After a long silence

I have returned. I have been way too swamped these past months, which I suppose I should have expected for my second year at the Game Assembly. By now my fellow second years and I have been divided into three teams of 22, and finished our first game. I've been bad at updating or this would already have been known. On the other hand I can direct you to Troglobyte's facebook page, with various videos ranging from team building to in-progress trailers, and our Indie DB page where you can play Neon Trigger, our first game!
Neon Trigger is a space shooter, and the story of dr Fox, a man of many talents and a lot of anger. It's got an 80s feel to it, and you fight space bikers. Neon, spikes, asteroids, what more could you possibly need? Reviews are much appreciated to help us grow and improve. It was made under a period of 10 weeks, but at half-time as we had studies demanding our attention as well.
The Troglobyte team has just started working on our second game, so far unnamed, which is going to be a real time strategy. We're all very excited over it even as we're starting to hammer out the basics of it. One and a half week done, eight and a half to go.

An early version of our logo, which has since been simplified.

I've also done my 12th year of NaNoWriMo. I've cheated, once again, and continued on the same story. This year was probably one of the most even years I've ever had. It was not that inspiration flowed like a wild river or anything like that, but that together with school I nearly had no spare time so it was a battle every day. It evened out and stopped being a pain to force out those words. They started coming at a reasonable pace, I found my inspiration probably because I was too tired to chase after it. It was a strange and somehow yet rewarding experience. And I finally got to introduce Fyren, who is one of my old characters who's still around, which was very exciting for me.
And speaking of which...

I drew him a while back, together with Zillah and Ziv who are both important to the story's history.

And then these three as well. I've got two half-finished trios waiting for a third party, and neither time nor inspiration for them at the moment. In part because it's now time to start working on this year's Think Ink comic. This year's comic is something I've wanted to do since 2011 when I visited Bath. I got super inspired at the roman baths there, and that's where the focus is going to be. This year the plan is to print in Japan, as Fanny is there for her studies and it would be a shame to waste such an opportunity!

Back to school

We started school off with an introduction to dynamics and... I'm honestly really excited. It's fun when things go right and, well, ok so maybe I spent way too much time trying to get that box-falling-out-of-cart to work but it came together in the end.

Speaking of the Game Assembly, I was going to post the cutscene pictures from the third game. I was kind of hoping that they'd get around to put it up on the homepage first, but that seems to be uh... a potential 'never' at this point. Only the top three text adventures (the first game we did) of my year are up, out of four finished games :(
So, with that said, here are cutscenes from our shoot 'em up:

The final one is the cropped version, because I have successfully managed to misplace the complete version. And by misplace I mean 'I can't find it on neither laptop nor external harddrive, and the school computers were wiped during summer so it's only existence at this point is in game'. Hooray, or something.
Oh well.

A little rest

Finally moved out of my old apartment and into the new. Still got a lot to sort out, but at least the vast majority is where it should be. Today I won't be running back and forth to clean at least, so that's a relief.
I have instead finished the basics on my Strong Female Pose picture, aka the butt picture, aka Dragon Age featuring Escher Girls and Hawkeye Initiative.

I've worked on it on and off since... late autumn during breaks at the Game Assembly. I didn't touch it for most of spring though. I'm still going to do some basic shading and add magic shine and whatnot but... yeah. Something presentable! Sorta. There are so many broken spines and snapped limbs I don't even know... The poses (all but Hawke) are based on 'female' poses of other works that are meant to be sexy I suppose. Well. It was great fun doing, and I might muster the energy to do a Mass Effect version in the (probably far off) future.

Speaking of the Game Assembly. The second game that I worked on, The Tomte, was nominated for Best Scenario at the Swedish Game Awards 2013. Which was all kinds of awesome, even if we didn't win. Hopefully it will be up at the Game Assembly's homepage soon, free to play.

Now that I've had a proper amount of sleep for a couple of days, it's clearly time to start camp NaNoWriMo. Plans are to continue that No Coffin Needed story.

I also continued doing those scribbly trio character pictures for the story. I've three other characters that have been finished, but no matching trio sets so... eh. Soon. Sooooon.

A busy month

Three weeks left before the summer holiday arrives for us at the Game Assembly. The rest of Sweden's students tend to end about... two weeks before that. On one hand, a bit jealous, on the other... we've got a lot of stuff to do and a lot of it is fun, and I know what I need to practice on during the summer.
We're currently working on our fourth game - a turn based strategy this time. It makes three weeks left seem short :O
I've also been a volunteer at Nordic Game (fun!), visited SPX/SIS together with Think Ink and sold comics and had fun with old friends and new, and been part of a game art exhibition. Additionally, Amanda and I have passed the 150 comics benchmark on Champions and Heroes (!!) and are preparing for one but possibly up to three new fanzines for next year, in addition to Think Ink's yearly new fanzine.

