ESWAT

Still haven't gotten into the flow of working on my third issue...  My daughter, my wife and I are all sick, my hotmail account (which I haven't used in years) has been hacked, and all my yahoo email and contact info has been deleted. Also, my portable hard drive with a lot of my professional work has been messed up, so I can't access it.

I've gotten lazy and in between taking care of the baby, the wife and myself I've been doing hard core video game time with Sonic Racing Transformed and Mighty Switch Force on the Wii U and Bayonetta on Xbox.

Suffice to say, I haven't been working on my stuff.

However, since my last post was about shinobi, I thought to throw up some more old-school gaming art from the archives...

Now that I think about it, this dude is kinda like a mature Mega Man...

E.S.W.A.T. was my system seller for the Sega Mega Drive (Sega Genesis, whatever). I think it came with an Altered Beast pack-in (which was still all the rage back then and I also really liked), but I asked if I could swap it out with this awesome game. I think I played it at a friend's place and I really, REALLY liked it. I would go to a friends house and played all sorts of multiplayer games, so I doubt we played ESWAT much. But it made quite an impression!

I remember these sliding dudes were a pain in the butt!

The game has an arcade counterpart, but plays totally different. The home version was more like a shinobi game and had two levels where you didn't have any armor: you were just a normal cop. The difficulty was pretty hard, but it was a lot of fun. My hardcore gaming muscles have atrophied what with all the continues and save points these newfangled games have nowadays, I doubt I could hang with it anymore. I DO fondly remember towards the end the suit gets an awesome power up and you can unleashed this super attack that had you spin in place firing a GIANT laser from your arm (which overheated your suit, so it'd be a move you can't always do) destroying everything! Fun stuff.

This was a blast to mock-up. The foreground buildings were built by a coworker then I painted over it  and drew a lot of the background,scaffolding, and glow effect-y things.

Life was a lot simpler then! The Mega Drive box art for this was awesome, I remember, and googling it up shows that it still is as awesome as I remember! Anyway, that's enough nostalgia for the day!

The neverending battle (in my body and mind!) continues! God Bless and thanks for stopping by!

P.S. I remember drawing the giant green boss robot too, but I think I may have lost that along with the stuff on my hard drive! What's left of it, lives on in that screen mockup above!

Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown

I love Virtua Fighter. I'm not very good at it, but I LOVE Virtua Fighter.

Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown by Sega got released around a month ago as a downloadable game for the xbox and PS3 for 15 bucks! It's such a steal! Virtua Fighter is one of the the deepest fighting games out there. I was so excited when it finally came out onto the console since it was only available in the arcades for awhile.

I drew up some sketches of the characters, while waiting for things to render at work. I worked really messy with a ball-point pen. They're not very finished, but I liked how loose I got drawing like this.

Jacky Bryant is the character I like playing as.

 Jacky was the first character I drew, and I was still still trying to get used to drawing in this style, so it's a bit stiff. I missed a lot of details in his jacket too. I like the cheesy one-liners the characters would say in the games so I incorporated some of their lines in the drawings.

Of the newer characters, I liked trying to learn El Blaze.

 My anatomy still needs a lot of work, so this next one you can still see I was struggling a lot with the drawing. However, this way of drawing lets me be messy and make mistakes, and it's okay! Everything looks like a mess anyways!

A friend of mine, likes to man Jeffrey as his fighter.

There was a lot of re-drawing going on in this Jeffery sketch, but I got it to something that I'm okay with.

UPDATE: I did this Sarah drawing the day after I posted this first batch. I just had to include her line. I remember doing a double-spit-take the first time I heard her say it in the game (VF2?). Also looks like I have some different tasks going on at work so this might be the last of these sketches...

Not really the pose she was in when she said this.

I love Virtua Fighter. Have I mentioned how much I love Virtua Fighter? Awhile ago, I randomly ran into Yu Suzuki, the creator of the game, at an E3 right as he was leaving, and I just had to have him sign my copy! Check it out:

Probably not worth anything, but worth a lot to me!

It's sad that more people don't play this game. It's actually pretty easy to get into, just 3 buttons, block, punch and kick. It's definitely not as flashy as any of the other fighters out there, but man, the satisfaction of actually figuring out a character is pretty amazing. I also love that button mashing is not rewarded in this game, scrubs will get punished.

Anyhow, that's it for today. On a random note: I'm getting my free preview tickets for The Dark Knight Rises tomorrow! YAY! Good night and God bless.

