Wondercon 2009 Day 3

Hoooo-wheeeee! Wondercon is over and I am beat! Day three wasn't as insane as Day two, but not as mellow as Day 1. It was raining that day, but people still braved the weather and there was a good amount. Saturday was such an awesome day for sales I only had 7 copies left to sell, and sell them I did! I actually sold out!

Sue! Wheat! I am very thankful to all the people that came by the booth and bought a copy of my book. Every bit of encouragement helps for me to keep on going! I'm also very thankful for the guys over at Ghostbot for letting me share their space and work the booth. And of course, I'm very thankful to God that He's given me the opportunity to be able to pursue a dream I've had since I was a kid!

It was a very tiring weekend and we were all on our last legs because of the madness of Saturday, but we all trooped on and managed to push a few books. I took a quick break and visited a couple friends of mine from RISD: Andy Ristaino and Chris Bennett.

I hung out with them at the end of the first day and we ended up going into a CBLDF sponsored auction where people could donate sketches for people to buy and have the proceeds go to the CBLDF. That was a lot of fun, I don't think I've just sat around drawing with other artists in a long time! Anyway, it was cool to see Andy and Chris again.

I think the biggest highlight for me happened around the end of the day, as we were breaking down the booth. We were handing out free sketches that day, but ended up having one left over. It was a drawing by Brad and it was just kinda laying around at the booth, when a little girl with her father walked by. I figured, why let the sketch go to waste? And told them they could have a free sketch. At first they were in disbelief when I told them, but they were so happy when I gave them the drawing.

They wanted to thank the artist that drew it, but unfortunately Brad was taking a lunch break (yeah, his lunch was at 4:45 or something that day!). Still, they were very happy and I caught glimpses of the daughter showing off her cool Wondercon Sketch to the rest of the family. Brad had finally returned and while we were telling him how his sketch made a little girl's day, that family passed by the booth again.

They were so happy to see the man who had created the sketch, and immediately wanted to snap a picture with him. They wholeheartedly thanked Brad and It was so cool to see the geniune appreciation they had for him and his sketch.

After a week of just busting out sketches, putting on our salesmen gamefaces and worrying about how to sell as much of our stuff as possible, it was nice to see someone actually appreciate the artist behind the sketches. It was a good way to end our first con!

At the end of the day, packing up the Ghostbot/ Bomb Squad booth was pretty efficient with all four of us pitching in.

That's it for tonight's post! Wondercon is over and the neverending battle continues! Goodnight and God Bless!

Wondercon 2009 Day 2

When I got to Wondercon on Friday, the foot traffic was not bad. A few people stopped by, some customers who had never seen my work bought a few copies of my book, and it was good. But, it didn't seem like I could sell much.

This is my Day 2 shirt. day 2 was such a rush, I took this picture while brushing my teeth. That's my toothbrush in my mouth in the upper left corner...


Anyway, upon entering Day two I had similar sale expectations for Saturday as I did on Friday. The Ghostbot guys whom I was sharing the booth with were also thinking the same thing. So to drum up foot traffic, they had decided to offer free sketches. They even let me tag along and do a few sketches of my characters! This is the booth at early morning setup:

And sure enough, once that "Free Sketches" sign went up, boom! Actually, more like KRAKA-SROOMA-DOOM! There was a flood of people all over the booth! The Ghostbot guys had to keep a waiting list and have people come back to the booth to get the sketches! On top of the free sketch idea, the crowd was different on Saturday.

A lot more families, kids, teenagers, people with costumes, R2D2's, The Watchmen, Spiderman back packs... you name it! Everybody and their mother was there (Actually one of the Ghostbot guys mother was really there)! It was that double whammy that just made the day go by so quickly because we were all drawing sketches at such a breakneck speed, selling the books, hob-nobbing with the fans... whooo!

Here's a view from my corner of the booth as I witnessed the power of Ghostbot! I didn't get fifth Ghostbot, Kris into the pic who dealt out some sketch madness as well...

