Jasmine is the President of Luminosity Mobile. Her goal is to create useful games, apps and other software to make your life more enjoyable. She lives in New York with her fiancee and two cats.
When not in painting mode, the Master Painter tends to be scatterbrained and flippant. He rarely pays attention when people are talking and won’t be able to recall a conversation he had with someone just five minutes ago, to the Apprentice’s chagrin. While well into his 60s, he still often acts child-like, pouting and sulking when he doesn’t get what he wants. Often, the Apprentice feels like a babysitter despite the Master Painter being five times as old as him. Despite, or perhaps because of, this lackadaisacal personality, The Master Painter has many friends. He rarely has to go out shopping as his friends bring over food and wine almost daily. Many stay to listen to stories of his youth, which are always full of adventure and magic. In fact, one of his favorite stories is how he got his paintbrush.
During his own Apprentice years, the Master Painter saw a beautiful girl with jet black hair and rose red lips collapsed in a forest. She was covered in scratches and her hair was a tangled mess. It was obvious to him she had been wandering the forest for quite some time. Despite her ragged appearance, she still looked divine sleeping beside a trickling stream. The sunlight filtered through the leaves gave her an almost angelic glow. His painter nature took over and he immediately pulled out his pad, brush and paint and tried to capture the moment. No matter how many drafts he went through though, he could not create one that satisfied him. After a few hours, she awoke from her slumber and jumped at the sight of him. Before she could run away, he explained what happened and his conundrum. “How I wish I had the ability to truly render the spectacular scene,” he moaned. With a smile, she conjured up a paint brush for him and said, “This paintbrush will allow you to create whatever it is you desire by giving you the ability to tame the paint. You can create anything you see or think of with this.” After he took it, she disappeared and he hasn’t seen her since. He has never told the story to The Apprentice for fear the teenager would lose respect for him.
When he is painting, the Master Painter becomes a completely different person. He is focused and serious, barely speaking unless to ask for more paint or a new canvas. His concentration is so great he will often go days without sleep.
Master Painter Information
65 years old
Favorite food: everything except for rhubarb
Created 500 paintings ranging in style from Impressionism to Neo-Expressionism
Wears ear plugs when painting
Owns 5 sets of the same outfit with identical paint splatters
The last time we showed off The Painter’s Apprentice at a Playcrafting event, we didn’t have it on mobile devices and there were a lot of problems with the responsiveness of our jumps and UI. After showing it off at the summer expo, we’re a lot more confident in the direction of our game thanks to the positive reception and constructive feedback we received. Many of the problems that stood out to players we haven’t even noticed, especially since we have been playing the game for so long. Some of the issues people noticed are:
Jump button registering upon release of jump button not on tap – leads to feeling of lag and unresponsiveness
Dash button shouldn’t be attached to directional arrows as people often dash to their death when edging to the corner of a cliff.
Loading screens need to be implemented (we’re already working on this one)
Updating color picker method (we’re already working on this one too!)
Overall, most people really enjoyed the overall concept, artwork and general gameplay. We’re getting much closer to perfecting our user experience. Once we implement and test out some new UI, we’ll be ready to start a closed beta testing. Speaking of which, we’ll likely be ready in a few months so if you’re interested in being a beta tester and shaping our games and level design email contact [at] luminositymobile [dot] com.
We also found some other really cool games at the Playcrafting Summer Expo that you should keep an eye on including:
Heart Catcher – by Emma Larkins. A two player card game based on bluffing. Release date Q1 2016.
Cultus – by CRAM Games. A card building game where you built up your cult to gain credibility. The person to get to 12 credibility wins.
Playcrafting has been one of the major indie game supporters in the past few years, so we were super excited to hear other groups are picking up the mantle to support indie devs. One group we found was Kill Screen. They do events every couple months at the Ace Hotel in New York. Hopefully we can show off The Painter’s Apprentice there as well to increase our reach.
This past week we’ve been experimenting with the UI and cleaning up a couple issues. Our biggest hurdle is still finding the perfect color picker method that is both intuitive and fast. I We’ve finally come up with an option that I think will definitely make the gameplay much smoother. We’ll be posting screenshots of these in the near future on our social media sites, so be sure to check us out on Twitter and Facebook!
