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.

Ridley

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

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.