#how to make isometric grid

[sahdevvala]

Isometric Design

#adobe #adobeillustrator #illustrator #illustration #vector #vectorart #Ai #graphicdesign #graphicdesigner #creative #creativegraphicdesigner #creativegraphic #creativedesigner #sahdevvala #valasahdev #kshitijvivan #kshitij_vivan #educationvala #educationcala.com #drawingandillustrations #vectorart #art #illustartiondrawing #2pointperspective #perspectivegrid #twopointperspective #roomdesign #buildingdesign #perspectiveillustrator #perspectiveillustration #1pointperspective #isometricgrid #onepointperspective #roomdesign #buildingdesign #isometricroom #isometricdesign #isometricview #isometricillustrator #isometricillustration #isometric #howtomakeisometricgrid

[omaano]

"What a strange pair. A Mandalorian and a Force-sensitive youngling, hmm... Who is in need of a master to guide him and help him to come into his full power, yes?"

Any time Maul comes across a Force-sensitive youngster: "Is anyone going to claim this apprentice as his own or do I have to do everything around here?" and doesn't wait for an answer. (Grogu is safe tucked away in Din's satchel, don't worry)

Din accidentally turns up with Obi-wan's keepsake in his pocket once, and Maul doesn't only fly into an episode of blind rage and super melodramatic monologuing, but he also gives him a boon that is nothing but trouble and chaos of epic proportions.

Bonus background detail/close up, because while I didn't redraw the full thing, I'm quite proud of my modifications:

More of the Star Wars meets Hades AU (I’m trying to give monthly updates on my progress with it)

[goblincow]

401% FUNDED | ONLY 5 DAYS TO GO!!

Field Agent Handbooks: Observancy Dept. 1924–28

Sharpen your ESP skills and seek out suspicious activity as a pendulum-dowsing Field Agent

This set of four Field Agent Handbooks are an always-on solo RPG/LARP to play with when out and about. They’re created as in-world artefacts from the 1920s, made for you to note your observations about the world around you through a lens of suspicion. 

1924 – Revolution

We suspect the animal kingdom of plotting a revolution and you are here to help us understand their devices.

Our mission in the Observancy Department is to spot any such behaviour or signs of suspicious activity, note them down, and draw our conclusions.

Additional pages include:

Blank map with grid references

Table of potential signs of revolutionary activity

List of weather types and symbols for notation

1925 – Leviathan

The age of flight may still be in its infancy but we have heard worrying reports from our aeroplane and dirigible pilots of glimpses of giant beasts roaming the aether, just out of sight.

Our fresh mission is to observe the clouds, look for unusual shadows & formations, and attempt to discern the activity and anatomy of these sky-bound leviathan.

Additional pages include:

Common anatomy of leviathan (hypothesised)

Illustrated chart with types of clouds and symbols for notation

Illustrated chart for estimating distance to horizon

Table to identify the Beaufort Number for the wind

List of weather types and symbols for notation

1926 – Communication

While we looked upward, we didn't think to concern ourselves with the growing cacophony in our very own gardens, forests, and fields.

Our mission turns to our leafy neighbours to see if we can understand their speech and intuit their meaning throughout each season.

Additional pages include: 

Signs and shapes to look out for

Size estimation chart

List of weather types and symbols for notation

1928 – Giants

From the landscape sprung the flowers, but who formed the landscape? Newly uncovered texts indicate the folklore might be true and giants may have indeed roamed and shaped the earth.

Our mission is to lower our gaze to the ground to identify oddly shaped mounds, mimetoliths (rocks resembling faces), gouged earth, and suspicious urban planning decisions. Under the hills there may be sleeping colossus.

Additional pages include:

Signs to look out for

Common rock types

How to draw landforms & rocks in an isometric fashion

I wanted to shine a light on this project because I met Luke at Dragonmeet in December '23 and fell in love with the way he thinks about RPGs, graphic design and play/ritual/thinking-the-world in his games!

I can't recommend this project enough and I've been waiting excitedly to support it and see it succeed! It really represents everything I think is special about RPGs and the things I also want to explore in this design space *and art movement* and if you have any interest in TTRPGs beyond the scope of dungeon games, Luke is making some of the freshest and most evocative design you can find in the entire medium.

Everything you see here is directly from the kickstarter. Go back it! I promise you'll be glad you did, there are few more unique and inspiring things you could spend your money on in TTRPGs right now!

[matty-from-megalos]

figured out how to use a triangular grid to make isometric stuff in affinity. we are so back, etc. etc.

[knotty-et-al]

Truncated Icosahedron

when my brain becomes more functional and less exhausted again i would like to make some tutorials about how to draw polyhedra on isometric grid paper.

I enjoy drawing truncated solids, because you can literally draw one polyhedron into another and just erase the lines of the previous polyhedron.

[archandshri]

23rd Feb '24 - [arch] OH RISO my beloved!!!!!! ft. cyberpunk hermitcraft soup group

A cliffhanger!!!! And now I have to wait a month for you to upload the second half?? How will I cope :’’0

For real, it’s so awesome to see your process and the sheer amount of inspiration you take! In particular, I thought ‘Sit on Two Chairs’ and ‘This Was Our Pact’ were particularly yummy. 

