Vision Riders Entertainment Blog

Sketchbook Monday #87

This will be the last Sketchbook Monday for about a month, as I will be away visiting family in Kentucky. Today's sketches consist of concept artwork for our upcoming game!

Serenity (you, the player). This is closer to what I'm looking for than how she looked the last time I featured her. She wears a backpack because that's where she keeps her inventory.

David, an NPC in the story. This is quite different from my initial concept of him, but I've taken a liking to it.

This is "your" son (id est, Serenity's son) Travis. He plays a key role in the story, but you'll have to wait to find out what it is! He's much younger here than he was the last time he was featured, as the story has been altered and reworked since then.

Sketchbook Monday #86

Random character design I was toying around with.

Ditto.

Advance Wars meets Civilization!

Fundamental Flaw

There's a freeware Civilization clone by the name of C-Evo that I've never been particularly interested in, but I recently chanced across their design philosophy. As a bullet point under how the game should focus itself on strategy, they note:

"The fun you'll have playing the game without reading the manual is comparable to the fun it is to move pieces on a chessboard without knowing the rules of chess."

I'm going to have to point out that, in my opinion, this is a pretty lousy paradigm. I learned how to play chess by actually playing the game with my father. "This is the goal of the game. These are how your pieces move. This is what you should be thinking about at this stage." I learned as I went. I didn't read any books on the subject until after I learned how to play, and I did so in order to understand and develop my knowledge of the game's strategy, not to learn how to move pieces around the board.

A game should already know how to "play itself" and should be designed to help the player along in getting their feet wet, if the player so desires. I like have a nice thick manual at hand as much as the next person, but I shouldn't have to read a textbook just to play a video game.

Sketchbook Monday #85

As per tradition, I am a day late.

The offensive-minded Feral class from Project Overworld. Oh, I want to make this game so bad!

Another, much rougher sketch of the Feral.

The ranger/nomad, from the same game concept.

Sketchbook Monday #84

Goodness! What's it been? Three months now since the last Sketchbook Monday? Life has been unkind to me as of late and, honestly, I haven't been drawing a whole lot lately. That's not a good thing, I guess. I promise I'll try harder.

An updated version of Kirimaru, a character I designed for the Tactics Heroes Project.

A very rough sketch of Glenn, who has never appeared in anything, but shows up pretty often here on Sketchbook Monday.

An early pass of Serenity, the possible main character for an upcoming project.

An early pass of Professor Waetcher, a supporting character from the same project. His face is a little lopsided here, I guess. D:

Rumors of My Demise Have Been Slightly Exaggerated

No, I'm not dead ~~just pining for the fjords~~. I've busy as of late with "real life": helping family move, getting ready to move myself, all kinds of stuff like that. Don't know when Swordmaster Odyssey will return, but I am working on other stuff that will hopefully be ready to share in another month or two.

As for Sketchbook Monday, I'll try to get back on top of that next week.

Sketchbook Monday #83

I've been busy paradigm shifting the past week and a half which means I've gotten pretty much nothing done. Bad Dale! Bad!

Lighting from Final Fantasy XIII.

Hope Estheim from the same game.

Sketchbook Monday #82

I just realized I haven't done this in awhile! (Well, actually that's a lie.) Anyway, today I'll show off some concept sketches of an adventure game I've been working on lately.

This tower is where the game takes place. It has a strange and unusual history behind it—the perfect place for an adventure game. Your ultimate goal is to reach the top of the tower. But why? And why are so many people here to explore this abandoned place? I can't say yet. It's too early to give away the plot.

This is your son. He'll be accompanying you on your adventure. Why are you taking your son with you to such an obviously dangerous place? ~~Because it's a video game~~. You'll have to wait and find out.

This is an adventurer who sees the tower as yet another place to explore and discover. He doesn't look like it in this sketch, but he's actually pretty friendly and outgoing.

This girl followed her friend to the tower. Her friend doesn't really like her that much, but he seems to put up with her for the time being. (Her friend isn't pictured here, but the sketch of your son above was originally meant to be her friend.)

This is a woman who has come to the tower for personal reasons. And by personal reasons, I mean I haven't decided why she's there exactly, I just know that she's important to the game's progression. Her character has actually changed a great deal since I doodled this sketch, so expect her to look completely different the next time you see her.

This is a gruff-looking wanderer who likes to keep to himself. Being an adventure game where you spend most of your time exploring and poking around and using random items in your inventory on each other in a vain attempt to progress all the other characters see you as a perceptive individual and, for some reason, the wanderer likes that about you.

An early design for a character in the game I don't want to give away yet. I didn't like this design, so he won't look like this in the final game.

Sketchbook Monday #81

It's the kid from My Brother. No, I haven't forgotten about it. I'll work on it some more sometime soon, I hope.

The little brother from My Brother. He looks a little too old here, methinks.

You'll have to excuse the quality on these next two scans. They're just little doodles that I did on notebook paper while jotting down a few ideas. I'd like to do a simple adventure game, you see, and these were a couple of the random character ideas that I had at the time.

The idea here is that the character is looking at their reflection in the car window as they ride. This is the reflection they're seeing and the character is, well, you the player looking at it.

