I had the honor of working with a couple of other game artists on a rough demo-level.  Our group was comprised of Kyle Hickey (scripting/modelling/Game Design), Dylan Rinker (Character Concept/ Character Modeler), Myself (Concept Artist / Modeler / Game Design) and Ian Spencer (Modeler).  We had a few ideas pitched, but what really hit off with the group was my suggestion that we watch Jan Švankmajer's 1966  Rakvickarna (Punch and Judy).   The working title, "Coffin Factory" is a direct reference to that short.

 The premise was that the player take the role of an current day Urban Explorer that gets into a derelict theater, then discovers that they cannot get out.  The possessed Punch doll from the theater's prop room intends to kill them, or turn them into a doll under it's control.  The game elements would be wave events with differing mechanics based on lighting effects and the theater sets from each 'Act' of the play- the character could heal if they stood in the spot light, could roam around the theater to try to outsmart the AI murder puppets, and they had to keep track of their ammunition/resource management.

It was important to the feel of our idea that items look distressed, distorted in proportions and a bit collage. 

We'd planned on three phases- The ocean, the desert, and then a boss fight.  For the first two, elaborate flats would move on stage as though there was a stage crew manipulating them for a 1700s play.  Some inspiration for these came from the 1988 The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen.  The disembodied nature of them felt appropriately disjointed and disturbing, and play-testing response was very good for the 'creepy' factor. 

Kyle did a great job keeping the master UDK file and getting assets placed in as they were finished.  With the walls and sconces, we wanted the theater to feel like it had been established in the late 1800s, then renovated in the 1930s/Deco period before closing during World War II.  The sconces and seating referenced the Art Deco, while the wall texture I made pulled from the elaborate patterning and golds/reds of classical theaters from the target building date.

The very first concept art for the level demo.  There were geometry/math issues with getting the floor slope and back lobby rotunda, and there wasn't enough time to implement the facing panels changing as well as the stage scenery.   Maybe someday in the future I'll take a crack at it independently as a modelling exercise.  I liked the creepy sun faces as mirroring Comedy and Tragedy.

We'll see you again in a little while, little explorer...

For anyone who has managed to talk to me about work lately, the conversation is usually along the line of:

Asker: So what are you up to, Kit?
Me: Painting spaceships~
Then later:
Asker: So what are you up to, Kit?
Me: Painting aliens~

This is actually rather marvelous– being able to be asked about my job, and actually being able to tell someone, in all seriousness, I'm painting/drawing/thinking about aliens and spaceships.  I love my job.  And we're working on some fun projects.  That is to say that the job I was hired on for, codename: Lambda, has been put aside for a little bit after our initial couple months of development.  Enter our current project, codename: Starship of the Line.  I can't say much about it, but there was a little talk of releasing some of the development work to get ourselves and others excited.  I'm excited.  I've been moving back and forth between a couple programs (Photoshop, Illustrator, Alchemy) and real media (pencils and copic markers), depending on what was faster or what I felt I could work best in on a given day.

So Cthulu and...wait...second row...Space Dwarves?  

We needed aliens and ships, and the design of one is sort of going to inform the other.  So the process started as doing some heads to choose which we all thought were interesting, taking those and making some bodies while I simultaneous started coming up with some different types of ships.  Before the ships got really underway, though, we needed some placeholders for engine, so I whipped up some that were simple and not really attached to any given racial idea.

A mishmash of silhouettes, basic turn around, ship-type sizing (fighter, warship, dreadnought).

We got into some story talks, with some art under our belts to get the brain-meat flowing, and now we're fleshing that out in some really fun directions.  Relatedly, I've taken the aliens we chose and started giving them bodies and spacesuits to try to match along with their story-lines/spaceships in our current proposed designs.  Here's a liiiiiiitttttlllle taste.  Really little, sorry, but we thought everyone would enjoy some of the designs as much as we do!  If you have a specific reaction or feel for any of these, feel free to share.

The design on these guys involved a lot of thought regarding cybernetics in Science Fiction-  how do most franchises depict them?  How recognizably human should they be?  How much, if they're very integrated with technology, do they themselves care about looking 'human'?  The head/face area is often a starting point since that's usually where we look.  The eyes especially.  But hands really struck me as well- lots of artists talk about being able to tell how skilled someone is at painting by how they do hands.  So looking at hands, and how hands look,  is something very "human."  Lastly was the bipedal, upright silhouette and average proportion.  Multiple legs, lack of regular feet, shifting the 'hip' width and joints were all things I was moving around.  

I had a mural commission for a full living room.  The inspiration piece I was shown was an early 1900s japanese-revival china hutch, black wood with gold inlay and tiny red depictions of people going about their days.  The hutch is in the dining room, and the client wanted the living room to be bold, a conversation piece, and tied to that furniture piece somehow.  Went with colours and themes - two of the directional kami being the blue dragon, Seiryuu, and the red phoenix, Suzaku, both over a parchment ground with blown gold flakes.  I did a few different kinds of dragons and phoenixes, since everyone has different taste on how body shapes and faces look.  I was especially excited to put the claw near the light switch like Seiryuu might play with the lights, as well as the lost and found scale coils coming all the way down the stairs.

