CNES-88

 Let me park my Sinclair C-5 and quickly plug my new project before I embark on an adventure in my blimp (dinosaur sightseeing).

CNES-88 project

Can't unsee blue "teardrop" bikini bottom

Some thoughts on the Mighty No 9 design. It's a tricky situation to do Megaman without doing Megaman, of course. They wanted to keep the silhouette and decided to change the internals, but... I think it's too much of a haphazard mélange of color fields, panel lines and mystery function knobbery. When designing characters for old games they had to be iconographically strong (strong silhouette and simple flag-like coloring) (consider Samus or the more obscure Marina Liteyear), because there was little or no space for embroideries... or rather, the embroideries were subordinate to the general masses and relegated to the side-art in manuals and such. Internal details can be useful, but anything which draws attention to it and takes up valuable space, has to be functional and not merely area-fill, I think. All this is easier said than done, of course.

Anyways, here's my take on a "Mighty". It's just a quick sketch of course and can't rival anything with weeks of iterations behind it, but I haven't posted any art here in a while, so...

Super Mario Land graphics tweak

Here's the latest project:

Super Mario Land

I redid the bulk of the graphics and injected it into the game using a tool that I developed. An IPS patch is available for download on the page.

The graphics are 2 bitplanes (4 colors) just as in the original, but you can choose your own palettes for foreground and background objects if you're playing the game in a more modern environment, giving you 4+4 colors, minus one for transparency.

It would most likely run on the original Game Boy (using a flashcart), but the original high contrast graphics were probably more suitable for that screen than mine are.

Kawaiik trailer storyboard

I read something about Doom 4 and got in the mood to draw something new for my Kawaiik project, so I drew a storyboard for a trailer which hopefully is effective at conveying the general idea of the setting. 

Only minor changes to the old Kawaiik project page.

Space Dragon

If I had the dough I'd do a pinball machine. I love the clean look of the 70's and 80's boards (Dolly Parton, Captain Fantastic, Lost World), but the machines in the 90's had more interesting features perhaps. Retro EM chimes here and there would be snazzy, along with some steppers. I think pinball loses its charm when it becomes too... unmechanical. I haven't seen a board with manga style art so that would be interesting. Music, something along the lines of TX Sector and Elvira and the Party Monster.

Space Dragon!

Phantasy Star

I never owned a SEGA Master System, but I fondly remember some of its games which I played at a friend's place. The SMS hardware was pretty good so it's a shame that the system has such a small library and never go to realize its potential in the way the NES did.

One of the best games for the system was, almost without question, Phantasy Star, an RPG released in 1987. It's similar to the forerunner Ultima in its presentation, with the first person dungeons and a mixing of fantasy and sci-fi. Of course, Phantasy Star's graphical presentation has more meat to it than Ultima's, but I think it also bests its contemporaries, Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. Makes me wonder how Toriyama's excellent Dragon Quest designs would've looked if DQ had been released on the SMS...

Anyways, Phantasy Star project page in the works.

Space Orc sculpt

I've been scratch sculpting! Work log over at: Cool Mini Or Not

Tangent: I've generally liked GWs sculpts and how their sculpts are very direct, use simple shapes, leave space for labels and user funz, have a clearly established language and suggest function for many components. I've seen other companies who just appears to be stacking "cool" shapes, without much rhyme.

Well, that's what I used to think, anyways. Then I saw this skaven guy which will serve to illustrate what has been bothering me for a while about GWs current style. Zig-Zag hair, like how a child draws it. There's no clustering or tip curves. And that robe (and rat leg) is made out of unstructured angular flakes, an element which is present in many of their other sculpts as well. What's more, their indents are these... soft valleys (shrink wrapped?), which leads to a sort of pillow shading, which is made worth by the lifeless smooth painting (washing?) style.

Again with the skinsack shapes: Ogres , and the zig zag and angular patches return. Those lifeless monocolor pants. These Ogryns are a different thing from a different era. Haphazard, yes, but with a certain... illustrated storybook feel to them, with plenty for the eye to explore.

