Roundup: March & April 21 (Patreon)

April unexpectedly ended up being a month that's completely kicking my behind. Seemingly just yesterday I was posting the Glories and Laments print, and next thing you know, it's suddenly halfway through next month and I've not made a single update. I did post a few other things here and there, though, so I thought that the least I could do was do a little roundup of what you may have missed if you don't follow me elsewhere. 

March

Since March was Oblivion's 15th Anniversary, Benefactor and I worked to get Bethesda's permission to publish some high resolution concept art images from Oblivion. In addition to just being nice, there's an image of Molag Bal's realm. The only one from before ESO, as far as I'm aware. 

There's something very special about the concept art of games from this time. Things had gotten advanced enough to need concept art, but concept artists as a job category didn't yet exist like they do today. 

See our whole gallery here. 

Additionally, I took some time to play through Oblivion's main quest again, and update TIL's storyline document. In addition to adding a ton of modern resolution (but vintage aspect ratio!) screenshots, I made stylistic updates to bring it up to date with the way we've been transcribing storylines recently. Having the player be named "player," using gender neutral pronouns for player narration, and including more information about alternative paths and dialog choices were the big things there. 

I also noticed just how short the game is when you cut out all the fighting. I wrote a bit about the discrepancy in word count over in this twitter thread. 

Finally: StygiesVIII interviewed me on behalf of the Elder Scrolls Wikia about some of my past works. 

April

Again on Twitter, I complained about meaningless TES6 rumors.

Continuing the Glowforge experimentation, I made some Dunmeri bookmarks of gold-engraved black leatherette. My first experiment with Saint Olms didn't quite work out, as the larger fields of engraving didn't get the nice gold outlines that I was after. I tried again with the ASV letters, this time sticking strictly to thin linework, which worked beautifully. Both designs were done by hand in Illustrator, with the Olms desing being based on his Morrowind artwork and the trim based on banner trim from ESO:Morrowind.  

The ASV bookmarks are listed on Etsy. If you're interested in one and are a patron here, send me a message and I think I can set you up with a discount code. 

I'm going to give the Olms design another try this weekend, except this time on thin veneer. Although my own bookmarks tend to be of the "whatever scrap of paper happened to be nearby" variety, they're really fun to make. 

Last but not least, I'm working on spinning up a new page on TIL to host extracted game data. I'd always wanted to figure out how to include this stuff in a legible format inside a webpage (so that it could be tagged and found in search), but for now, just letting people access it at all will be a huge leap forward. There's so much dialog and general data that's either completely undocumented or scattered about. 

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Now that I write all this out, I kind of like this style of post. Let me know if you'd be interested in me doing little roundups of what I've been up to in the future.