Gradius!




Gradius redesign project, It's a bit fragmentary at the moment, because I rushed it. It would be cool to do a painted 2D version, but a lot of work covering all the angles * animation of stuff. There's a remake called Gradius Rebirth coming soon, but so far I think Treasure's version looks the most interesting.

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very nice work as always. :D

One little thing though. I saw the stone heads in the screenshot you showed here and I thought of Salamander for the NES, which featured the same enemies.

I looked the game up on Wikipedia and it turns out it's a spin off of Gradius. I don't know whether or not you've played it, but if you haven't it's worth checking out because it takes place in the same universe.

I enjoyed reading through the redesign doc. The girl mech looks a lot like your Lore redesign haha.

Jed A said...

ZOMGWTF Win

love it

Edu said...

I love your work, it's uber. How do you manage to tell so much with so little strokes? sometimes it looks as if your concepts came out of nowhere effortlessly and that's just incredible.

what's your approach for storytelling? I love those background stories with thumbnail illustrations which you sometimes add to your game redesigns.

So many questions, so little time, lol

Anonymous said...

I have to agree with the previous commenters. Your artwork is always brilliant; I have to wonder how you're able to create so much in such (seemingly) little time.

Not to mention Viper Girl is cute. :)

Anonymous said...

Awesome stuff as always.

Although Konami already beat you to the punch on giving the Vic Viper boobs :)

http://www.konami.jp/am/otome/character/index.html

Arne said...

Atnas: I Played LifeForce on the NES. Once I almost got to the last boss in a single life, but one of them stone heads (Moai) on the last level tricked me into ramming a wall. I doubt I would've gotten past the closing barriers without dying anyways.

Ewardo: It's not actually just a few strokes, it's many strokes made to look like a few strokes. It's very much about cleaning up.

I like trying to make the game universe functional and rich, and then I think of the player as someone who just happens to be in it. Star Wars did this well, I think.

Often, these projects take about a week, but some of the larger ones are based on previous work I've done.

So, Konami beat me too it... Actually, I've seen that character design, but I didn't remember it (or made the connection). Vic Viper was in Sky Girls too, but as a regular plane/ship.

Jacob said...

You should screencast one of your painting sessions. You have a style that is so clean and painterly that it looks like you were able to do these in a very short amount of time - I would love to see the process.

Mike Monroe said...

Much luv. Please post more.
Has any screen shots of Gradius VI surfaced yet?

axcho said...

I really like that flat color painting style! I never really considered the possibility that you could make a game look like that, but now that I've seen it I might try doing it myself sometime.

Thanks for posting your cool game redesigns and concept art. Reminds me of Daniel Cook's stuff a bit. :)

Actually, doesn't Jonathan Blow's new game Braid use a style kind of like that? I wonder if we'll get to see more of these painterly 2D games in the future...

Wunderbear said...

That modular boss design looks like something from Fraxy.

http://mokeron.hp.infoseek.co.jp/zg/fraxy_main.html

It has a modular boss designer which is fairly easy to get to grips with, and very fun to play around with.

o.O' said...

Been folowing your art what feels like five years already? Just saw you had this blog.
I adore how you put characters and colors down, aswell as the quirky puns. Best of all, the retro stuf just spills over from immersive enjoyment of ye old games.
Looking forward to see more.

Anonymous said...

Hey, sorry to comment about an unrelated post, but I'm sort of interested in making a Starflight clone as you hinted about in your Star Control post earlier this year. It would be neat if you'd like to work together on it, but I haven't got anything concrete yet. I've got some existing code for a Spacewar! clone, so I think I can rework that and try to see what a barebones version of the game (flying around in space shooting stuff, docking with space stations, whatever) might look like.

Arne said...

My StarFlight/Control 'clone' would be more of an space RTS-Exploration-Sandbox ...thing. An engine which takes plug-in species would be ok legally. Then of course I would do the SF-SC species anyways. I I have some code done for flying around and shooting. I could probably re-use parts of my Robotron game code for that. Or any of the Asteroids clones I've written. The problem I have is getting all the parts together. My space game engine has a lot of simple stuff that needs to come together, and that's the part I can't do. It needs trading, dimplomacy, resource gathering and construction, archeology, etc. Otherwise it'd just be another fly and shoot game. I suppose I should lay out steps to achieve that goal. Frying around with a ship, with bucket sort cells, is a good beginning. Then some customizable viewports of the playfield. Proper...uh, instance-ification of the ships, encapsulation, yadda yadda.

Andy C. said...

This full of awesomeness. Very nice. Now I want to see some R-Type goodness. haha.