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I'm a freelance 2d artist; My portfolio can be seen here.
Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.
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  Dredmor Testing, Miscellaneous Pictures | 
Posted - 3/22/2009 3:31:02 PM | Dungeons of Dredmor - Looking for testers
Yes, it's the game that refuses to either live or be dead. ("Yet with strange aeons, even death may die.")
Screenshot:
All graphics done by me except for character animations and anything that reeks of programmer non-design ability (like the awful yellow color on the cash counter in the lower right. Sorry N.; I just don't like that yellow.)
How to describe it?: Old school dungeon-crawling but really ... zany, I guess. This is one of those games which ends up the product of locking three guys in a basement that causes them to lose all perspective about what is sensible and right in the world. Apparently "items in the game are distributed according to the Maxwell-Boltzmann probability distribution", whatever the hell that means. (This is what I get for working with math nerds - they never do things the easy way.) It's silly, to say the very least, and you cannot be told about this silliness; You must see it for yourself.
So: N. is using me for my (insert sarcasm) fame to recruit alpha testers from Dredmor. To transmit the essence of his message:
"Anyone interested should e-mail dredmoralpha@gaslampgames.com with a bit about themselves, previous testing experience, hardware configuration."
So come all ye bored people and help us out by testing this silly, silly game.
The rest of this post is padding, basically. Stuff I found lying around. Hope it's amusing.
Various Test Graphics
I was cleaning out my work folder and found a bunch of test graphics for projects that never happened.
Very small buildings:
First: a pixely building, second: a pixely building drawn to look more like a render of a 3d model and less like pixel art (avoid hard outlines, use softer gradient-like shading).
Hexes 1:
I really like drawing terrain tiles.
Hexes 2:
Here are some smaller sized hex terrain tiles drawn more from a top-down perspective, with some testing of transition masks.
Animated Character Sketch:
It'd be fun to do a low-color isometric character animation set like Fallout or Jagged Alliance. It'd be a ton of work, though, and by extension and important to potential clients, it would cost more than one might expect.
I don't know, though - it looks neat, is the thing. And with all the experience I've had in animation lately, I think I could make it work rather nicely.
My Desk
I took a picture of my desk for some reason.
The setup is driven by necessity more than whim, to be honest. Whim is very expensive and I don't make enough money to be able to afford much of it. I do love my large screen - it's absolutely essential for doing artwork.
Empty bottle of JD not pictured.
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| IE Icons, AO portraits + buildings | |
Posted - 3/19/2009 8:53:15 PM | Various items today. I know that pictures are pretty much the best thing ever, so I've made sure to have plenty of those to show.
Icons for Immortal Empire
Immortal Empire (yes, go have a look) is a game I've done some work for which I've gotten permission to talk about -- it's some sort of fantasy tactics/RPG game where you collect items and build characters, cast spells and it's all .. in-browser somehow? That part isn't my concern; I draw. I'm sure it'll be good; Jesse, the fellow making it, takes inspiration from all those excellent old PC RPGs.
So: part of my work was to do various 50x50 icons. Here are one hundred of them.
I won't go into detail about what anything is just yet, but while making them I saved the current version periodically so that I created a progression of the art from start to finish for every single icon (though I admit, some happy ones had only two steps, initial sketch and final version; Others went through up to twelve iterations). I think what I'll do at some point is do a write-up describing the drawing and thought process that went into making some of the more interesting ones.
So from an artistic standpoint, I noticed how much not only my small-scale painting got better, but also my thinking about composition. When you get down to it, there's only so much you can put into a 50x50 pixel space; you have to try to get across something by arranging things just so. It's kind of a fascinating problem to have to keep solving over and over in different ways.
Digital Painting for Aragon Online
Character portraits for Aragon Online, fantasy browser-based strategy game.
     
These need to be reduced to 80x80 pixels, so creating a nicely reducible composition and 'brush'work is of primary concern. I've started loosening up a bit with the thought in mind that I can arbitrarily crop the images to fit important stuff into the reduced versions. I hate to say it, but then first drawing which I put the least effort into polishing is the one the reduces to a small size the best.
In a general artistic sense I'm really enjoying getting some digital painting practice drawing faces, figures, and working with very simple, direct compositions, using colors and light and dark and lines of motion and such. And suggestive, but simple background elements - those are fun too. Note how pretty much every portrait has a theme going on in the background except, again, the first.
Hmm. So in particular,
1: Fix up the rough line/brushwork, make something happen in the background/. But then it did size down well, so maybe nothing need be done.
2: Hrm. More touchup on the face, eyes; Maybe make her not an elf, the AO elves are not so dark and broody - this sort of happened as this is picture adapted from a picture for something completely different, as you can see I posted the base for this two posts ago.) I have an interesting set of in-progress shots of this portrait, so I'll have to post them when I iterate a couple more times.
3: Maybe I ought to clean up the background a bit, make the brushwork less rough, more blurry. And fix the hair rendering up, it's done with very hard-outline right now.
4: Her visor thing really bugs me, the brushwork on the face definitely needs cleaning up (though I love the huge scars), and the background spears are little too 'neat' for my liking ...
5: I'd like to make the torch-lit procession in the background fade out in the distance better, define a mountainscape a bit more ... maybe do some touchup on brushwork on the face and hair, as always.
6: His hand needs to be about 1.25x larger, not sure about the lips, and his arm looks flat. This is the most recently drawn, so I have the least perspective.
There's a quick self-critique for ya.
Heh. I love this stuff so much. Remember the portraits in the old Bioware games? Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, and such? Those were great. I was really disappointed when they replaced them with 3d models (eg. NWN1 -> NWN2). It just isn't the same.