I think book covers are really hard. You have to sum up a book’s energy in one image, make it stand out and show just enough so people want more. Exploring the narrative through those full pages is really interesting - though this is something you did for fun, it could be a really useful technique for getting to know a narrative. When I’m designing my comic covers, I always do it last - that way I’ve had practice with the visual style and I’m thoroughly familiar with the themes, so I guess spending a bit of time with the characters and narrative in this way helps for standalone book covers too. Of course, it helps if you have the time for that XD

Okay!! Onto what I've been up to!!! [warning this is a beefy post I'm sorry for your poor reading brain]

The past two weeks have been really enjoyable! I’ve been playing a lot with slow world-building, in sketchbooks, google documents, and voice notes to friends. Letting myself really sit with concepts, think about the characters, let them play in my head with no expectations. With this relaxation and lack of pressure, some beautiful narratives and interactions have been developing. I’m starting to need a name for a world/ the story. I’m not quite ready to give them a full introduction to the internet - I know it doesn’t but it feels like there’s some accountability to *produce something* and this slow development is really important for the quality and my skill building. It’s really hard to take on, but we actually don’t have to make the perfect thing now! In fact, it’s impossible. Pressure on ourselves makes it so hard to make something good if we’re always grasping at the final result.  In the meantime, while those characters develop, I have been working hard on my basic skills. I wrote about characterization last post, but this week I focused on setting and colour. I was inspired (once again) by Hermitcraft. I’ve seen some really incredible illustrations of Minecraft builds in the fandom, and it seems like a great exercise.

Bdouble0's Season 10 Base illustrated by @applestruda [source] and The Red Zone, built and illustrated by Bdouble0 [source]

One of the creators on Hermitcraft, ImpulseSV, created this build in a recent episode. It takes inspiration from the last season of Hermitcraft, where he was part of the ‘soup group’ with two other players, and his current base concept - a cyberpunk city.  I also LOVE his new character design, so I wanted to place him in the scene.

Screenshot from Impulse's video and new impulse design by @maxx-doodles

Here are some initial thumbnails I did, trying to figure out the composition. I wasn’t sure of the vibe yet, so I tried some rough thumbnailing, and drawing on an isometric grid and other perspective techniques. I’m going a bit mad for characters at the mo, so I wanted to place some in the scene. I found the angle of the isometric grid steep to place characters comfortably, so decided against that.

Looking back at it, I love the second! But I believe I was struggling with the perspective. I decided on the last one eventually.

Now, I absolutely adore all of the players in the Soup Group, and I am BIG fan of redesigning their notable characteristics to suit different settings. So yes, I decided to put all of the soup group in the image.

PearlescentMoon (left) from my comic and GeminiTay's Hermitcraft Season 10 design [from this thumbnail] (right)

Here's the sketch of the final image. I really enjoyed coming up with cyberpunk versions of them all. I used the impulse design almost exactly, with a few extra interesting details since he's mostly viewed from the back. For PearlescentMoon (middle) I kept her fringe, dark hair and gave her a glowing moon symbol on her top. For GeminiTay, I kept her long ginger hair, antlers (but glowing!) and took inspiration from her new season 10 design - a dark blue jumpsuit to match her dark blue clothes in her new design, and the braids she is often drawn with. I also gave them edgy new hairstyles. And a robot arm. I don't have lore for that.

As usual, I filled each flat colour-to-be with black and lowered the opacity to play with the values. Then I added colours one at a time, aware might be riso printing it. Originally I stuck to trying to make it printable (making the colours out of ones I could make my layering 2-3 colours at different opacities), but as I went on, I decided to drop that and focus on the quality of the image in a digital format alone. I did keep the grayscale version above with all the separate layers in case I needed that if/when I came to riso printing it. Below are the main two digital colour schemes I tried out.

I settled on the one on the left, with the blue tones - the foreground characters really pop. I put a few details in Gem's hair, colour variations etc, and cropped it for Instagram. I actually much prefer the cropped version - it sits better in a rule of thirds.

Now the moment we've all been waiting for :'')

RISO!!!!!!!!!!!

I returned to Cardiff after a couple of months away and was delighted to spend my first day back at The Printhaus, an awesome shared print studio where I have basically made my home. A few of my awesome friends happened to be there, so I spent the day playing around with this image with their help! (please check them out they're very cool - Gavin helped me a lot (we hung out at Thought Bubble, remember? and Rhi gave good crits too!!)

For those who don't know, risograph is basically a shitty photocopier that can only print one colour at a time. However, you can play with gradients and opacities, and layer colours really nicely to combine. I've done a lot of single-colour tonal work with riso but this is my first go really layering.

First, Gavin showed me how to separate the channels in Photoshop, using the flat image uploaded to the 'gram. We copied and pasted these layers in grayscale and added blending modes to each layer to replicate what they might look like when printed.

With blending modes, the digital mockup looked like this!!

This bit goes into technical details for replicating what the print might look like for those who might want it - feel free to skip :)))

I copied and pasted the Cyan, Black and Magenta layers as greyscale (as you can see above)

I made all of the greyscale layers multiply layers since risograph ink is transparent and we wanted to see how it layers. The ink usually comes out a bit lighter than you think, so it's good to bear that in mind. I used a clipping mask over each greyscale layer and a blending mode. WHEN YOU PRINT, PRINT IN GREYSCALE, NOT COLOUR.

Here's how I split the colours from CMYK to the riso colours, their hex codes and the blending mode I used to replicate the colours:

Cyan - Mint [HEX#82D8D5] Screen Magenta - Fluorescent Pink [HEX#FF48B0] Screen Black - Blue [HEX#0078BF] Overlay Yellow - scrapped for colour scheme purposes

Blue, Mint and Florencent Pink layers in greyscale in Procreate.

Riso printed Mint and Florescent Pink layers on separate paper, followed by the two layered together.