These past couple weeks have been full of updates and changes and we’re pretty excited about them. We’ve made a lot of small changes to the UI, which will hopefully make the overall gameplay experience that much better. Most of these changes were to add some subtle animations to the menu so they “fade in” instead of simply appearing on the screen. It makes the menu system much more dynamic and fluid. As well we’ve darkened the icons for the menu and level select so you know when you have clicked a button. These small changes really have a huge overall impact on the look and feel of the game. We’re still working out a couple other things but you can check out the new system in the gif below:
We mentioned in a previous post that we have gotten a new tile artist and we’ve switched over a lot of our old worlds to the new tiles. It’s made a huge difference in the way the game looks and for the better. On the design side, we have a lot more flexibility with our level design and can pretty much create almost every design we dream up (with a couple caveats of course). And since we have multiple tiles on a sheet, our game size should be much smaller than our previous method. Aesthetically, the levels are much more visually pleasing. There’s just the right amount of contrast to the background to really make foreground pop. You can check it out below.
If you’re in the NYC area, you can play our new and improved game on 7/29 at the Summer Expo. We’re still cleaning up a couple UI things but we’ve made a ton of improvements too so we’re super excited to show it off. As well if you’re in the DC/Baltimore area we’ll be at VGU convention August 1-2.
Luminaut Dev Log
Besides these UI changes, we’ve also completed some loading screens for the levels and we’ve updated some icons to keep with the painter theme more. We’ve finally fixed our double jump issue and now we’ve also added in the ability to jump once after you fall off a ledge so you can still save yourself. This makes the overall jumps feel much more responsive as previously if you tried to jump while falling off a ledge nothing would register. Plus, we’ve finally gotten the paint brush tip in-game to match the color you’ve chosen. It’s pretty great and serves as a great reminder of what you have “equipped.”
We’ve got a lot more updates coming your way. If you’re interested in testing out the build, subscribe to our newsletter and we’ll contact you first for closed beta testing.
referral for one of the flying enemies original image via deviantart
After working furiously on our demo for the Very Big Indie Pitch this past week and watching others play the game, we realized there was a significant lack of enemy types in The Painter’s Apprentice. After one of the programmers also pointed it out, I took a look and realized we needed to make some additions before moving forward. Right, now most of our enemies either patrol back and forth or will follow and attack. They all are also ground enemies. We’ve made some changes to one of our planned enemies to simply act as a kind of “turret” enemy that stands in place and shoots boomerang paintballs once players are in its line of sight, but it won’t follow. As well, we’re adding in a few flying enemies to mix up the gameplay a bit. Some have horizontal attacks, others will have vertical and still others will drop other enemies. There might be other enemies we add along the way, but for now this should hopefully add a good amount of variety. Do you have any ideas on obstacles or enemies you liked in other games? Let us know in the comments!
PG Connects and Very Big Indie Pitch
As you know, we attended the Very Big Indie Pitch at PG Connects over in San Francisco on 7/7. It was pretty hectic and a bit nerve-wracking (holy crap I had to speak with people from Samsung, Amazon and 148apps) but ultimately it was a very rewarding experience. While we came in still with many issues that had plagued our previous builds, we received some valuable feedback on how to improve the game for the future. Our main issue was with the UI. We have tried to come up with more fluid controls and, after speaking with several top-ranks mobile journalists, have decided on two methods:
Have a slide out menu from the attack button and have the colors come out in an arc formation leaning to the right.
Slide out menu but players press and hold the button to select the color.
We’re going to try out both options to see which one feels the smoothest and hopefully we’ll have that updated in the near future! Besides game journalists we also met with some great ad networks like appsholic and seed and also met with some China localization experts. We’re definitely picking up some steam and can’t wait to meet others at our next conference in DC.
Sadly, we didn’t win the pitching contest, that honor goes to the fine gentleman of Shovelware who created a zombie, match three, tower defense hybrid game. I was able to play some at the event and it was a lot of fun. I would describe it as a match three Plants vs. Zombies type game. It’s currently in beta testing so if you’re interested, sign up!
Luminaut Dev Log
While we’ve gone a bit slower in recent months, we’re starting to pick up the pace now that we’ve brought on another programmer. A lot of our fixes are mainly aesthetic and we’re moving along at a comfortable pace. If all goes well, we should have a very polished demo in another month.
After showing off the game at PG Connects I noticed load times were quite long when going between levels. At the same time one of the programmers noticed the same thing and we are now working on loading screens so players don’t think the game crashed. We’re editing some artwork we used for our postcards for our splash screen as well.
