This is character lineup of what I remember of Ocarina of Time; in essence: this is what the eight year old me took away from that game. Here are some beats I wanted to hit with each character BASED on my eight year old interpretation (and keep in mind, I honestly barely know the story, I was just an eight year old wanting to hit dudes):
Adult Link
I know Link is supposed to be growing into a cunning warrior however, he's been all about this princess for how long and she still seems hardly grateful for the deeds Link has done. Because of this I always had a sort of pity on adult Link and thought of him as a hopeless dork with a sword.
Kid Link
Always came off as a snot to me
Unkempt weird little orphan elf kid?
Sheik
Who's she fooling?
Adult Zelda
With the introduction of Sheik I started liking Zelda a whole lot more throughout the game, so I made her less boring as she aged, and a little more presentable if you will.
Kid Zelda
Yawn. Spoiled princess, all I remember about her is her guards were assholes and kind of a pain to get past.
Guru Guru
Once again, nothing changed too much, just wanted to make him because he's such a weird recognizable caveat character.
Deku Scrub
I didn't really do all that much here, I just always thought they were a cool enemy type and wanted to paint one.
Goron
They are big cuddly dumb volcano bears that are blessed with retard strength (pardon the french).
Princess Ruto
The fishiest polygonal sexpot my prepubescent mind has ever seen.
King Zora
I felt it necessary to include him with Princess Ruto but all in all he's just a morbidly obese fish with a cape.
Ganondorf
He was creepy and weird and green and just seemed like the type of dude that eats maggots, smells disgusting. I thought he was way too pretty in the games, so I just wanted to make him look more spindly and weird. That being said, being such a horrible villain I totally could and maybe SHOULD make him more badass and cool, less spindly and weak. HOWEVER, this interpretation needs to remain true to 8-year-old-Ethan-universe, so that's Ganondorf.
One of the things I've been doing over the last month or so is redesigning some characters from Zelda. Here's where I'm at with some of the cast, there is another set like this I need to make some decisions with yet, and even these are subject to change. It all looks a little too cute at the moment, hopefully I can change that in the next pass.
Here's a study I decided to try out. I always forget about Scupltris for concepts and base sculpts of things but it's a really awesome streamlined tool. Last night I got the itch and decided to sculpt from a J.C. Leyendecker study. A little blobby yet, getting there.
For Delta Quebec, there is a trope character I needed to throw in: the damsel. I named her Damsel, because I'm a hack and it sounds southern enough for me to leave it as that for the time being. The inspiration for design is the WLA (Womens Land Army) that was around in Britain, then later in the US during the first and second world wars to help man the fields while the men were out fighting.
It's all sort of a Rosie the Riveter aethetic I suppose. Pardon the sketchiness, that's me in almost forgot to post this mode.
At first glance spelunky is an adorable looking dungeon crawling adventurer. To the average XBLA consumer it reminds them of Terraria or Minecraft and lets you assume that it is all fun and exploration. The art style loses it's charm after about the second time you fall into a spike pit, lose all of your gear and have to start from level 1-1 all over again. Sounds awful right? Until when you realize the 8 stages you just completed took all of 3 minutes.
The basic premise is you have 4 lives, 4 bombs (which destroy map tiles), 4 ropes (makeshift ladders you can deploy), and a fresh clock. The controls are VERY precise and predictable, because if you touch really anything that isn't treasure, gear, a damsel, or the ground, you lose a heart. Your objective is to move through the map as quickly as possible without losing very many hearts. Easy? You don't get hearts back, unless you come across a damsel which you must carry to the end door or run into a kissing gallery where you can pay a hefty price from treasure you've collected so far in your short life for an extra heart or two. Idols count for $5,000 if you can survive the giant boulder that chases after you. Extra gear such as a pickaxe - which expedites your journey by allowing you to knock out bits of the map, and the compass- which gives you an arrow directing you towards the exit gate, will help you immensly. Oh, and for those of you thinking that you can safely crawl through the map at a slow pace, a giant ghost will come out the side of the screen at a certain point (around 2 minutes) and kill you on first touch. The name of the game is learning the systems - finding ways to avoid, defeat, or evade them- and doing so 4 times over before getting a completely NEW set of systems to learn, 4 times over. Caught all that? The name of the game is memorizing the systems and responding accurately.
