While I was making my 3d music box experience for the Skiddosaurus community, I also decided to participate in the communities secret santa.
I was matched with someone who filled out a pretty extensive survey, but one thing stood out to me: they said they'd like to learn Japanese someday. I always enjoy when I get gifts that enable me to do new things, so I thought something related here would be cool. I thought about getting a steam key for Shashingo, which is a really cool experience where you walk around a virtual recreation of Shibuya crossing and learn about Japanese vocabulary.
I didn't just want to give out a steam key, as that's kind of boring, so I came with a plan. His secret santa form also said his favorite vTubers were Skiddosaurus Rex and Nanashi Mumei from Hololive. I was going to hire an artist on Skeb to do a drawing of them together, but I waited too long and ran out of time to order, so I had to draw it myself.
My idea was simple - Skiddo and Mumei would exist a Japanese style convenience store (known as Konbinis), and had the player some lottery scratcher tickets. If they're winners, they'd reveal a steam key. Pretty simple project to code, so I've included this project in my art section, because the hardest part was the drawing by far.
I started with a doodle on paper by referencing the characters as well as some stock art to get the pose sorta okay. My initial drawing was pretty scuffed, but I had no time, so had to roll with it.
I really like working with dot paper instead of graph paper, much easier on the eyes.
Once I had my doodle I decided it was finally time to learn Procreate. I've had an iPad for a long time, and I've previously written about using drawing tablets on Windows. But for some reason, I just never got around to trying out the Apple pencil and related software.
Once I fired up Procreate and spent a few minutes with it, I immediately fell in love. It felt magical, like the first time I used a Wacom CintiQ, but even better. The combination of the iPads touch screen being able to zoom and rotate the canvas, but also have perfect input with the Apple pencil was absolutely magical. From now on, the iPad will probably be my goto drawing experience, despite my positive review of the Huion Kamvas 13.
Despite how awesome the iPad was, the drawing still took me several days to complete, and went through several iterations. It was exhausting and my arm hurt after. But I can say I am very proud of how it came out. I normally don't draw anime style characters so this was entirely new for me. I know have much more respect for people who do this regularly, knowing just how much work goes into it.
You can see the final drawing below, note, that I didn't draw the background - that is a blurred photo of a real location.
As you can see, they have some lottery scratchers in their hands.
When I went searching for a way to buy the Shashingo Steam key, I was only able to find it as part of a Humble Bundle. That meant, there would be about 9 keys for the price of one. I decided to give away all 9 keys as part of the experience. The game play loop is to click the scratchers, see if there's a winner, and if there is the steam key will be valid. If not, it will be a randomly generated steam key. I programmed in some probability so not every ticket will be a winner and there will be some random about of losers in between.
I used photoshop to make a lottery style scratcher, that's dinosaur themed to match the dino theming of the Skiddosaurus Rex community.
You can play the experience here:
https://orokro.github.io/messier45/
You can see the code for the experience here:
https://github.com/orokro/messier45
Otherwise, take a look at the scratchers below!
