Meet the Medic and then hide your wounds.

I could write a book about how busily busy I’ve been lately, which would contain an inhumane amount of grammatical errors, captions, which, when read backwards would destroy the very fabric of existence, and the secret ingredient in my recipe for homemade tiffin (and it’s not yeti blood this time!). But I won’t do that, because nobody would read it, which is why I’m writing this blog post, so nobody can read that, too.

Here’s the medic. He needs a name, so for all intents and purposes, he’s called Glob. Glob likes long bike rides on a Sunday morning so he can feel a cool breeze whoosh through his ventilation fans. He also likes to feed geese and to hack the limbs and flesh off live humans so he can figure out what components they keep inside their shells. So far he’s discovered that his oil tank cannot be filled with human blood, saliva or feces, but when all mixed together with corrosive acid they make a disgustingly powerful cocktail he likes to call Liquid Life. Death is almost imminent upon consumption.

Here are my initial bodily sketches for him, which, if you look carefully, don’t look carefully. He has a very similar body type to the ranger, but I don’t need to tell you that because you’re not even reading this, and if you are, the sensation of feeling slightly less smart and reading this blog post are completely uncorrelated. Maybe. Probably not. There’s a slight chance that… I’m sorry.

Glob did try to synergise some his body parts with human parts, which is how he acquired this brain. Long story short, it turns out brains need something called oxygen to function. Who’d have thought, eh? Not Glob. He died within fourteen minutes of making the connection, to be found seven minutes later by the Fembot who smashed his body onto the face of the nearest robot. Glob was grateful. I won’t detail how robots express that emotion (there’s a corkscrew, a whisk and seven wooden spoons involved).

Glob liked the body the Fembot patched him up with so much that he decided to keep it and get a paint job. He thought green looked good. He thought green looked good.

Heading over to the Outfitters and Glob knows style if it punched him in the face. Because it did. Repeatedly. The Fembot wasn’t there to repair his face this time so Glob has to hide his scars with this mask. Stylish, right? The mask also punched him in the face.

Being £176.98 lighter and 176.98lbs heavier, Glob ventured into the world a free, careless and foolish robot. For there is no freedom out there, only death. Oh, and also his companions: the ranger, the dembot and the fembot, who would fight cog and bolt beside him, until every last enemy lay broken and written-off in the wasteland before them. And for that, Glob was grateful. We’re going to need more wooden spoons.

The Demolition Bot – Now With Real Napalm!

Not exactly what it says on the tin, but close enough (but that’s not close enough). Here is the Demolition Bot, or Dembot for short. But we could go even shorter than that and call him Screw, which is what he’s actually called and also not what he’s actually called, because I’m in the process of getting it changed to Doomsday. Even that isn’t his real name, as his full title is intended to be Doom ‘Doomsday’ Martinez. Catchy, right?

As the name would suggest, the Dembot deals in explosives – and I mean explosives! The kind that even hiding under a rickety wooden table won’t shield you from, and then some. His weapon of choice is dynamite, and rightly so, from one robot to another, you don’t stand a chance against dynamite. Unless you’re Die-no-mite 3000.

As with every character, I start off with the trusty thumbnailing process. A month or so back, I created a master thumbnail sheet for a wad of different body shapes – you can find the image here – and the team were smitten by ‘O’ and dubbed him as our Demobot from the get-go. I envisioned him to be a petite robot carrying a huge backpack full of explosives and warheads.

 

From the final versions, the second robot was the most aesthetic, but with the backpack from one. Once this decision was made, I scaled the robot up and took him through to shading and colour.

 

I’m a sucker for purple and green, and I think in this instance it makes the Dembot look really radioactive, but in terms of complementing the other characters and their colour schemes, it’s a no-go. So we settled on the more diluted teal tones. Now the furnace, that’s a funky idea, the Dembot could ignite his dynamite on his own fire. But it looks like a mouth. And now you can’t unsee that. It drove me crazy when that seed had sewn and I couldn’t see the grill as anything but a mouth, so I quickly (and might I stress roughly) knocked out some alternate face plates for this character. With the mouth gone, he looks cuter and less likely to backchat.