We always start with the lighter colour inks first, because sometimes the rollers can pick up the ink and cause extra marks where you don't want them. The first two colours came out great!

The first time we printed the blue, it came out very dark (left, first image). I have had this issue before - my last book, Winter Wellbeing, came out much darker than I wanted. Now I realise that the blue ink is super sensitive. All the 'white space' that is covered by a low-opacity blue on the left is only 2%, and yet it has come out pretty strong. We tried printing it on one of the misaligned images just to see, but it took all of the brightness out of the neon soup sign at the top of the image (second image). So I changed the values and pushed them way lighter, so it just pushed the values of the darker bits slightly, and brightened some of the lineart (right, first image)

And this is the final riso printed version!! I'm so so happy with how this came out. It's so different from the original digital version, and I actually love that.

I didn't create new colours in the way that I intended to - I wanted to play with overlaying purposefully to create specific colours eg. orange for the hair etc. But!!! I'm really happy with how it came out. That will have to be a project for next time.

Also, many copies are slightly misaligned, so in future I think I'd do flat layers for the colours a more blobby style with the linework on one layer only so there's less of a chance for obvious misalignment. design for the riso, rather than riso the design.

Overall though, this feels like a super cool step up and a milestone for me. Super happy with how it came out!! And I'm excited to play with colour some more. Can't wait to see the rest of the Lionheart brothers! Enjoy your weekend :)))

Archie 🕺🕺🕺🕺🕺🕺🕺🕺🕺🕺🕺🕺 <3

[coldgoldlazarus]

Suddenly remembered a dream I had a few years back about Prime 4. I was in this lush sandstone-y underground area, looked like a greener, less dilapidated and dusty version of Chozo Ruins in some ways? Enclosed roof, but with strategically-placed skylights boring up through who knows how many layers of rock to let sunlight in.

And there were these long, narrow "windows" at eye level, but with really fancy decorative trellis patterns instead of glass, providing views into adjacent rooms. At one point I glanced through one and saw like four or five rooms in a row that all had these trellis windows connecting them; and then hopped into a Morph Ball tunnel that led me to the furthest one.

The place was also laid out ridiculously exacting to a grid, not a diagonal or rounded corner to be seen, and this extended to the etchings in the walls too; almost felt like it could have been made in Minecraft if not for the level of detail. I eventually found a door leading outside to a gulley, and found that aside from some ramps, the entire surface here was also super terraformed to fit into that grid structure; looked like erosion had messed that up in some spots, but for the most part it was eerily regimented. Again going back to the minecraft comparison, unlike that where the terrain generation still makes natural-looking hills and curves even out of meter cubes, here even the layout of the different levels looked really artificial and squared-off. Almost 2D-Zelda-esque, honestly, if rendered into 3D. But at the same time, the amount of like, vines and moss and tall grass and other weird alien shrubs all over the place kept it from feeling creepy, just kinda weird.

The gunship (Classic edition, I think) was parked nearby, and I got into it. Instead of a destination select like in Corruption, though, I just got a cinematic fixed third-person view while controlling it manually, which also had the side-effect of making the surroundings look even more like an isometric game. I slowly hovered up, then turned east (based on the position of the sun; it was early afternoon) and took off, and enjoyed watching more of that weird landscape pass below me. It took several minutes, but finally came to a medium-large canyon, which seemed to mark a border between that terraformed garden landscape, and untouched natural geology.

I tilted my camera down a bit to better see what was ahead of me, and on the other side of the canyon was arid scrublands with cacti and stuff, with a big gradual slope up to a pair of absolutely massive mesas in the distance, so far away that the haze in the air rendered them dark sihouettes against the sky, and towering well above even the Gunships's current elevation. I angled toward the gap between them, and around then was when the dream either shifted to something unrelated, or I just woke up.

[swishysword]

why did I never start following you I was looking for you in my list of moots and then I realised you were never there... well that's fixed now

anyways the actual question hi!! I've seen you share some lancer campaign stuff (very cool!) and I think you're running your campaign using foundry. is it a good tabletop? I've been using roll20 but I have some beef with it (I ran out of storage space pretty quick) and I checked out foundry real quick cause from what I've seen it's pretty great, but wowie that's quite the price tag (especially for my silly unemployed self).

is it worth it? you got any upsides n downsides you'd like to share with anyone thinking about using it?

thanks for hearing me out! also if I mistook your tabletop for something else you are legally allowed to fire an apocalypse rail at me

Hihi! You're right about me using foundry, I've got a few campaigns I'm running on it (the #my table tag)! Personally I've been liking it much more than I ever did roll20, but it's not quite as plug-and-play as roll20 can be. On the pilot net discord (https://discord.gg/lancer), there's actually a channel dedicated to talking about lancer and vtts, which is a good thing to check for help and options too!

Foundry's like $50 usd, but at least it's a flat price and not a subscription. Also goes on sale every few months so you could wait for one of those to grab it (as of writing this too it's on a 20% anniversary sale too until May 31st). On top of that you have to host stuff yourself, or else set up your own server—I personally set up an external host at https://foundryserver.com/ but obviously that means now I'm paying for a subscription for that and honestly you probably don't need that, I've got a friend who handle hosting herself and it works perfectly.

The thing that's both nice and a lot is the module system. It's got a browser built in so you can search both the stuff in their database, and you can put in links to stuff other people have made, which is where I've installed things like the isometrics look I've got (grape juice isometrics). It also means you do have to spend some time while doing setup adding modules, testing them, figuring out how it works, etc. It also means that if you start having errors and bugs, the debugging process can be a tedious "disable every module and then turn them on one-by-one until you find which one is the problem."