Our splash screen
As well, we’ve implemented a new enemies: the the bludgeon blob. He’s our next attacking enemy and while he might be slow, he definitely packs a wallop. We used Clayface from Batman as a reference point for the character design.
The many colors of bludgeon blob
Besides this, we’ll be streaming on Saturday at 7pm ET another level that we’ll be creating, this time for the Surrealism world. As we want to incorporate the overall themes of the art style in our game design, the surreal level will be very meandering with numerous dead ends. Don’t worry, we’ll have checkpoints.
We’re gearing up for the Very Big Indie Pitch in San Francisco so most of the work is fixing some bugs and making the game look and sound prettier. Not necessarily exciting stuff so we figured we’d introduce you to the main character of the game – The Apprentice.
Basic Information
14 years old
Started apprenticing for the Master Painter at the age of 10
5’4″
115 pounds
Has an older sister
The Apprentice has been painting for as long as he can remember. He likes to tell people he was born with a paintbrush in his hand. While certainly an exaggeration, even his parents can’t remember a time when he wasn’t creating some piece of art. By the age 5, he was entered into a prestigious art school to hone his skills and give him more competition. Only 5 years later it was clear to the teachers his talent and work ethic far exceeded his peers, so they arranged his apprenticeship with the Master Painter. Generally these apprenticeships go to older children, but The Apprentice was such an anomaly the teachers wanted to see how far he could grow. Since that time, he has been learning new techniques from the Master Painter, helping him restore old paintings, arranging the still life references and scouting out locations for landscape paintings. While he respects the Master Painter’s talent, The Apprentice is easily annoyed with his devil-may-care attitude. Still, he continues studying under him in the hopes that the Master Painter will acknowledge his talent and allow him to create an original painting.
Art might be his number one passion, but The Apprentice is also fairly athletic. On his days off he plays pick-up soccer with a local team and practices some martial arts. Although he isn’t as naturally talented at sports as he is with painting, his teammates and martial arts instructor consider him in the top 30 of his age group.
You might have noticed we’ve been keeping busy with the convention circuit this year. While going to these events can cost a bit of money upfront, it’s a great way to meet other developers, journalist and, of course, your audience. Showing off your game can be a bit daunting especially if it will be the first time you’re showing it in public. Do you need to have a complete game? What should you bring? These are all questions you might have as a first time convention exhibitor. All of us have to make our start somewhere so here’s a handy guide on how to be a good exhibitor.
Where Should I Start?
If you’re like other small independent developers, you’re likely working on a very limited ($0) budget. If this is the case, many of the big conventions will be off the list as it can cost you well over $5,000 for a booth. While some of these might offer discounts to indie developers the best place to start as a beginner is a local game development community. One of the best sources is IGDA (International Game Development Association). Search for IGDA + your city to see if there is a local chapter in your area. Many of the events require you to be a member, which comes with a nominal fee of $48 USD per year. Not only do you get into exclusive events, you also receive discounts to some conventions! Some IGDA’s also host local expos that showcase local game developers. Check your IGDA’s calendar to see if they offer these kind of events. Not only are they FREE they’re also a great way to get your feet wet. These events are not as large as conventions, but you’ll still get the benefit of live feedback and an audience.
Besides IGDA, you should also check meetup.com for game developer groups. Many of these host demo nights where you can show off your game to a small crowd. Make sure to sign up as soon as the call for developers goes out as slots get filled up very quickly. In general, you have about 10 minutes to talk and show off your gameplay. If you’re not used to speaking in front of a crowd, this is the perfect time to improve this skill. These events are usually fairly small (probably no more than 100 people) and the people in attendance are generally other independent game developers. If you’re not quite ready to stand up in front of some strangers and talk about your game, you should at least go to a couple of these events. You can take note of how others present and get to know the other attendees. After a couple, you’ll start to recognize some familiar faces, which can help ease your nervousness when you do eventually present.
It should go without saying but make sure you’re presentable: clean shirt, jeans, freshly showered, brushed teeth, etc. Appearances do matter and if you look slovenly people will likely think you don’t care about your game. When speaking with people, make sure to give them a quick overview of the game and what makes it unique. Don’t hover around them too much. Be sure to smile and know the answers to common questions like:
What was this made in?
How long did it take you to make?
Is this available for sale?
What can I play this on (PC, Mobile, etc.)
Where did the idea come from?
Once you’ve gotten comfortable in the smaller arenas you can check out Gameconfs for a list of game conferences in your area.
