A few months ago I tested for an artist position at a company. They gave me the theme Little Green Men and I made a couple images that I submitted to them. I used this project to sink my teeth a little bit further into Illustrator, the first image I sketched out the main character, the Men in Black character, and the Ufo Alien in pencil, scanned it, then inked the linework and did the text graphic in Illustrator. I then exported it to Photoshop for coloring.
The second image I was a bit looser with the original idea and sketch. It's not as strong of a piece, I think, but I did like that I was able to knock out a second idea, even if it wasn't as fully developed, to show a bit more range. I used the same process, changed up the inking style in Illustrator a little bit but again, did the coloring in Photoshop. I had spent a lot of time on the text graphic, and was pretty happy with how it came out, so I used it for both images.
Ultimately it didn't lead anywhere, and while I probably wouldn't call these portfolio pieces they allowed me to practice and play with some new techniques. I didn't sign any paperwork or NDA, so there shouldn't be any problem, I think, with posting these up for everyone to see.
Last spring I took a class in game design and I ended up developing a small prototype/proof of concept. I linked some of the character designs earlier, and I figured I might as well put up some screenshots and a link to the actual demo if anyone were interested in checking it out. It's an attempt at a 2d side scrolling action game, similar to Devil May Cry but with nowhere near as indepth of a combat system. I mostly wanted to focus on fun characters and actions.
While I did a lot of the work, I had some help from some other members of the class who helped with getting some of the artwork into the game (Ben Lamboy), music (Nick Gingarella and Tyler Boyd) and enemy coding (Nick again).
If you'd like to give it a shot, you can download it here. There's a simple tutorial to get you started with moving around. For the menu, just use the arrow keys and enter.
Here's some recent 3d work that I started because of a challenge on gameartisans.org to model a game character cosplaying/dressed as another. So my idea was Yoshi from the Super Mario Bros. games dressed as the dragon from Panzer Dragoon. Limit was 3000 polys and one 512x512 texture sheet. Right now it stands at 2934 with all of the armor pieces, and wings. The texture is rather rough at the moment, but given the design of the original character I'm not sure how much more detailed I want to go with it. I'm going to attempt doing a normal map also to add some more detail for the armor, as it's not something I've tried before and want to finally tackle.
I've been playing around a bit with the Unity3d engine, a cross platform 3d game engine that people have used to develop for PC, Mac, Iphone, the Wii, and even the web. So last week I spent some time trying to mock up the basics of a 2d shooter (control, firing, explosions). Here's what I've got so far:
It's pretty rough at this point, but I'm going to work on getting 3d work into it instead of just using primitives. The engine itself isn't too difficult to work with, but it takes a little getting used to. And that's what I'm after, familiarity and proficiency.
I grew up on too many cartoons in the 80s, too many comics and anime in the 90s, and videogames came somewhere inbetween then and now. I draw a lot but not as much as I should. I believe Gackt will save the world with the POWER OF ROCK AND ROLL.