Unfortunately between having to figure out hosting and setting up modules, it's got a lot more overhead for the gm than just spinning up roll20 and having it work out the box. Flip-side, the pilot net discord is really friendly and happy to help explain things. Heck, there's even a guide on google docs (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VoSrsI_RnlDtrmshNWRdTdY5Xl3eB3oxUxEJt1Vqj44/edit#heading=h.bgdnv8sel1f) people put together for that purpose!

On that note you can almost certainly find someone there who is down to let you play around with their setup as a temp gm.

tl;dr

I think it's worth the price, but you can probably afford to wait until a sale if you're not sure. It's a lot more work for the gm/host to set up, but in turn you have a lot more you can do with it.

also while I have you here, let me get into some specifics

I use starlight furnace's art (https://starlight-furnace.itch.io/) for the tiles and backgrounds, retrograde minis for the mecha (https://www.retrogrademinis.com/) both of which are free.

For foundry modules, I'd recommend

grape_juice-isometrics

Hex Token Size Support

Grid Aware Templates

Drag Ruler

There's also some useful stuff like Drag Upload that can help making things feel more intuitive.

also let me beg your forgiveness for so many words with pretty pictures

[art-of-mathematics]

Hexagon-shaped box made with basic materials

Today I wanted a solution for an easy-to-carry box for my pencils that I can nest into each other (like russian dolls (those wooden box dolls you can insert into each other)).

My solution turned towards this hexagon-shaped box which uses basic Steckverbindungen, cuts and folds.

In the sketch you see solid lines - these need to be cut.

The dashed lines need to be folded.

I reduced the size of my blueprint sketch by 5% and by 10% to have smaller grids.

Then I transferred the three differently sized grids on foil and assembled them:

The first attempt:

This 3-box-assemble is not stable enough, because the foil I used is very thin and too instable. And I made lots of mistakes and was overally very sloppy with crafting.

Yet, overally this works ok. If I improve the previously mentioned aspects this box assemble will work fine.

I might:

- use thicker material

- be more exact with crafting each box

- consider using 3 clamps for additional stability

- improve the Steckverbingungen between the three boxes

I can insert the three foil boxes into each other.

(I might make photos later. but right now I am very sleepy and want to "laze around". )

Perhaps I might write a better-structured post later as well. (once I crafted the improved model)

after all I enjoy the hexagon design - and how well I could use isometric grid paper to draw the pattern for that box.

[mortia]

I am a happy girl. I’ve discovered something and I am a happy girl!

We all know how to make custom maps for TS2, right? Load up SC4, find a small city and then painstakingly use the janky tools to create a map that works for you while not being able to undo if you make mistakes or see your map in anything other than an isometric view. 

I got really annoyed thinking about this because, for my new game, I want my map to look very specific dammit! I hate working in SC4 and then fucking something up because I sneezed and never getting it to look the same ever again. 

I knew that you could generate Region Terrains using a grayscale image...but a TS2 map needs to be one Small City, not an entire Region, so how would I make that custom map work when I’d need the entire Region to be the size of a Small City? And then, could I just create my map in a 3D program so that I can dial in exactly what I want, geometry wise instead of having to fiddle in SC4 and just create a height map there?

WELP. I MADE IT WORK!!!!

I’ll write up a proper tutorial when I have the bugs worked out and know it works for sure, but for now...

First, I created a plane in 3DS Max with 64 segments square, this is the exact grid size you will be working with in SC4. 

I used an in-game Neighborhood object to correctly scale the plane to match an actual overall ‘hood map. It was approximately 6′x6′ in Imperial Units.

Next I did some silly pushing and pulling to create some wild hills and valleys on the plane. I generated a height map from a top-down render and saved that out to be used later. 

^ The Height Map

Next, I opened up the SC4 Regions folder and made a new Region. the Config.bmp image is the one that determines the layout of your region, this is how custom regions are made. I decided to try just making a region with a single small city to see what would happen...

^ that red pixel represents one small city on a SC4 Region map. If this worked then I’d have what I needed (in theory)... 

AND IT WORKED!!! Obviously very silly looking due to my just being in testing mode, but it works! Doing it this way means that it should be possible to just sculpt maps in 3D software so that you can get the look the way you want it and then do any fine tuning in SC4 once you generate the Terrain. The good thing about doing it this way (I think!) is that this should make it much easier to create world-specific CC like Neighborhood Deco that actually fits your world perfectly (more or less) because it’s all to scale and you can plan for it when sculpting the map.  

Consider this the first entry in my “mortia builds a new game” series and I’ll be back when I’ve worked out the kinks :P

[jeremy-ken-anderson]

Squishy Endings

I’ve been thinking about games like Dead Cells and Hades and FFTA and even Slay the Spire that have endings that are only sort of endings.

And how End-y the endings feel to the user has a lot to do with the quality and quantity and format of what comes after.

I’d say defeating the Heart in Slay the Spire is truly the Ending, even if there’s no Ascension. The bonus material includes extra challenge to deepen the experience for players who are into that, but very much feels like, well, bonus material.

At the far, far opposite end you have Automata, which has something like 80% of its gameplay and plotline hidden behind what it initially tells you is the Ending? I don’t know how to classify that.

Hades has plot doled out in little bites and the pace of those - from what I’ve seen from streamers and such, I haven’t gotten there myself - doesn’t seem to change after you defeat Hades, nor after you get to the credits. I wonder whether it just kind of peters out eventually as the game runs out of dialogue options, or whether it ever gives you a True For-Really-Reals It’s Over. I feel like it’s the former simply because I expect I’d have seen it if the latter existed.