I don't think I've ever drawn my character that fast in so many poses! But for every sketch I did, each Ghostbot must've done 3 in that time! I mean, I know the amount of work these guys (and gal!) have to do on a normal workday, but I've never seen them in their working state! And lemme tell ya that was impressive! It was like that scene in Raiders of the Lost ark when Marion and Indy have to shut their eyes when the Holy Spirit is released from the Ark! I had to close my eyes otherwise I would melt like a Evil Nazi with glasses...

Here's a pic of Ghostbot breaking down the booth at the end of the day... What a day!

Anyway, the day went by so fast and a few friends came by, I met a few nice people in publishing and people also trying to get their own stuff going, it was really fun. Thanks to my friends who brought by food, I didn't really leave the booth much but we were well stocked with Beard Papas, Dim Sum from Yank Sing, a Turkey sandwhich from Firewood and Beef pot pies! Yeah, I ate alot!

I've almost sold out of my stock! I think I have 7 books left. Definitely, my sales were better than I expected, I was actually hoping to just sell 10! Good thing my friend told me to print more and I bumped it up to 50. So, thanks to everyone who bought my book! You guys definitely made me more optimistic in cranking out more issues! Okay, I gotta get ready for Day 3! Woooondercoooon! And Awwwaaaayyy!

Wondercon 2009 Day 1

I survived day 1 of the Wondercon! Whoo! Pretty cool to be on the other side of the table, but also pretty tiring! I took a few pictures:

Here's my Wondercon Beef Brisket Breakfast from this hole in the wall restaurant around my neighborhood. Yum! See my name tag? It says 'Exhibitor'! Oooooooo...


Here's a shot of a shirt I had made of Bombgirl from my book to promote my Comic Book.


Here's me having a total dork out at the beginning of the day over by my area.


It was pretty cool to have people drop by and say they like the book. I think my favorite moments were when I'd catch people do a double take and actually stop and look at the book. Even if they didn't buy it, there's a certain sense of satisfaction to know the Bomb Squad was able to attract attention. Especially in a place where everything else is asking for attention!

I think it was good that I changed the name to "The Bomb Squad" rather than "Bombgirl". When I heard someone else say it (someone I didn't know), it sounded nice to hear it. A little shout out to my buddy Roque for suggesting I alter the the title a little!

I shared a booth with Ghostbot and their producer extraordinair, Corrine Lau, hooked Ghostbot up with a goodie bag, filled with food and water for the day. And she also made one for me too! Thanks Corrine! And the best part of the goodie bag? Everything in it was "Ghostbotted"! Awesome!


Whew! I am beat! Day 2 here I come! Good night and God Bless!

Wondercon Bound!

I'm going to Wondercon this year, but for the first time ever I'll actually be on the other side of the booth! My friends from Ghostbot had a little extra space that they have generously shared with me! Here're the details:

Wondercon
Booth 415
February 27 - March 1
Moscone Center South
San Francisco, CA

I'm really excited to be able to jump in and actually take my first step into the comic book industry! And with the Ghostbot guys to boot! I've just been in my safe little apartment producing my comic book, but I've never truly let it loose on the general public (Sure I post up some pages on my blog but that's like 2 people seeing it!). I'm anxious to see how it's recieved!

And the Wondercon will be my ground zero! I'm selling the comic book itself as well as a Sketchbook edition. I just got the copies a few days ago and now all the promotional stuff I have is set up. Have a look-see:

To see all this stuff together is definitely a cool feeling. Multiple copies of my book, a big ol' poster of the cover, the shirts, buying little frame thingys to hold my comic book upright... it's so surreal. True, I haven't sold a thing yet, but it's such a blast for me to realize, whether it fails or suceeds, this is the launch of my book! The neverending battle is beginning!

If you're going to the con, drop on by and say hi! Good Morning and God bless!

Robot concepts

Today, I just successfully got my router to work! Now my 360, PS3, Wii and PC can now be on at the same time! The possibilites are limitless!

