Got wood(s)?

This is the generic forest background for Legends of Zork. I was way more pleased with my rough than with my cleaned-up line-art which was dutifully saved and improved by the tiredless efforts of Chris Oatley.

The rough:

The line-art:

And the finished piece:


I lost some depth on the left side behind the thorns. I should've had another layer of midground trees or bushes to create more interest. Chris more than made up for my lack by desaturating and lightening the colours at distance. I still like how the thorns and bark look.

Dungeons w/o Dragon(s).

This is another dungeon location that got done up for Zork. It contrasts well with the first one being wide-open as opposed the the maze of implied hallways the first (see two posts below) was.

Here are the rough, line-art, and coloured (by the amazing Chris Oatley - again) versions.





I should've put in more Mario pipes. Oh well, lesson learned.

Utopia Kingdoms

This is the second of two browser games I was working on with Jim Zubkavich. The design for the village itself took a while as there were technical specifications as well as design requirements that had to be met. The colours were kindly and skillfully done by the talented Saejin Oh.



I did have fun working within the constraints of the project however. My biggest complaints about the piece I could have solved by going back over my initial roughs (which were done seperately for each building) to make them more cohesive style as well as (ow my eyes!) perspective-wise. My isometry (english majors beware) got more than a little out of hand. The issues are readily apparent comparing one building to another.

I also got the opportunity to do some designs for the advisor characters for Utopia Kingdoms. I don't think they really hold their own compared to the awesome work of Julie Faulkner and Will Makra who did the lion's-share of the character design. But it was nice to be allowed to draw something other than backgrounds for a bit! Colours done by Rob Ruffolo.


From top to bottom, left to right:

General, War Hero, Healer, Sage, Archer, Calvaryman, Defender, Merchant, Mystic, Seer, Scout, and Invisible Swordsman.

Dungeons.

This is by far one of my favorite backgrounds I did for Legends of Zork. The progression from foreground to midground to background works well and there are plenty of paths for the eye to follow and imply further depth. If I could change anything, I'd repeat the torch element a few more times to set scale better, or failing that, the alcove. I'd also have done a better (good) job on those cartoony skulls. Oh, and my stairs are crap too. Grr.I ended up cleaning this one up twice. I went a bit too overboard on line thickness on my first go and cheated the bricks a bit too much. In the interest of showing some final line art (sans colours) voila:

Once again Chris turned a potentially boring palette of browns and greys into the delightfully subtle but exciting scheme below. I LOVE the low key pink and green compliments he worked in. Not to mention his use of lighting to focus on the pathways I mentioned earlier!

This is a Giant Crocodile.

From Legends of Zork. Big surprise, I'm sure. The rough (above). And the final, coloured by Jim Zubkavich himself:


I like his teeth (although I prefer the rabid-crazy eyes in the rough than the cliche angry eyes!)

G.

Drawing whole cities scares the hell out of me and it seems to happen to me ALOT. It's not just the idea of all that detail but also striking that crucial balance between far-off scope and up-close intimacy can be difficult or soul crushing depending on the day. Here's one of my latest forays into depicting a city as a whole: Greater Borphee from Legends of Zork.

I wish I had stuck some characters in the foreground to populate things up a bit more. It seems a bit too empty to me now, looking back. And no matter how small it is in the game, I still feel like I should have put way more detail in the buildings than I did. Next time Gadget!

All and all though, this is still one of my favorites from this project. Again, vast amounts of credit to Chris Oatley for his crazy colours.

G.

Double Fanucci Face-Cards

Jim posted the suits for the Double Fanucci cards over at his awesome blog of awesome so I figured I'd show one of the face cards we put together.
This happy fellow is Death and this is his card. Looking back, I wish I had come up with some clever unifying look to all the cards but I'm still happy with how they turned out.


More tomorrow!