Querulous

Shooters

2011-12-14T13:17:00.003Z

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

2011-12-05T13:02:00.005Z

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!

2011-12-02T12:42:00.005Z

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).

FFL marathon

2011-11-29T20:32:00.006Z

Three games, three days of doodling.

The Final Fantasy Legend games (aka SaGa 1-3) are perhaps not very well known. I'm not sure if they even came out in Europe. The first one was released 1989 in Japan for the GameBoy. The game mechanics are different in each game, but the general idea of the games is that you can play many different kinds of characters. This includes the monsters that you fight (and eat), robots, cybogs, espers and humans.

Because the games are kind of abstract, they can do a bunch of stuff without having to think about art assets. The DS remakes of SaGa seem to have... limited themselves a bit because they had to show the player characters during combat.

For a FFL project, I'd like to see starter characters like:

Beast: Human or intelligent humanoid (e.g. Griffon, Lizardman) which can buy/find and equip swords, armour and stuff. Perhaps the armour needs to be "fitted" by a smith to explain anatomical differences, if that sort of immersion is important.
Virus: An entity which can take over robotic bodies (replacing the robots from FFL2). Perhaps the various models have different upgrade options (power cores, shields, whatever).
Tamer: Can control up to three captured monsters of a certain power-level at a time. (replacing mighty morphing meat eaters from the FFL games).

I'd totally play a party of 4 skeletons, because I like skeletons. You couldn't do that in the FFL games because the monsters had to keep morphing since they couldn't be level'd.

Slightly related, somewhat recent, WIP.

Zelda 2 roughs

2011-11-03T11:47:00.005Z

I'm mostly doing pencil and Photoshop roughs these days. The wrists get a little better each week, overall, but there are ups and downs because I insist on trying to work or surf.

Here's a few Zelda 2 redesigns that I've been noodling on the last few days. I'm not sure what to think of the game. As a kid I thought it was a bit strange, but I played it anyways. It felt like a chore to play through, because it was more linear, but the combat was sometimes enjoyable.

A top down game like Zelda 1 has a symmetry to the up-down and left-right directions, but in a sidescroller you have gravity linked to up-down so combat and navigation is quite different. The Darknuts... sorry, Ironknuckles were both fun and frustrating to fight.

Anyways, I decided to draw some Zelda 2 creatures because I hadn't done that in years. A lot of the monsters are sort of based on the ones in Zelda 1, and since I like that game more, I used the designs from it where possible. The Zelda games change the story, style and monster designs a lot in every game (and the manuals have their own style too), so I decided to just use the sprites from the original games as a base.

The story never sat well with me, so I decided to rewrite it. Hyrule almost has a garden-like terrain in the first game, and there are these strange rocks and statues standing around in formations. The dungeons feel technological and otherworldly with their smooth clean walls, though that was changed in BS Zelda and later games. I hadn't heard of Lovecraft in the 80's, but that's sort of the feel that I got. What strange ancient race had built the dungeons, and perhaps even the overworld? The Great Race of Yith? The Elder things? The... Like-Likes (whom have since then regressed)? Something I'd like to play around with.

As for the gameplay, I always wanted to make an isometric "topdown" version of Zelda 1, but since this is a Zelda 2 project, It'd have to be a sidescroller with a topdown worldmap. I wonder how that would play if combined with Roguelike? It's sort of unusual to see, and I like unusual.

So, a random world map, with palaces/dungeons, towns and NPCs who generate quests (e.g. a fetch quest NPC would create a cave/dungeon on the world map and toss a kidnapped kid into it). The dungeons should probably be generated from finished rooms though, to ensure enemy placement is fun and suitably challenging.

The weapons, armour, spells and items could be random, and before you drink that potion, you might want to identify it...

And then there's permadeath.

Concepts:
Sheet 1
Sheet 2

Hand problems

2011-07-24T12:18:00.003+01:00

I've been having some elbow/hand nerve problems (which appears to be cubital/carpal tunnel related) in case you wonder why things here have been a bit slow (though, perhaps they are anyways). It's unfortunate that it took a dire lesson such as this to teach me to treat my hand/elbow right. It appears to be getting better though, and I'm having a doctor check it out soon. It's difficult to make an appointment during vacation time.

UFO

2011-05-19T21:55:00.003+01:00

I watched the 1970 TV series UFO and couldn't stop myself from doing a few doodles or trying to turn it into X-COM. Space 1999 next?

Page.

Green stuff sculpture

2011-03-21T23:22:00.007Z

I'm almost done sculpting one of my Astro Knights. It feels like it has taken forever. Well, it has taken weeks of intermittent work. This is most likely the longest time that I have worked on a single piece. My patience is normally limited to a few hours. I might send it somewhere for casting when it's done'ish.

WIP Thread

StarSword page (updated)

Go Forth...

2011-03-06T21:32:00.005Z

So, I rushed this out today.

I don't know if there is any truth to the news (Edit: There isn't.), but I wanted to draw something on the theme. The (digital) painting is a bit wonky here and there, so I might have to clean it up later. The original is 2x WUXGA or so, but I'll upload that later.

Black Scarab

2011-03-05T16:50:00.002Z

Some time ago I started working on a spaceship/shuttle for a comic of some sort. During the development, I started to realize things that I.. already knew. A ship that's just shape-play is not that interesting. I think Time Bokan has a really nice ship. The Grandis tank from Nadia is fantastic too.