Now with my PS3 and Wii updating themselves, I'm just popping on my PC for a quick post on some old concept art I did with robots...

A lot more misses than hits, but hey, what can ya do!

Until next post, God Bless!

The Jetsons

Just posting up a couple of Jetsons drawings I previously did. I never really watched a lot of the Jetsons growing up. I saw a lot more Flintstones instead.

But doing some research when I was prepping up for these drawings was a lot of fun. It was cool to see how these characters were constructed and trying to figure them out. Plus it was a great excuse to watch some episodes!

This first one I did was pretty much standard, by the numbers action shot.


Some people had remarked that it looked like the Jetsons vs. Arvin's robots. And it pretty much is because I hadn't had the chance to soak up the Hanna Barbera style at the time I drew this (... still haven't!)

This second one was a little unorthodox. It started off quickly and I was pretty confident that I got the composition figured out so 'easily'. Oh how little did I know! Here's the early thumbnail:

The finish was a struggle. The shape of the drawing changed many times and I was trying to wrap my head around how it would work. I drew the image in 3 different segments and I had to manipulate those assets in the computer later. I was fighting with it until the end, it was pretty frustrating.

I ended up with this crazy long image. Kinda cool I suppose but rather unwieldy and odd! Oh well, that's what I get for charging in there like the Sandman with no back up from the sinister six (snort)!

This Episode of the Jetsons was a pretty good one! See if you can track it down! Eep! Opp! Ork! Ah! Ah!

Until next time! Good Night and God Bless!

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!

My Comic: The test print

I haven't been putting up new posts about my comic book progress because I didn't want to post so much that people wouldn't want to read the final thing when I got it done! Anyway, I have a new post now about my comic! Tan ta da duuun!

Issue number 1 is all done and colored! I'm missing a cover, but the all the heavy lifting is done!

I was so excited to finish I wanted to see it in print ASAP! I sent off a test print to this company called ka-blam. I heard about them through Keith Erickson, a friend of mine at work. He published his own Dr. Pineapple comic book with them. The print he showed me of his black and white book was pretty nice, and apparently they do full color stuff as well.

The wait between sending my order and getting it was excruciatingly long, even though it really only took a week! I just wanted it already! When my book came, I was so giddy. I mean, sure nobody else sees this thing on shelves and all, but to finally have it in my hands... the feeling's priceless.

After around a year of working on this thing, it felt really good to have it in my hot little hands! It felt kinda good to tell people, oh yeah, I'm working on my comic book, here! Have a look! It's a crazy feeling for me to be able to do that.

The colors came out pretty good considering how saturated most of my schemes are. It's also a good guide for me to see how my digital colors look like in print. I'm still having trouble getting the hot pink I like to use to show up!

I'm so ecstatic over having it physically here, all stapled and everything, I don't think it's quite sunk in yet: what do I do with it?! I'm not quite selling it online yet, as I want to do it when I'm close to finishing the story arc, so I think I should show it around to publishers and editors. Get some kinda feedback, reaction, whatever.

But, I don't really know how to do that.

Nonetheless it's part of my dream, right? So this coming year, I'll definitely push myself out the door and put on my hob-nobbing game face and hit the comic book conventions and see what happens! Not my greatest strength, but definitely something I'm going to have to do, or else I won't know if my book can succeed or fail.

Anyway, that's next year's conundrum and prayer! For now, I think I'll just sit happily thumbing through the comic I made for an audience of one (so far!).

It's been a long road, with so many stops and starts, and I am very thankful to God that He's given me the strength to see this first issue through. That's it for this post! Good day and God Bless! The neverending battle continues!

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.

Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3 - For Sano

Well, WOTB: Commando 3 has been out on the PSN and XBLA for a couple of weeks now and I've been closely looking at the reviews and the comments from a few forums. And it's been getting a mixed bag of reviews. Our average review score is landing at around 65%. Our highest so far has been an 85% from 1up.com and the Lowest is a 40% from Giant Bomb.