Painting was about 2.5 weeks with only Windsor Guest and myself painting, mostly in drying time.  The parchment effect on the walls was achieved with pushed oil washes, then drawing the figures and painting them in acrylics, and finally a guarding matte clear coat over everything so that the client could still wash the walls and have a clean house.

A collection of various props from this or that.  Mostly all in the sci-fi dystopian, action/adventure, or RPG themes.

These were each hand drawn, scanned, then the basic flats added to show the modelers a better idea zones.  The green being the visor, blue being where liquid air should be in canister or  bullet-glass bottle.

These were each hand drawn, scanned, then the basic flats added to show the modelers a better idea zones.  The red being the mechanical lights/eye interfaces, blue being where liquid air should be in canister or  tubing that showed intake/outake.

And the more fantasy elements- gem pick-ups.  Each of the gems was supposed to have different effects, so having a variety of shaping and color was important.  I played with painting in facets or leaving them cabochon or raw.

This was a concept paint of the environment "Heart Chamber" where the boss would be encountered.  I was focusing on clear materials definitions for the environment artists, suggestion of propulation assets, and clarification of the red blood cell powerups and the virus mine enemies.  It was done wholly in photoshop, in about 3 hours.  Later, after I made the Cell logo text, I converted the paintup to a 'wallpaper' format as you see here. 

It happened January 25th- 27th, so I'm a little late in posting up the meaty bits associated with the efforts.  Reasons?  Doing a 48 hour event pushed a lot of things behind by about 48 hours!  After that there's been some family medical emergencies, and work that is under NDA....but I've been noodling away. 

If you every get a chance to do a GGJ, do it.  Anyone is welcome, anyone interested in game production at all.  There were even two boys, 13 and 14 I think their ages were, at the Pittsburgh location who set out to code an entirely text based team.

This concept was trying to feel out the opening menu screen and whether we wanted custom font or just to use a premade font.  We liked the effect, animated the blood cell throbbing with a heartbeat sound, and went with it.

I took on the role of Producer for an outstanding team, as well as a Concept Artist, Game Designer and Texture Artist.  Producer meant collecting files and holding meetings, being the final decider on directions discussed, keeping everyone to deadlines, and most of all keeping cool, calm and collected while encouraging team enthusiasm and health.  By the end, concept and UI work complete,  I was putting blankets over sleeping teammates and telling others when they'd been working for more than 2 hours straight to stand and have a 5 minute walk and water break.

Our Team logo, NoBrows.  It's a stylized portrait of Travis.  Apparently at some point he'd lost a bet and shaved his eyebrows as a result long prior in history.  So our team wagered him his eyebrows if we won any awards.  It became a running joke over the event, and the logo was a surprise to get him and everyone to laugh.  It worked well.  Sadly, he still has his eyebrows in real life.

Some early iterations of White Cell's design over top of a vein/artery environment concept.  With only 48 hours, I was trying to cut down by combining the environment, propulation and character on one piece.

My excellent, talented teammates were  - Amanda Wallenhorst, Jordan Jenkins, Cody Wilcoxon, Matthew Kline, Travis Kehler, Kyle Hickey, and Theresa Liddington.  This year's theme was a heartbeat, and we had decided early on that we wanted to make a side-scroller in the Unreal Development Kit.  Cue the canonball run collection adventure of White Cell, who fights to free your heart from the grip of Cardiovascular Disease. W, S, A, & D guide the character along the environment to collect red blood cell power ups, and players have to be careful to avoid the exploding viral mines.  The product came out beautifully polished for 48hours and 8 sleep deprived artists, and everyone who played it commented on that aspect. 

Our Stylized main protagonist, White Cell.  

The enemy virus mines and some indication of how they should animate to the skinning/rigging team.

We discussed wanting to maybe spend another week jam session on it as a group, figuring if we got that far in 2 days, a dedicated 7 might allow us to push in a projectile attack, some other interesting enemy variants, expand the 'boss battle' and have more than one level.  I really hope we can organize it together.  As the Producer, I suppose that will be in my court to start emailing everyone!

In the meantime, All GGJ participants upload their source files and playables to the GGJ site, and agree to released them under Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 version of the Creative Commons License. So go play our game, Cell, as well as all the other amazing 48-hour free vignettes created by this amazing event!

The base palette we decided to use as well as a prop concept in a infected and non-infected state of texture swap.

Spoiler?  WhiteCell is based on a basophil immune cell, so win or loose, he has excreted his defensive chemicals to poison/eat the enemy and perishes.  Its a glorious sacrifice to save the body and become a hero.  If he loses....poor thing gets infected.

We even had suggestion that we should have WhiteCell plushies made, with the hole in their body still there, looking cute and gore. It was great people got into the ambiance and feel so much, and really liked the style.

