Shooters

Yesterday I was trying to do some of the Unreal (1) characters, but they give me absolutely nothing to work with. They all have the same big-hand-feet muscle bodies, same chubby silhouettes, and some variation on the head and minor texture bits. Normally I try to find some prominent feature then I exaggerate that and use it as a theme for the figure.

These were the only characters that I felt like I could do something with.

I see that there are a few highrez texture packs out there for older shooters. I think they kind of miss the point. It's much more important that the texture details are aligned to the map geometry and make architectural sense. Tiled highrez textures often just pronounces low poly stuff badly, like corners and floor-wall adjacency. Not to mention that a highrez texture can also miss the point of the original texture.

What else? Oh, a while ago I did a Serious Sam page with some doodles. I don't think I've ever played the game, but it looks like it's fun, at least for a while.

Star Frontiers

Star Frontiers is an old sci-fi space opera PnP RPG from 1982. Here's my take on the main playable races.

I changed a few things, like making the legs of the bug-like Vrusk of varied length. I think it transitions into the torso better. 4+4 equal sized legs felt crowded and pointless.

The Yazarians are some kinda tall flying squirrel-monkey. I thought they looked a bit too squat in the original artwork, and I changed the anatomy of the gliding wings to better accommodate for worn gear and melee combat.

The Dralasites are perhaps the most fun of the playable races. They're amoebas, but appear to have a preference for a sort of humanoid, tripod figure.

There are actually two kinds of worms, the S'sessu and Sathar. They remind me a bit of the Ur-Quan. Perhaps there's a connection.

I don't like my Mechanon drawing. It's too greebly and unfocused. The Mechanon's faces are sort of similar to the Mechan's of Starflight. The Mechanon were introduced along with a few other races in one of the expansions I think (Zebulon's Guide to the Frontier?).

I also drew a Queequeg, because it reminded me of a Lovecraft creature. I don't like how my version of it turned out though. There's another similar looking creature that's kinda fun, the Edestekai.

Edit: Added more figures. I wanted the Osakar to be more alien, so I moved the upper torso down. The Ifshnit were generic Dwarves which didn't seem to fit the setting. I changed them into beard-owls. The Humma were plain kangaroos. I didn't know what to do with them, but I thought they should look less like animals trying to handle human equipment. I added some sideburns and SWAT-gear, and erected the pose. Perhaps with some Raptor claws they could be good at close combat.


You can easily find (what appears to be legal) PDFs of Star Frontiers' rule books and expansions online. It still has an active community.

BHOU!

So, three cold callers yesterday (land line). One called right after 8am. I can't block them because I run a company from home and do-not-call-list rules only applies to private numbers (NIX in Sweden). I don't have time to play games with them, so I think I'm just gonna tell them to wait, resume my work, then hang up after 2 minutes. Hanging up quickly only gives them more time to harass others.

I'm thinking I can get them to stay on longer if I leave the phone next to a radio or a sound source. I might have to do some experiments with a stop watch and graph paper ready.

A warning though: Some scammers specialize on calling from a pay number and hang up before you can answer. If you call them back to see what it was about, they try to make you wait and since you're the one calling, you'll be the one paying (probably a lot per minute too).