More Spaceships

More spaceship sketches from over the holidays.  A lot of these are basically Star Wars copies.  I don't draw ships and machinery much so I'm training my hand to get used to drawing them and placing the greebles in the right place.

Merry Christmas, Why Am I Still Working?

Because I've booked so much work for January that I need to start chipping away at my workload before work on Prison Architect starts up again, that's why.  Sketches above for an outer space based board game I've been commissioned to work on.  These are cargo ships, transporting goods across the universe and helping to make the outer rim inhabitable!  Except for the top machine on the first page, which turned out to be some sort of retro-futuristic motorbike.

Car Concepts

Keeping in line with the recent blog post about our game, I thought I'd share with you some of the conceptualization that went behind the look of the game.  When I was thinking of how I wanted the game to look, and how to make it look if not unique at least a little different, I immediately remembered some car designs that I liked in The Art of Monsters vs. Aliens.  The concept art in the game featured a retro 50s-60s look (think diners and drive-in movies).  These caricatures of cars really caught my attention so with gusto, I set out to sketch some of my own cars.

.
Obviously cars aren't my expertise, but I had a lot of fun sketching a Honda Jazz and trying to simplify its look to turn it into a game sprite.  I sketched the jeepney from pictures (thanks, Google Images!), because frankly I didn't feel like standing in the hot sun explaining to curious passerby and suspicious police why I was so intently looking and sketching a public utility vehicle.

I had a lot more fun sketching cars than I thought I would, and by the end of the exercise I felt I was getting more and more proficient at it.  Unfortunately it really wasn't really time efficient, and I found (unsurprisingly) that when I finally shrank the images I made down to sprite size (roughly 40x20 pixels) any superfluous design elements had disappeared.  So in the interest of time I decided against preliminary sketches and instead went straight to the game sprites.  Seeing as we're already behind schedule (real paying work gets in the way of passion projects) I think it was the only move I could really make.

Spacechem voted one of 2011's top indie games by Gamasutra!

My longtime friend and artistic idol Chris De Joya pointed out to me yesterday that Spacechem is one of the top indie games of 2011 as voted on by the Gamasutra editors.  While I've always maintained that my art is the least important aspect of the game (I'd rank it design first, music second, art least) It's always still a thrill to see it getting press on sites like Gamasutra.

As I like to do whenever I post about Spacechem, here's a little concept work from 2010 when we were first working on the game.  This mining boss is one of the first you'll "fight" against in Spacechem.  I drew upon industrial machinery when concepting for this, as well as mining vehicles in RTS games like Command and Conquer.  I'd also forgottent hat I'd actually  used Google Sketchup to help me better visualize the machine before drawing it in Photoshop.  While the Sketchup concept and the final product aren't 1:1, it's amazing how useful Sketchup as a free software can be for conceptualizing objects like vehicles and buildings.

By the way, even though Spacechem was nominated in this year's Indiedb awards, it still needs more nominations to find out where it ranks in the top 100 indie games of this year.  The whole Spacechem team would rally appreciate it if you could click here, then click on Puzzle Compilation, then click on Vote!  While you're at it go on and check out the other fantastic indie games on the list.

Martian Ships Concepts

I have a couple of preliminary tasks that I set for myself before I actually go ahead and start the final illustration for the Art Order "Princess of Mars" challenge.  The first task is to design a Martian ship.  I must admit I'm really awful at vehicle designs.  Prior to these sketches I did do a few sketches of sailing ships like galleons and even modern ships like destroyers just to get a better idea of the basic shapes and silhouettes of ships.  I even had a look at one of Feng Zhu's free tutorials on vehicle design to try to get my head in the right space, but I just ended up being depressed at how dull my designs are.  As with most things it'll just take me time and a LOT of vehicle concepts to really get better at this.

I think I'm going with ship number 3 just because it looks the least Earth-like.  Next up, I'll have a crack at designing what the green men of Mars look like!