Alas, Poor Update, I Knew You Well

My rich younger brother bought a new Intuos for reasons I do not comprehend and gave me his old one. This is nice and all, but having used my tiny 6x4 Graphire. Problem is, thanks to the size change, my work flow has been completely thrown off. It's hard to explain, but basically I can't judge the distance between objects on screen anymore. I'll be looking at something, but I can't tell how far or at what angle I need to move the pen in order to undertake what I'm trying to do.

Finally, I gave up for the time being and thought "Well, maybe I can plug my Graphire back in so I can finish off today's page?" I tried this, and all I managed to do was crash my computer. :/

Guess I'll just have to keep practicing with the Intuos so I can get the page up next week.

Sketchbook Monday #80

I actually scanned all this on Monday, but I was "lucky" enough to catch a wonderful cold from my brother and have spent the past few days putting up with headaches and manufacturing snot.

Concept art of Naomi from Under a Different Moon.

More concept art of Naomi.

Concept of Ulf from Under a Different Moon.

You can tell this person is serious because their hair is blowing in the wind. It's a proven, scientific fact that wind blows through your hair when you are serious and also awesome.

This is a future character from Swordmaster Odyssey that will--should the story continue in its current direction--be introduced not too long from now.

Sketchbook Monday #79

Yes, I said I would cancel this, but if there's one thing harder for me than finishing something, it's giving it up. Why those two things don't cancel each other out is beyond me, unfortunately.

Concept art for a random side-scrolling game I had an idea for. The character can switch between a long-range attack (here a rifle) and short-range melee attack (here a sword). Two two designs are male and female versions of the hero. Beyond this and a sketch of the jump pose, nothing ever came of it. Honestly, I have enough unfinished ideas as it is. Why can I not think small?

Concept art for Under a Different Moon.

More concept art for Under a Different Moon. The design for this character's armor was largely scrapped and redone.

The most ambitious concept art for Under a Different Moon! The finished version of this is is meant to be the "cover art" that will appear on the main page of the site once it goes up. That idea may change, though, considering many of these characters don't appear until late in the narrative, and I'm not sure if I'm ready to commit to their designs until I get to doing the art for their first appearances.

Sketchbook Monday #78

Happy New Year, everyone! Welcome to 2010. Hopefully things start going a little better here at Vision Riders. Not sure why I'm doing another Sketchbook Monday, or if this one will be the last, but enjoy the ride while it lasts I suppose. If you'd like to see Sketchbook Monday continue, please let me know. As far as I can tell, nobody reads the blog.

Two characters, Khalil ("Kal", the boy) and Jacob (the spiky-hair girl), from a story I have been toying with and have managed to write some of. If ever finished, I don't think it's something that would fit in here at Vision Riders.

Random guy I drew because I needed the practice. Seriously, people, would you believe I spent two years in art school? I should be able to draw better than this! Practice, practice, practice. I must become more diligent in the coming year so that my skills may become stronger.

Serious guy/girl/something. You can tell they're serious because their hair is blowing in the wind. That's serious stuff! You'll notice I've been tweaking my style as of late. I want something more realistic, but still stylized. Granted, I've been trying to do that since long before Vision Riders. One day, I will perfect it! Bah! If only that day were today.

Who dares to challenge the might of the paladin, Glenn?

Random ninja/samurai guy I felt like drawing. Honestly, I don't think he turned out too bad.

So much so, in fact, that I ended up drawing his whole body. I generally try to avoid giving characters scarves because the only canon Vision Riders hero, Jessie, already has one, but he ended up with one anyway.

Sketchbook Monday #77

This may be the last Sketchbook Monday I do. Not the last one this year, the last one period. No one really reads the blog as it is, so I might as well save my efforts for entries that are more worthwhile. Meh.

A character design for a super-quick game idea. Except that nothing is super-quick with me. I could turn The Raven into War and Peace without so much breaking a sweat. And I could do it in my sleep. With both arms tied behind my back. And a blindfold. Although if I were sleeping, that'd be kind of redundant.

This is the co-pilot design. The idea of the game is that you're piloting a drill from the Earth's crust all the way to its molten iron core. Really, from a gameplay standpoint, you'd only need one character to personify the player, but I felt like giving the hero a co-pilot so here she is.

Here they are together. They make a cute couple, don't they?

One more of the girl.

Something I just felt like sketching; a girl in a basketball jersey.

This is what I wasted my time on all last week. This page is an excerpt from a simple sketched draft of a short story in comic form. The draft is complete, but as usual, I am doomed to never finish anything so don't expect to ever see me work on the real thing. There's fourteen more pages besides this one. Ouch! It was well over what I was shooting for.

Sketchbook Monday #76

I'm not wild about this new sketchbook I've purchased. The paper is too dark and flimsy, and the scans are coming out very poorly (though a bit better than I expected they would, I will admit). I'll probably try to "burn through" this paper as quickly as I possibly can. In the meantime, here's a very, very late Sketchbook Monday.

Still experimenting with the art style for Under a Different Moon. Here's an older version of Iccari, along with ????. I'd like to serialize the story here on Vision Riders, but I'm waiting on input first. I want the story to be the best it can possibly be, despite its age and cliché-ridden plot.

Look, it's anime Iccari!

Here's a more realistic rendition that my sketchbook paper utterly ruined. This is close to the style I'd like to use, but it wouldn't look right with my horrid skill, so I'm afraid to use it at all. Oh, how I wish I could paint! T_T