There are 4 stages per level and 4 levels overall, but I've never made it to the last level (I'm probably 10 hours invested). After completing a level a certain amount of times you may be prompted to build a tunnel as a shortcut to a more advanced stage, however you give up any opportunity of being on the leaderboards, so feh to that.
The multiplayer consists of a few stages with drop boxes and awful things everywhere. It's essentially a super fast Bomberman in which certain maps are started by every bomb from all 4 players being launched at each other from the start of the match and is over in 5 seconds. It is very shallow, very quick, and pretty fun, especially if you play with bots and try to use some teamwork to take out the bots which are surprisingly cunning. There's also a co-op mode, which is the same as singleplayer except once again, no leaderboard possibilities, and no tunnelman appearances to build on your singleplayer game.
Props to Derek Yu for making me feel wholly inadequate.
Apart of my Delta Quebec designs is environments (finally). I'll be posting an overview of this city but the basic structure of the oil city (I haven't made up a name yet) is the residents living in modular stackable homes all around their main town structure of sustainable. Since it was built in a desert, they rely on this tower of 'energy' as a panacea to all energy, nutrition, and other concerns. Though the tower doesn't generate it, but store it from the mines - I'll get to that another day.
I love football. Let me reiterate. Love it. A previous client asked if I could help out with some concepts for a Unity game, it got canned almost instantly, but luckily I was given permission to show off some concepts. These are the three mobs in the game: fan, cheerleader, and football player. The hook: they are zombies. So I went to my big book of stereotypes and came up with these. I had to suit the football player in a neckroll/leather hat, which sent this into some retroish themes (older uni's are better anyway)
Tangentially, I am craving a Mutant League Football(-esque) game, and may do some concepts along the lines of how I would design it. Boney Romo, Slay Matthews, Frank Gorey, J. Cutter and the likes. I did a little chrome study with a sketch I made for the concept, nothing fancy, just a fun way to practice chroming out some robits.
So yesterday I got the itch to learn. What is something I'm not quite good at and need help? Perspective. In fact, I wanted to draw a military vehicle of sorts. Problem was simple: wheels.
So I went on my journey of looking up how to draw a perfect ellipse in perspective. Step 1: draw a perfect square..... Wha.... How do you do that? I dredged through the interwebs, art forums, even going so far to a few Art Center students to limited success. Finally I came across a really long-winded series of videos for one point perspective ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfDbXPPzo0c ).
For the sake of myself, and anyone that happens across this, I'd like to reinterpret the video with a quick image/walk through. Let me preface this in saying, using this in a piece or planning is WAY too much work, and very limited. My intention of using this is to check my eyeballing- ie. draw 10 eyeballed squares, check them with this method, correct accordingly.
Draw 2 horizantal lines perpendicular to one another. The top one is the horizon line(HL), bottom is the ground line(GL). For the purpose of the exercise, a portion of the GL will be the closest leg of the square in space.
Measure between the HL and GL and multiply the distance by 1.73* (photoshop users can just use rectangle marquee to select the gap, then in the height dimensions type 173%). Measure the new quantity from the horizonline, and mark, this will be your eye point (EP).
Start your square, draw a reasonable length near the vertical line we just drew and create the front leg, and converge the edges toward the VP.
From the EP, measure 45 degrees each way from the center (photoshop users can make a square, rotate it 45 degrees and mark both edges). Draw 2 lines outwards until you meet the HL, mark the convergent points.
Connect the 2 initial points of your square to the opposite Median point (MP). You really only need to do 1, but 2 will help to make sure your work is correct.
VOILA! connect where the last 2 lines converge with your vanishing square legs and you have your last leg.
*Admittedly, I'm not sure the significance of 1.73. If I were to guess it has something to do with treating the square as 2 triangles, being that the square root of 3 is 1.73 blah blah blah. It works.
