MEAT

Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator's aesthetic was a vulgar, throbbing mess. What a fun project. The palette ended up being a mix of P1 phosphor greens and a sickly alt-CGA dose of magenta, purple & infra-cyan, dithered to hell and brought to life in flashing, pulsing style.

That palette helped us make the game something unique. I always like to work on projects that are recognisable at a glance - being memorable is more interesting to me than just "looking good". It's fun to make a game that you can't possibly mistake for anything else.

We chanted "MEAT" at each other, shared our love for the Command & Conquer install program, and embraced the dither, the weird palette shifts and somehow wholeheartedly brought this to life. Try to convert a screenshot of the game to greyscale and you'll see how much of the palette's contrast was derived from unusual leaps in hue & saturation that somehow end up working. I love limited palettes for a multitude of reasons, but hadn't used them in over a decade. This might be one of the best ones I've worked in.

I think the fever of our work on the game shows in the finished product. Colours flash and glow, the flesh throbs, the market moves constantly and stressfully. It's uncomfortable, kind of repulsive, and it knows exactly what it is trying to be. It took me back to days of gleeful chaos in jam games, weird experiments, of being a young game developer and indulging in the act of creating something. It's very different to most of my work now, which is carefully planned, and quite rigid in its definition of success and beauty. Very satisfying work, but I also loved revisiting that chaotic energy of old here.

Re-Imagined

One of the most fun personal projects I had this year was taking inspiration from a variety of games that I love the world/characters/aesthetic of and seeing how they'd look in the style of adventure game that I'm used to drawing. I already posted about the process behind one of these but it seems sensible enough to collect them here as well for posterity.

There's a couple of reasons I loved doing these. One was that I got to play for a little while in these other worlds, settings that I don't normally get to experiment with, and that's always wonderful. Especially as I'm an epic sci fi/fantasy kind of guy, and rarely get to draw that sort of thing. Another great aspect was trying to take design cues from other artistic sources and incorporate them into my own work. Amazing what you can learn doing this. Finally, and probably the best of all, it's just nice to do tiny projects, things that can be finished in a single evening or two, especially these days when the games I work on are always getting bigger and more complex and everything takes years to do. It's a huge boost to just finish something small and put it out there into the world. There were a bunch of other games I would love to do this for - Anachronox, Omikron: The Nomad Soul, The Outer Wilds, Caves of Qud, Planescape: Torment, the list goes on and on. Maybe someday I'll do some more.

One quick note - I never ended up posting the scene from Command & Conquer: Red Alert because I finished that one on the 23rd of February 2022, and posting it at that time seemed to be in very poor taste. I'm putting it up here for posterity, nothing more. I only ever showed it to about three people, but I had a good time looking at Mønsted's snow and trying to figure out how he did the colours. I'd do it slightly differently looking back at it now, as would I put more detail on the tank, etc, but such is the nature of hindsight and rushed personal projects. 

Thanks to everybody who boosted these back when I was doing them, the response to this project was so encouraging.

(Update 20 June 2024 - added The Witcher 3)

Disco Elysium

Heaven's Vault

Beyond Good & Evil

The Operative: No One Lives Forever

Shadowrun: Dragonfall

Command & Conquer: Red Alert

Outcast

Thief: Deadly Shadows

Final Fantasy IX

Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Six!

 

I've started working on the next section of Old Skies, getting Fia's next outfit designed and then walk, talk, and "pickup" animations done in preparation. The normal stuff necessary for a Wadjet Eye game protagonist. This means that she now has six different outfits in the game so far. That's as many as all the companions in Unavowed plus both female & male versions of the player character. Anyway, here's a fun little preview of some animations using all 6 of those outfits to celebrate this little milestone!

And as a little bonus, here's a pigeon animation I did today:

Class: Cartographer

 Might & Magic I may be the perfect game for someone like me. To clarify, it is perfectly suited to someone who loves drawing maps, loves making careful notes, loves playing with a sheaf of pages by the keyboard that need to be referred to constantly.

One of the best things about playing this game as an artist is that I can bring my interests to the experience. When drawing maps I am thinking of ways to make them look nice, or inventing simple ways to draw icons for things I want to highlight. When making notes I am using my skills in round hand calligraphy to invest in the theme of a sprawling fantasy RPG. It’s the kind of game that requires me to pull equipment out of my drawer in order to play. Some might say that’s how an adventure should be.

But best of all, I’m actually doing something. Cartography and chronicling is a massive part of this game, perhaps a good half of it, and the game is well set up with neatly divided maps and careful orienteering tools to aid in your mapmaking. Every map is the same size and shares a coordinate system. The world map that comes with the game has features shown on it that you will actually encounter, so when you see that sector E-4 has the “Perilous Peaks”, you know that you can name that sector of your map that. The presence of a sea monster or a giant scorpion on the map similarly warns the attentive player: here be danger.

There is plenty of danger, too. As is to be expected, one must use heroic might and powerful magic to overcome the various opponents in the game. But combat in RPGs is never amazing for me. There’s usually too much of it, it’s usually either too simple or too complex, and mostly I appreciate its presence as a way of making the exploration varied, tense and challenging. I like having to protect myself from fire against dragons, or use turn undead on skeletons. But I can get that in any game.

The true challenge, the true wonder of this experience is the exploration - I consider exploration as a vital form of gameplay, that complements gameplay like combat, puzzle solving and resource gathering. Finding stuff feels great, and Might & Magic I has me poring over my maps, looking for clues in the structure of dungeons or studying the layout of features to work out mazes (which are wonderful to solve when you’re drawing every single square in a grid out clearly anyway). There are jokes, tricks, puzzles, traps and patterns hidden in these maps, and it’s a joy to uncover them, to mark them out, square by square, and to unravel the secrets of this world. Better than waggling some imaginary sword in some virtualisation of a combat experience, better than picking spells that obviously counter the spells of my opponents (and let’s face it, game magic is usually so elemental, so rule bound), here I’m genuinely interacting with the game world, line by line.

My party of adventurers are knights, clerics, sorcerers. But without me, their trusty surveyor and scribe, there’s no way they can prevail. I’ve never felt more important in a game.