As no one likes to see robo-booty (unless you do like to see robo-booty, in which case, I’m speaking indirectly), it’s time to put some clothes on the little fella, lest he freeze to death, which, for a robot, would just make him more efficient than ever. So, if anything, clothing him is only going to increase the chances of him overheating. Shoot. Looks like we’re going to have to get used to enjoying the sight of robo-booty after all.

 

If my subtle use of stereotyping wasn’t a dead enough giveaway for you, the Dembot is Mexican, at least that’s what it says in his pants… Which to me said either bandito or mariachi. There’s a certain finesse to the mariachi, which, quite frankly, the Dembot just doesn’t have. He’s crazy and wild, he’ll throw dynamite around like they’re dollar bills at a strip club and then he’ll blow up the place because he was actually just throwing dynamite around. So bandito it is then! Except less poncho, more moustache.

 

And here he is. 61% crazy, 19% dangerous, 52% scrap metal and 100% terrible at Mathematics. If he runs out of ammo in his barrel the bomb strapped to his chest will go boom. He’s here to blow stuff up and blow stuff up… and he’s all out of blow stuff up.

If you want a more current news on the project, please follow our Twitter @CVG_Studio42.

Robot Cowboys vs Robot Indians

With the second year of university well and truly behind me, the journey into third year commences. I like to call it 2.5 year, but it doesn’t seem to be catching on. The task for us now is to get a hefty start on our third year game. And boy are we started! By which I mean yes. We are. Started that is.

There have been a tonne of ideas floating around, and some great ones to boot. We finally settled on an idea, which, in the simplest way possible, is Cowboys vs Indians. But not just any cowboys, oh no sir, it’s a coalition of robots and cowboys. Cowbots. Roboys. I don’t know, sleep on it.

As Lead Artist and Character/Prop Artist for the team (Studio 42) I’ve been scribbling away at some character designs this week and I’m pretty happy with where this is going. But there is a massive tear in my heart as to whether I want to get serious with this or adorable. Here are a few designs to tease your wanting eyes.

The guy below, he’s a Sheriff. But I don’t need to tell you that. You noticed his badge, right? I love the idea of having a very top heavy character with a skinny waist and legs. So that’s what this is. I guess, if anything, this guy looks like a ranger. He’d be right at home gracefully wielding a sniper rifle, casually knocking your block off while you obliviously think that that slight whistling in the wind was natures song, when in actuality it was a .50 caliber bullet racing towards you at 2,200fps with your death certificate. Now you’re dead. At least you won’t be making that mistake again.

You don’t want to mess with this guy. I mean, seirously, I messed with this guy once and now I’m bound for eternity to sing Carly Rae Jepson’s Call Me Maybe until people’s heads explode. And you’ll be surprised to find how easy the transition from intact to brains-on-the-wall is. But you don’t have to ever worry about that anymore. I trapped this guy on paper. Here he is. Laugh at him. Go on, he deserves it. It would be ridiculous to think that his production number ‘1337’ has anything to do with any sort of lame gaming reference, and it couldn’t be that in some crazy, upside-down world, it is completely a coincidence. Nope, I didn’t think you’d buy that either.

As precious and as innocent as this little deviant looks, don’t be fooled by her appearance. Or do. That is what she wants after all. And she’s going to kill me if I knock her reputation. She may not be the sharpest bot in the assembly line, but who needs smarts when you’ve got a body like that? Though you may not think it, there’s a whole plethora of weapons stashed under that skimpy little shirt and behind those slick pleather chaps. Unthinkable, unimaginable, unspeakable weapons. Mainly repeaters I think.

This little lady doesn’t like to leave anything to the imagination. Well, not your imagination. She left it all to my imagination. Look at her, bursting with creativity and tattybojangles.

Whatever could one do with four arms, you ask? I’ll tell you. You could peel two bananas at once.  You could point in four different directions. Or even the same direction. You could crawl on all sixes. The possibilities are endless. This guy doesn’t use his arms to their full potential. Their purpose is nothing exciting, like those stated above, in fact, it’s actually kind of boring and sensible. He uses the lower two to control his robot horse while he upper set man the crossbow. What a waste of a perfectly good appendix.