It seems I've really ticked off a lot of people with the art style I chose, especially in my character designs. In one case it seems to have really grated on a reviewer's nerves so much that He couldn't even get past how atrocious my stuff was that it basically brought the score of the whole game down! Here are a few examples of people's comments on my art work:

"The logos, menu layouts and pause screens are well-done, but the character art kills the overall package. Sorry folks, this one just doesn't catch the eye. Environments are nothing special, attention to detail is sometimes lacking, and did we mention the character art?"
- Ryan Geddes review, ign.com

"yea... not to be excessively critical, but im in the art industry. and i gotta say, the character art in this game is really weak. it looks like something i'd pull out of my a55 back in college when the the deadline for an assignment was 1 day away and i didnt even start working on it yet."
- 'drtaco99', Gamefaqs poster

"I think the art/style is fugly and low-budget looking. It doesn't match the series, type of game or even anything else Capcom is known for. I really hope this is the last game to use it since I'd rather have NO art than BAD art. The explosions and environments are decent looking without that cartoony crap spoiling it.."
- 'CrossHanded', Gamefaqs poster

"for an indie developer, i'd be less harsh on the artwork. this is Capcom, though, and i'm sure they could have spent the $100 bills they light their $1000 cigars with to get one of their regular artists to put a portfolio together." -'xenodolf', Gamefaqs poster

While I've developed a fairly thick skin for criticism for my art and being able to decipher constructive criticism from even the worst critic, I don't think I expected to get such a negative reaction from a lot of fans.

I think it's safe to say that if a sequel for this game would be made (which I doubt), I definitely shouldn't be a part of it! It's quite a blow to the ego reading some of the postings. People will go out of their way to state how they didn't like the character designs, but otherwise they enjoyed the game. For awhile, I really felt like I brought the team down.

In any case, I know I gave it my best shot. I definitely did not want to make another 'realistic' looking game. I'm one of the few that's pretty much sick to my stomach seeing the same old boringly-designed-space-marine-versus-boringly-designed-space-aliens-FPS. The way I see it, if other people can have their boring mediocre designs drive their games, why can't I have my boring mediocre designs out there too!

The thing is, I didn't think people would hate my drawings this much! One poster took a line from Dane Cook and said the art made him want to punch babies (that ran as our office in-joke for quite some time)!

Anyway, don't worry I'm okay, I've gotten over just how bad of an artist I am. Case in point: I just watched Wall-e. And I am both amazed at how awesome the Pixar artists are, and depressed at far I have to go as an artist!

Anyway! In one of the forums I ran across this one poster named 'Sano'. Now this guy didn't like my art either, but there was one thing I did that he liked. Here's what he said in the posts from the Capcom-Unity Boards (I'm 'Biggedy' by the way, and 'CapKraig' is the Capcom-side producer of WOTB: Commando 3):



I had initially thought it'd be a funny reference if I made the Commando's prison outfits mirror another Capcom character's prison duds. In this case it was Cody, from Street Fighter Alpha 3. It was a fun, but maybe a little obscure way of sneaking in an in-joke.


So when Sano posted, I was so happy that someone actually caught my reference! I was so pleasantly happy that day! One dude! One dude got my reference! Cool! That one guy expressing his appreciation for my in-joke (not even my art, really!), tipped the hate-scales for me by a lot. In my pessimistic head it went like this:

"Maybe nobody liked my art and maybe I caused the game to be brought down a few notches of where it could've been, but one guy actually got my gag! Cool!"

I think I would've been fine if it ended at that. But a few days later, Sano came back to post a screenshot of the panel he liked so much. Wow! He really liked it!


But that screenshot's too blurry, so...


This one's for you Sano, perhaps the only one I managed to entertain with my art! Thanks for single-handedly picking me back up from "my-art-sucks" land and bringing me back to "my-art-sucks-but-maybe-I-can-get-better-someday" land! And in true neverending battle style, here's the rough thumbnail of the drawing:


That's it for me! Good night, er, good morning all and God Bless!