1942: Plane concepts

Here's a couple concept pieces I did for 1942: Joint Strike. With the constant back and forth we had with the client designing characters for Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3, we decided that we wanted a less character driven 1942. It was such a back-breaking endeavor for me to create cutscenes and try to single handedly do all the character design work for C3: WOTB, that cutting out characters for 1942 sounded like such a good idea (even though I like having characters in the game).

I had actually started warming up to the world war 2 characters theme outside of work, on my free time, and even created some characters. Luckily, we shot that idea down from the get go, otherwise I'd be so burnt out after shipping 1942. For 1942, the characters were the planes themselves and not so much the pilots. So I went about drawing a P38 Lightning and a D98 Mosquito.


Boy, these sketches just proved to me how much practice I need with vehicles and perspective! I am so bad at vehicles, it's not even funny! I had such a hard time getting these things to look like some form of plane! This task definitely led me to a great appreciation of technical illustrators and industrial designers.

That's it for this morning! Next post, I'll go back to the character designs of Commando 3! Sa susunod...!

1942: Joint Strike is out!

The other game I worked on for the PSN and XBLA is out! 1942: Joint strike is now available for download!

The Lead Designer of the game, Marcus Montgomery, and I have been busy watching the message boards and reading through some remarks about how sucky our game is and thereby effectively lowering our self-esteem for the day (sometimes for the week!). Sigh. Can't seem to please anybody! Anyways.

Here are some 'turnaround' sheets I mocked up at the beginning of the project. The schematics of the planes are collected from various internet airplane sites (thank you various internet sites!). I overlaid some colors and mocked up the in-game planes' paint jobs.




Later on during production it was decided not to have specific countries tied to the planes. So we got rid of the American, Japanese and British markings. With these 'turnaround' sheets, I tried to give the UI artist, Diana Fong, some kind of reference to show her what I was thinking for the menus, and at the same time help give the modelers schematics to work off of.

The idea was mainly to give the game a very old-timey, sepia, sky captain-y look. So I went so far as to take a look at some pamphlets and their typography back then. I really liked how they mixed cursive and bold print in the references we had gathered, so I aped that in the mockups. We wanted to do propaganda posters, but I told Diana I wanted to lean more towards the American ones and not so much the usual German army type ones we've always seen.

I'm also posting up a line up of the silhouette sheet I created for Marcus and I to take a look at for our propsed plane types, relative scales (which is all fake) as well as bahavior types. This sheet was handy for us to have a quick glance at which silhouettes were working and distinctive enough for us to use. Marcus had some aversion to the flying pancake, but I wanted that in no matter what! So we made a compromise. I actually cannot remember what ithat compromise was life of me, but I got to keep the flying pancake! Yaaaay!


Tomorrow, I'll post up some concept art I drew up for the Mosquito and the Lightning. It's a great example of why I shouldn't be drawing vehicles! Haha! Alright until next post! Good night and God Bless.