Important features

* Familiar shape, or theme.
* Sub vehicles/units that can be deployed by the characters..
* Transformation and adaptability, i.e. flying, underwater, tank, walker, mole...
* No superfluous detail. Each component should have one or several functions.

On top of this, the design needs to have camera space inside, and perhaps windows so the interior and exterior can be connected clearly and not become two different sets.

Notes on my designs:

Ship

* The engine nozzle doubles as a propeller.
* Legs double as fins.
* Cockpit dome doubles as gun turret.
* Engine+leg area can swing down, VTOL style. This uncovers the exit hatch (and an extrudable ladder) on the back, thus using this area for warranted detailing rather than greeble.
* Unfortunately I couldn't come up with a way to tuck large wings into the design while keeping the bug theme, so I'd have to cheat with some kind of force field wings (partial). Feathers can be packed together, but it felt wrong for my bug theme.

Robot 1

* The top observation knob doubles as detachable observation drone, R2D2 style.

Robot 2

* A humanoid robot which is transformable into a hover bike. Hands turn into handles, feet into pedals. Maybe it can use the ship's main gun, which could be detachable (and usable as a regular rifle even).

There needs to be some kind of micro mechanic too, similar to the Doozers from Fraggle Rock. Yatterman had little robotic ant mechanics iirc.

Thanks GW!

2011-03-04T10:09:00.003Z

This is exactly what wanted when I paid 55 dollar to supplement my Escher gang.

They Look just like on the picture. And so random. Good thing these weren't in the Gang box that I already have.

Armoured space soldiers

2011-03-01T21:55:00.004Z

StarSword 700 is not at all inspired by Warhammer 40000. Instead, it innovates the genre with concepts such as "Astro Knights", bulky robots and vehicles, Elves in space, Brutal green creatures! I could go on.

The page is just a bunch of nonsense and late night brain-farts atm. Uh. I meant it's an unpolished diamond. Yes.

Pathways into Darkness

2011-02-08T07:46:00.001Z

I drew some stuff from Pathways into Darkness and added it to my Marathon page.

Galactic Gladiators and Galactic Adventures

2011-01-21T16:33:00.003Z

...are two strategy/RPG games from the early 80's, designed and programmed by Tom Reamy (he only made these two games afaik).

The player(s) assumes command over a band of alien adventurers armed with things like disruptors and laser swords. Like in most RPGs, the characters all have names, stats, XP and equipment. Both games uses single screen arenas/sites where two teams of 1-7 characters or so can duke out. In Galactic Adventures you can travel between different planets, exploring new locations for treasure. As I understand it, there's no final goal, other than what you may set up yourself.

During combat, the players (human or AI) first take turns to give orders to their characters (perhaps in secret), and then watch the action play out in a real time segment, one character at a time. If everyone moved and fired at the same time, it would be more difficult to follow events that unfold on multiple fronts (although it would be more realistic and cooler to watch).

I think the intent of the author was to capture the freeform adventure feel that early Flash Gordon, Doctor Who and Star Trek TOS had... and perhaps their newer incarnations lack.

I have only tried Galactic Gladiators (using DosBox of course). The interface is very primitive, but you can make the AI play against itself and just watch.

Reference:
The manual for Galactic Adventures (I can't find the one for Gladiators).

Videos (Apple II versions):
Galactic Gladiators
Galactic Adventures

Other random finds:
Mother Brain Has Been Aliving!
Too cute. Sad end.
Hero Quest music, ZX Spectrum

Diablo

2011-01-15T20:39:00.003Z

I don't have much games on my Mac. In a way it's kind of good, because games make me feel unproductive. It would be great if games could educate me in some way, or allow me save and even share what I have accomplished in the game (e.g. Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress). Leveling up a number is less interesting to me. It can be fun to become better at a player skill oriented game (e.g. Tribes), but ultimately that feels like a waste of time too.

It's a bit of a tangent perhaps. I felt like sharing some thoughs. This is a blog after all. Maybe I should treat it as such and post more often. In respect to Diablo... I think it's a game about building a character. I always liked the character creation and development aspect of games, be it Starflight, Spore, or Dungeons & Dragons. I often play the wrong class (e.g. warrior sorceress) in Diablo 2 because I enjoy playing like I shouldn't. Feels more creative.

Diablo 1 allowed you to mix things up more (Magic being learned from books), but the game isn't available in Blizzards BattleNet store. While the Diablo games did a good job at giving you what felt like personal items, most of the items actually disappear into the information swallowing black hole that is the town store. Anyways, personally I'd like the see the character personalization aspect taken further, be it wearing in boots and gear, naming things, changing graphical appearances, or even stuff like home decoration and pets, as seen in some Japanese dungeon raiding games (e.g. Azure Dreams).

Anyways. I have hastily put together a rather incoherent page with some notes and random ideas. I'm not sure where it's heading.

Diablo page

Ett Hav av Skräck.

2010-12-24T10:07:00.004Z

This was found in a Yule ornament box.

It's dated June 11th 1990.

Enter if you dare (and can read Swedish).

Humble Indie Bundle 2

2010-12-14T17:05:00.011Z

The Humble Indie Bundle #2

As some of you may know, I'm doing stuff for Cortex Command every now and then. It's an indie game developed by DataRealms, and it's included in the Humble Indie Bundle #2 which just went public.

