Rebel Squad

Here's something I've been working on every now and then. It's a little project based on the strategy games by Julian Gollop. You've probably already heard of X-COM, but he's also responsible for the Rebelstar and Laser Squad games. I thought it would be fun to take those universes and merge them into one. Well, here it is:

The Rebel Squad Project

As you can see, I went for a cute comic style. To be frank I'm not that fond of the realistic approach that has been used a lot in various remakes. The older games were cute and colorful, and X-COM featured a comic style intro. A lot of people I hear talking about X-COM also seem to want to retain or expand on the relatively complex gameplay with the base, hunt, character and strategy elements. Not many games have that kind of width and depth to boast.

Hohohoray

Just got these from HLJ.

I think stuff looks better in pairs, so I bought two of some. I think the same goes for character designs in concept art. If you're drawing a mass produced trooper, drawing a few of them helps you to get a better feel for how the design works in groups. See the next post...

Intercepted

Who can resist the Tie Interceptor? Not me. I was a bit skeptical about the low price in conjunction with "snap-together and pre-painted". I think they're pretty decent, and a little weathering and subtle lining could take them further. The details seem crisp, but the snap together seams are sometimes a bit sloppy in how the details meet. It's probably pretty unavoidable though. They mostly snap together just fine, but occasionally I had to do a little surgery with a model knife. I also used a model knife to carefully remove them from the sprue and trim off the junk.

The pilots seems to be about 1:72 size. The interior cockpit module has a front plate which can be painted before the hull is snapped around it, but otherwise I'd say painting the interior is a waste of time. Also, don't put fingerprints on the inside of the wind shield.

Here's some pics (exterior not weathered).

Peel Trident

When aliens arrive and find out that we designed something as awesome as the Peel trident sports-car - and didn't follow up on it... they are going to kill us all.

Handheld

Here's a quick rough concept of a handheld. It's a bit larger than a regular handheld, maybe 4" wide. It's meant to be usable and not a design turd for yuppies who want to fit everything in their pocket. The "SGRM", Shallow Games Restrictions Management, makes sure that only deep strategy games like X-COM, Dwarf Fortress, Total Annihilation, etc are playable on the device. If a Match-3 game is detected, the device explodes, sending broken glass shards into the face of the culprit.

Features:
+ Big screen, minimum 400×400.
+ Pressure sensitive touchscreen and pen with LMB/RMB
+ Analog joystick in the middle, reachable by both the left and right hand thumb.
+ Maybe some shoulder buttons on the back or on the side, I dunno.