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is in this weird middle space where there’s only a little bit of post-Final Boss plot, and it’s kind of weakly written, like maybe someone wanted to include it but they didn’t have the resources to spend a lot of time on it or the like. But also it’s very possible to have only 20 or 30 of the 250 missions complete when you “win,” meaning a TON of content is still there for you, just not plot. I think even if you try to finish everything as you go something like 80+, maybe even 100, of the levels are flat-out locked behind getting the Has Won The Game status. So there’s explicitly a lot of content, but there’s also not much plot and (to my eye) what plot is present isn’t well-considered or well-executed, even compared to the regular plot (which some people rag on harshly as well).

Pokemon’s also a curious beast, not least because it has always been running two concurrent plotlines in every game: The run through the badges as you attempt to become a Pokemon Master, and the Team Evil Doin’ Evil Stuff plot that keeps intersecting yours as you go. Even after you do both, there’s often a hunt for legendaries and/or shinies, as well as filling out the ‘Dex (especially if you’re not a doofus like me who tries to collect them all as soon as they become available and then keep them all at the same level - the math around how exponential growth works makes this completely unworkable around the fourth gym pretty consistently).

To me the follow-up plot items of FFTA and Pokemon always feel a little weak, and to be positive about it I think a lot of that comes down to them having a satisfying conclusion to their basic story. You stop the rampaging pokemon (by hucking your Master Ball at it!) that Team Evil was trying to get to do their Evil Stuff, and you become Pokemon Master (sometimes by cheesing the poor Final Four with the OP moves from that rampaging legendary you just caught). The stuff after that is personal satisfaction/collection but isn’t really story. The story is properly concluded. FFTA has seen you able to get home again, and breaking your friend out of his obsession with a false reality (pushed by a creepy divine being pretending to be his mother). Having the game go on after that requires a bunch of weird hand-waving/lampshading, and from a story perspective it’s not great even if I’m glad to get to continue beating up morbols on an isometric grid.

Ah, the irony of my not knowing how to properly end this meditation on endings...!

[omaano]

SW Hades AU July Update

Other updates: May - June - July - August

I've made a lot more progress with my Star Wars meets Hades AU project than I'd imagined - and absolutely none in other aspects, so let's see how the past month has been!

I have finished the character illustrations both for Maul

and Omega, (look how cute she is in her pocket sized version! ^^)

and I have also finally rounded out my Din collection, so that I now have 6 variations on his character art (helmet on and off, with Grogu and the darksaber, and with and without Grogu and the beskar spear in hand).

Aphra has lines and flat colours too, as well as the very basic lighting layers on her!

I'm real hyped to start working on her! I'm very proud of the dynamic pose I picked for her, too. I'll likely up the red in her jacket and gloves for a bit of a pop in colour, because all this brown everywhere is growing a little boring tbh. Like with certain other characters...

There has been some progress with Obi-Wan, but it's going suuuper slow, and I continue to preemptively worry about how I should completely redraw him for after his reunion with Cody, too. (Iirc Patroclus is standing with his spear in hand after he's reuinted with Achilles in Hades, and I also very badly want to draw him with his lightsaber ignited, but I feel that wouldn't be very good for him just, you know, hanging out in front of his little house on Tatooine...)

And now I'm going to add my first ever poll for the next month in case anyone wants to weigh in on the order in which I add characters to this project:

I'm making no promises, but I thought this could be fun :)

This post is growing a little long, so I'm putting the rest about Obi-wan's background re-draw, and some musings on picking colours for Omega under the read more ->

There was no room for it in the previous update, but I'd fully redrawn one background finally for Obi-Wan's chilling spot!

It is the same setup as where you can find Patroclus in game, with the walls and the chasm and the doors out, but I added Obi-Wan's hut and a desert envisonment. (I've watched so many videos on how to draw in an isometric grid, because there was always something that just wouldn't work... I'd thought there was a trick to drawing squares and circles in this grid that I just couldn't figure out for the life of me - and it turns out that I was just careless and my grid wasn't tight enough so I had to eyaball distances and the width and length of things too much lol.) And now I'm faced with the difficult task of picking colours and figuring out if the character shading tricks also apply here or not.

For now these colours are more for just to block in certain elements in the background, but I have some more desert/desolate looking backgrounds saved from other Supergiant games (they've got some really vibrant and dark colours, like wow!) as well to hopefully help me out moving forward.

I'd redrawn those bulbs you can find over the door leading out of various chambers in-game, because I might as well go in full re-design mode bit by bit, and after some deliberation and googling I picked the Mandalorian Crusaders symbol as inspiration for it.

And now back to Omega for a bit:

While I was working on the character illustration for Omega and Batcher I became very aware of how weird it is to pick colours for me. (I very heavily rely on preexisting colour palettes; I have multiple saved just for the Hades project like for Rex, Ahsoka, Cobb...) I'd been working on Rex and Cody last (Maul doesn't count because he doesn't have very human colours, so picking reds and purples and browns for him wasn't so shocking tbh), and aside from the armor paint and hair colour they very much share the very same colour palette. That was easy, I'd picked the skintones off Boba and the little portrait icons already, upped the saturation a bit because seeing the base skintone laid down scared me, and off I went.

(Laying down the first layer of flat colours is always super scary because they too often seem too dark and too grey/green, which I know will change after the complete shading is done but it still looks very off putting...)

