This looks really good. I don’t know why, but the first game that sprang to mind when watching the video was Adventure for the Atari.
Oh it’s probably because of the looping areas
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ooo yeah i love the level of abstraction atari adventure is operating on, too. it really is like an adventure distilled down to its base parts and your brain can’t help but fill in details.
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i remember Section Z on the NES having a strange cylindrical maze structure where you would go through these left-to-right scrolling stages then reach a terminus where you went up or down through a teleporter, which could take you back in loops
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Webcomic update, I had picked some prior dialog and then rewrote it as I was putting it in, yet again. I can never commit to a script
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recently did a character design thing for fun, i’ll hide my usual overlong ranting about ~the process~ behind a spoiler
The Stuff
So the initial pitch I was designing for was just “Fighting Game Character” and “Fisherman”. Which, I mean, a punch-pal requires a delicate balance of bonkers-wild and completely mundane, imo. all of the best fighting game character designs (which is to say all of the best characters, because fighting games across the board have the best character designs in anything, don’t @ me) feel immediately simple and sticky, but then have a bunch of weird details or some Thingtm yknow? anyway.
I’d also decided, even before the first preliminary sketches, that she wouldn’t be a grappler. That’s way too easy! Snooze! honk shoo honk shoo! i don’t want ranged command grabs with a fishing hook! So very quickly I’d decided her gimmick would be smacking opponents with fish on her hook, i thought that was way funnier and actually kinda fresh
I admittedly didn’t do a super rigorous job of prelim sketches with this one, which isn’t ideal, but I do think in the end she came out as something i’m really proud of anyway, so. (but also, i’ve gotta catch myself better on that and force myself to do more prelims when i do other designs - i tend to only do a few instead of a decent handful. i mean i didn’t even sketch a goofy-ass pose of holding the fishing pole like a katana!) anyway this was me toying around with posing and costume, i still really LIKE the idea of lifevest + bikini + flip-flops, i think thats a fun fit for a character, and at first i kinda thought thats what i’d be going with for her.
and those prelims turned into these two sketches for the end of generation 1 of the designs. i felt really strongly about this pose so i drew them both with it (again, not necessarily best practices, but i felt like i could feel what would work), and actually ended up really being taken away with the fishing overalls look. rip unshaven terry bogard lookin ass lady tho, i think thats pretty fun too
by this point i’d also decided that part of her gimmick is during the battle she can catch a fish, but the fish she gets is random, and then they impact normals and specials. think like zappa’s ghosts in XX. so you can see that i’d drawn her with like a cooler over her shoulder? but i felt like stuffing it back there with the fishing pole was just a bit messy.
anyway then i didnt touch this for a month or two and picked it back up this week since i took the week post-meetup off from my other work
so i did some silhouette testing with the idea of having a box with her. we’ve got wearing a cooler, holding a tackle box, and just rocking nothing. while i liked the idea of the other two, i just felt that the silhouette was strongest with the hand on the hip and nothin else to it. there’s that triangle negative space between the arm and body that i like, and it makes her body feel more stocky when its just her and she’s in tight. which, i mean, at this point i had decided (without testing alternatives, granted) that rounded rectangles would be her primary shape (with circles also), cuz i wanted her to feel stocky and sturdy but not particularly aggressive
also worth mentioning at this point that while designing her i decided her wife was a giant sea monster (inspired entirely by “fish women want me”). also i decided this games gimmick is its a buncha wifeguy dykes fighting in a tournament where if they win their partner (doesn’t necessarily have to be their literal wife) gets their truest wish granted. i’ve got a lot of other character ideas for this already, if i hate myself enough i’ll add this to the pile of “fake games i want to do a lot of visual and game design around for fun, but never make” like my file.frnds shit (that i swear to god i’ll get back to when i’m less swamped with other projects that need shipping)
anyway so i took that silhouette and did a pass at trying to refine it with other details, which is the top row here. trying some different hair/hat situations, different amounts of muscle, different hook shapes, etc. the bottom is my combination of my favorite elements of all of em - i really like the negative space between the pocket of the pants, her torso, and the handle of the fishing pole. it’s kinda shaped like a blocky hook! that’s great!