Some basic thumbnails for environments in the previsual development.  The plan for the game progression is NIMH labs > NIMH Labs duct work > Forest > Derelict Truck > Forest > Fitzgibbon Farm > Establish the Rose Bush Colony. 

These were a mix of Alchemy, Photoshop and traditional copic marker on graphics paper.

The lower left thumbnail actually shows the theoretical grating that the rats woudl exit out into the forest from.  This is the door that would have been impassible were it not for the help and survival of Mr. Ages and Johnathan.

The Derelict Toy Truck with the dead toymaker inside.  This is what provides the rats with their rat-sized tools and would be a beginning equipment pool and skills/learning level up station for the rats as they discovered some books here to read.

I need to study more farm houses and farm equipment.  Neither of these really takes into account barn structures.  But they do start considering the location of the rose bush on the front lawn of the property as well as showing off the tiller that later is important to Mrs. Frisby.

So I'll need to start converting these to color studies and tightening up the forms and lighting and propulation. 

The paintovers of the chosen silhouettes are through a second pass, meaning they're presentable for sharing here on the blog.  There's some tweaking, I think, that could still be done here or there with cast shadows.  Critiques are welcome,  in the interim before a 3rd pass, while I shift into environment thumbnails. 

All of these were painted in Photoshop over top of the Alchemy silhouettes.  The longest part was the base fur painting, which I then cloned across in each case in order to streamline and save production time.   Materials and colours were easily swapped out using the alt+click to constrain layers to the mask of the main layer.

The Logo needs a little love still, but that's back burner to getting the content done.  This is a personal project for pre-pre-portfolio (only I've already had pre-port and am in portfolio now).  A prequel Visual Development Artbook to the 1982 animated film directed by Don Bluth, The Secret of NIMH, based on  Robert C. O'Brien's 1971 children's novel "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH".

The prequel will focus on the escape and founding of the society of rats in Rose Bush while introducing the political intrigue and growth of polarization of power between the leaders: Nicodemus, Jenner, Justin, Mr. Ages and Johnathan.

The plan is to format it something similar to what Scott Robertson guided his students at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California,  Khang Le, Mike Yamada, and Felix Yoon to do in their "The Skillful Huntsman."  Granted, there were three students there and they had 14 weeks to produce really amazing work.  I'll have been just me, and essentially 8 weeks to have enough time to then try to throw it together to some sort of 'book'.  But goals are good and this is something I can work on and refine even past graduation.

Mr. Ages, one of the two surviving mice.

Jenner, the eventual villain of the movie.  He has to appear aggressive and more tending towards violence, but at this point he is still very much part of the brotherhood and group effort.

I started out with character silhouettes, utilizing Alchemy because it really forces straight up plowing forward-there's no undo.  There's not really any layers.  What will be evident, is that at first I was spending (wasting?) a lot of time redrawing the silhouette for each outfit design.  In some cases that would be very helpful, but the basic character shapes for this project are predetermined to the Bluth property/designs.  They have to be recognizable.  So one silhouette and a lot of outfit designs was really what I needed.   Then I discovered the 'Load Background Image' in Alchemy....and felt like a total noodle.  So later design sheets have standardized main silhouettes with focus on the outfit and breaking of the silhouette.  

 

Johnathan Frisby, the other of the two mice that survived.  He's supposed to look inquisitive and friendly.  Throughout the book "The Rats Of NIMH", the mice prove themselves the most generous and heroic of characters compared to the somewhat isolationist and (some might argue) facist practices of the Rats.  Additionally, Johnathan dies later in the story, so it is important that he be instantly readable and relatable- able to be enjoyed and understood by a player.

Justin, eventual captain of the guard.  Some military elements need to show through, as do his sense of honor and his youth this early on.

Nicodemus, the leader of the Rats.

During the pre-production and scripting phases of the Secret of NIMH, Don Bluth and his fellows encountered the problem inherent with the Shapeshifter as a Mentor of the Hero’s Journey – they know everything.

A  character who has all the answers destroys the tension in a plot or the sense of uncertainty.
The solution they found the solution to this in their voice actor, Derek Jacobi.  He focused his readings on Nicodemus’ time in the labs.  It drew the focus of the character’s on screen time to the mystery of who he was rather than all the answers he could provide – therefore providing a mirror and possible foil or foreshadowing to Brisby’s own trials of self discovery and growth of courage.

(Don Bluth’s The Art of Animation, p.34 May 2005)

For my own purposes this approach to the character is important to know as the prequel will start with the escape from NIMH itself.   While still a leader, Nicodemus is no longer a ‘mentor’ character, but is at the beginning of his own journey.  This will need to be reflected in the concepts – he’s in his prime, he’s intellect and wisdom without worldly experience, and therefore he is fallible.  

A combination look at some of the pre-production designs from when we were ramping down on DGPX and stull trying to hammer out the story and theme elements of Modus, as well as the beginning of style examples, then character and NPC designs.