So. The way the colouring in Hades made sense for me is that it works with pretty desaturated colours, there is a lighter shadow colour that's a bit more desaturated and the hue is shifted cooler but is still pretty cool to the original base colour (so much that I'd often have to turn it darker so that I'd see it laid down if I'm not sitting right), and another darker shadow layer that is a tad more saturated and warmer in tone. And there is also (a possibly slightly cooler shifted) and lighter highlight, and another more saturated colourful highligt (in the skin that is the bright, peachy orange for example). (and the little super bright pops of colour at the very very end. I hate adding them so much, but they are very important!)

But while I could pick the skin tones off of Rex, the problem I'd tumbled into was when it came to shading her hair (it's very important to me that Rex and Omega shared all these colours). Omega has a lot more hair (shocking, I know), and so shading that required a lot more than Rex's simple two-tones, and the "shadow" colour from Rex just didn't work, it was too saturated and warm in a larger quantity. So I tried to find another blond character in Hades, picked some colours off of Theseus... and those didn't work too well either, because those colours looked too pale and washed out compared to how lively her skintone was. There had been a lot of adjusting - I'd colour picked all of Theseus' colours and watched like a hawk where my colour marker moved both in hue and saturation a couple times in every which way and tried to mimic that in comparison to my base colour... and then you already saw how she ended up.

Here is the visual representation of the process:

I do a lot of these swatches.

You can see them there next to Omega with the blues and the gold/metallic detail colours (the latter of which I'd ended up using in her crossbow), and up above with the Obi-Wan wip as well (I needed to pick a lot of colours from Chaos and Aphrodite to figure out how to go about his pale skin), but I also worked like this with Din and Achilles in the beginning, as well as trying to pick the greens for Boba's armor. Usually the first and biggest hurdle I run into is choosing my base colours... that's something I really need to work on; but after that this method really helped me feel a lot more comfortable with cell shading.

I hope it made sense to you, and it was at least a tad bit entertaining (or if I'd ruined the word "colour" for you for a while, I'm sorry XD, I know I'd used it a lot). This was really the first time I'd truly seen how I changed around the colours I worked with in a piece, and also tried to go a bit more consciously about shifting them around here (that's why I have all the screenshots XD) and thought I might as well share them here in this monthly update.

I've also switched over to using CSP and a display tablet, in the hopes that I can familiarize myself with them without the pressure of needing some fancy or very specific brushwork and work process. No texture, little need for pressure sensitivity - I hope to slowly pspsps my brain into accepting working with these, and build up some success and good experiences before I try sketching and drawing on it and maybe trying out some new unfamiliar brushes as well ^^;

[ciaranswritingportfolio]

Every Cancelled Call of Duty Game [YT Script]

Call of Duty: Real Time Card Game

In 2008, a company based in California primarily known for producing trading cards named Upper Deck Entertainment were set to release a real time card game based on the Call of Duty franchise. Ben Chichoski, the lead developer on the card game working for Upper Deck at the time, worked closely with Activision in order to bring the chaotic feeling of the games to the table. The game had been fully planned, and two player would pit themselves against each other on a 5 by 5 grid, winning by achieving set numbers of points based on “kills”, which would have depended on strategy, planning ahead, and tactical speed. 

Different game modes were planned, just like in the main video game franchise, including various game objectives, such as a capture the flag mode. 

Less like the Pokémon trading card game, the Call of Duty cards served no benefit from trading, or collecting, with just one of the standard release packs, named “squad decks”, being enough to play on equal footing against someone who may have purchased more cards. This aligned the proposed card game with a more traditional tabletop boardgame-like framework, however, the focus here was on speed, and fast paced card-slapping action. 

Unfortunately, this never entered the production phase, so no cards were made, but archived websites detail the rules of this lost Call of Duty game, showing how much work went into pre-production. We can only speculate Activision’s motives here, as not much alludes to the reasons of why this game was cut from the ranks. 

Call of Duty Tactics

The studio Vicarious Visions was acquired by Activision in 2005. It already had experience in making spinoff titles for various company IP’s ranging from various Disney releases, to making Crash Bandicoot, and Spyro games for the Gameboy Advance. It was some time after this, around 2009, that Activision had tasked them with creating a Call of Duty game that was likely to be intended as a downloadable-only release to keep hardcore fans occupied between Modern Warfare 3, and Black Ops 2.

The only real piece of evidence from this tactics-style spinoff is some short footage that animator, Steve Nelson, released on his website portfolio. The video displays untextured character models in an untextured environment, engaging in battle. The camera, typical of isometric tactics, or simulation games seems to snap into a third person view when giving actions to a specific troop, but also is able to float around to spectate the battlefield, and presumably to give directions to a whole squad. This game was eventually cancelled, with again not much information surrounding as to why, perhaps the slower paced, tactical action didn’t quite line up with the frantic gameplay that the series is known for. Fortunately they did end up releasing their own Call of Duty game with Infinite Warfare in 2016.

Call of Duty: Combined Forces 

Visiting now yet another studio who worked on the Call of Duty series, ‘Spark Unlimited’ is a studio which had a contact with Activision to make Call of Duty: Finest Hour. Although the game released to high reviews, the studio was encumbered by lawsuits, and legal complications regarding their previous involvement with Electronic Arts. Essentially their first lawsuit began when Spark formed from around 20 EA employees, where they accused the newly appointed Spark members of helping to start up the new company while still receiving wage slips from Electronic Arts. EA further investigated and accused Spark of stealing trade secrets, and copying their internally made development software.

Things were looking ugly from the beginning for Spark Unlimited, but their legal battle didn’t stop there. 

