Thursday, November 17, 2022

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



5 comments:

LeftHanded Matt said...

These are gorgeous. Superb job, thanks for posting. I wish they existed as real games.

Ben304 said...

Thank you so much!

Jen said...

I (sill) have your Oddworld piece as my Windows lock screen! It's still so fun to see =D

Ben304 said...

That's so cool to hear! It's really fun to see which of these games connected with people in different ways. All of them have a special place in my memory, it's great to share that with people!

Unknown said...

holy shit these are GORGEOUS