Part of a storyboard for an adventure game pitch. I still like the idea very much. It had a lot of Tintin and Roman Polanski influences.
Category: Illustration
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Ominous
Trusted Soil is almost ready for its public debut, this friday and saturday at the EJECT graduation expo at the HKU! If you are in the neighbourhood, do stop by and come take a look! In anticipation, please enjoy this promo poster:
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Trusted Soil
I recently graduated from the HKU school of game design (thank you, thank you), so I thought it was a good time to point you in the direction of my graduation work.
I’ve been working on an adventure game the past few months with a few people that we’re really excited about called Trusted Soil. You can read all about it on the official webpage or the freshly erected devblog, I won’t reiterate all that here. What I am here for is to give you something to look at.
For Trusted Soil I did all the background art, character designs and animations (and some scripting/design). It was a challenge for me to work in a slightly more realistic style than I am used to. While the lineart is still fairly distinctively my style, the lighting and color is much more detailed than what I am used to doing. I drew a lot of inspiration from Wormworld Saga, and initially I wanted to approach that style even more closely, but we decided it would not have been time-efficient as we wanted a completely functional end product, not just something that looked good.
Below is a sampling of backgrounds I created for Trusted Soil.
In addition to that I also developed a custom dialogue system, about which you can read much more on this page.
We are working now to polish up the build we submitted for our exams, and will soon release the first episode.
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Stacking
Found a sketch from back when I still did dailies. I was intent on doing more of these but I never really got around to it.
I’m glad someone managed to snap a pic of the car in question later to prove I wasn’t exaggerating. If anything I was doing the opposite, because apparently in reality there were 24 boxes…
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Reimagening
These are some character designs for a project I’m working on. The game follows a group of scouts on an adventure a good few decades into the future, so that was a good excuse to give the classic boyscout outfit a facelift. I kept a few things that seemed integral to the scouts outfit, like the scarf and the badges, and updated everything else.
Since nature evolved aswell in this future scenario (and became a lot more wild and dangerous), I took inspiration from mountaineering outfits and even the costume redesigns for recent superhero movies to create an outfit that would better protect these kids against different kinds of environments – making a thermal shirt, long pants, gloves and a futuristic version of the swiss army knife part of their standard equipment.
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Progression
Now that I’m cautiously starting work on my webcomic again, it’s funny to see how my style has improved in the past two years. The same characters appear in both of these.
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A man with true grit
A quick paint I’ve been meaning to do ever since I saw this iconic shot over a month ago.
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Blimey
I was rearranging some art folders and I found two pieces of concept art I don’t think I ever posted here.
I really like the style these are done in, it’s so deliciously simple.
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You know tha’s right
Another still painting, this time of my favourite crime-fighting duo Shawn and Gus from Psych!
Psych is one of my favourite shows, I can never get enough of these guys’ antics. Also it has potentially the best intro song of any contemporary tv show – whattt.
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The Frenzy Dailies
Long long overdue, here are my frenzy adventures from last summer in comic form for your enjoyment.
Click this thing up here for the full thing.
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Dailies – 1 Feb 2010
I found some old dailies while going through my art folder, so I decided to finish them up. Here’s the first, more coming soon.
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The Brows
Continuing tuesday’s exercise, here’s another moviestill painting – one of my favourite scenes from In Bruges.
It’s not entirely on par with the last one, but I suppose I can’t complain. I wanted to include Brendan Gleeson’s coked-up mug aswell, but I spent enough time on just Colin already, so maybe I’ll add him another time. And I have half a mind to make one of Ralph Fiennes aswell, to round out the Bruges trio.
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Credit where credit is due
The other day I came across these amazing moviestill paintings on DeviantArt, and I refused to believe they were real (as in not painted over). Then I tried it myself today.
Turned out pretty good! It took me about two hours, no paintovers, 0% colorpicking, just a lot of comparing back and forth.
The still is from the movie It’s A Boy Girl Thing, a highschool bodyswap movie from 2006. Last night I stumbled upon it as I was flipping through the channels, and I was surprisingly captivated by what first seemed to be a run-of-the-mill movie. It took many of the tired conventions of the genre and mixed them up in interesting ways.
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What’s been cooking
So last week we wrapped up the school project we’ve been working on for the past two months. It’s called Overleven op Drakeneiland (survive on Dragon Island), and it’s a cardgame based off a well-known children’s books series here in Holland.
Drakeneiland is set on an island off the coast of Greece where difficult children from Holland are sent after they do something bad. The island is completely devoid of adults, so the children have to maintain a society of their own, where everyone contributes to the greater good. It’s very Lord of the Flies, without all the violence.
