This is a screenshot paintover (lineover?). I just wanted to see what it looked like as a VTOL. These should have a little turret and camera upgrades if they're landing in the middle of a battle, though that might displace the troops tactically I guess.
2022-02-20 14:16:10 +0000 UTC View Post
I suppose the best way to do isometric reference figures 3D modeling, but that's a skill I don't have. I'm used to sculpting with clay though, so if I were to make an isometric game I'd probably end up with a workflow closer to that of DOOM. It still saves a lot of time when dealing with perspective, pose consistency and self+drop shadow. Shadows (light) for the figures might be better off as nearly top-down so they don't spill into other tiles much, complicating things. Shadows in general ar...
2022-02-15 16:31:54 +0000 UTC View Post
With age it has become increasingly difficult to play games like Dwarf Fortress and X-COM. Part of it is a dwindling interest in games, but these games are also difficult to break into sessions. I can't remember what I was doing last time and lose any investment.
When thinking about how to mitigate this in my old X-COM project I got the idea of logs, perhaps visual histories of past actions, and auto-diaries for the personnel. One would still have to read those though, which adds ...
2022-01-31 23:31:31 +0000 UTC View Post
I suddenly just wanted to draw this. I'm kind of sad the new games didn't reference the old much visually. The appearance of this armour varies but overall it sticks to the same look. I gave mine some additional padding/seams/panel lines. The original style is more of a skintight superhero suit I guess.
If I were given millions of buckaroos to do an X-COM game, maybe I'd go for a functional lowpoly 3D style to keep the pixel look but save on the effort of doing rotations which just seem...
2022-01-30 20:50:14 +0000 UTC View Post
Requested in a previous post. I took some liberties. Don't let a WS of 2 stop you from pursuing your dreams.
2022-01-28 17:35:47 +0000 UTC View Post
I better post this as a WIP or it'll be forever. Like mentioned in the previous post, I've been thinking of using a "retro" board game style as a vehicle for my Starsword / Star Sword setting. It makes it simple for me to focus on lore-type illustrations and not getting bogged down by specific assets. For example, I started on Space Crusade type game but quickly realized that painting floor tiles just feels like generic work. So, at least for now I'm focusing on being able to make some headwa...
2022-01-27 17:19:18 +0000 UTC View Post
I've been thinking a lot about which vehicle I should use for my Starsword (not-40K) project. Ideally, I'd like to go 6mm tabletop, but it's beyond my capabilities. Next up is a TTRPG, but I'm not a writer. A comic is a whole lot of work.
My most realistic idea might be to take the print & play '70s style boardgame route (fully solo). The player is the equivalent of Kirk or a Rogue Trader, exploring different locations on a hex star map. Each location is a mini game... it could be s...
2022-01-22 11:56:30 +0000 UTC View Post
As per request, something Fallout. This started out as an X01/Advanced armour but I decided to do my own thing instead. It's more slim than the typical Power Armours and fairly "designed/engineered" looking so I plopped on some random spikes and rust. When doing research I looked at all the armours in the games and... some have a tendency to looks like bits attached to a player model, which kind of work in a postapoc setting I guess. But I wanted something with a bit more engineering. Not sur...
2022-01-17 20:35:05 +0000 UTC View Post
These are the thumbnails for my Star Trek project that I've been adding bits to. Most of them are quite small and more like notes for the digital elaboration and cleanup. There are some other ships on there too. I often draw these while watching lore videos late at night in bed, trying to learn the factional design language and quickly play with ideas that popup (thumbnails are good for this as they're so fast to do).
A4, 300ppi, Mechanical pencil 0.5
Edit: To cla...
2022-01-13 16:29:28 +0000 UTC View Post
Not quite sure what to do here this month. My brain is all over the place. Maybe some requests?
2022-01-12 20:34:07 +0000 UTC View Post
This is a 1:1 paint size (1 layer) Yule bot from 2008 and Cortex Command (Imperatus faction). I did various stuff for that game.
Red dots are chromatic abberation fakery just to liven things up. Then there are some blue reflections and fog. The saturated brown terminator (light | dark) edges on the sack also helps to make it look less muddy. It's hard to define/design details when painting it in a single layer, I find, so it ends up being more suggestive. I mostly used a round brush at ...
2021-12-24 16:45:05 +0000 UTC View Post
It may be no surprise that I prefer the older Doctor Who material. For its charm rather than its quality, I'd point out. I think the series could work without the time travel element, and perhaps without the doctor even. This would be more like Star Trek TOS, with some characters appearing out of a door at this week's location rather than out of the Galileo shuttle. Wheel in Space = DS9. Place Box = Enterprise-Defiant (advanced and maybe from the future but with just teleport and phasing abil...
2021-12-16 23:35:58 +0000 UTC View Post
Here's an old piece from 2000 which I never posted in high rez. I found some notes about it in a text file, included below. Possibly it was inked in late '99 and coloured once I got my first flatbed scanner.
The original ink was A4 size which I scanned as line art (1-bit) and colored using Painter 3, floaters (what are floaters? I've forgotten) and the airbrush. The font is Metrostyle, which came with Adobe Imagestyler (I used this for text effects back then, but many of its features go...
2021-12-05 15:14:22 +0000 UTC View Post
A system for organizing families? Well, no, it's a haphazard design sketch of a NES-FC hybrid base unit. I've included some process stages in case anyone wonder how I do these. The perspective is freehand as I don't know anything about 3D tools. As usual, I do the shading in the line art layer, with rather flat colours in a multiply layer. The vents and labels are transformed as it's very difficult to draw skewed high density stuff. I gave it a double dust hatch as those are fun to play with....
2021-11-29 11:06:11 +0000 UTC View Post
NES cartridges are mostly empty inside as the PCBs are similar to those in the smaller rectangular Famicom cartridges. I think a few early NES games (Gyromite?) had FC-to-NES edge connector adapters inside though, filling some of the empty space. Another reason for the size could've been that they wanted to to design a front loaded "Entertainment System", supposedly distancing themselves from "videogame" branding, due to the crash (exclusive to North America I think). Here in Scandinavia we a...
2021-11-28 18:38:25 +0000 UTC View Post
Attached here is a flattened version of my Barbarian Prince map that's nearly finished and abandoned in that state. The PSD is hundreds of megs so I'll attach a flat jpg (still 28mb). I haven't mustered up the courage to test print it yet... I forgot what the resolution was but it might be in the jpg metadata. You don't really stack and crowd counters in this game, so the hexes don't need to be as big as I might've made them.
Barbarian Prince has been covered on my site somewhere. It's ...
2021-11-12 20:47:57 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey. So, if anyone is interested in print & play aka old forgotten board games maybe no longer played for a reason, here's an OUTPOST GAMMA cleanup I've been working on. I don't know if it's a good game as I've yet to play it, having just finished my build. One can sort of solo it, if changing perspective (there's no hidden movement or cards).
These old games often have desires to be computer game type simulations and aren't streamlined like modern board games where rules often appe...
2021-11-12 20:20:15 +0000 UTC View Post
Some tricky designs.
It's unclear how Cave Swallow Men would carry their spears when flying. On their backs perhaps. They can fly so their arms have to be functional wings unless they have arms in addition to the wings. The Raw/data file is pretty brief (well, it inherits specs from elsewhere). Always hard to draw wing arms because you get wing bits pointing out.
Edit: Added a new image with another variant. Real Cave Swallows a...
2021-11-03 22:10:01 +0000 UTC View Post
I wanted this design to be a bit different from a regular spider to give it identity. I turned the front legs into mandibles of sorts, partly to remove some legs for a simpler look. The body is more like that of a hermit crab or snail. The maw I borrowed from a recent Kruggsmach design (Crimson Trumpets series). Normal Cave Spiders are just 50 grams and hunted by cats like other vermin class creatures. Apparently they're useful for producing silk, but difficult to farm. Larger creatures which...
2021-10-31 19:01:31 +0000 UTC View Post
Drew another thing for no particular reason. Some kind of camera grip thing going on, and the usual shoulder buttons instead of Start & Select, which I always find inaccessible on joypads. The Switch lite has this minus button that's used for the map in Dragon Quest Builders 2 and I kinda have to angle the thumb around the analog then click it with the nail, aaayy ayy ayy. Often these kind of small buttons (like on the DS) just sink into my finger pads if I try to press them normally.
... 2021-10-19 17:00:48 +0000 UTC View Post
I never owned a MiniDisc player. There are a few cool looking ones, but generally I don't like the curvy designs of this era, with oval tilted buttons and spline-lines. Anyways, I turned the form factor into a handheld... probably a bad idea be be squeezing the disc hatch... the PSP, here for scale (UMD discs were smaller btw.), had the grips to the side of the hatch so it wasn't a problem there. Maybe a regular drive slot could work, with a little dust hatch to keep pocket lint out... if a s...
