Bugs on Ice

 I am still working away at Jason Frank. This render is from a couple weeks ago because I haven't saved out a newer render in a while (notice the seam on his neck from where I re-attached the head lol.) This model is taking me quite a long time, I realize. I'm really trying to go for a super high poly detail in this model. All of my past models have been very... low res(?) I've never incorperated things like lip lines, crows feet, and skin pores before, so this is my attempt to bring all of that together for the first time. I want to go all the way with this model and so I'm taking my time to make it as perfect as I possibly can. My only hope is that after spending all of this time on the sculpt, the detail isn't lost when it transitions to a low poly form.

Most of my time recently has been devoted to Easley-Dunn Productions and their game Monster Football. For the past couple months I have been spending all of my free time (when I wasn't playing Grand Theft Auto 5) modeling the wicked team of bug monsters! The image above is of the coolest looking one so far.

 At work I was given the opportunity to come up with some booth concepts for our swamped design team. Although I think some of these ideas are really cool, I was told none of them work LOL. So I guess I'm not a very good designer. Oh well.

We also got an Oculus Rift at the office! It's pretty awesome. I have been working on a futuristic roller coaster ride in Unity. Even though roller coasters were one of the first things we made in school, I am still struggling to animate a car going around upside down loops! DAMN YOU! I'm starting to remember things though. It should be wild :D

The last bit of news is about a GameStop weapons challenge for Saints Row 4! I heard about it from a co-worder and teamed up with my good friend Brad (who could be considered a Saints Row fanatic) to come up with a cool gun idea. One of the many guns he thought up was one that uses magnets and polarization, which I thought would be a really fun weapon to use in game. So I drew it up and submitted it to the challenge. Low and behold, we were chosen as a finalist!! I filled out the paper work a couple days ago and we're now waiting until the 27th when the public voting starts. I'll probably be posting voting links all over social media when the day comes, so I hope anyone reading this can vote for the Polarizer!

I just wish (since the winning gun will suposedly become DLC) that I could actually model the gun myself; just because that would be awesome to have a weapon I made show up in a AAA title like Saints Row.

A guy can dream.

Octo-crawl

Here's some stuff I made at work. This is an octopus I started animating for one of our side projects: 

And these are a couple screen grabs of a sculpt I made in my free time:

It's a Rat Man. I might go back and add a little more to it; although realistically, I probably won't...

fighting the good fight

Man, I really haven't posted anything in a while. I thought I would write myself a little update so I can try and collect my thoughts.

First of all, I'm 24 years old now! Woo! I also have an apartment and ended up making negative 300 dollars last month due to all of these things called "bills" (a speeding ticket also didn't help too much)

But I digress: I want this blog to be about work that I've done, so here we go! Commence the dump:

First of all, I did some illustrations for a card game being shown off at a sort of anime convention in Pittsburgh:

This is actually the second year I've done cards for this (although I still haven't been paid for these...)

My friend's brother is beginning to develop a web show and wanted a cartoon depiction of himself to use in titles and whatnot. He asked me to draw that for him:

I'm still looking forward to seeing it animated in his video intro.

Just this weekend I wrapped up 2 side projects. One was a T-shirt idea that crossed Pokemon with the Wendy's fast food chain:

This was nice because it was my first attempt to seriously make something in Adobe Illustrator. It worked as a nice tutorial! I think I may use AI for future projects just so I can keep things super clean and crisp instead of struggling to make things look nice in Photoshop (all of that pixelation!!!) I also submitted this shirt to TeePublic https://teepublic.com/show/3920-mistys If you want to dish out $20 for it and tell 29 of your friends to do the same, I'd be extremely appreciative!!!!! :D :D :D

The other thing I finished was a little video my friends and I shot MONTHS ago. I had been putting it off but finally got around to capturing all of it and piecing things together:
It's not bad considering I edited it down to under 5 minutes from the 45 minutes of footage we shot.

That game I said I was working on in my last blog post has been put on hold. Despite saying "I'm going to finish this thing!".... I aint gonna finish it right now. Trying to build a 3D game for a mobile application seems to be a little over our heads at the moment. Instead, we are focusing on a simpler, 2D animated game that we can hopefully produce a little quicker. Not sure when that ball will get rolling, but I'm sure I'll post something about it when it finally takes off.

In the meantime, here I am! Still working my same job and wishing I was doing other things. Looking through all of my old blog posts, I noticed I had a good stream of new 3D work coming out on a regular basis. I hope to start having that kind of work again soon. I just need to not be so burnt out from wasting the majority of my days doing mindless tasks at work. Today was a bad mental day, but tomorrow I should be IN THE GAME.

I also want to start doing more comic work. I never finished this concept, but here is a sample of one project I really want to do:

It would be a reimagining of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers story. It would be darker and grittier for a more mature audience and would chronical all of the events from the start of season 1 all the way to the death of Zordon in Space. This project would be a HUGE undertaking, but it would be a lot of fun to make AND fun to read when it's done (at least I think so). I am calling it Angel Grove.