Adopt a Rainforest

No posts on my comic book today, just kinda taking it easy before I dig back into it and draw the cover for the second issue.

So as a 'filler' post, I dug up something I worked on awhile back. I freelanced a bit for a company called LOLapps on a facebook game called "Adopt A Rainforest". I don't think it's up anymore because A) the landing page on Facebook only said it had 10 active users a day and B) When I try to connect it just gives me an error message!

This was my second social gaming gig I think, so it's interesting for me to see this body of work nowadays. I produced a lot of assets for the game. Come to think of it, I think I produced all the assets for it! But before I get into that, let me start at the beginning: it started out with a test.

I was given some character design parameters and look that LOLapps was trying to go for with this new game they were developing. I can barely remember what the parameters were, but this is what I submitted:

I have very little knowledge in working with Illustrator or Flash, so I did this guy in Photoshop. Luckily, the client liked what they saw and I landed the job. I recall that they were hiring other freelancers, but I think they must've settled to use just me (I could be wrong). Of course if I had known I'd be the only one producing art for this game I think I would've freaked out and not done it at all!

Anyhow, I produced a bunch of work and all of it was done after my regular job. So I would usually clock in another 3-4 hours a night extra once I got home. It was VERY tiring, but I must admit it was also good experience. I was producing, I think, 1 of these assets within 30 mins. I think I was averaging 45 mins to an hour per asset. The client wanted me to work faster and they seemed pretty happy with what I was producing...

Animal Character Designs

I think the fact that I worked so fast was stressful, but also very fun. I clocked my time, and budgeted what I could get away with with my schedule in mind. I think that disciplined me a lot to not dwell and move on to the next one. Admittedly, they're not all great designs, but there are maybe a couple in there that I still like.

Events

I learned alot about color and silhouettes with this project. Because I was working at a small size, I had to make sure things were clear and distinct.

Supplies

After these submissions, the client asked me if I could provide a background that all this art could reside on. I wasn't really thinking of backgrounds when I generated the art, so that was a little difficult to design. Backgrounds aren't quite my strength, I'm afraid. Still, it turned out okay.

Background

When I saw the game in action however, I wasn't quite that pleased with how they interacted with each other. I guess I didn't really plan ahead in how these things looked together.

Later on they asked me to generate a banner for them too. Of course I wasn't that great of a graphic artist either, but I dove in for that assignment as well anyway! Here are the designs I came up with: 

The last one ended up being the final comp that they liked.

It was pretty tough maintaining my day job and this at night. I was pretty tired, so I was quite happy once I shipped off the last of the assets for this game. While the freelancing gave me some great pocket money on the side and  invaluable lessons for my art, it was quite tiring. I don't thtink I'd be able to handle something like that anymore!

That's it for this post! God Bless and good morning!

Sleepy Genius' 1942: Joint Strike step by step design

I'm taking a quick break this post. And just wanted to focus this on a friend of mine's blog.

Before I started worked at Zynga, I was working for a console development company called Backbone Entertainment. I was there for around 10 years, and a I worked on quite a few games there. A few didn't turn out so hot I have to admit, and even though I never got to make the perfect game, I do have a handful of favorites from that list! One of them is 1942: Joint Strike for XBLA and PSN.

I was the art lead on that project and the lead designer on that project was Marcus Montgomery. He's set up a post recently that details a very cool step-by-step of the work that went through some of the decisions he made for that game. It's a great post and really opens up the nooks and crannies (trials and errors!) of the intricacies of designing a game.

I mean, how crazy of a responsibility is it to be a game designer, right? Design makes it all work. For design to function correctly, it pulls all the disciplines together and makes 'em sing. While I love making the art and all, what really sticks to me as a player is how fun the game is, how balanced it is, how challenging it is, how unique it is; usually everything else once I get past the visuals! Basically, art gets me to look at a game, but it's the design that gets me to love it.

Anyhow, click the link and have a gander at the sleepy genius.

I also have a couple of old posts here and there on this blog for you to check out too. Good night and God Bless!

My Cityville Work

I've been working at Zynga as a 2D/3D artist for almost 10 months now, and it's been pretty busy! Being part of the launch team for Cityville would do that! The thing I enjoy the most about being there, is the opportunity to be able to draw again for a living. When video games started shifting heavily to 3D artwork, I had to adapt and learn 3D programs and a majority of my work relied less on my drawing skills. But with social games, there's still a large need for art to actually be drawn! On Cityville, I get to utilize both my 3D skills with animation and from time to time, I pinch hit to help out the 2D staff.