And their Orks are all teeth and plasticard now. I miss the "clowny" Bonner orks with their more rounded forms. Well, mostly the art that is. The sculpts were so-so. I guess I could buy some old EPIC Ork vehicles though.

...Whuuuaaaaat$

Star Maidens!

If you're into 70's TV sci-fi, do check out Star Maidens. Orange, Brown, Olive, Duck egg!  The "Storm Troopers" are the best. Even if there were sci-fi stuff on TV nowadays, I doubt we'd see something like these colorful concoctions from the past.

I've blogged about UFO earlier, but I hadn't seen much of the spiritual sequel, Space 1999, until recently. I actually haven't much liked what I've seen from Space 1999 so far. The plot is so obviously at the whims of the writer, oftentimes plowing down a morally deficient (or just oblivious) line of thought without much regards to scientific literacy or plot integrity. I can accept a flawed plot if it's fun and there are cheesy guys in 70's outfits, but Space 1999 is so damn beige (the characters in particular), both literally and metaphorically.

Superficially, it tries to set a serious tone, but underneath its all... fantasy writing. Moral dilemmas carry weight because we can relate to them, because they are realistic, even if the setting is not. In fantasy writing, there's often just an emotional appeal, then a Deus Ex Machina to prove it right (against the odds), delivering an unjustified, empty moral lesson.

That said, I really enjoyed Space 1999's s1x08 Dragon's Domain.

Colorful monsters

I've made a Pokémon page. I've been trying to draw Pokémon since the first game came out, but I've found that it's really difficult. Aside from my own numerous attempts, I've seen so many clones (games) or fan designs... fall short.

Also, I made a little page for a 16 color retro palette.

Kid Icarus Uprising impressions

I've updated my Kid Icarus page with my thoughts on the new game. Also, I found some scans of the original Kid Icarus manual art: GBA and NES . The new art can be found at creative uncut. Here's an interview with the guys who made the NES game.

Startopia, again.

I've made some new Startopia art.

He-Man

Under-developed He-Man doodles Each He-Man character has some sort of thing about it (feature or shape) that I eventually will have to find and exaggerate / focus on / make a theme.

I was never into action figures as a kid, but I recall seeing (expensive) He-Man and Star Wars figs on the toy shelves, perhaps secretly wanting one. It's kind of silly how so many of the He-Man figs were just repaints of the same muscleman sculpt. I think the most fun/striking ones are Skeletor, yellow skin Evil-Lyn (not a fan of the pale skin version), and the best henchmen are Spikor, Trapjaw and Spout Snout. His main henchmen are pretty boring I think (Merman, Beastman, Triclops?), and so are most of the good guys. Roboto would be fun with a different head I guess. It would be cool if he was delivered in pieces and had to be screwed together. Zodak has a fun Kamen Rider helmet, but then the chest piece ruins everything.

The new "classic" display figs (4H) has a nice Webstor and Cobra Kahn, and even the regular palace guards are sort of nice, matching Man at arms. Shadow Weaver is striking character but the figure was not made widely available. Skeletor is showing a bit too much of his neck, but I've seen fixes to that.

I'm not really a fan of the 200x stuff which was occasionally quite... malt-cross style as I call it, and a tad too... McFarlane.

I think I actually prefer the smaller legs of the old figures. It brings focus on the more characteristic upper part of the figure, and it agrees with my small-leg fetish.

Spaceship design

I've made a page with some of my thoughts on Spaceship design.

Dragon Quest project progress

I was surprised to see the theme of Google's April's fools, because I was just noodling around on my Dragon Quest project.

Some new Total Annihilation roughs

I've been trying to draw some TA stuff again, this time from a lower perspective (unit portrait views). It sort of makes sense to make sure the units look great and recognizable from a pure top-down view, but I still wanted to... expand on the designs, which is difficult with top-down drawings.

Core and Arm sheets.

