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.  

Care to play?

Communications.

We did end up finishing something of a product in time!  I can't actually express how much fun and energy-giving this was.  Working with Brian is a blast.  We joked a good deal about sci-fi space opera tropes, and tried to incorporate some nods to popular series. Since the theme was 10 seconds, we wanted to put the player in a situation where every second and choice counts, and let them see the consequences of those choices in an entertaining way.  By letting the player rewind through time, we could extend the gameplay beyond the constraints of the traditional '10 seconds' while preserving the theme and experience once choices were again being made in a new timeline.

Its a point-and-click choose your own adventure, and the rewind mechanic is in a basic state is functioning. There are roughly 5 endings achievable, character elevation works, and sound is in (thanks to Brian's daughter!)  There are some spelling errors in the initial scenes- The Incomprehensible seems to be appropriately the biggest contender in that.  Just can't comprehend that alien enemy...

Captain: "...."

  Some of the things that were planned, but we were short on time to finish: (1) Animated rewind of time, (2) The rest of the endings/interactions to get them (3) Animated view screen content based on the current threats.  There was a whole list of features that were not part of the 'core' experience that it would be a lot of fun to get working on a second pass, like parallax shifting of stars through the windows of the Pequod's hallway and  a greater sense of the battle that the game throws you in in medias res among others.  I believe there will be further development, but it's going to be secondary to the primary company projects.  

There's a few days left of voting at Ludum Dare's site, but more importantly there's some nice feedback in the comments regarding how people felt about the retro-styling and the comic-y cut-scene presentation.  I enjoyed painting all the little cells, and rather like all the little characters and their little ships.  (I actually want a folder or shirt or something with the Ensign panicking on it )

I believe that there are plans for a formal post-mortem on the game, probably to be put on RealityFoil's own website, so stay tuned for that as well.  I'll save talk about design decisions and art development for that so that this doesn't all get painfully repetitive.  In the meantime, enjoy some more art~

Emergency landing, planet side!  Lucky you navigated towards water, Captain.

Attacking the Incomprehensible, without sacrificing your ally the Albatross for the greater good.

Warp Cores are very sensitive to space combat.

August 23rd-26th!

   I'm teaming up with Brian, a coworker here at Reality Foil, LLC for this fun game-jam event.  I have no idea what we're actually going to make, but we talked about maybe needing 2D character animation.  I haven't bone-animated anything in flash for over a year, so I threw some flats together on layers, opened the bone tool, set some poses and exported it to various file-types to see what we thought about it all.  It looks ROUGH, let me tell you, but now all that great stuff from Actionscript 3/Flash/Prototyping class with Patricia Huettel is finally filtering back into my brain after months and months of not touching it.  

So stay tuned for progress updates, screenshots, tears of pain and of joy!


Man, I miss my Saxon Crown game... I should revisit that little point and click adventure.  

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 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.  

This was for the Extras gallery within the in-game menu interface.

Hotel scene painted up by Keith, the banana-car model by the Vehicle Team, the web layout and skinning by myself.

The skinning and layout for the gallery pages - character, vehicle or environment.  The characters were designed mostly by Max Davenport and then Brittany Cloud.

I could not have had a better introduction to the Team GAme Production class/effort than what I managed to luck out with.  Every game has a rotation of 3-4 quarters to create a 5-10 minute playable demo experience.  The whole class acts as a game studio, working in teams beneath leads and using Scrum.  It was the final quarter, so there wasn't as much offical 'concept' work for in game models, props, characters or environments left for DGPX - a racing game.  I worked under the incumbent Concept & Design Team Lead, and took on the role of graphic and marketing materials artist - website design and assets, help in the User Interface, In-store posters and advertisements, In-game fictional advertisements, and learning and researching the RAD Tools for Environment Team so that we could implement some Bink videos. 

 I got to design an impromtu logo for our art bible, among other bits and bobs.

 Manifest was a group project with Brittany Cloud, Jordan Jenkins and Matt Gillmeister.  The initial game idea itself was Matt's, a survival horror of a prison asylum in the 1950's where ex-Soviet and ex-Nazi scientists have been contracted to research weaponizing the human psyche.  A subject is injected with top secret concoctions and then put through rigorous  abuse to encourage the development of instability.  Inborn fears, dementia and psychosis start to gain power and 'manifest' as supernatural, quasi-physical creatures that can affect the environment and others.

 It was a lot of fun to work with.
 The style we voted on going with was a pseudo realistic, almost comic book style for the real world and a more lethal looking but brighter chroma-ed 'manifest' world for the manifests and the trips into the players psyche.

Our development centered around a sizzle video that introduced the story and the battle dome - where the inmates were forced to display their enigma manifests and combat each other in pseudo-roman, often lethal combat. 

The player character, male version.  I suggested his name be 'cipher' and his number 00000 - meaning 'nobody, no person'.  We wanted to keep the physical reality grungy, almost monochrome keyed to a filthy, non-descript grey.  All the prisoner clothes were old, reused as they died.  Some individualization could be possible by ripping off sleeves or legs and reusing them for scarves or bandaging. 

Dr. Nadel, the scientist who heads the research and appears in all interactions as a saccharine, 'benevolent' figure.  He isn't.

This is the enigma of general Fear, Phobos. 

We played around with ears or no ears. 

This is fear of the Dark, or Shadows, possible names were - Nyctos, Scotos, Lygos.

One of the many early stage sketch concept for enigma manifests, this one of Insomnia.  We didn't develop her for our 11 week project.