Vision Riders Entertainment Blog

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.

Random character design I was toying around with.

Ditto.

Advance Wars meets Civilization!

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.