Cortex Command is very much a work in progress. We've been making slow progress since about 2004 or earlier. Fortunately, it's one of those games which is already graphically aged. If a new impressive 3D engine comes out (making other 3D games look bad) it doesn't affect us as much, because the qualities of our game lies elsewhere. Perhaps people approach the game with different expectations too. On top of this, we have a talented and active modding community, and this always extends a lifetime of a game. Mods and modding is probably where the main enjoyment of the game lies now, because I haven't been doing as much content as I should have.

Right now I'm redoing the intro slides that I'm not happy with. Most of the assets that I did felt like sloppy placeholders, so I really want to get started on doing the stuff that is detailed in the design/fluff docs. It will be needed for strategical meta game layer that we've been working on. New in this build of the game (B24?) is... some... skirmish thing.

I'd link my CC stuff and DataRealms here, but it appears the server died. Stop all the downloadin'! Help computer!

Oh yeah, above are some pin-ups that I did for the HIB2 promo page. Hopefully I didn't offend the other developers with my chibified interpretations of their characters.

Edit: I've made a simple page with some of my other HIB promo art.

A few updates

2010-12-09T00:12:00.005Z

MoO project - See update section.

C21 online - This is a Japanese MMO that I researched. It has some nice robot design here and there.

Paradroid - Cleaned up a few of the roughs.

Elite game - I've added some scribbles at the bottom of this half finished Elite-I-don't-know-what-I-derailed page.

Spotter Challenge!

2010-10-02T18:40:00.008+01:00

When Megaman found a new ruin site to explore, Roll had him running errands instead. This was a perfect opportunity for Tron to sneak in, grab the treasure and lay in ambush. However, the ruin is populated by several new Reaverbot types, none of which are in Tron's database. Can you help her to identify them?

EDIT: Revealed the source sprites.

The 3DS, Kid Icarus, and MML3 announcements all came as a surprise to me. I often complain about 3rd person 3D games and how their inability to present clear spatial information to the player can hamper certain game design verbs. For example, in the game Space Harrier, aiming can be a bit tricky. In the new 3D Mario games, there aren't a lot of complex destructible block situations, precision jumping, and things which we saw Mario do in the early 2D games.

However, I'm cautiously excited about the potential of the 3DS to address these issues. Even older games where 3 dimensional spatial relationships are important can become much more playable... if the 3DS is as effective as advertised.

So, naturally I'm curious about how MML3 will utilize the 3D screen. Just how it will affect immersion during dungeon crawling, or dog fights? Could a line of reticles meeting up with the enemies give the player a better aiming experience? Will the 3D screen be used for something quite unexpected and great, or will it end up being a forced gimmick?

I'm also curious about this 'new development approach' mentioned by Inafune, and how MML3 somehow would be a game 'for us'.

I'm very tempted to revisit my own Reaverbot Legends project now. I've linked it below, in case anyone is interested. The part which was most appealing to me about MML was the enigma of the Reaverbots, the Digger community, and of course the Tron Bonne character. I really liked the MML series and I hope MML3 turns out great and Inafune has fun making it (he did seem pretty excited). Edit: Wait. He quits and becomes indie?

Edit: Also.

Edit: I've actually been updating my MML page a little recently.

Marathon

2010-08-29T17:29:00.008+01:00

I've put up a small Marathon page. Slightly related, does anyone know if a ray casting (e.g. Wolfenstein) used textures like this? Seems like an obvious thing to do, but maybe it would require too much memory because of all the angles you need to pre-render, especially in an engine where you can have player elevation. I think it could look impressive, anyways.

I'm of course not talking about modern stuff like normal/bump/parallax mapping here. Just a few pre-rendered texture view angles (still drawn square from the front). If a texture is symmetrical, we can do some mirroring when reading the raycasted columns and save some memory there. The textures would probably need to have flat L/R edges (unlike my example here).

Good Job!

2010-06-17T14:45:00.006+01:00

I was pleasantly surprised to see this first screenshot of 2K Marin's new 'XCOM' game. Apparently it will use game mechanics similar to Valkyria Chronicles for the combat, but all of the strategical features of the original game are still present. Nice!

Yeah, it's not true ._. I made it all up.

The Lego Project

2010-04-02T17:57:00.001+01:00

Here's a Lego project which I was working on last year:

androidarts.com/legoproject/

I got myself busy with other stuff halfway through, but the idea was to redesign every Space faction and... come up with a bunch of useful micro mecha parts.

I don't have time to work on it now, so unfortunately the project is in a half finished state with more text than illustrations, and a lot of the illustrations are just pencil roughs which needs to be iterated and cleaned up.

I did polish up some of the factions, like Ice Planet and Blacktron, but the rest are kind of fuzzy or junk which should've been erased.

Starsiege

2010-03-14T15:37:00.003Z

More derailing. I had a lot of fun with Tribes back in the day. Tribes is actually called Starsiege: Tribes though, so I researched the Starsiege and Earthsiege series, and promptly derailed, moving onto a mecha project. Apparently Mech was trademarked or something, just like Droids is a trademark. Earthsiege called its mechs 'Hercs' instead.

Anyways: I've made a Tribes proto page.

Before this, I was noodling on my Kawaiik project.

To the right, a Cybrid Herc.

