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What I Learned at DevWorld 2019

/Dev/World is a three day conference in Melbourne covering everything Apple-related. It was my first time there and it was incredible. All of the talks were excellent and everyone was welcoming and friendly.

These are my notes, published here mostly so that I can tie all the things I learned directly back to the people who taught me. Blockquotes are paraphrased from the talks.

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The Ultimate Guide to Animation Tools for the Mac

As my workday leans more towards asset generation rather than straight coding, I’ve started looking at different tools available for creating and animating characters.

The art style I’m aiming for in my games is cartoony but won’t be pixel art so, while there are many great (and often free or low-cost) pixel art animation tools, I won’t be discussing them here.

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Sam and Max Hit the Road

As always, this is full of spoilers!

I think about this game a lot.

I think about how it starts with a woman trying to talk calmly to a man who has tied her up and is threatening to kill her just because she had the temerity to say no and how that’s even more relevant and relatable 26 years later.

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Day of the Tentacle

As always, spoilers! Day of the Tentacle was first released in 1993, so…

Day of the Tentacle was magical to 13-year-old me. The establishing shot of the mansion with its wild, bendy architecture was mesmerising. The thick bold lines and flat shading of Purple Tentacle as he sipped the ooze and set the story in motion was like nothing I had experienced up before in a video game.

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Simon’s Instagram Top 9

These are my Top 9 posts from Instagram this year. A nice mix of stuff from my location studies (2, 4, 5, 7, 9), some concept work for my adventure game (1), and the results of my first art stream on Twitch (8).

Erin had been trying to convince me to do more illustrations of the places we travel to for years because she thought folks would like them. This year I finally started doing some and already they make up the majority of my top 9.

Turns out she was right.

(Again.)

All the Procreate Brushes

I have a core collection of brushes that I use on a day to day basis with Procreate. I kept meaning to try out some of the other brushes but I never quite knew what to reach for.

While hiking the Dales Way, I spent the evenings sipping fine ales and going through every brush on offer. I wanted to find out what each of them looks and feels like, how they work with pressure, and what difference using the side of the Pencil has vs the point.

Here are twenty screenshots detailing every brush in the standard install of Procreate.

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