welcome to the compound
Yeah! Whatever!
I’ve been trying to keep up a good (but not daily) drawing pace this month so far so I spend less time feeling rusty and crappy and also experiment a bit more. It’s been ages since I tried to just paint something without guidelines, so here’s a little speedpaint of V1 from Ultrakill. Only took an hour or two, really.
I did this one more or less for coloring practice since I haven’t been doing much of it lately. I’m still not a hundred percent feeling the red armor honestly!
I just kinda tossed this one together one night when I was feeling really achy and craving a hot soak.
Made another pass over Hornet’s armor design, I think I’d still like to tweak the skirt area and maybe change or ditch the hip armor. I’ll have another look at her ‘civvy’ dress sometime and try to make them look closer. I simplified her hair accessories a bit since the ‘wing’ clips on both sides just never looked the way I wanted them to. Her middle lock with the multiple clips is supposed to look like a bee stinger and the white wing clips were meant to be wasp wings, but didn’t really come off that way. I also stopped drawing her hair as tied with a bunch of bands so much as braided with a ribbon running through them to create a similar streak or band effect. I left the wings pretty plain this time since I’d like to make a nice copy of her wasp emblem I can re-use between illustrations of her. I made more of an effort to make the wings a decent size this time too. It’s kind of annoying trying to pick the Super Hornet references out of the regular Hornet references, by the way. I’m picky about this because I do plan to have her become a Super Hornet later on…
With RGL’s Shmuptember marathon coming to an end and Steam’s shmup sale apparently beginning, I am “eating good,” as the kids apparently say. Got to show off Grand Cross, Graze Counter and a bit of Zeroranger, play Twinkle Star, Deathsmiles and Star99 with friends, and got some stuff I want to try out soon. All in all, it was a really great weekend even if I worked through most of it. Anyway. Have a sketch dump!
I’ve not been sharing new art on Twitter lately due to the new TOS thing about them owning the rights to repost/reuse/train machines on all of your data but I haven’t committed to deleting my account since it seems like the majority of people still use it. Bluesky ain’t bad though. Cohost is cozy but seems to really only connect me to a small slice of people I know, and Tumblr is Tumblr. (In all seriousness, Tumblr doesn’t seem to have as much of a PC witch-hunting experience as it used to, I think the porn purge forced most of the really preoccupied folks to Twitter, which ironically seemed to lead to a reverse exodus when Shitty Bruce Wayne took over)
You may have noticed progress has been uber slow on my game(s) and my art grind progress has been a bit erratic, and both are kind of related. I had this kind of “eureka!” moment last week to change focus from a tabletop lite strategy game a la Heroscape to a card dueling game then when I sat to print out and test things I realized, “oh shit- I have no idea where to begin making this actually function.”
See, my goal with CH and Irrgarten before it was to keep things quick and easy to set up and play without making it so simple as to be boring or the same every match. So, the concept of the duel system was going to be danmaku, basically. Shmup stuff broken down in such a way it could be played with cards but still have the “vibe” of carefully taking shots while avoiding massed fire. The idea was each player gets a Battleship style board, but can move around between turns while trading fire via pattern cards. So, main issues:
So, it was kind of starting to lose the vision I had in mind and all the compromises I could think of either were too board gamey or inadvertently ripping off something else (which I confirmed by going through my copies of Bullet?? and Pocket Paragons.) So, all that paired with the odds of anyone wanting to help test it have me a little crestfallen. I’m not quite ready to give up or anything, but I think I’m better off focusing on art for a while and/or learning how to make a digital version of the game for easier access and distribution.
Finally shaking off the funk so I hope to have more real content soon. Until then… take it easy folks.