Skeleton Wars

2010-01-22T15:38:00.005Z

Back in 2006 I started doodling on a game which I had wanted to make for quite some time. Basically, I wanted to see something like Warlords, but with more fantasy races (orks, elves, etc). In 2008 I revisited the thumbnails which I had done, and cleaned them up a bit. I also wrote a bunch of stuff, but didn't make anything public, because it was an unfinished mess. Today I compiled a simple page using the now old material. So, here it is, my Skeleton Wars page. (It's still a mess.)

I've also been secretly updating my Doctor Who page. (Also still a mess.) I'm looking forward to seeing what Matt Smith and Moffat will do.

Some new old stuff

2010-01-14T15:45:00.005Z

I've been sitting on this content for some time.

Misc game projects

More misc stuff

Eventually I want to make individual project pages, but at the moment I've just collected a lot of my art and text bits onto these two pages.

Right now I'm working on an Elite game. My previous blog post might have hinted at that. I'm thinking I'll try doing a bunch of art assets this time, leaving the coding to someone else. Programming can be fun, but it's slow progress.

It will be a top down game (because it's easy for me to draw, not knowing much about 3D). I don't think that the third dimension really contributes that much, game mechanic wise. It adds realism, but controlling and displaying something in 3 dimensions is much harder.

At first I wanted to make trading the primary thing (blasting space pirates aside). Then I realized that what I actually enjoy is space exploration, finding alien cultures, tomb raiding, big enemy fleets. Trading still has its fun, but it risks getting grindy.

It's YouTube

2010-01-08T08:29:00.004Z

I made a YouTube account and uploaded some Frontier Elite II videos. I could never get into Elite 1. It has a more fun universe, but less things to do, and kind of dated graphics / UI. Frontier (Amiga version) still works well graphically I think, perhaps because of its flat style. The Archimedes version looks interesting because it's not player centric. I also need to check out Escape Velocity, because a top down Elite clone looks like an appealing thing.

Also noodled on my Elite ship paper craft page.

Flickr and Lego

2009-10-23T17:33:00.003+01:00

I made a Flickr account and uploaded some Lego stuff.

Starflight

2009-06-09T02:41:00.008+01:00

I've been making some progress on my Starflight project. I had some old art and text material which I copy-pasted together and made a page out of. It is haphazard and not as finished as my other unfinished stuff.

Starflight project page

To the right: I'm dabbling with programming again (BlitzMax). I'm doing a so called "Immediate Mode GUI". The technique has both advantages and drawbacks, but overall I like it. Coming up with the crew was the most fun part of Starflight, and I couldn't resist feature creeping it. Each crew person actually has the same stats and stuff as in the original game, but I'm just showing a short form here to fit the entire crew roster on one page. The officers (red) gets a bonus from having a well versed captain and good subordinates. The 'Grey Shirts' will die first on missions, and can be used as meat shields. Yeah, that might sound familiar.

Oh yes, I almost forgot, I've also updated the Master of Orion 1 project.

Megaman Legends

2009-03-24T14:58:00.005Z

It may be no big surprise that I prefer the first two NES Megaman games over the later incarnations. However, there is another game in the franchise which I'm fond of: Megaman Legends. This game was so unlike the original Megaman that I could accept it for what it was. In fact, I bought all three MML games for the PS1 back when they came out, and I think I like the first one the best... (surprise).

Megaman Legends Project

Rebelstar Raiders

2009-02-21T08:11:00.005Z

Here's some research I did on Rebelstar Raiders . One thing which I really like about the Rebelstar games is that the moonbases and other installation appears functional. It's not just random mazes and rooms with crates. The first game had 8*8 px characters, and if the maps use tiles it doesn't show at all. The later games (Rebelstar 1 & 2) moved to 16*16 px characters, and then Laser Squad introduced character rotation and an angled perspective (not isometric though). X-Com inherited a lot of combat mechanics fom these older games, an in some ways it was inferior in that department. I think the machinegun fire and aim control works better in Laser Squad. You can spray X number of bullets between two arbitrary points. It feels really Rambo.

Roughs

2009-02-15T06:51:00.007Z

Here are a few sheets with unfinished redesigns. The character proportions and head scale are about the same as in the Xexyz stuff.

X-Com
Rygar
Metroid

As for X-Com, I think I'm going to have to revisit my Rebel Squad project and revise the designs. I think these kind of proportions with more curves is more dynamic, and I've changed my mind about real time vs turn based. One of X-Com's biggest strengths is character development, and in a turn based game you can maximize the player's exposure to the characters. I think, even if you design a real time system with multiple monitoring windows (for scattered characters), the player will have a constant nagging feeling of having to be everywhere at the same time with his eyes. It's not enjoyable to constantly be reminded that you might be missing important action pertaining to your characters. Being able to effectively deliver tasty little bits for the player to build his game spanning macro story with takes priority.

As for the cute cartoon style, I don't believe it would make the game less scary or involving. Horror is mostly music and build-up. Benny Hill music will make almost anything funny, and if you just walk into a grimdark scary movie it's not scary at all because you missed the build-up.

4X

2009-02-05T11:08:00.003Z

Master of Orion 1 is a nice little game which I never had the chance to play until recently. I started on a redesign project a while ago, but decided to go my own way halfway in. I sketched up my own aliens and game mechanics to avoid infringement.

I got distracted as usual and went off to work on something else, so I'm not sure in which state I left this.

