Zombie Nirvana Games

I got the notification email last night: FCAP has been accepted to the iTunes podcast directory! Huzzah! This is the press release I’ll be posting around shortly.  

Zombie Nirvana Games’ mapmaking podcast, Fantasy Cartography with Adobe Photoshop, is now available at the iTunes Music Store. Hosted by Butch Curry, Fantasy Cartography is a free, weekly video podcast dedicated to bringing viewers an array of tips, tricks, and techniques to create great maps for their roleplaying games.

Fans of the podcast have said that they’re “producing maps ten times better than ever before” and that “these podcasts can’t come fast enough.” The addition of Fantasy Cartography to the iTunes Music Store makes it even easier to put some panache into your mapmaking.

Click here to check out Fantasy Cartography with Adobe Photoshop at iTunes!

For more information, visit ZombieNirvana.com.

I’ve been working on a couple of things today that have kept me pretty swamped (more about those in a day or two as they develop), so I haven’t had time to put together my Photoshop tip on Quick Masks. I’ll have it up later this week, but in the mean time, here are a few places you can look for more Photoshoppy goodness. If you have no other Photoshop links in your bookmarks, have only these!

1. Adobe Photoshop Exchange: Right from the horse’s mouth. There are currently 8791 pages worth of downloadable content. Tutorials, patterns, brushes, whole freakin’ books. The Exchange has it all. While you’re at the Adobe site, head over to the Forums if you have any questions; they have one of the most active Photoshop discussion boards around.
2. Pixel Perfect with Bert Monroy: I’ve been a fan of Bert since his appearances on The Screen Savers back in the glory days of TechTV. This is a guy who would’ve forgotten more about Photoshop than I’ll ever learn if he’d ever actually forgotten any of it. Which he hasn’t. Don’t believe me? Go check out Pixel Perfect. If you were a fan of his Screen Savers appearances, Pixel Perfect is like that… on steroids. You should also check out his work over at his website; a lot of the techniques folk use to create photorealstic effects in PS were invented by Bert! (And if you get a chance to see him live at one of his seminars, it’s worth it!)
3. Photoshop Killer Tips: Matt Kloskowski is one of the PhotoshopTV guys (more on them in a bit), and of the regulars he’s my go-to guy when it comes to solid, practical tips. In addition to doing PsTV every week, he puts out a new episode of his Killer Tips screencast nearly every weekday, and it’s always worth watching. I modeled my Fantasy Cartography podcast largely on Matt K’s ‘casts. If that guy doesn’t love what he’s doing every minute he’s doing it, he fakes it really, really well.
4. Planet Photoshop: The Tutorials and Video sections make Planet Photoshop worthwhile. A lot of other Photoshop sites didn’t make the list because while they have a lot of tutorials, most of them were written by folks who seem to have never written a tutorial in their lives. Not so with Planet Photoshop.
5. NAPP: The National Association of Photoshop Professionals. I’m including this one last not because it’s the least worthwhile but because you’ll have to pay for the good stuff. Joining NAPP will cost you $99 for a year’s membership. But that membership gets you access to their members section, which is packed to the rafters with downloadables and tutorials. Plus you get a year’s subscription to Photoshop User magazine, which I read religiously! You also get access to the full run of the PhotoshopTV podcast, now known as NAPP-TV. The guys on PhotoshopTV cut up a lot, and spend a fair amount of time shilling, but there are a lot of good tips in there amongst the chaff. It’s no surprise that many of the folks responsible for the sites I listed above are NAPP members; it’s a great organization, and their website is one of the best Photoshop resources out there.

In this episode, things get colorful as I talk about saturation, color picker tricks, gamut warnings, and faux-watercolor painting! As usual, you can view it right here, or head over to YouTube  or Revver and check it out there.

A lot of folks have been asking me when Fantasy Cartography will be available. I’ve learned that it’s generally a bad idea to announce a release date for something until you’re darn sure it’ll actually be ready on that date, so I’m not ready to go that far yet!

 What I can do is give you a sneak peek at a few pages from the introductory chapter. Just a few pages, but it should give you some idea of what the finished product will look like.

You can download it here!

 The technical bits: After playing with a few different formats, I decided on a 9″x7″ landscape format. I really felt like I was either wasting space or having to cram things in with an 8.5″x11″ format. Plus, 9×7 is one of Lulu’s standard formats, which will make converting all the PDF’s into a printed book.

 Like I mentioned over on the Fantasy Cartography page, the book will initially come out in 5 PDF’s: the introductory Basics chapter (which will be free for download here and at YourGamesNow.com) which will come out at the same time as the first section, Overland. These will be followed (as quickly as possible!) by Cities and Towns, Dungeons, and Interiors.

Once Interiors is out, all the PDF’s will be available in a big bundle, and I’ll compile the whole thing for print in a full-color edition on Lulu. At that point, I’ll have a better idea if some kind of video version – either in the form of downloadable content or as a DVD – will be worth pursuing.

That’s all for tonight! I’ll be recording the next installment of FCAP tomorrow, and I’ll post some ponderings about a possible future direction for the podcast in the next day or two.

I’ll be messing around a bit with some new themes and setting up a new, cleaner look for the site. It might be a bit odd for awhile!

Update: OK, that should do it. Special thanks to my wife Lisa, who helped me with a bit of coding!