In other words, I've been quite busy and had a lot of fun, though I think I'll appreciate a breather when the summer break finally arrives. As much of a break as it will be.
Meanwhile, I've started experimenting with a new scribbly style. My comic teachers always told me I needed to stop fiddling with details (sorry, not quite there yet XD) and let go of my careful lines and add more black spaces. Well! I've been drawing some of my (huge horde of) characters from my NaNoWriMo novel that I keep working on, doing just that. And it's fun! And faster than my usual pace.

 

 

 

Evidently I can't decide on what to write about them, but on the plus side, characters who I've only had work names for before now have proper names. So that's... what I've been doing with essentially all my time this past month.

SPX/SIS coming up

And my team and I are finishing up game three at the Game Assembly. This time it's a shoot 'em up, and it's been fun despite it not being my genre of choice. I finished cutscenes and convo pictures earlier this week, and we got working on what little dialogue we have today. I might show the cutscenes off later, but for now know that I'm working on rim lights. ALL the rim lights.
We also finished the concept art course, during which I made these two:

We were to take the Grimm Brothers's story The Skillful Huntsman, and do a take on one of the characters. I had great fun doing thumbnails (a total of 87 before I realized that perhaps it was time to continue to the next stage XD) and ended up with enough time to do two.

And now I'm going to go and pack my bag, because I'll be way too tired tomorrow. If you're in the Stockholm area this weekend, be sure to come by. Think Ink is releasing our first printed book The Art of Fika, and we'll be selling some old pieces and some individual new pieces as well :)

2 month update

Okay... long time no update, again. I've been crazy busy, to the point where I've gotten sick because of it, but it's been calming down now that the work for the Think Ink anthology is done. Now I've actually got spare time when I'm done with the school work (for what feels like the first time in six months). Not that that has stopped me from getting a cold, but hey...

This is page 1 of Forest born, the skogsrå comic I've been working on for what seems like forever. Finally done! :D It will be part of Think Ink's The Art of Fika anthology, which will be released at SPX/SIS this year, and four out of five Think Inkers will be there, yours truly included :)

As far as school goes we've started our third game - a shoot 'em up - and we're at the same time doing a course about concept art. First time doing photobashes, and I have to admit that I find it a bit difficult, though I can certainly tell that it speeds things up considerably.

We were supposed to do a form of mechanical transport or vehicle of some kind. I chose to do some kind of steampunky roman chariot with built in horse thing, though I ran out of time and didn't have time to fix the wheels and the legs which are off . Still, it was fun.

And then we did some landscape depth practice. I've tried this before, with the Shmil picture, and I quite like it, but I chickened out and went with a cave rather than buildings. Still, I got to try to draw saiga - possibly the world's ugliest antelope. So ugly they're cute XD
We're working on character designs for the Grimm brother's story The Skillful Huntsman at the moment, and I made 87 thumbnails before I realized that maybe it was time to stop and go on to the next step. Ahem. It's great fun though :D

Other than that, Champions and Heroes is turning 2 years at the end of the month. Amanda and I are both sick, but planning on a joint little birthday comic to celebrate.

Time flies

I have been oh so very busy since... oh... October, I'd say. Squeezing in the time to manage a cosplay before the Bioware dinner, going to the Bioware dinner, NaNoWriMo, trying to catch up on my studies as the cosplay ate too much of my time and I had to sleep too, and learning the basics of 3d in Maya. It ended up with me being sick as a dog the last days before the holidays, but I'm recovered and back in the Game Assembly as the new term began. We've started working on our third 3d project, and our second game. So far so good, but I could certainly do with a few extra hours in the day. And then some in the night.
But, so far we have a lowpoly fjord horse.

I am really happy with this, even though I would have liked to give it more detailed legs and a fringe, but we were only allowed to use 500 triangles. I'm not sure where they all went to be honest. I checked inside so many times, expecting to see a tiny horse or something in there, explaining where all the triangles went XD

The second 3d project was the vampire hunter's crossbow.



I wish I had had the energy to do more on it, texturing and working on adding more details on the normal map for all of the crossbow. Alas, I was sick half of the week, and it got worse towards the end of it. It is named both as a bad pun, and as a Supernatural reference, courtesy of my friend Jonas.

 

And then I've been doing some character designs for the game. We are basing the story around old Swedish myths, and where they would be now. Evidently I chose the huldra/skogsrå/lady of the forest to design. She is a favorite of mine after all. Personally, I like the idea of a crown made of raven wings, but the dark skinned version is my favorite. Whether or not she, and Näcken (a nude violin player who drowns people) who I am currently working on, will have clothes in the game depends entirely on the outcome of our meeting with the teachers tomorrow. Personally I'm all for nudity as long as it's not treated with the 'male gaze', but I provided a clothing alternative all the same, just in case. Viking inspired, but altered to reveal her hollow back :)