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