Character Design : The Miner

Taking a little break from the weekly challenge contest, I created a character, whom, for all intense and purposes, we shall dub ‘The Miner’. He is a miner after all.

I started out by sketching my character with a 4B Derwent Sketching Pencil. The sketchbook I used was a really nasty Ryman’s own one. I really need a higher quality pad for doodling.

I then brought the guy into Photoshop to colour him in. I painted over realistic textures to make him pop out a bit more (the full texture list/credit can be found here). I’m really terrible at drawing in Photoshop, but I can manage with the painting. I think it’s time to upgrade to a bigger tablet.

Figure Study : Male Sketch

I’ve been on hiatus, AFK, absent, everything, you name it. Had a few personal problems at home and I’ve really lost my mojo this past month. So against my will, I’m forcing myself to get my jive back.

I haven’t done any figure studies in such a long time. Here’s a quick male sketch to get the ball rolling again. No reference used. Just my big brain. HB pencil used.

Character Design : The Doctor Development

I’ve gone back to the drawing board and been utterly stuck there over the past week. I keep cycling through the themes and the more I explore them new themes arise! Today I put my foot down and decided that I am doing the space-esque theme. [Fig 01] displays some of the initial concepts I had. From this point on, I got a really heavy military feeling from my concepts (due to the huge buttons and the badges and straps).

At this point, I took inspiration from some of my initial concepts [Fig 02] and how I could apply colour to my character. I really didn’t want to step outside the boarders of red, black, green/yellow. Having such a restricted colour pallet, I found it difficult to apply colour and achieve the correct composition.

Before outlining my final concept I did a few more torso sketches [Fig 03]. I went back to the old man thing, I really can’t get it out of my head. But this character looks a lot more sinister without revealing any sort of age or identity.

The concept is there now, and I have begun modelling it as a way to force myself not to change my mind again. That being said, I won’t be uploading the final concept until I’ve tweaked a few areas (I’m terrible, I know).

Character Design : Sci-Fi Doctor

I experimented with a tonne of different costume designs yesterday, such as bio-hazard, surgical, space and sci-fi. I was really drawn to the space and sci-fi kind of thing, such as Mordin from Mass Effect. Taking this little sketch of a doctor with a ray gun (cliché, I know), I took him a bit further and coloured him with my Copics. He really looks like he belongs in Looney Tunes.

Character Design : The Doctor

I really don’t know what I was thinking when I set out to create an old man for the malnourished brief,   yet I still wanted to do a doctor-type character. So I’ve popped a mask on him and all is well again.

Here are a few sketches for the character’s clothing. I’m not too sure, it all seems a little bland to me. He really needs something interesting to make this work, like the syringe strapped to his arm [Fig 02], but more immediate.

These were drawn using fine liner and coloured with Copic markers. I have already begun modelling my character and if you’re interested in seeing the progress you can go here.

Charlie’s Walk Cycle

As part of the Design module for Semester 2 we have to create two full levels from the games we prototyped in Semester 1. We concluded with the game ‘Hat Tricks’, where players have an enchanted hat which, when they wear it, will transport them into an alternate world. Unfortunately, we had the horror genre as part of our brief and I’ve been given the laborious task of artist and animator. You can only imagine the amount of work I have to do, not to mention, I can’t animate for…

I had a major breakthrough today and managed to get Charlie Rellik*’s (the protagonist the player will play as) walk cycle into an acceptable condition! Of course, it’s still a bit rough and it’s only 9 frames, but as I have over 30 other animations to complete and around the same amount of static images, we pretty much have to suck it and see.

Here is the walk cycle in action, the .gif is just a test to see if it worked, when the spritesheet is complete it should look smooth in the program.

*It’s killer backwards.

Character Design : Body Studies

So I’ve laid down some really rough cut designs for the character’s figure. I know it’s really sketchy on my Wacom, but it’s really given me some perspective.

Even though the brief asks for malnourished, I think I’m going to make him top-heavy. I think it looks a lot better with some muscle on the arms, and having the stomach and legs sinewy. Besides, in terms of modelling, the more stylised I make it the more it won’t be restricted by realism.