2021-10-11 14:11:58 +0000 UTC View Post
Or perhaps Datasette Boy? It's a bit of a nonsense concept, but one that had to be done~!
I like two colour cases so the back is dark gray. The screen is not incidentally the size of a cassette tape. The buttons might be more for regular tape use.
Tape control would be automatic, like on a whirring 1960s Mini Computer. Some 1980s Home Computers had cassette control capabilities too, via the "Remote" jack I think. Afaik the implementation was not as elaborate as the see...
2021-10-09 20:27:05 +0000 UTC View Post
If I think back 20-25 years I remember really struggling with developing my pencil thumbnails into larger pieces. A thumbnail is sort of in flux allowing you to imagine it in various cool ways. Once you start refining, that aspect is lost as you're forced to make choices and fill in sensible details.
I tried scanning, printing out big, then doing new lines on top, but it somehow didn't work. Ultimately, I think I just didn't have enough experience thinking at a higher level of detail an...
2021-10-06 12:47:06 +0000 UTC View Post
Photobash with anachronisms . Arcade portrait screen, as the drive would be pretty long, even if a compact modern USB model. Thinking about it, if using regular Mitsumi disks the drive could be smaller. The Famicom ones have the proprietary NINTENDO bit tacked on. Regardless, the screen would sit on top so I guess it would be quite a Volvo to hold~! Shoulders might be hard to reach but are about as far up as on the Switch Lite (but lack the curve. I think the Switch Lite is a bit wide to hold...
2021-10-06 11:54:20 +0000 UTC View Post
I'm posting another PSD. The DF Trolls are building destroyers so that's what's going on here. I like the Gorlaks and figured they could have slightly different appearances. They're kind of like Orc-Pacmans.
The workflow is as described earlier, but here I'm using a coloured background. Sometimes white is a bit hard on the eyes and it's nice to have a base colour to build on and it adds a bit of atmosphere. I scale down to about 30-60% for the web, so my original work resolution is not ...
2021-09-28 21:04:50 +0000 UTC View Post
Here I wanted to draw a Female endoskeleton (different from T3's), but it turned out to be much trickier than expected! I started out with a photo of my Neca 2009 T-800 figure, which is kind of cheap and probably not very accurate. Rather than painting over the photo I put it on 50% multiply and redetailed using line art below, then I rescaled and used a little liquify – a morph feature in Photoshop which is good for experimenting with figure and proportions. Unfortunately liquify doesn't w...
2021-09-28 20:10:37 +0000 UTC View Post
I've wanted to make my own monster collection game and universe for decades now, but haven't been able to produce more than a few designs that I find passable. I think I'd like to go for a look somewhere between Pokémon's efficiency and Digimon's wild playfulness and anthropomorphization. For specific game design reasons, the monsters are perhaps not caught/bred (or evolved ), but summoned or crafted from ingredients (relevant to shape and composition) generally found as drops in the wild. T...
2021-09-19 16:09:55 +0000 UTC View Post
This is a project and setting based old stories now in the Public Domain, such as A Princess of Mars, The Gods of Mars, Warlord of Mars, and At the Mountains of Madness, The Shadow Out of Time, as well as the Gilgamesh epic. There's some mild nudity because that's a thing on Barsoom/Mars.
2021-09-14 12:39:43 +0000 UTC View Post
In the first book we learn that Martians are very often nude, wearing but a "harness" for holding weapons and various "accoutrements" which clang and rattle at inopportune stealth moments. The harness design vary in description when there is one. I don't know when the iconic X-shaped harness became dominant. Maybe it was in the '77 Warlord comic, where I saw it. That comic also featured the fancy boots (the books suggest sandals). In some of the older illustrations Martians/Carter are shown w...
2021-09-13 20:21:52 +0000 UTC View Post
Hunting for that Thark face that I imagine when reading the books, but it remains fuzzy and indeterminate. I grew up reading the Warlord comics (from the late '70s) so it's maybe something along those lines. If following the description closely, they have eyes on the sides giving 360 coverage, though when Carter and Tars Tarkas are trapped in a room and enemies spring from beyond their field of vision, it appears vision isn't really 360 after all. Tube ears go on the forehead (bad directional...
2021-09-11 16:13:16 +0000 UTC View Post