What Should I Bring to a Convention?
Banners catch people’s attention
Besides yourself and a way to play your game the other non-negotiable item you should have on you is your business card. If you don’t have one, you can order some over at vistaprint.com or other printing companies. On your business card make sure you include your website, social media handles, your contact information and the name of your game or company. Of course, if that’s all you bring, you likely won’t attract too many people to your booth so some other items you might want to consider are:
A banner with your game name, image and company logo
Swag – posters, postcards with a quick description of your game and links to your site and social media presence, buttons or pins with an easy to recognize image or t-shirts. If you don’t have a lot of money you should stick with postcards or buttons.
Another person if you can. Not only does this help alleviate a bit of tension, it also gives you the freedom to walk the convention floor and check out other games.
A notebook and pen. You can use this to take notes at some talks or leave it out on your table so attendees can subscribe to your mailing list. People are more likely to write down their name and email on a piece of paper than type it in on a tablet.
How Finished Do I Need the Game?
You just need a couple playable levels for a successful demo
At large conventions, people likely will not spend too much time on your game unless your company’s name is Blizzard, Ubisoft, Bethesda or…well you get the idea. Even at smaller events, attendees are unlikely to spend longer than 5 minutes playing your game. What does this mean for you? It means you don’t need to have your game completely finished before showing it off at these conventions. Of course, you need to make sure the parts you do have playable are polished and show off all of the key gameplay elements. Make sure to have your demo build completed at least a week or two before the convention so you have time to test for bugs and optimization.
People Don’t Like My Game!
There are always going to people who simply don’t like the genre of your game and for them there isn’t much you can do. However, if you notice players getting frustrated with the gameplay or a lot of them making the same errors, it might just be your game. Many players don’t have a problem telling you what’s wrong with your game, but often they don’t exactly know what’s wrong. It’s a good idea to gather some information from these people. If they say your game isn’t fun, probe them a bit to ask them what they didn’t find fun. Were the levels repetitive? Was the UI too confusing? Was it too hard? You can often gather a lot of this information simply watching people unfamiliar with your game play it. When I did a live demo of Once Upon a Runner I noticed a lot of people had problems identifying the pits. So I extended the size of the pits to the bottom of the screen to make it more obvious. Often players don’t necessarily know the exact issue, but they know something is wrong or missing. It’s up to you to listen to what they say AND watch them play to pinpoint the problem areas. You can easily find ways to optimize the user experience by simply paying attention.
Remember: Always thank players for their feedback. They’re giving you valuable information on how you can make your game better.
Wrap Up
Conventions are one of the best ways to spread the word about your game to a wider audience. While you can end up spending a lot of money to exhibit, there are other ways you can go to these events without spending a ton of money. If you’ve sharpened your public speaking skills you can sign up as a speaker and score free tickets. Or you can go as a guest and simply talk to other developers and find some press who might be interested in talking to you. The most important thing is to get your game out in front of other people.
It was a spur of the moment decision and, let’s be honest, last minute but with two days left in the competition Luminosity entered the Very Big Indie Pitch hosted at Pocketgamer’s PG Connects convention. And, what do you know, we were invited out there! We’re super excited to take part in the pitch. Not only because it can potentially lead to some very big ad spend on Steel Media (one of the leading online journals for mobile games and apps) but also because we’ll be pitching to other publications and journalists. It’s both exciting and a bit nerve-wracking at the same time. So if you’re out in San Francisco on July 7 and happen to be attending PG Connects, let us know! We’ll be more than happy to chat.
With this new upcoming deadline, we’ve decided to bring on another programmer to spread out the workload a bit more. We’re still looking for people so if you’re interested in working with Luminosity on The Painter’s Apprentice please email jasmine [at] luminositymobile.com [dot] com for more details. Overall, things have been a bit rough lately with people moving, starting new jobs and generally being busy but we have been making progress especially with the game design ideas. In our latest Twitch stream we discussed ways to make the levels match the different art styles not only for thematic purposes but also to keep the levels from getting stale. We came up with some pretty great ideas and we’re very excited to implement them. For example, in the Surrealism world, we can have the paths meandering with many leading to dead ends. In the Cubism level we can have alternate paths players can take to beat a level. You see where we are going with this. Plus now with the new tiles we can really make the levels exactly how we want.
Besides this, there hasn’t been too much going on. We’re still plugging along and with our programmers getting settled into their new abode, we should be making some headway in the upcoming weeks.