Spark’s saving grace this time was their contract with Activision. They helped pay for their legal fees, and eventually released Finest Hour, with a steep budget excess of $6million due to the court battles. Craig Allen, founder of Spark went on to describe the companies disorganisation during development, and cited the fact that the Spark team continued with an ‘EA way of working’, and was not up to expectations with Activision. 

Combined Forces would also have been set in World War II, acting as more of an expansion to its predecessor, coming as no surprise that Spark’s pitch for the sequel was rejected, considering the their declining relationship, eventually leading Activision to cut ties with the studio.

The two companies are now embroiled in the bitter legal battlefield of their own, after they both sued each other once Spark’s contract was terminated.

Call of Duty: Devil’s Brigade

Devil’s Brigade was being developed by a studio named ‘Underground Development’, a few months prior to the release of the original Modern Warfare game. The studio, owned by Activision at the time of development, announced their closure in 2010 with lead designer, Kyle Brink, suggesting that the merger of Vivendi and Blizzard made Activision cut them from the company. Things may have panned out differently if they managed to make Devil’s Brigade. The talented team working on this game decided that its setting would be in Italy during the second World War. This was intended to be a tactics style title, with less focus on chaotic, frenetic decision making, and more calculated planning. Details emerging from the cancelled game showed that the D-pad on the controller could be used to give orders to the players own squad. With each command being along the lines of battle orders such as ‘Barrage, Assault, Holding the Line, and Regroup’.

Various screenshots were released detailing some of the items that would have been found in the game. The leaked documents also revealed that it would have third person viewpoints, unlike the isometric style tactics game Combined Forces, that would later be cancelled too. 

The cancellation, according to developer Jason VandenBerghe, was due to developer Infinity Ward requesting more control over the Call of Duty brand. 

Call of Duty: Roman Wars

With possibly what would have been the most left-field for the series, Call of Duty: Roman Wars would have retained an element of the bloody gameplay we all know and love from Call of Duty, but it would have been set in the Roman era. The player would take on the role of a member in Julius Caesar’s Tenth Legion, a famous historical army most trusted by Caesar himself. 

Already involved in the cancelled Call of Duty scene, Vicarious Visions were responsible for the conception of this title. They pitched this game to Activision after they had requested more experimental ideas for the series. 

Vicarious Visions created a level based on the historical battle of Alesia, yet plans were made to have the game take place across a variety of regions, like forests, oceans, and desert plains. Footage obtained by GamesRader displays third and first person views, including direct melee combat, or ranged by the use of bow and arrows. IGN reports that the game would utilise catapults as a further ranged option, and that the Call of Duty equivalent of tanks would be translated to ridable elephants for this historical epic. 

On the cancellation, a spokesperson for Activision said that the game was never seriously considered as an addition for the COD franchise, and was never asked to even move to a prototype phase. The amount of work done on the game already meant that Vicarious Visions instead dropped the Call of Duty name, and attempted to pitch it to Ubisoft under just ‘Roman Wars’, which again ended up eventually being rejected.

Call of Duty: Vietnam

We now come to Sledgehammer Games’ third person story set in wartime Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos over the 60s and 70s. 

The game would have most certainly included a large single-player campaign section, with developer Brett Robbins sharing details about the axed game in an interview with MinnMax. 

He said the plan was the make a COD game with the adventurous and linear style similar to the Uncharted games with a much more brutal edge. Game artist Glen Schofield highlighted that the harshness of the sci-fi game Dead Space was an influence in the kind of atmosphere they wanted to convey. 

Development never got too far, and only a 15 minute demo was made, with Robbins describing the work they did up to that point as an experiment in how they wanted to make their mark on a title of their own. Call of Duty: Vietnam would have been Sledgehammer Games’ first full title in the series, but once their 15 minute demo was made, development was quickly put on hold due to issues at Infinity Ward, one of Activisions Studio’s primarily working on Call of Duty. Developers at Sledgehammer were asked to help out and pick up slack on the development of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, likely leading to the delay of their gritty title. This eventually led to more delays, and inevitably its cancellation. This was unfortunate as executives appeared to like the game, but they never found the time to complete the work, as Sledgehammer ended up being tasked with making Call of Duty: WWII, and are now rumoured to be working on a new Modern Warfare title, so all ended well for the studio.  It seems that Activision has a history of cancelling games that would introduce new, experimental elements to their hit series, perhaps not wanting to spoil their run of best selling games. 

[19 References Available on Request]

[theavaricesystem]

Alright I'm gonna make a post on here about the very sudden idea I had for a video game, that is currently spinning wildly in my brain:

Sprint/STRIDE

Setting: An as-of-yet unnamed Sci-fi city, where sapient AI are still relatively new and are a hotly debated topic in both legal, ethical, and scientific spheres. Capitalism can't seem to find an easy way to exploit these Synthetic Humanoids, at least not yet.

Protagonist: a Synthetic, designation STR-103, nicknamed "STRIDE" by their creator and mom. They were designed with experimental tech, which allows for "photon conversion and projection". Meaning, they are able to convert their body into light in order to move at the speed of light in very short, angular bursts.

STRIDE felt called to help protect the city they were made in, and eventually begins investigating a dangerous outbreak of "Rapid Personality Burnout", an event which can cause synthetic humanoids to suddenly lose the ability to reason and become dangerous to themselves and others. STRIDE's creator lost a friend and partner to an RPB, making this a deeply personal endeavor, even beyond the risk that STRIDE may experience one of these burnouts themselves.

STRIDE is a sleek, aerodynamic, almost minimalist synthetic, with various rabbit-like features, such as long ears, digitigrade legs, and a small, angular tail. Their face is a screen, which displays their emotions via emoticons.

