FINALLY!
After about 3 billion years I've finally got round to painting up the
winners of my creature feature. The overall winner was the tubby fellow
to the right, however I noticed there were many similarities between him and
another of the concepts so I've gone and made them the same species.
These creatures are 'Ferals'. Creatures that were given the boot into
the Abyss (yes, there's a place even lower than Heck, apparently). Due
to the violent nature of the females, the Ferals were forced out of Heck
due to them causing property damage to the local businesses.
Don't they make a cute couple?
Right, next time I update I'd better have something other than doodles otherwise I will punish myself by watching an episode of The Gilmore Girls. Hopefully I'll update again soon as I'm keen to start putting together a test background and firing it up in Unity... but since I finished my commission work I've had several other jobs come rolling in. Not that I'm complaining or anything. No. That would be most foolish indeed.
Edit: And there's me losing track of time again... HAPPY EASTER YOU LOT!
the past couple of weeks I've been going at full pelt trying to finish off other work and I've managed by channelling my superhuman abilities to find the time to throw together a couple more concept pictures (also known 'as stop being a lazy git'). These will probably be the last for a little while* as I shift focus on to thinking through the puzzles- I came up with a few ideas while working on the low res backgrounds I've done. The first section will be the demo stage and will see Stan escaping his job at Soul Food Burger and giving the player a quick look around the world of Heck.
*I am still very aware I need to paint up the 'winner' of my creature feature contest thing.
I actually watched a presentation with the part man part God that is Tim Schafer talking about how Double Fine's Kickstarter game 'Broken Age' which I'm massively ashamed to say, I haven't got round to playing yet. The presentation is a full on power hour and has a lot of interesting snippets of info from Tim and select members of the Double Fine team. Check it out if you're interested in doing anything like this yourself- wish I'd watched it sooner...
Mmm... point and clicky.
Right, now I've got the fanboy-ing out the way- on with the concept art! Meet the Guardians- inspired by The Knockers (as in door knockers) from the 80's film Labyrinth, starring a teenage Jennifer Connelly, a host of awesome Jim Henson puppets and David Bowie in the tightest tights this side of a low budget super hero flick. The idea is that these two have been stuck beside one another for thousands and thousands of years, unable to move. This as you might imagine is quite frustrating so it seems the only way to whittle away the time is to bicker and argue- until the end of time. They also guard the single entrance/exit into Heck- a trans-dimensional elevator.
I designed the two statues to be opposites as I find that always results in good comedy- a classic trope that's been around since the likes of Laurel and Hardy. One of the statues is tall, proud, well spoken and slightly up his own backside- the other is short, brash and vulgar. I'm hoping the dialogue will practically write itself!
First off, many apologies for going AWOL for several months. It's been quite the rollercoaster as it were. On top of various commission work, Christmas, getting a bit sick and generally being distracted, progress on Heck has slowed considerably.
However, I have had some thoughts concerning the game and will be dabbling in the Unity engine from here on out as it'll help me pack more detail into the game and be able to be played on a larger range of devices. I stumbled across a toolkit called Adventure Creator that enables you to make point and click games in Unity without having to learn (shudders) coding. Which is just as well as my brain just isn't wired that way. If anyone else is interested the toolkit can be found here and is currently going for half price through the Unity Asset Store (about £28).
I still have some work to get done before I can dive back into the warm and welcoming underworld of Heck but I'm hoping progress will pick back up in the next couple of weeks. Until then, mortals!
Yeah, didn't think Heckoween worked very well. Anywho, here's a an image of the Ferryman taking Stan across the River of Souls... Stan, eager to ruin any sense of atmosphere decides this would be a perfect time to try out his pirate impression.
Hi diddly ho! I'm holding a mini competition of sorts for this bunch of uglies below- just name your favourite or favourites and in a few days I'll tally the scores and create more finalized images for the top 3! The inhabitants of Heck are a varied bunch so I'm hoping to make my next set even weirder!
In the mean time I realise my progress and updates have been a little slack as of late so here's an image I did a few weeks back of a gentleman named Rodney. His skills involve knocking things over and making sure they don't get up again.
Heck will see Stan visit the mortal realm of Urf among several others so he'll have many people to interact with. Being the over thrown dictator of the underworld, he may not be as popular as he'd have liked...
Ok, so I couldn't resist working on some characters outside of Heck. Whilst I work on a few animations for Stan I'll post a few of these up.
Goddess
Angelica- daughter of The Mighty One. Kind, beautiful... exceptionally
dumb and impossibly naive. She has spent an eternity in Haven, never
being able to interact with the lowly people of Urf. Her dream is to win
The Exploit Contest and become a popstar. She's not prepared to let
small matters such as being unable to sing and dance get in her way.
Soul Food Burger always excels when it comes to matters of hygiene. At least that's what they say anyway. This is it for the backgrounds for the time being- next up is working on some basic animations for Stan.