Writer Lydia Rood wanted a game to accompany her books that would explore a different side of the franchise. It had to be an expanded universe thing, so we couldn’t recreate one of the books as an adventure game for example. But since the books deal mostly with social interaction, we decided a roleplaying cardgame was the perfect solution. A physical game would be much more fun to play for the target audience aswell (kids between the age of 8 and 10).
After a lot of research into Greccian architecture, nature, clothing and different visual styles, balancing the cards and a lot of playtesting, we produced a working prototype.
It consists of a deck of cards, money (the copper sticks) and points (the shiny gems). The deck consists of three different types of cards: blue cards, which signify a profession with a special talent each players has to pick at the start of the game, and green and red cards, which respectively have a good or a bad influence on the game. With these cards you have to collect as many of the shiny gems as you can, and you pay for the cards with the copper sticks.
In addition to that, we built a digital companion in Adobe AIR, that scans each card and tracks player stats like karma and number of points. Each profession has it’s own iconic backdrop in there aswell. This allowed us to put more detail into the artwork there that we could not put in the playing cards, because we wanted to keep those as iconic and easy to understand as possible. We use a lot of icons throughout the game anyway, to avoid long blocks of text.
I designed all the playing cards and their illustrations, and my colleague was responsible for the digital companion. This allowed us to put more detail into the companion to complement the iconic simplicity of the cards.
Reactions were very positive, both from the kids and the client alike. In the end we found that no matter what age players were, they all had the same learning curve, and all had the same enjoyable experience.
The client was so pleased infact that they want to sit down with us after the summer vacation to discuss how we can get this product on the market! So expect to be hearing more about this soon…
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Headshot
A while ago, Alison Sudol (of A Fine Frenzy fame) set up a contest for a new DeviantArt ID. This is sort of like an avatar that appears on your DeviantArt page to accompany your bio. I thought I’d give it a shot, it was a nice challenge in compositing a more artistic image as opposed to what I normally draw. I tried to keep it close to her aesthetics, and that must have paid off, because I won!
This image now graces the official A Fine Frenzy DeviantArt page:
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Internship report
Having recently completed my internship, I thought it would be nice to draw a dailie (or rather a ..seven..monthlie?) about the whole experience, since I had originally planned to draw dailies all throughout it. But somehow I never got around to that… funny how these things happen.
I made it for personal use at first, but people started telling me I should use it as my internship report for school. So I did! I wasn’t looking forward to writing those ten pages anyway…
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Snowgazing
A random doodle I made during work today.
Sitting next to the small window in our office is a perfect spot to observe the people walking by. This girl stopped in front of the windows in the corridor for a while to look at the sudden snowfall, forgetting all about the phone call she was in the middle of.
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Return of the Dailies
I was digging through my art folder and found these Dailies I drew a while back but never got around to finishing.
One of the many adventure-filled days of my internship! I was going to do so many more of these, but somehow it never got off the ground. Too busy I guess. OH WELL.
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Colin
Heavens, where has the time gone!? Out the window it seems. Or into my new job at Monkeybizniz perhaps. Hmmm…
Nevertheless, I’m forcing myself to get my sketch on in order not to get terribly out of shape – with drawing, not staying fit (that ship has sailed). I am super fucking jealous of Seung Kim’s awesome style, so I’m trying that. I also wanna do more dailies soon and I’m keeping a little Moleskine as a sort of internship diary. So here’s a little Colin for ya.
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Closure
Guess it’s about time for an update eh?
I wrapped up my sophomore year a few weeks back. Passed all my classes in one go, and the project turned out very well! I worked on Will O Wisp, assisting with game design, concept art, creating pretty much all the textures and putting together the audio and gameplay trailer. I think we put together a pretty nice game if you look at where we started, with artists that knew very little about 3D, and programmers that had never programmed for games before.
So now I finally have some free time again to work on some personal projects (and to look for an internship). I’ve started working on Dinerdate again, finalizing the script and characters, and drawing the first few strips. It’s a little slow because I’m still experimenting with fonts and word balloons and coloring techniques, and I gotta get familiar with the characters again – in terms of being able to draw them consistently. But I’m getting there!
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Dailies
I hit a bit of a funk in terms of art recently (as you might have been able to tell from the lack of posts ;)), so I’ve started doing some hourlies again to try and break through it. And so far it’s working out quite well.
Technically these aren’t hourlies anymore (a practice where you describe what happened each hour you were awake.), but more like what I like to call ‘dailies’ – a little summary of that day. Not every day is as interesting ofcourse, so I usually just pick days that were themselves noteworthy in some way. Here’s a couple that were lingering in my sketchbook:
