch. But Clara is gorgeous and cheeky and awesome, so it's all good. Lady Arin paid me a visit yesterday, and I was delighted to discover that college has transformed her into a true Whovian, hurray! And she also watched Smith before Tennant, because we're sisters and that's how we do.

Hokay, off to do birthday things. My goals today are to finish Cloud Atlas and play through Portal. We'll see how far I get.

Commander Kip
"It's smaller on the outside!" "Now, that is a first."
Normal is overrated!