If you're familiar with Facebook social games, you'll know the games rely on spamming your friends' walls to get them to keep playing, get rewards and advertise the game. Well, I get to make that spam! The character designs for the game aren't mine so it's a style that I had (and still continue to) wrestle with and try to get down. Also, a lot of these assets have to get pumped out quick, so you'll see me struggle through some of these; there's quite a few mistakes in there that make me cringe now that I see them again. 

Here's a few examples of my process. Not very different for how I draw my comic book! The art on the far right is the final version seen in the game.

I usually work at around 4 times the size of the actual icon, and I use Photoshop, because I'm not that savvy with Flash (yet!). I shrank down some of the preliminary stages just to keep everything uniform. 

Above are some icons for materials that you'd collect in the game. I found these to be a lot of fun (in the problem solving kind of way) to do. You might notice, with these icons I start going nutty on making things shiny! It was kinda neat to play around with effects so forgive me if I went overboard!

Below, I tried to organize the icons in chronological order from my earliest work to the latest ones. It's really interesting to see my progress and what I have problems with or what colors I tend to go with. There's a LOT of iteration that goes into these icons, sometimes even a complete re-do after it's colored in and finalized. And with tight deadlines it can be very stressful and nerve-wracking!  But all in all it's done for the good of the game. 

I sneaked myself into the second icon. I just couldn't resist! Here's a hint: I'm not the lumberjack.

By pumping out so much of these and with so many iterations and corrections, I've been able to learn quite alot and I feel get better at drawing and drawing for a deadline. I have a lot of issues with perspective still, and have learned how to cut corners but still provide an interesting image. And, of course, composition plays such a giant factor. These icons are such a great exercise, requiring me to find new solutions for storytelling, color theory, clarity and hitting deadlines! Some of these lessons I can see are already seeping their way into my comic!

And that's it for tonight. Good night and God bless you as much as He has me! Heck, more!

Super Delicious Space Cowboys

Well, let's see... where to start? A lot of things have happened since my last post!

I'm happily married now, I quit my old job and have a brand-spanking new one, and Wondercon is right around the corner and my 2nd book is not even close to being finished! Okay, that should get us all caught up.

I'm trying to get back into the groove of things and get back to the comic. Planning a wedding and Honeymoon and all that can be quite a schedule changer! For the meanwhile, I'm going to throw up some freelance work I did a couple years back. This work was for a facebook app called Super Delicious Space Cowboys done by Ohai. I was hired to do some character designs and assets for the game.

It's interesting to dig up these because they really do show the process of designing. From my initial concepts all the way to the final product, you can see all the back and forth that goes on between me and the client. I thought it might be a kick to share that here.

Though... I have to admit there are QUITE few drawings in there that make me cringe looking at them! Warts and all on this blog right? Anyway...

This first guy was a monk character. It was kinda hard to pin down what the client had wanted for this character so you can see the look and the attitude for him is always changing. I'm not too keen on the final pose or design of the character I ended up with, but as long as the client is happy, then so am I!

This next one, was for a hacker-type character. I liked the second pose I drew and brought that through to the final. As far as design goes I think I'm more biased toward the third green sketch I did with the hood.

This guy was the first one I designed from the bunch and I think this nailed the look and attitude for the client. We got rid of the mecha arm and kept it closer to a real cowboy design.

I remember this last character was a tough one as well; a diplomatic like character I believe was the description. The initial direction was to make her regal, like Cate Blanchett-y type (we can all see that I cannot draw likenesses too well from that second sketch, huh?). But we took her to a different direction later, owing a lot more to Inara of Firefly for inspiration.

Anyway, I need to go to sleep! Check out Super Delicious Space Cowboys on Facebook here if you want to see the final product. Good night and God Bless!

Space Invaders Exteme

I worked on Taito's Space Invaders Extreme for the XBLA a few months back. I helped with upresing the graphics of the game and adding some extra spit and polish (it's out now, go buy it!). It was fun to go back into manipulating pixel art again. With all the new fangled 3D art I've been doing, it was good to do the 2D again, even if it was just processing the stuff.



But hey I couldn't have asked for a better game to process the art for! I was a big fan of the DS version of the game when it first came out, so it was a blast to be able to tag my name on the legendary franchise (even in a tiny, tiny way)!



These pictures are some wallpapers for the xbla downloadable content I got to create. That's it for tonight, I'll see if I can post up some work I've been doing for The Bomb Squad #2 next. Good night and God Bless!

Bare Knuckle

I'm a Sega guy.