Whew, it’s been a busy week! Artcade 3000 wrapped up this past Sunday and we displayed The Painter’s Apprentice there. Unfortunately we didn’t really get a chance to go there as we were busy working on the prototype for Phase II of the Boston Festival of Indie Games digital showcase submission. We got it in three minutes before it was due. Now we wait to hear back from them if we have been accepted, which should be around mid-July. Keep your fingers crossed for us and hopefully we’ll see you in Boston in September!
There is another upcoming convention we’ll be attending – the Video Gamers United Convention in Washington D.C. It might be a relative newcome to the convention circle, but it already has some pretty big name sponsors like EA, Gamespot, Gamestop and Alienware. We’re super excited to take exhibit with them though we’ll have a pretty small booth (5×5, hey that’s big enough!). We’re always on the lookout for some great conventions so if you know of any near New York City or San Antonio, TX shoot us an email at contact [at] luminositymobile [dot] com. And of course in July we’ll also be taking part in the Summer Expo held by Playcrafting.
Luminaut Dev Log
With all of these conventions coming up, we’ve been making some great headway in our development process. Most of our time has been spent fixing some bugs and making more artwork. If you didn’t catch it this past Saturday, we did another live testing of the current levels we’ve created over on our YouTube channel or Twitch. As well, if you want to say hi and ask us questions while we’re developing, be sure to subscribe to our Twitch channel. We stream every Saturdays at 7pm ET. Anyway, on to the highlights for the week:
Programming
Updated main menu system so it fits more naturally on the screen.
Changed color picker menu – now players just have to click the palette then click the color instead of pressing and sliding their finger to the correct color.
Made UI larger for better user experience
Art
He looks like Woody Woodpecker
Levels 3, 5, 7 tiles completed
Finished animations for Speedy blob and Bludgeonblob
We’ve been scrambling to get things done this past week due to all of these deadlines, but we’ve got a little time to relax now that the next event isn’t until July. Hopefully this will give us plenty of time to refine our gameplay, levels and fix some more bugs that crop up (as they often do).
We’ve been keeping this on the down low for a while but we’ve actually gotten a new tile artist – Krzyzstof Dycha. Our previous artist had to leave due to health issues. While we loved her art there’s no way we can push her to do more. Health comes first! So we reached out to Krzyzstof and he’s been creating some new tiles for us. We debated whether we wanted to simply copy the previous tiles and simply complete the leftover tiles or start from the beginning. Ultimately, we decided it would be best to start over again so Krzyzstof had full reign of the art. I personally am glad I made this choice as the tiles look great! They’re very flexible and I’m super excited to start using the new tilesheet. We’ve finished up to World 5 so far so only 3 more worlds left. Right now we just have the basics for the different worlds, but I might end up adding in a couple more obstacles to ramp up the difficulty in later levels.
Bugs
Just last week I ran into a serious issue where all of my prefabs lost their tags and layers. While I was able to easily fix this there’s a new issue. Now the Apprentice is getting stuck on invisible walls and ceilings. I’m not sure exactly what is causing this. I have created a new scene and even then the issue is still occurring. I’m still trying to figure out the issue but hopefully it’ll be resolved soon as we have to submit the game to Artcade 3000 this week! Keep your fingers crossed so we can figure out the issue before then.
Luminaut Dev Log #5
Besides this, we were all super busy this past week. Saturday we all finally played League of Legends together. Most of us were relatively new to the game except for our programmer Alex. To make it fair the n00bs were on one team while Alex was by himself (except for the last game). Even with those odds, Alex managed to win 2 out of the 3 games. Guess I better start practicing! You can watch the video over on our Twitch channel and don’t forget to subscribe! We stream every Saturday at 7pm ET.
So what have we been up to game development wise?
Music
Sound effects – Jump and enemy die
Finishing up Level 4
Art
Completed UI
Draft of Bonus level
Finished World 1-5 tilesheets
Painter rainbow attack animation completed
As you can see it was a bit of a slow week but we’re still progressing quite nicely. Hopefully we’ll have a working build ready to test by the end of June. Are you interested in being an alpha tester? Subscribe to our newsletter and we’ll contact you first to be a tester.