Pixelly buildings for Aragon Online will be posted here. I swear, this set is going to be done this day. It must!
Pixelly Buildings for Aragon Online
It is done.
Something about Orcish architecture, doubtless way too influenced by the LOTR movies' interpretation of Isengard -- something, something, monolithic stone structures and war-machine industry. It's a bit late to write anything useful -- all I see are pixels. I dig the colosseum, looks like orcs could have lots of fun there.
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| Merchant Seas | |
Posted - 3/12/2009 8:16:12 PM | Not only has my life been super crazy (though it's calmed down), but I've also been getting lots of work; It's great! And I really need to update my portfolio. The problem with professional work is that you can't talk about it until the game is released, so I haven't had all that much to say. Anyway, I wanted to try something different here by talking about an entire project at once rather than piecemeal.
On with the important stuff.
Mike Dosey's Merchant Seas
(That's kind of got a ring to it. Mike should be like Sid Meier with his name in front of all the games he makes. It doesn't matter if no one knows who he is -- it looks like people ought to know, so they'll pay attention. Heh!)
Right. So this is a writeup about some work I've done for Mike in the last month or two to show a bit about my thinking and the process of making assets for a game. And to show off my work - and Mike's game - of course.
The game, the job
It's called Merchant Seas, as noted, and is about sailing around in the 15th century and doing trading sort of things. Or at least that's my very simple way of putting it that gets across the feeling that should felt 'at a glance'. Graphics are important because they form a first impression about a game. So my job then is to make the UI looks pretty, paint a picture for the front page to make the game look fun (the equivalent of box art, I suppose), and do some pixel art type ships to extend the existing ship graphics that Mike is using (which you may recognize from a popular set made by Inquisitor aka Richard Janes.).
UI
The game's theme suggests to me a sort of old-time nautical style for the UI with lots of warm wood colors, brass, weathered paper, and serif fonts. At the same time, the rest of the graphics as they exist are pretty light-hearted and colorful, but not too colorful: the shades are somewhat more on the pastel end of things, so I'll try not to make things too dark or too saturated with color. (I do have a tendency toward making darker graphics and using strong colors, so I need to watch myself sometimes when people are going for broader appeal. And the ability to see what's going on without turning the brightness up.)
Mike had prepared a list of UI elements with programmer art versions of everything which were very helpful in illustrating his intentions. I started off those and basically drew a layer over them in Photoshop to give them the look I had in mind.
The way I started these, I gave every element a unique look, like it's own color of wood and arrangement of trim and corner decorations. It's fun to make these little things, but after a few like this, Mike set me right on making sure that the UI had a more unified look, with panels and elements constructed from similar parts. I know it's awfully small, but if you compare the cut up images of the UI in figure #1 with figure #2 you will see how I redid the UI (and also to account for some changes from Mike's side to give him more space to work with).
I'd like to note also that I used brighter highlights of metal, like the bright colored gold, as well as higher contrast with outlines and highlights to show which parts of the UI are interactive and what the player should pay extra attention to.
And by making a sheet of generic graphic parts (extracted from the unique elements I originally made), Mike can build new UI elements at his leisure or make small changes if he needs to. Maybe my original idea in making such sheets was to allow UI graphics to be built programmatically (see my work from November 2007 on my own Isostrat to show how I did this way back then), and though that's not the case in this particular application, it's a useful method to consider in constructing UIs programmatically.
Ships:
Richard Jane's original tileset came with three ships but Mike's design for Merchant Seas requires that players be able to meaningfully upgrade their ships, so he had me make five more ship levels. And, at that, there are three nations (so far) and all of the ships needed a color layer to designate who they belong to. And, can't forget, there was a matter of making a little aura of lights reflecting from the night-time water.
The challenge with the ships here was to match the original style. This was quite intimidating at first, but once I did some intense sprite work for another client (and was therefore too jaded to be fazed by anything), I took a closer look and saw how the ships were drawn, like what Richard was thinking when he made them. And it's not like I haven't spent some time staring at his other tilesets, as well, considering their popularity. Seeing it on that level, it was easy to jump in and draw some variations. (Side views only; They look the best):
All of those sails are a bit of a pain, I must admit, and if you pay really close attention you may see that some of them don't really match between the side-view and the up/down views of the ships -- partly because they didn't really match in the original graphics, but it's not like I can blame the poor guy for just getting them done. This isn't engineering, what matters is the impression they make on the player, and for that, I think it works.
Painting:
I enjoy how Mike indulges me by letting me do paintings for his projects. For as much as I enjoy digital painting, it's really what I actually do and practice the least - so I get more work doing everything else, and end up much better at everything else and with a better portfolio for everything else, and so don't get painting work. But I'll quit whining and get on with it; I really do enjoy all of this and would certainly rather be making game graphics than advertisements or something.
The idea was to have a painting that's adventurous, involves a ship, and, you know, the romance of sailing the seas. I did not intend for it to be combat related as such, or too dangerous-looking -- it should express rollicking adventure above all. And, at that, I based it on combining two paintings I rather like that instantly came to mind: Breughel's Icarus and Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa, see here:
The raft is on the right, as I'm sure you can see. Yes, this is putting that Fine Arts degree to good work.
Basically I took the background and lighting from Medusa (but toned it down a bit, because it's rather dark) and the ship from Icarus (Again, lightened it up). Here's the progression of the whole thing, click to see the larger sized image:
Then I used that painting to make a banner for Mike's webpage for the game; Here's an in-Photoshop shot of me extending the top of the painting just a little bit to fix the composition a little:
Then finished up with this:
And that's how it's done. Thanks Mike!
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