I still want to also make my Budget League super hero comic series as well, but Angel Grove would probably gain a bit more traction just because it's Power Rangers (it's also already completely written since it's based on the TV show).

That's my update! I hope to post a bit more frequently. Hopefully with new things to show!

Peace!

-M@

LLC

Gears are turning. For the first time it feels like something could actually "happen" in terms of my videogame career. I don't want to say this is will be a sure-fire success (because chances are it will not be) but I will say that things are looking up.

 

My programmer friend Matt and I are going through with the creation an LLC to house the production of some games we've wanted to make. We currently have one game in the works and are in negotiations to develop another game related app.  Neither of which I can really speak about indepthly at this moment, but since everything is moving so quickly, I don't think it'll be long before I start posting updates relating to the two. The above render are characters from our first game! Exciting :)

The Game.minder Expo is this coming Saturday (March 16th) up in Cleveland. Matt and I will be there, walking the floor, talking with people, and learning everything we can about starting an independent game studio. A lot of the Cleveland Game Developers will be there and as of right now, admission is free, so go check it out. It should be a fun event!

A couple other things I've worked on recently include a 3D rendering of a baseball bat grip known as the BatJack. You can go to their official website and check out the video on their homepage. The video is a little long winded and my animation only shows up for a couple seconds at the 3:30 mark, but all in all it was a cool project. The Bat Jack is a nifty little invention that improves the grip on a bat. It really works too!

I also designed the logo for a local bowling team which you can see below. They are the Coconut Monkeys! That was a pretty fun project as well. This logo is actually going to be embroidered on their shirts. I'm hoping the embroidery comes out well so I can get a picture of the final shirts and post it on here.

Game Jam 2013

This past weekend I attended my first Global Game Jam up in Cleveland. There were a lot of really incredible and talented people up there who I really enjoyed meeting. I also loved seeing some awesome little games emerge from the amongst chaos. 

My one regret is that I wish I had introduced myself to “more” people because I only really talked to a small handful of individuals. If I attend next year’s event, my goal will be to work freelance style and help out a number of different teams instead of working solidly with one individual group. This way I can interact with more people and get more involved. 

In terms of my own game, I was rather disappointed with the outcome. I worked with two individuals who didn’t seem to really have their “eye on the prize” throughout the weekend. An overactive scope mixed with a lot of distractions lead to the game not being playable at all. The final product was nothing more than an animated intro cutscene (a shitty one, at that) followed by some broken gameplay that had no end. I give my teammate the benefit of the doubt however because he totaled his car on the way up to the Jam and was in the hospital for 2 weeks prior to the event. I’m absolutely certain these events factored into the group’s overall energy as we worked.

Personally, I felt like I accomplished a decent amount of work.  I modeled, unwrapped, rigged, and animated 2 entire characters as well as couple of other props. The models aren’t by any means “top notch”, but considering our time restrictions, I’m happy with what I ended up with.

I’m looking forward to getting back to work on my own projects where I will actually have a decent amount of time to make the art look good :)

Dawgin'

 

Tis the season! I am off work and trying to cram in as much or my own personal work as I possibly can. It probably doesn't look like I get a lot accomplished considering how little I post online, but my problem is that most of what I work on is unseen by the public (including yall in'ernet folk). But I sat down and pumped out a new piece for my main DeviantArt page: HERE It's a continuation of the Budget League series of heroes I have. There's a short little bio written on that page but I didn't go into specific backstory elements because I'm saving that kind of thing for the actual story pages. And yes, I do still plan to make this comic. It's not going to happen soon because I have other comitments, but I WILL do it. I swear to god. My only fear is that someone is going to see these on DA and rip the ideas off before I can produce the book (but there's also the chance that my character ideas are so dumb that no one would want them LOL! Let's hope for that one!)

My main commitment currently is my indie game studio (the word "studio" is used very lightly). We haven't bought the business license yet, but we are working on the game itself. My teammate (also named Matt, if I hadn't mentioned that prior) has code running and assets moving in engine. I just recently got the main character textured and rigged and am starting the animation process. I would post some screen shots but we are trying to keep it all under wraps until it's closer to completion. It's exciting!! You'll just have to take my word for it.

Just to reiderate my plans for the future: When this first game is completed, we are going to release it on the IOS app store. Then we are going to start production on more games and small apps. Matt has a friend who has been in this line of work for quite a while (doing quite well!!) and he is working as our advisor for this whole opperation. With the tips he's giving us, we hope to start bringing in a steady revenue stream once our games have been for sale over time. If all looks good, we then plan to focus on making games full time. That means opening up a small office workspace in a house or apartment and becoming an official indipendant developer. THAT is when I plan to start doing comic book work on the side. Currently I am working a full time job and making games in my free time, but when I transition to full time game developement, my free time will be open to writing and drawing other things. This plan is my dream and it will always be my dream until I achieve it. And I am really confident that I can.

It sounds farfetched. Probably because it is! Although it may not be impossible as much as it is very very difficult. It's going to be tough as shit! But I'm going to do it. You sons a bitches!!! I'm DOIN' IT! 

Try and stop me.

(actually, don't)