One of the hardest things about creating a game is how to incorporate a tutorial. For a lot of old school gamers from the Nintendo era, a hands off approach seems to be the best option. The game itself teaches you how to play by forcing you to perform certain actions. For mobile games, however, the players are very different. Many don’t necessarily have the time or patience to learn the ropes. At the same time, they also don’t want a long and involved tutorial. It’s a pretty difficult balancing act and it can really make or break the flow of the game. For The Painter’s Apprentice, we decided to go with a mainly hands-off approach. Rather than have walls of text explaining the buttons, we devised simple plan that also weaves back into the art theme – tutorial sketches. If you’ve been following our our Twitch channel you might have seen us create a couple of these sketches.
Tutorial sketch telling you how to jump
We wanted to keep the tutorial as simple and streamlined as possible so players could immediately jump into the game and get a handle on the controls. As well, it melds perfectly with the story and theme.
How to attack an enemy
Developer Log
A lot goes into the creation of a mobile game. While the game might seem simple, we actually have a full team working to make the game as amazing as possible. To give you a glimpse into the game development process we’ve asked team members to give us a glimpse into their work. On a previous post we had Ray, our composer, tell us how he created his music and sound effects. Now we have Grace Yang – our background artist – provide us with a cool video and little bit of background.
What got you interested in becoming a concept artist?
I’m one of those artists who grew up in a town where people thought that all artists were either fine artists or art teachers. So I grew up thinking that art was meant as a hobby. It wasn’t until senior year in high school that I found out (through picking up a Halo concept art book) that there were other kinds of jobs for artists, and that this type of profession might be worth looking into. I always loved video games and animation but my knowledge of the process behind their creation was very limited and I didn’t know where to start. I decided to apply to an out-of-state art college in Los Angeles, where the heart of the entertainment industry was and I got accepted. As a Digital Media major, I was able to discover more about the artist industry in general. Though I learned about the many other types of jobs in the process of creating a video game or film, my one true love has always been drawing and designing so I have the most fun being a concept artist!
What is the first piece of artwork you created?
I’ve been drawing since I was very young, so I can’t say for sure what my first artwork exactly was. I loved Sailor Moon and Pokemon, so I drew a lot of fan art, and I also loved animals, so I drew the animals from photos from my favorite books.
Naive Art
Explain your general process when creating the backgrounds for the Painter’s Apprentice.
Since I would be working in different artistic styles, (some which I’m not familiar with at all) the first thing I do is to research and look for reference photos of paintings or pictures done in that style. After all that research, I finally start on the background assets. First, I start off with the sky and ground, and adjust the colors based on what I think best suits the current art style. After that, I go through the list of the other assets, such as the trees, shrubs, flowers, houses, and clouds, and depict them in the current art style. After all the assets are done, I clean them up and do minor color adjustments if necessary to make the level look cohesive. I then show a mock-up of an in-game background level to the director (Jasmine Greene) and then either edit it some more or move on to the next level.
How was your experience working with different art styles?
It was really fun! I have experimented with different art styles before but this was my first time trying to imitate specific art styles. Researching the art style before I started was very useful because I had to figure out how brush strokes were made (in traditional mediums) and imitate that digitally. I also had to figure out color palettes that suited the art styles but were not a direct copy of an existing painting. Some art styles I was initially not familiar with but became some of my favorite to work with were Fauvism and Neo-Expressionism. Overall, it was also a great learning experience.
Do you have some words of encouragement to aspiring artists/designers?
I feel like my advice will be pretty similar to what others have said, but as a concept artist, I think it’s especially important to always keep drawing everyday. It could be drawing from life or by mind. Either way, you’ll naturally improve. Other than that, what has personally helped me the most was going to art college and being able to immerse myself with fellow artists (which was a pretty new experience for me), learning from them, and learning from teachers in the industry. If college isn’t an option, signing up for individual classes could be useful too. Lastly, know what you are truly passionate about and don’t hold back. Art should be fun!
When not in painting mode, the Master Painter tends to be scatterbrained and flippant. He rarely pays attention when people are talking and won’t be able to recall a conversation he had with someone just five minutes ago, to the Apprentice’s chagrin. While well into his 60s, he still often acts child-like, pouting and sulking when he doesn’t get what he wants. Often, the Apprentice feels like a babysitter despite the Master Painter being five times as old as him. Despite, or perhaps because of, this lackadaisacal personality, The Master Painter has many friends. He rarely has to go out shopping as his friends bring over food and wine almost daily. Many stay to listen to stories of his youth, which are always full of adventure and magic. In fact, one of his favorite stories is how he got his paintbrush.