MoO1 / Space Conquest

Xexyz / 亀の恩返しウラシマ伝説

2009-02-01T17:14:00.009Z

The X-Com genre is terribly neglected, is it not? I was working on this Xexyz (a side view jump and shoot game) redesign project when I totally derailed and turned it into a topdown X-Com game instead. My universe design approach is getting kind of worn. I'm always using the "giant spacewar - defend a base" setup. So, yeah, well, here's another game which will never see the light of day. I'm not sure who sits on the Xexyz licence. It's probably Hudson Soft or Atlus.

Turtle game (Edit: Made another 'screenshot'.)

Remember Robo Warrior?

2008-09-19T01:29:00.004+01:00

Robo Warrior was one of those games which had a fun first level, but it just got monotous after that. Kind of like the first slices of blood pudding. I always wished there was something more to the game each time I returned to it. I never knew that Robo Warrior actually was titled Bomber King and took place in the Bomberman universe somehow. I also didn't know that there was an interesting sequel for the Gameboy. Too bad, I might have enjoyed that one.

Anyways, here's another of them pages: Bomber Queen

Gradius!

2008-08-08T09:37:00.003+01:00

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.

Second iteration

2008-07-25T05:16:00.008+01:00

I gave the Bionic Commando redesigns another shot. These new ones are more true to the source sprites (ref). The placement of colors and masses is important for achieving likeness, but I took the liberty of varying the colors a bit to liven things up. I kept the extra colors close to the main colors, e.g., purple and brown, skin tone and white, and sky blue and light gray.

There's a little specular light pixel on the boots of the sprite characters, but I made it into a gray detail instead. If my redesigns had gloss boots and were rendered in a game engine then the specular might move around or disappear, thus reducing likeness. I'm trying to think of the sprites in a nonfigurative way and more like a collection of color blobs. It's less important what the pixels portray. The type of likeness I'm after is more on a 'corner of the eye' or 'flashing by' level. In video games that kind of rapid identification is very common.

Edit: Threw a render layer on the 'copter trooper. The details are still mostly nonsense, as are the lines on the suit.

Intelliwacom

2008-07-23T19:07:00.002+01:00

Dark brown plastic, wood and brass metal.

Pressure sensitive Wacom tablet and a pen with a button. Paper inlays.

Dual analogs. 4+4 buttons.

Large top screen.

I remember having fun with Lock and Chase and Demon Attack.

Pastel Horrors

2008-06-30T17:15:00.008+01:00

Alien Syndrome is an Arcade game born in 1987. It's a top-down run and gun game based on the Alien movie. The game itself isn't much to hang in the Yule-tree, but it does have one thing going for it. The art style clashes with the scary alien theme in a humorous way. All the aliens are drawn with happy pastel colors and don't look very scary at all. Unfortunately all the sequels and ports have completely ignored this defining aspect of the game and went for a more serious gritty look instead. What a pity.

Edit: It's possible that the game was darker on a real arcade machine and didn't have a happy pastel look.

The gameplay consists of searching for comrades (other humans) who have been stranded on various space ships. Each spaceship is like a little maze, and you have to find a number of comrades and reach the exit. When you pick up a comrade (by touching) they will just disappear. Maybe they're beamed off the ship. They're also immune to the mean aliens while the player is not. The player can not leave the ship until a number of comrades have been saved. There's a time limit which stresses the player to move along. The aliens just teleport in, and although only a certain number of them can appear on screen at once, there's no shortage of supply.

Certainly, the game is not meant to be realistic. The use of abstractions can be handy when trying to deliver an arcade experience. However when devising an simplified rules of something that is realistic, it's easy to start accumulating exception rules to patch things up. In the case of Alien Syndrome you have infinitely respawning aliens, and the player has infinite ammo. This creates a scoring problem. The player could just stand and accumulate easy points all day (and hog the arcade machine). To patch this problem a timer was introduced (a self-destruct, time bomb or whatever).

Robotron aside, I don't really care for highscores, and a timer not only stresses me, it kills immersion too. It's like something outside of the game is counting and checking up on me. It's a bit like not being able to put on high level boots in an RPG because I'm low level and using the boots too early would break the (poorly devised) game.

If Alien Syndrome had been for a modern PC, a lot of fun stuff could be made. Finite ammo, health and pickups could keep the player moving about looking for loot. If the alien reproduction is integrated into the gameplay then various tactical situations could emerge, such as destroying the queen, food supplies, blocking off paths, etc. The larvae could develop into different things depending on what food they find. Maybe the aliens use smell trails like ants do, and the player could manipulate those. The Comrades could barricade themselves in, engaging in firefights with the aliens, holding until the player arrives. The missions could vary in nature and the solutions could be improvised.

Yeah, well, enough feature creep and brain farts for today. I might post some other stuff soon...

Sontaran

2008-04-23T17:54:00.003+01:00

I wanted to see what a Sontaran would look like in the exo-muscle system I came up with for my Cylon redesign a few years ago (which I suspect the Crysis guys drew inspiration from). Anyways, I thought the stripy nature of it would fit the Sontarans.

I wonder if the upcoming DrWho episode will have any Rutans since they're the main antagonist of the Sontarans.

Also, with the Dalek out of the picture (more or less), what are the Movellans up to?

The Tower of Druaga

2008-04-08T13:20:00.007+01:00

Recently there have been some games which makes a point to be really, really hard on purpose. I wanna be the guy and Syobon are just some examples. I'm not sure if any of these games come close to The Tower of Druaga though.

