The weekend

Ah… Sunrise soothes me yet again, since I’ve not gone to sleep, but rather been up drawing, calculating, planning and scheming. I’ve not been that active on the blog the last couple of days, since I’ve been busy working on Leviathan. Well. Working on Leviathan is the “real” job I’m doing, so it comes before writing on the blog! It’s too bad I can’t show you what I’ve worked on pretty much all of this week… It’s just spoilers for you, I’m afraid 😦

But I’ve done some other things, so I might as well share a little bit of what else I’ve done! The whole team is now trying to focus more on pushing something more visual and interactive into the website we’re planning. Just now, I put the final touches on the concept of what might be our face outwards when we move away from this blog. I think I’ve got some neat ideas in the mix, and hopefully, we’ll create a website that can keep you busy until you can actually play our games! The way things are looking like now, it won’t be long at all until you can see what we have been working on!

But now, sleep calls for me.

Tomorrow is a new day to dream and create!

SHiFT out of order

thingS are slOwly falling into place. Right now, i’m Reviewing some of mY drawings FrOm this month, pondeRing which drawiNgs are gOod enough To pass as concept art for leviatHAn. Vvhile going through the drawINGs, i’m also thinking about uploading some oF the better drawings from each of my scetchbooks. of course, most of my readers probably don’t know I’m always carryiNg a sketchbook, that I Slowly fill out wHEnever i have an iDea. for example, all of the documentation for TREE was made in book number “tree”, over “tree” pages(tree is actually 3+3+3, YEs. I like numbers.)

Today i downloaded unity3d, so i’m gonna start messing around with that later today. By Using uniTy, I cAn easily MAke games i’m working on for other consoLes. And thiZ opens up for having a certain whale of a game on it’s rightful console, based off where most of the inspiration for that game came from. You guys would love soMe of the features i could Add by haviNg the game on that console, KAPISCH?

Added note: there is now a lot more people than just me working on Leviathan and other things. So expect to see something from the others guys here too, as this is not my personal blog. I don’t have one of those.

More sketches? Yes.

Tonight, like yesterday, me and Victor is working on making more sketches for Leviathan! We wrapped up the first round of the enemies and bosses, and are now focusing on drawing the different areas in the game!

I’m trying to push Victor pretty hard, and have several quick sketches with his take on what I’ve told him what the enemy or area he’s gonna draw looks like. This way, I hope to generate new ideas that I hadn’t thought of, and get a fresh take on it. So far it’s working pretty good and we’ve managed to make 23 (And adding more as I write!) drawings. After we’ve drawn each area, enemy and other stuff I want drawn, Victor will draw each thing once again, without looking at the previous work, so that I can press every unique, new idea I can out of him! With this tempo, we might be done with that sooner than I thought, and can spend more time on producing better, larger and colored versions later!

Oh, I’m trying to be careful not to spoil to much of the enemies and areas, so all this stuff you’re seeing is from pretty early in the game, don’t worry about getting the game spoiled, because that would suck.

Victor’s blog can be found here.

Some Early Sketches!

The mermonster, as drawn by Victor

Me and Victor teamed up for the second night now to try to make some sketches for Leviathan! We have gone through each and every enemy and sketched them up to include detail and to better the quality of the actual low-res sprite. This is one of the drawings for tonight, of the Mermonster, one of the mid-bosses in the game. I really like the twisted expression on it!

Other than that, the production of Leviathan has steadily started to increase again. I’ve created several more sprites, written alot of neat little stuff, and fixed holes and errors in the story. Hopefully, me and Victor can come up with a lot of new ideas for the enemies, and create a lot of sketches! Right now, it’s looking good.

Check out Victor’s Blog too!

Tell us if you like it or hate it, either way,  I’ll update later with more sketches! (Tell me if you want to see an enemy in particular!)

Animating and Designing a boss!

Octopus+pus

Today I’ve spent a lot of time on trying to put together one of the bosses for Leviathan! Most of the time went into animating the head and the “flair” on the side of the head.  I think the animation itself turned out alright, and considering i put down about four hours on animating the flair alone, it had better be alright, or I’m getting someone to animate it for me! (Nah, I’ll probably end up doing it over five times, and spend twenty times as much hours on it as necessary.) I have some pretty neat ideas for this boss, and I want him done so I can fight him myself!

I drew inspiration for the flair from a pharaohs head-gear, while I tried to make the head as alien as I could. Majestic, god-like and alien. Perfect description for an octopus!

Btw, anyone of you know of a good gif-editor? It’s getting too complicated to cut and paste every part of the full creatures, for each of frame in Flash…

Post of Awakening

Well, I finally got around to creating myself a blog for my work and all the other things I would want to write about. I made this blog because I need somewhere to just write down my thoughts on the fantastic world of gaming, and somewhere to output whatever I’m doing of work so other than me can see it. If you like what I write, or have some comments, I’d be really glad to hear it! I love me some constructive criticism!

Introduction aside! I’m going to continue playing some Ni No Kuni now.  The visuals are awesome! Just like a Studio Ghibli film, but it somehow reminds me of what I used to fantasize when I played games like LoZ: Link’s Awakening. Other than that, I’m REALLY. REALLY looking forward to Fire Emblem: Awakening, and I’m gonna thank Kotaku for that…

Oh, and VG, the biggest newspaper in Norway will interview me about gaming addiction tomorrow… I think I’ve been interviewed three times already on the same subject…