Frozen Synapse Doing Well

I referenced Frozen Synapse before, but now that it’s finally come out and seems to be doing quite well I thought I’d post about it again.  It always does my heart good to see any indie company I’ve worked with do well, and it certainly gives me hope that I’ll be able to release a game of my own with some friends one of these days.  Above is one of the concept UI pieces I did for the mode7 guys way way back in 2009 (I always cringe a little when I look at old work, made me rethink posting this).  Considering how “small” Frozen Synapse is as a game it’s educational to note that games can take years to be made, even if it’s not triple A material.

War Mania Cover

Super quick cover I made for iphone dev Touchten games‘ War Mania.  Thought it apropos to post it now since War Mania is 50% off right now.  Can’t vouch for the game since I never played it, and I can only take credit for the cover.  Looks like your standard chaos management game though, so if you like the genre give it a shot.

Absolutely Tired

Exhausted.  Posting this picture precisely because it’s something I can’t talk about yet, but it will suffice to fill my twice weekly posts.  I hope to have something more substantial on Thursday, but not making and promises.

Girl Sketches Showing Different Emotions

Going into the backlog this time, and found a sketch form a silly game my friend and I were thinking of putting together.  Essentially it would have been a dating simulation, where your conversation skills would either let you land a girl in bed or not.  So yeah, it was a hentai game.

Master Copies : Satsuma Gishiden

You can read more about Master Copies here, but essentially the idea of a master copy in art is to try to reproduce the artwork of an artist that you like in order to better understand why they drew/painted the artwork in a specific way.  The idea isn’t just to replicate but to learn by doing this and thus grow as an artist.  I must admit I’m skeptical as to whether or not this will actually work, but I’m willing to give it a shot anyway.  These drawings were made with a combination of brush/fountain pen, and are the work of mangaka Hiroshi Hirata in book 2 of the Satsuma Gishiden.

Music Box on Xbox Live Arcade

This post comes as a bit of a surprise to me.  I was going to put up an entirely different image until it came to my attention that a game I’d been working on a year ago has finally been released on Xbox Live.  Actually, “game” might be a misnomer, since it’s more a music/beat sampling software similar to flstudio compressed into a console experience.  My role in the game was to design the UI, and you can see above some of the design ideas we were discussing.

We liked the first design sample best so we extrapolated on that and the UI you see here is pretty much what made it into the game, with some minor changes and tweaks.  I’m curious as to why it took so long to come out, though my gut tells me it has something to do with Microsoft Certification.  You can check out some gameplay videos here and here to get a better idea of what the game’s like; the former was released by the creator of the game and the latter by a music producer doing a review of the game.  Anyway it’s pretty cool, so if you’re musically inclined (or not!) and have 80 Microsoft points to spend, why not give it a shot?

Urban Sketching : Man Under Tree 2

Turns out I have an affinity for drawing men under trees (make of that what you will).  This was drawn while having drinks and dessert with some friends in Eastwood City last Sunday night.  This is one of the few times I’ve used both pages of my sketchpad, and I find that I like having the extra space to let a sketch breath a little bit.  I’m not sure how I feel about the placement of my caption though.  In terms of composition I think it may have been better in the upper right corner.

Spacechem Print

 

I’ve been wanting to draw something as a thank you to all of the good folks that bought Spacechem. Though  Spacechem’s story isn’t one of the main attractions for people that bought the game, it’s definitely one of the things that drew me to the project.  This scene depicts one of the last boss confrontations (the one right before the final level, I forget the name of the boss exactly).  One of the ideas behind the bosses in Spacechem is that each boss grows progressively more intelligent and “human”.  I wanted to blatantly accentuate that intelligence by making him a huge brain with an eyeball stuck into it. With tentacle feet.  OK so my character creation skills could use some work.