so i sketched a design back over that silhouette! i wanted that bare arm to have tats, and heart and anchor weren’t doing it for me (besides, i’d decided that the hook would be her motif since its the only sharp thing in her whole design, and i didn’t want a tattoo of the hook on the arm that sits right next to it, i thought that would be tacky) so i made it a tentacle wrapping around the arm. the idea is its supposed to like, evoke her wife or whatever
and then, naturally, i colored that in! after adding a few details, namely the cigarette and the fishing hook in the beanie cuz i thought that was cute. also youll note that in cleaning up the straps on the overalls, they end in fishing hooks that hook into the front piece. thought it was clever (also these are based on a pair that i personally own which have like heavy-duty clips there so its not like its that far off)
you can also see the value breakdown here, where i tried to be pretty careful with contrast! the hook is the darkest color, and the rod is the lightest (besides the white and the hair but we’ll talk about that more later) making them always pretty easy to spot! further, theres a pretty strong value contrast between the overalls and her skin, making that big bared arm also easy to spot. meaning that her main two attack points, the fishing pole and her free arm, are always easy to spot at a glance on the design!
likewise the overalls are the only thing using their color, and they are covering her legs and torso, meaning that is always an easy visual indicator of places she can be hit. both good details for the purposes of clarity in a fightan! woop
now this is what i’d call about … 90% done, there’s the treacherous final 10% to get from here to her final design below, and i wanna talk about what the differences were! because while most of the changes are pretty small, i think they’re all important. and, i mean, iunno if youve read all this you probably are the kind of sick freak who kinda likes hearing my too-verbose screeds about character design and the importance of the process
- the hook is too narrow. she’s really big and stocky, the fish are gonna be big n chonky, it should feel more in line with her design.
- the hair and rod don’t need to be two separate colors. they’re super similar as-is, and it would be a waste of palette space for the sprite in a game to have them separate, so, lets fix that
- the reel is just way too noisy [also a little out of perspective lmao]. so lets tone that down. hell, the reel is also basically always gonna be somewhere she can be hit, so lets make it share the overalls color to both indicate that and push it into the background some.
- the darks need to be darker, i could push the values further. particularly between the overalls and the boots, so lets do that. also lets push the accent red slightly darker so that its value is a little more different from the green tattoo.
- the hook being on our left side of the beanie puts too much weight on that side of the design, but i really like it as a little detail. lets move it to the other side
- extremely unimportant details - but lets make her wedding ring the accent color instead of the black. we can pretend its coral or something. also right now the knux are ‘LOVE’ and ‘FISH’ but to keep it more in line with the hat joke, and also because come on she doesnt love fish she loves a big fish woman thats different. so lets go ‘FEAR’ and ‘FISH’
and we end up with this, after i do my turnarounds and whatnot. (i didn’t really do a proper process on the fish i just winged it). so yeah she can hook a random fish in battle, and they generally would have different uses. pufferfish is your bread and butter, the eel doesn’t deal a lot of damage but is great for fast pokes while zoning, and the electricity makes its hitboxes deceptively big. the tuna is just big weighty punishes that are real slow.
i imagine she plays as not a particularly fast character, and the kind who’s good at zoning long-range, and can do some nasty combos when she starts up close (definitely launches with a real meaty uppercut, and then you just juggle motherfuckers with the fish. i envision this fake game as a 2D fighter, but i like the idea of a 2D fighter character’s combos looking more like a 3D fighters where you launch an opponent and then juggle them from the ground). but, she’s pretty bad in that mid-range, because yknow thats inbetween the fish and her hands, and so you’d have to be really mindful of spacing playing as or against her
the names pronounced like the fish
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no one at any fighting game pro studio is working harder than you just did
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Sorry I’m @ing you, but this is the correct take.
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my mom found a drawing i did as a kid. i have no memory of it but it includes words of ritual incantation such as “zelda forever” and “donkey kong on fox kids”
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made myself a new avatar in lieu of The Happenings Elsewheres and cuz i’d been using the other one for too long
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updated this webcomic
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slapped a new coat of paint on an OC cuz i’m self indulgent and need to draw a bit more for my own sanity
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playing around and changing up slimegirl’s design for the first time since 2018
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Love the bow
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The same person that drew the last picture I posted I commissioned to draw this. It’s Scarlett from Liber Perturbatio, the second of my games that don’t exist.
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Finally finished a page of my webcomic. Enjoying doing a combination of tight shots and wide shots
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