While everybody was growing up going nutty over Super Mario, Mario Kart, Metroid and Zelda: Ocarina of Time on their Super Famicoms (I guess I should say SNES since I'm in the US now!), I was spending all my hard earned allowance/chore money on my Sega Mega Drive (Genesis, I mean!) and absolutely loving Golden Axe, Eswat, Sonic and of course, Bare Knuckle (cough, Streets of Rage, cough).




I love beat 'em ups and Bare Knuckle and all it's three iterations will always hold a special place in my childhood.

I mean how could you go wrong? No boring exploration, collecting coins or talking to villagers. Just me fighting crime with my two fists and eating random pieces of meat hidden in barrels!

Everytime I hear Axel's grainy "Gran Uppa!" battle cry going over Yuzo Koshiro's thumping music, it brings a geeky tear to my eye. What can I say, I really love these games!

Drawing these guys was so much fun! As I was working on these, I would remember playing the games over and over during those summers in Hong Kong; beating up on Mr. X and his army of punks.


Adam (the dude above) never really made it back as a playable character after the first game, so it was cool to give him a slight update but still stay true to what he looked like.

Can't really go wrong with jeans and a shirt, so I didn't mess with Axel's get up too much. Gran Uppa!!

I remember having a crush on Blaze, back then. But man, put some clothes on girl! Kikousho!

And of course, I gotta draw one of the punks they beat up on, right? Complete with 'droppable' pipe and knife that you can use to beat up his other homies with! I hated those knife guys!

These were such a joy to draw, they totally transported me back to those worry-free days. Well! Enough nostalgia for now, the neverending battle continues! Gran Uppa!

1942 and WOTB: ego boost

Well, I just came back from my vacation in the Philippines! Apparently I'm more jet-lagged than I thought as I slept for 12 hours and woke up at 1 in the afternoon today. I still have a lot of unpacking and laundry to do. I miss my family already and the fact that I'm leaving the really nice weather of the Philippines for my cold lonely San Francisco apartment makes it even worse!

Luckily, whilst surfing the internet to catch up on my usual stuff, I landed on a certain top 20 chart for XBLA's most downloaded games of 2008. On it, are two of the games I worked on (1942 and Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3)! Yay! Number 14 and 19 respectively!

So in light of that, I'm posting a test video I did for how I wanted the special move effect done in Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3 done. I mocked up this anim with the original assets from Mercs and I think a Chrono Trigger background (I can't remember, game nerds, please correct me). The explosions were mine from the GBA version of Grand Theft Auto and the concept art of Wolf's face is from Sach Steffel. So click away at the link below!



For a peek at how it ended up looking in the game there's a clip of it in here (scrub to 0:22 for the start of one):



Okay, enough bragging and ego boosting! I go back to the grind tomorrow! Good afternoon, God Bless and a belated Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3 - Minesweeper/Coyote

Next up on the Wolf of the Battlefield front is Coyote. The red bandana wearing Rambo look-alike was never part of the initial character designs I had drawn up. What he was before was an explosives expert/minesweeper. I got a few reference materials on bomb diffusal equipment and sketched up his initial design.




He ended up being one of my more favorite designs from this game. I actually took his arm design from a previous design I did for Backbone (way back when we were still called Digital Eclipse). Since that old design was never used, I was happy to work it back into the minesweeper.

Alas ol' minesweeper didn't have such a happy ending. Midway (pun intended) through the project cycle, Capcom had switched management teams. We had lost our Capcom side producer. The new management wasn't quite happy with a few of our characters. They had wanted to change a few of the designs and sadly, the minesweeper got the ax. In his place, they wanted Rambo:


Apparently, he looked too much like Rambo. I didn't know this but Sly Stallone didn't really like other people using his likeness, even in a parody. I had heard that he had sued other video game companies for having his likeness. So, in an effort not to get the pants sued off of us, upon Capcom's request, I went through a few re-designs of the head.


I had already designed a few UI screens with the minesweeper, and because I really liked his design it was really painful to redraw everything all over again.

Really painful.

I think I was already close to my breaking point at this time, but I still had to push through. I remmeber trying to draw the options screen and I was just having such a difficult time trying to get the drawing to look right. No matter how much time I spent on it, I was simply too tired to get that drawing right. It still looks kinda funny, but it's passable.



So, while I like how the Rambo character turned out, I really do miss the grumpy ol' Minesweeper. Well at least, my blog will be the only time he'll be able to see the light of day. So here's to the old codger! That's all for tonight! Good night and God Bless.

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.