fluffygameguy's What I did over the holidays part one: sketchy business...

I told you i'd be doing this! I bet you didn't believe me when i said i would... well i am! Here is the first instalment of my what i did over the holidays segment. First i will start you off with a few of the enemies i sketched over the holidays: the dwarf bandit, toadman and a small rock creature that  sadly never made it into the game. personally i didn't like it, it was a small sketch i decided to throw on to see if it looked good.. to me it didn't, but hey, that's why there is a design process in the first place; to see if anything works, looks good or for the fun of it. The dwarf was really an inspired sketch after i had seen the Hobbit. Plus, i have preferred the dwarf race over any other fantasy race, so it was through personal decisions that a dwarf was needed within the game. The toadman was an inspired from the japanese mythical creature the kappa. an aquatic creature that would normally fool people into deep waters and drown them..... nice. O_o... anyway, this one wasn't as evil. It would just steal things from you... it could be worse.. it could be drowning the main character.. we wouldn't want that now would we?

So here they are, first the sketch then the colour version of them

Hope you enjoy them. How do they look? send me a comment and i'll get back to you!

Stay tuned for the next segment of...


fluffygameguy's what i did over the holidays!!! *cue dramatic music*

I have to keep up! 'Up'dating that is!

Hey guys, well, it's been a while.... Christmas, New Year, a failed doomsday theory (again...) and of course... WORK! have kept me from updating... I mean i could have whilst munching on a turkey leg over Christmas, but no. Food comes first. To the people who know me, you know that's the case... I'm kidding, (or am I?) That time of year is meant for family and friends so of course I go off the map to enjoy myself and  over the holiday season doubling my weight in food.

But eating lots doesn't mean i haven't stopped working hard, oh no, i've been doing a lot of sketches and photoshopping which i will show over the next few weeks which i will call 'What i did during the holidays'. Don't say i spoil you too much now.. It will have a couple of sketches to show you what i did for the first side of the final major project and a couple of photoshopping escapades which to me were a fail but hey ho!

I almost forgot to put this bit in, but we have changed our idea completely. Well, sort of. Instead of our game being a 3D resource management, cart defending, tower defence game, we have changed the scale to 2 ½ D side scroller (now is when i need some 'oooohs' and 'aaaahs'), and the aim is still to defend the cart from enemies but now, the player just needs to get as far as he can. so its kind of like 'Temple Run' i guess.. get as far as you can until your cart's resources reach zero or you run out of lives. It's lessened our workload and still keeps in all of our asset production and characters that have been made for the previous concept.

For now? I am onto doing 3D work for the game at the moment, modelling one of the enemies: the Dwarf Bandit, which is almost finished, he just needs legs... Matt is working on another enemy: the Toadman, which is actually complete if my memory serves me right. And Beth is working on a few environment assets along with some awesome textures for said assets. Today, i also got a heads up about a couple of programmers joining our side who seem to be very interested in our mechanics, so everything seems to be looking up for our future finished game. Yay!

Just so this doesn't look like a boring ramble of a man who can't keep up with updating a blog, here's a picture to keep your attention to this post. It's of my WIP (or 'work in progress') of the Dwarf Bandit.

Closeup, the beard is in progress, i hope it looks awesome! :D

The amount of polygons that are highlighted.

The hand which was a pain to sculpt... :/

Side view to capture the mohawk in all of its hairy glory

So, i guess that's it... Stay tuned for the new segment coming in and ill post progress for the models as they go.

On a side note, a few people have said i should video blog... is that something you guys would like to see? Leave suggestions in the comments below and i might consider it....

Woo! Adobe Certified!

As the title says. I am now an Adobe Certified Associate! Which basically means that I have the skills to plan, design and build manageable projects in Photoshop  This also gives me greater standing for when I get into the wide world of work. The exam describes parts of project management, photo manipulation which I didn't understand that well since I only do digital painting, but overall the exam is fairly easy, so anyone viewing this looking for a line of work in design I strongly recommend you take this to increase your chances of finding a job. It makes you feel good too, the people I've talked to after doing theirs felt the same way and wanted to do more. So what are you waiting for? Go! Take it! Take it now!


Also, project-wise, here is the finished painting of the main character, its taken a little longer than expected because of dissertation work.. But do let me know how it looks and what needs improving.

Check my team's blogs out too! You know you want to!
For Matt's click here
For Beth's click here

Is my photoshopping getting better? You tell me!

As I have said in some of my few posts, I am not very good at Photoshop  So I have been practising for a couple of weeks now and I just wanted to post up a few pictures to see how my progress is coming along. So leave any comments about how my progress is coming along, or anything about my work, it will be much appreciated. (there are possibly more e-cookies if you leave a comment. I can't get rid of these fast enough!)

BEFORE: 

AFTER: 

Also a big thanks to Beth for helping me! See her blog here

Winter is coming... and too much neck...

OK... playing Assassin's Creed 3 took longer than expected... a LOT longer.... plus my dissertation got in the way... but don't fret, I have been drawing in order to carry on with the project and to show you lucky few the things I'm doing.


OK so as the title says Winter Is Coming (anyone who gets the reference: applause and  an e-cookie for you). Now as a big guy, I never really feel the cold (due to my extra 'padding'), but the other day I did.. So I made a small drawing to express my feeling for the cold so here it is..