I threw in some Dark Reign and Starcraft homages just for fun. I think Dark Reign in particular had some very nice unit and building design. Instead of a boring buggy, it had the Spider Bike. Even something potentially very boring like the (Taelon) power generator was turned into something very characteristic.

I also wrote down various ideas which popped into my head while drawing.

Notes

A particular concern of mine is the (unwitting?) use of "Dazzle camouflage"-style color schemes which I see in... well, not just in RTS games, thinking about it, so I rant a bit about that. Dazzle camouflage was not meant to hide ships, but rather to make visual identification (of ship type and heading) as hard as possible. Of course, when you alternate colors on a figure, you sort of tell the brain that these areas don't belong together. If done excessively all over the figure, the whole thing breaks apart, losing not only it's silhouette/mass, but also its identity in relation to other figures with the same color scheme. On the other hand, if you just paint all of the figures blue, the silhouette and mass will be intact, but telling the figures apart will still be hard.

So, in regards to color schemes in RTS games, I think it's best if one picks a few "flag" colors, say, two dominating colors, like a team color and a race color, then two or so more minor race colors. The top-most part of the units should have various iconographically effective shapes forming out of these colors (working with the masses of the figure). I don't think two colors is enough to help differentiate a lot of figures, so I'd sometimes put the extra minor colors in a dominant position on special figures. The Core is dominantly red and silver, but mix it up with some black and camouflage yellow, and then there's a role-defining colors like fusion core teal and construction stripes.

I've been playing TA Spring on my Netbook. It gets hot. I'm thinking it's because TA is so sexy.

Wasteland 2?

Wasteland looks pretty colorful and cartoony (characters, colors and story) for a spiritual ancestor of Fallout. Looking at the Kickstarter page, the pitch art for the Wasteland 2 (while nice looking) sort of clashes with the so clearly expressed sentiment to stay true to the original. On the other hand, I don't mind when a different style is used, as long as the designs are intact. On the other hand, Wasteland 2 has an opportunity to be graphically distinct from "brown brown black gray brown" and "brown gray brown brown black". I guess Borderlands is a bit more lighthearted stylistically, but I've never played it. Last Armageddon has one of the best settings of any post apocalyptic game I think, but now I'm derailing.

Anyways, I decided to draw some of the characters from Wastelands. A lot of the robots are just nonsense, but I decided to struggle with what I was given and not change them too much towards what I'd like to see. The game actually uses the same portraits for different encounters, so there's some room for doing variation once the base has been established.

Wiki page with ref
Mobygames page ... Dang, I forgot to do VAX and the Scorpion tank. Maybe later.

Edit: I doodled some more while watching a nicely produced Wasteland Let's Play. Here I've used the 4 head tall figures from Wasteland's overhead view (people have more normal proportions on the encounter portraits though), but changed the perspective from what appears to be a sort of top down cavalier projection to a typical isometric one.



Wasteland certainly has components of what we now consider a typical post-apocalyptic game, but it also have this... atmosphere of 18-19th century type story telling. At one point in the game, the player's party enters a garden with giant wondrous fruits and vegetables. Apparently someone has made canoes out of giant banana skids. I could almost see Alice, Dorothy or (Beanstalk) Jack stumbling into such a place. This made me add the giant mushrooms wrecking the asphalt. There's also a type of haphazard, carefree quality to the storytelling which makes me think of older stories rather than our modern, formalistic 3-act, moralizing ones. Vengeful baby with gun!

I drew some random figures on the map just to see what happened visually. In Wasteland, encounters rarely show up as figures on the overhead map, which is understandable since it's a lot of work to animate 400 different enemies and NPCs. Persistent figures also brings up a lot of problems like, guys getting stuck, blocking each other, shooting at walls during combat, permanent corpses, yadda yadda. Though... I wouldn't mind seeing an X-COM version using the Wasteland setting. There's the Ranger Center trying to discover technology, random hostiles, mutants, and robot bad guys with their own bases.

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).

FFL marathon

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.