The gameplay: turn based, where STRIDE takes action by plotting out a course, moving a number of spaces according to an ENERGY bar, and interacting with enemies and the environment to neutralize foes in a nonlethal manner. STRIDE refuses to use lethal force, even on other Synthetics.

After STRIDE takes action, there is another turn for "The World", where all of the enemies-and the results of the actions taken on STRIDE's turn-come into play. STRIDE is not built for durability, and thus, WILL die from one stray bullet or well-timed attack. However, no other Synthetic or human can keep up with their processing abilities or speed, giving them a great advantage.

Movement and Actions both use your ENERGY. You have to balance how far you move with how many things you do in a turn, and vice versa. Enemies will often not follow you as you move however, opting to stay in place and try to catch you between movements to close in and attack. This means the best course of action is to alter the terrain bit by bit, until a path is cleared for STRIDE to close in and subdue hostiles in one turn.

Visuals: grid based movement, possibly isometric graphics. Alternatively, 2D sprites on a 3d plane?

Definite sources of inspiration: The Flash, TRANSISTOR, and Fire Emblem/Advance Wars/tactics games in general, and Tracer from Overwatch (kinda sorta)

[knotty-et-al]

Isometric dot grid stencil tool DIY

Do know when you are getting sad because you want to draw nice shapes on a blank piece of paper - but there is no helpful grid - and you have difficulties drawing straight lines - the isometric dot grid stencil tool is there to help!

Today I created an isometric dot grid stencil tool with scrap metal. And I want to write a bit about how easy it is to make. (Beware: You still need a lot of patience to punch all these damn holes into a thin slice of metal.)

[The distance between the dots is 0.5cm btw. [yes, I'm a metric system supporter. ])

Tools I used to create that tool:

- needles (one thinner and sharp needle, and one thicker needle (to dilate the holes afterwards wlth a rotating motion)

- hammer (for making the thinner needle go thru the scrap metal like a knife thru butter (but with more force... ))

- wooden/bamboo/whatever tray with a not too large hole [~ 1-2cm will suffice] (so the needle does not go into the wood, which is annoying and makes the needle unsharp very fast) - For the wooden tray I used a simple cutting board normally used for food preparation - it has a very helpful handle (just a hole with 1.5cm diameter)

- a printed piece of isometric dot paper and sticky tape (to form a tube with the sticky tape, so you can use it as double-sided tape. Add the printed paper to the sticky tube-thingy. Then attach it on the scrap metal. [It will be removed afterwards. (Removing the sticky tape afterwards is still very annoying. Thats why I left a rest on my tool. I put a looot of thought (slight exaggeration) into considering to remove it, but in the end I was too lazy to remove that part of aesthetical annoyance - It has no effect on the practical aspect. I might remove it anytime in the future when it annoys me too much and when I have more nerve to do so. )]

- a lot of patience to make whatever number of holes you want to have in that stencil. [I find this routine work calming actually.]

For the one depicted above I made approximately ~200 holes [I am too lazy to calculate and/or count the holes rn. This approximation might suffice.]

- garden scissors (to cut the scrap metal)

- pliers (to rounden the sharp edges of the cut scrap metal) [last step]

- - -- --- -----

What could you do with the stencil tool, you migt ask:

One can use it to draw an isometric dot grid on paper (for furtherly drawing shapes in the dot grid.)

One can also draw circles with it.

And one can also attach a piece of paper or other material and make holes into it with a needle or safety pin.

In the photo depicted above I made a cube pattern (with a mistake). I could continue to sew these holes together, so the cube illustration becomes more visible - and if I use a large enough thread so one could feel the lines - it could also be a card/art a blind person could "see" - alias feel.

Also: It is calming to punch holes in paper with that stencil tool.

Maybe I might also consider doing the stitching activity afterwards... Hmmm.

[leam1983]

Super Mario RPG Remake - Controls

It's crazy how the most effective QoL-related change can completely alter your experience of an older title.

The original SMRPG release was a fully isometric release, with Mario, his pals and the environment being gorgeously pre-rendered sprites and backgrounds - for 1996's standards. That meant that everything was fundamentally grid-based and was generally workable with a D-Pad, if perhaps just slightly clunky thanks to the lack of effective depth perception. If you remember the floating squares in Bandit's Way and how difficult it was to eyeball them in relation to the floating chests above and the prowling K-9's below, then you'll probably agree with me in saying that depth perception was the one glaring issue of an otherwise almost-perfect title.

Now, however, even if everything from the environments to the level design slavishly sticks to the 1996 original's concept, we at least have control sticks on the Switch, and a full 360 degrees of freedom along the ground plane. Funnily enough, this makes eyeballing jumps in visually tricky spots much easier, I've found. It's much easier to stand at the edge of a platform to better have a sense of your location in theoretical 3D space, to then walk back, assess your jump and perform it. It's also much easier to jump on the Save Points first-try, as I remember always frustratingly turning my attempts to save and close the game into my maybe superfluously vaulting over the block once or twice - and never intentionally.

Generally speaking, the remake of Legend of the Seven Stars is another hit in a stellar swansong year for the Switch - especially if you're not a fossil like me and don't actually have the original's SNES cart gathering dust in a box somewhere. It's also another really odd reminder of the fact that if you gave Mario a weight-loss diet and a new hairstylist, his general game design ethos would make him fit in with the latest Final Fantasy's roster rather seamlessly.

An electic cast, the power of friendship and compassion winning the day, enemy designs that don't make a single lick of sense... Might as well throw in a couple Chocobos and nobody would bat an eyelash.