The game was released by Namco in 1984 for arcade and was soon ported to a bunch of other platforms. You play as a knight who traverse a 60 floor tower while stabbing enemies and finding hidden treasures. Treasure chests will only appear if you do certain rather obscure things, different for each floor. We're not talking bomb the crack in the wall like in Zelda 3 here. You won't get any hints of what to do. Maybe you need to stand on that tile over there, draw your sword, and count to ten, or kill a red enemy after you've killed a blue, or use a certain item. Making matters worse, many of the treasures are mandatory to complete the game, and you won't really find out until you reach the end. Making matters even worse, you can easily lose treasures, and there's also evil treasures which may cripple you permanently. Also, you can get 'Zapped' back from the last levels to the beginning.

Mind, this game was released before the internet and before 'save states'. It very much relied on several people collaborating and chatting among themselves, because I can't see how one person could beat this game alone.

Wait, why am I talking about this game? Well, it's interesting because it seems to be some kind of Proto-Zelda. Many of the enemies are the same, and the hero has the sword-shield mechanic as well as grid aligned movement. I think some of the music is similar too. Playing Zelda right after Druaga really does feel like you've just made a 'next-gen' jump. Zelda has aged a lot less than Druaga and is still highly playable.

Trivia:

There's a fun Druaga anime which the authors have released on YouTube and a bunch of other video sites.
Ugetsu Hakua did the character design for the anime. It's an artist I've been keeping an eye on for quite a while, although his site haven't had much on it in recent years. Anyways, the knight designs are really cool.
A lot of people who make brief contact with The Tower of Druaga complain that the hero is slow... this because they did not find the speed boots on floor 2. Without them the hero will have to crawl through the game.

Also, new project:

Tower of Kana Edutainment

Star Control

2008-03-24T15:28:00.006Z

Allright, here's a little Star Control fan-art page I've compiled from various posts here and there. It's not polished or finished, but there's some stuff for you to look at at least.

Star Control Project Revisited

Yeah, I have another server. I registered a firm name, Android Arts ANJ. Had to tack on ANJ on the end, which kinda sucks. In Sweden we can't have - crap, I can't even translate the word - 'nurture-activity-descriptive' names for firms. Electronic Arts wouldn't be allowed for example, not under the present rules anyways. I guess this is also why we see a lot of stupid Web2.0 names like Quambo Jambax Liveblogzap.

I'm working on a logo of some sort.

Bionic Commando Roughs

2008-03-15T18:12:00.009Z

Just playing around here with some quick rough concepts. Bit of a sci-fi take on the details, but the general shape and color placements are (with exceptions) somewhat close.

Star Control

2008-03-11T22:40:00.007Z

It is time to revise my Star Control stuff again. The older stuff I had made was needlessly unfaithful. With enough revisions it's possible to get a redesign close to the source without sacrificing much likeness.

In the case of the Thraddash, the communications image contradicted the smaller melee pilot image. There's also dialog information and music to consider when shaping a redesign. I don't care for the voices, so the music works as a voice for me when I read the dialog.

The Thraddash are brutes, like an anthropomorphic rhino/boar/hippo. I suspect they were based on the G'nunk from Starflight since they respect combat prowess. The Melnorme has the following to say about the Thraddash:

"To make a Thraddash your friend, kill him -- but then of course, he's dead so what's the point?"

At first I wanted to combine some brute looking animal with both the Comm and melee image to make something new, but then someone suggested that the melee image is actually a pilot or combat suit of some kind. I think this solution was much better. Doing an in-between design is like... having people in antarctic and egypt dress the same based on the average temperature... or like democracy.

It seems my site died btw. I got another server I can use though, so we'll see what happens.

Source:

Redesign progress:

Megaman

2008-01-17T14:16:00.000Z

I never liked the covers of the Megaman games, so I made an attempt myself. I think it failed at the composition stage and it totally lacks an idea. It started out as a cover idea which looked interesting as a thumbnail, but as I worked on it I realized more and more that it didn't work. Maybe I approached it wrong too. Realizing that, I turned it into a white background pinup instead. Now it does nothing more than present a few drawings without any finesse.

Head-scale feels a bit on the fence. It's not like the sprite (2 heads) and not comic scale (5-7 heads) either. I think mine is 2.8 heads or something. On the sprite, his head is between his shoulders, so I lose similarity points there too.

I don't like the cone-feet which became so pronounced in the SNES games, so I put the masses more towards the center of the legs. Not sure how that worked out though. I do like how MMZ tackled the legs and costume designs. Actually I think he has cone-like limbs in a few of the intro/equip screens from the NES games too, but in MM2 he mostly look tubby/trunky.

Megaman's face is actually close to white in the first game. This was because they used a bright yellow skin tone, and large white eyes. I think this works better with the idea that he's a robot. Borg, and all that. They actually changed his skintone to flesh in MM3. In MM4 we learn that Rock was a household robot which was converted into a fighting robot. He does have a flesh colored face in the MM2 equip screens though.

Megaman has always been a silent lethal assassin to me. He got in there and did the job without bla bla bla teen angst. His mouth is just a neutral line most of the time, and the first games didn't really have any lines/speech for him.

---

So, where to go? Here's a few things I wanna do. A 'true to the game' MM1 cover, with the same amount of fun as the SMB1 EU cover. These are the original Megaman covers (they're missing the Famicon one which was kind of fun).