Anyway, back to the project, a LOT has been happening since I  last posted. Character revamps again and a couple more sketches and colour tests. Now with the recent character change, I decided to do a couple more polished images because I kept varying on what he looked like, so here they are:

So as you can see, the first one was good, until Matt pointed out the neck... it had way too much neck. So back to the drawing board (even though I don't have a drawing board..) I re drew the characters so the neck didn't make him look freaky. I also decided to do colour tests. some of the colours don't really go but hey, that's why they're called tests.


Some time later.....



So last Monday we had one of our formal/informal group presentations, that went really well and saw most of the other groups projects which were going well, we then sat down and decided that the character didn't look right again, so we sat down and suggested that we go back to my first initial sketches (seen on my previous posts) and go for a shorter, stubby character. We came up with a body type that the guys were happy with but I wasn't as I thought it looked more human  so I created 6 more body types around that shape and looking at my design mood board of short and round characters. See below:

This was my preferred choice because it was very stylised

This was the body type chosen










This was one of my first sketches with the new body type, I added a scarf/ pelt to restrict the model from doing too much neck animating when put into 3D. I tried to keep the old clothing but due to the wider figure, it just didn't seem to work.

Well that's what has been happening... sorry for the long post but I'm going to try and keep up with updating now. I might even post something later if you're lucky.

Aaand while you're here check out Matt and Beth's blog too, you won't be disappointed!
for Matt's click here
for Beth's click here

Aha! Revamps and Painting!

So quite a bit has happened over the past week, we had a discussion about the characters and we wanted them more stylised as i noticed they were edging towards a more human appearance, so I sat down for an hour or so drawing new styles and mostly chewing the end of a pencil in frustration since I had artist's block most of the week. But in the end, I managed to come up with a new main character that made the other team mates happy. Plus I liked it (I guess that helps), it felt like a character that I could draw again and again but I needed to redo some of the other characters first, so I did.

I then decided to finally create something on Photoshop  Now, I've never really been that good at painting whether it be traditional or digital. I always found myself sticking to pencil drawings but as I've developed within my game design course I've tried many different things one of them being Photoshop which I didn't touch until halfway through my first year. I think that I have improved over the past couple of years but as always, I'll leave you to be the judge. 

This is the new main character. he hasn't been painted yet, but he's near completion, he has the same sort of clothing on like the previous incarnations but the body now has longer arms and a bigger head, eyes and longer mouth. It is a lot easier to model in 3D as well.

This is a design for one of the characters the main character will meet along the way, you can see on the Photoshopped image i played around with chain mail. I cant tell if it was successful or not but at least I tried

Matt insisted that there needed to be a hippie wizard in the game somewhere so I drew one. I like this design mainly because of the floating orb he's sitting on. yesterday Matt said that the smoke from the pipe should feed an orb of smoke underneath him so I'm going to play around with that as well as finish the main character. I've got a lot of work to do today considering I'm going to be off the radar tomorrow playing one of the games I've been waiting for for ages so I'll post in a few more days.

Don't forget to comment on what you see! Help is appreciated on how I can improve on my work. 

As always find my team mates blogs here:
For Matt's click here
For Beth's click here

More drawings!

We have been debating on the project mane and we came up with one two weeks ago. Project: Rocky road. I designed a logo last week to depict the name as well as our faces from left to right it's Beth, Matt and Me.

There have been quite a few changes to the game overall, head over to Matt's blog to see what's going on with the game internally and what it is about. I just focus on the game art :). 

So, here are some more drawings to keep your eyes satisfied. I will try to get more up on here but I will be focusing more on the writing side of the prject over the next couple of weeks. but ill try my best to keep updating when I can. Feel free to comment on them and I'll try to get back to you.

 For the main part of the game, we needed hero encounters so the next couple of sketches were of the potential heroes the character can interact with in the game. the first one is my favourite, mostly because of the handled weapon so on the A3 sheet I'm drawing on there are more designs of weapons he could use (I just don't have a big enough scanner to scan the whole page..) and the other one is a sort of elven character and possibly going towards a 'Legolas' angle since they are holding a bow and arrow, as like the other drawing, more designs for the bow are there too. 

 We had another discussion last week about the character himself, he should be a little older for the story we are trying to make for him. So I came up with this revamp of the character. he wears the same sort of clothing but just with a bit more bulk instead of a small childish body frame.

These also came up in a meeting last week. We wanted a sort of totem or rock for the player to save the game so I came up with these over the weekend. The first one reminds me of the golems in Dragon Age. I still don't know about the eyes.. I also flicked my pencil around on the arms to make it look like he has symbols on there. I like the second one because I thought of having an ornate wood carving as a totem. The face reminds me too much of the Pringles guy so I'm going to have to change that.. I also tried to do some celtic patterns on the wood since our university is based in Wales and the Celt pattern is everywhere

 
These are a few old concepts of the cart carrier. I gave up on designing it and focused more on the main characters but I will be returning to them when I start on the creature drawing for enemies and such.





















By the way, also look up Beth's work! She is very good with drawings and digital painting, right now shes working on the cart designs and the scenery colours, she will work on clothing for the characters as well since she likes character clothing so go visit HERE!