Maybe it would also be neat to make some illustrations like the Kid Icarus instruction booklet had. Also, I wanna continue my Mega... uh, -maiden(?) project which is like 6-7 heads, and that would require some larger enemies and higher detail resolution, which could be a fun elaboration.

The cuter 'Super Deformed' scales are fun too in a way, but (at least when it comes to robots) I tend to lose interest when there are no details to explore or they are exhausted too quickly by the eye. With too much simplification and focus on narration and gesture, designs can be a bit like... a 4 note jingle; Catchy and easy to get, but not quite satisfying on an intellectual level.

Rebel Squad

2007-12-27T16:14:00.000Z

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

2007-12-27T16:04:00.000Z

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

2007-12-22T01:09:00.000Z

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

2007-12-21T22:33:00.000Z

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.

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Handheld

2007-12-21T14:36:00.000Z

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.

Ridley

2007-09-03T18:25:00.000+01:00

I've been struggling with trying to draw Ridley since Metroid 1 came out. He's a tricky bastard, how does that mouth and neck work? It occured to me that I had always tried to change his appearance into something 'more cool and buff', so this time I tried to stray pretty close to the sprite instead.

I think the crazy neck-mouth does add a certain charisma. He's quite a bit different in the manual, with three eyes stacked upon each other and trunky snout of some sort. Much of the artwork in the manual seem to correspond poorly to the ingame sprites. The Kid Icarus manual was much better from that viewpoint.

Some similarities between Alien 1 and Metroid 1:

Fossilized guys sitting around.
Ridley might be named after Ridley Scott, and is somewhat similar in design to the Alien.
You encounter and fight a dangerous alien lifeform.
This is a real long shot, but in Kid Icarus (aka Light Myth: Parthena's Mirror) had several enemies named after musicians. The big flying mouth is called "Mick", possibly a pun on Lick and Mick Jagger (who has a big mouth). There's also an enemy called Collin, and around it circles enemies which might be called Filling in the japanese version. Phil Collin performed a duet with a certain Phil Bailey around the time Kid Icarus and Metroid were made. Bailey is a part of a famous Metroid password , but it doesn't appear to be hard coded so it's probably a coincidence.
The female protagonist strips in the end, also revealing that her hair style and hair color is similar to that of Ripley. I think they intended for it to be close to black (like Ripley's), but that wouldn't show against the black space so maybe they made it brown instead. Actually, given how much the NES palette can vary, it's quite tricky to decide just which color her hair is. She could be a red head too, but she's certainly not blonde. The hair also appears to be wavy in the ending graphics, but straight ingame.

PSG update - Metafight and Guardian Legend

2007-08-24T08:35:00.000+01:00

So, I have finally updated my website 'PSG' with two 'design docs' I made a while ago. I bought Blaster Master (Metafight in Japan) when it was released here in Europe, and I did not regret it. Most of the time I do not like games for what they are, but for what they could be. Aside from the corny runaway frog story, Blaster Master had a fantastic potential. The sequels didn't quite follow up on the style of the original though, or tap into its pool of potential.

As for The Guardian Legend, I hadn't played it until just recently. I was in the midst of the Metafight project when tGL's charm got to me, and being easily distracted, I quickly wrapped up Metafight and began working on tGL. I spent about a week on it before getting distracted again.

One thing which is very important to me when I do these projects is to keep much of the design from the original game intact. This is not common in the world of remakes and sequels. In fact, I challenge you to think of a single sequel (or remake) which remained very faithful to its original, after having made a generational leap that is.

I like to think of designs as being entities in a multi-dimensional design space. What I enjoy about sprites and pencil thumbnails is that they are... fuzzy entities. They have not yet collapsed into a clearly defined singularity, like next-gen designs tend to do with all their HD and 2048^2 pixel texture maps. Older game sprites are more fuzzy, stretching out in all directions like gas nebulae and star clusters, and can thus more easily be made to overlap with the regions of design space that I prefer. The alignment and coherence of a group of designs is also important, and it's much harder to achieve if you're dealing with singularities rather than nebulae. Think of it like trying to draw a harmonious line between designs A1-B1-C1, while keeping parallel and not too close to A2-B2-C2.

Quake was great since it was, especially at lower resolutions and software render, very noisy, raw and gritty, and that brought homogeneity and alignment. You couldn't tell what the skin of the Shambler was. Is it hairy or just has white skin? In your mind it was awesome in any way. A next-gen Shambler, I fear, would be dumbed down, collapsed into something artificial, plastic normal map looking. Quake 1 was about noise and grit. It wasn't tidy, clean or softly fluffy. It crackled like an old vinyl record and it was that which gave it a soul.

Getting to the point... the design space I envision is really vast and multidimensional. Of course the number of semantically differentiable designs is much more limited, but I still feel that you have a lot of playroom as a designer, even within the nebula of an old sprite. I'm not sure why the sequel makers won't explore their home nebulae a bit more. At most you see a few vague nods in the direction of the original. Maybe it's because of a lack of respect of the original, or a lazy haphazard attitude towards design. I don't think it's a lack of skill, because like I said, staying within the confines of a nebula is not that hard and you still have a lot of playroom to do cool things like next-gen singularity designs or whatever.

Lets have a look at some Lynels I drew from Zelda 1. It's a tricky design and I struggled quite a bit with it. One problem I have is wanting to nudge things towards a bit more mature proportions. This means my redesigns (the blue dots, here trying to find an attack vector towards the perceived center of the nebula) can end up a bit towards the edge of the nebula (gray). I simplified the nebula to two dimensions, but it's really vastly multi dimensional. I kind of have a trend in my redesigns, preferences and alignments into certain dimensions, and I'm not exploring the much of the available space. I really wish I could get closer to the center with these designs. With so many dimensions maybe I can find a place where the space is warped or bent, allowing me to sneak in? Maybe the nebula stretches out in a dimension I was not aware of, thus giving me more leeway? Also, I cannot just pick any attack vector, I must stay in harmony with all the other enemy designs as well, such as the Moblin or Tektite.

Anyways, I'm not saying it's wrong to try new things. There are a lot of sequels which have ventured into new space and made a memorable home there. I just think it's odd that there's hardly any faithful generation leaping sequels. Why not pay respect to the original and tap into all the cultural history and nostalgia which you'll basically get for free?

StarCraft 2 could possibly qualify? Too early to tell. Someone suggested Mario 64, which atleast kept a lot of the bestiary intact from the earlier games. Realistic games (such Zombie or Racing games) does not count, as there's little to redesign.

Neophyte

2007-06-05T01:28:00.000+01:00

Startopia, released in 2001, is now somewhat of an obscurity. I found it very appealing at first because I quite like games where you macro manage and your troops just go about their business. To the right, some Startopia doodles I made.

Startopia is a bit of a Peeping Tom game, as you can observe your units going about their business. I'd like to take this opportunity to namedrop a few other games which I like because of their Peeping Tom qualities : Dwarf Fortress, Sim Ant (and many of the Sim* games), Dungeon Keeper (same devs as Startopia), Settlers and maybe even Progress Quest ;)

Also, I loved how the entire game campaign was just one large map with all factions brawling about in the WarLords games. Usually I'd never actually play those games, instead I'd just sit and watch all the AIs duke out. Basically, the type of games I mentioned are like a balloon, they have a beginning point but no end point. Well, they might have ending conditions, but the basic idea is that you're very free in your movement inside the balloon space. By contrast, games like HalfLife 2 are like strings of sausages. Your freedom of movement is limited to a tunnel, and every now and then there's a choke point which leads to the next sausage segment.

Something which has puzzled me lately is how developers often market their game as the balloon, but sell a string of sausages instead. Is it that hard to actually make an actual balloon game? 20 years ago it certainly was a lot harder because of slow hardware, but the largest obstacle now is probably wetware and the high priorities given to graphical presentation and story elements. I'd say it's generally harder to make balloon games look good (and have a good emergent story, like Dwarf Fortress does), and that's why we end up with so many sausage games instead.

Anyways, back to Startopia. As it turned out, I ended up not playing it much, because the replay value was hurt by something, and it took me a while to figure out what. I'll get to that soon.

Some years ago I made a simple natural selection simulation thing. I gave my creatures weapons and a belly which both could mutate and vary in size. Eating the belly full would result in kids, and if it was empty the creature died. Movement cost the creature's mass (weapons+belly), and creatures could eat other creatures if their weapons were superior and the meal would fit in the belly. I also had low nutrition grass which anyone could eat. This, I thought would result in a lot of different creatures. I'd get whales with huge bellies (too big to be eaten by anyone), maybe grass eaters and predators, and small bugs which multiply fast, etc.

However, all I got was a creature with a lot of weapons and a relatively small belly. This was initially confusing, since with only one type of creature evolving, what were they using the weapons for? No none had a belly big enough to eat anyone, and carrying the weight of those weapons did cost them a lot of energy. Then it strook me. They were turtles, and the weapons were defensive. They'd keep their shells thick or nasty enough to assure they didn't get eaten, and their belly small enough to make babies fast. Still, why only one type of creature, where was all the diversity?

And back to Startopia a last time. I think the reason I didn't want to replay it was because the environment was the same every time, and this was also the problem of my little life program. A varied landscape sponsors diversity much more than a sterile one, and neither Startopia or my life program had one.

Well, that about concludes this little multi directional rant. Don't expect it to get much better in the future either.

Querulous

Shooters

Star Frontiers

BHOU!

FFL marathon

Zelda 2 roughs

Hand problems

UFO

Green stuff sculpture

Go Forth...

Black Scarab

Thanks GW!

Armoured space soldiers

Pathways into Darkness

Galactic Gladiators and Galactic Adventures

Diablo

Ett Hav av Skräck.

Humble Indie Bundle 2

A few updates

Spotter Challenge!

Marathon

Good Job!

The Lego Project

Starsiege

Skeleton Wars

Some new old stuff

It's YouTube

Flickr and Lego

Starflight

Megaman Legends

Rebelstar Raiders

Roughs

4X

Xexyz / 亀の恩返し ウラシマ伝説

Remember Robo Warrior?

Gradius!

Second iteration

Intelliwacom

Pastel Horrors

Sontaran

The Tower of Druaga

Star Control

Bionic Commando Roughs

Star Control

Megaman

Rebel Squad

Hohohoray

Intercepted

Peel Trident

Handheld

Ridley

PSG update - Metafight and Guardian Legend

Neophyte

Xexyz / 亀の恩返しウラシマ伝説