Volcanic Environment

Hello everyone and anyone! I don't have a lot to say today, but I do have a concept piece I spent most of the day creating to share! I wanted to spend most of my day trying to really make a piece of concept art that looks decent. So that's exactly what I did! I went with the volcanic concept from the thumbnail I drew, but I changed it up quite a bit. I also incorporated a different tactic to get the gears going in my head by taking a real world rock/mountain and building off of that. I do like what I've created :) For my first major piece I am very happy with it! Here it is!

I didn't really make it that great of a size honestly...but I just threw in some numbers and went with it! I started off with this rock/mountain/formation to get my mind working...

I like this approach to creating things! It gives you a real shape, but allows it to be freely altered to match your needs! I did learn in this though that lava is not that fun to draw. It's rather hard to make look like actual lava...oh well!

Well I hope you enjoyed this quick post! I will be back with some more work later this week! Probably not for a couple of days as I work, but man when I get into college...I'll have so much free time to doodle! All right, I'll talk to you all later! Have great days!!

Hands, Armor, and Environments!

Hello there everyone! I am back with an exciting post! I know I said that I would try to draw that environment I was having issues with the other day, but I decided during my drawing that I am going to leave a lot of my pencil and paper sketching for the human anatomy sketching. I have found that to be where I am struggling the most with drawing. Bodies and the like. So the two sketches I have to show today are some that I watched videos on how to draw and tried to imitate them. Personally I am very pleased with how they turned out!

These are two different hands (male and female) that I drew while watching Mark Crilley. Actually both these sketches are from Mark Crilley video tutorials! I figured that starting with the hardest part about the human anatomy would be the best place to make the road ahead get easier (hopefully). I like how they turned out! I have learned a lot about shading and light sources from his tutorials.

This is some armor that I sketched as well. I've never really drawn armor before so I think this turned out well! Much more proportionate that I thought it would end of being!

I have exciting news. My parents know the field that I am interested in and did a lot of research into what is required and what I would need for it and so...they bought me my own Wacom Intuos Pro (medium)!!! And I have been doing some fiddling with it and have come up with some environment thumbnails! I'm not all that great with it at the moment but I am learning more and more on making proper depth and lighting and all the fun stuff that goes into creating the environment artwork! So I thought I'd show you the thumbnails that I have completed so far!

The top left one is kind of a marshy swampish environment. The top right one is someone looking out over a volcanic area. And the bottom right one is in a forest of sorts. Obviously I have not done the bottom left one, but I will tomorrow! I've been doing these thumbnails to get an idea of what type of environment I like and want to explore more in depth. I currently like the volcanic idea, but it is not the best looking out of the three. I might go for a different angle and make a more upclose to the lava because it just looks like spider veins right now.

Well that's what I've been working on for the past few days! I'll post more once I've created some more thumbnails and possibly a focused in environment. Maybe a character too?? Who knows! I'll talk to you all later! Have great days!!

Pencil and Paper Sketch Work

Hello there everyone! I have a few sketches that I worked on these past couple of days and I am going to share them with you! As the title of this post implies, I sketched these using pencil and paper and the reason for that is it is just simpler to get my ideas down and also have control over my line work. I am having to learn how to exactly draw with pencil and paper because I honestly have never really drawn sketches besides little doodles here and there when I was bored in math class. I think this will be very interesting for me to do and I have so far kept to my schedule of when I will draw so that is very good! So without further ado, here is my very first sketch!

I do have to apologize for the lighting of the picture as I am in a room where all the lights are rather dim and yellow which gave the drawing an odd orange color, so I used a bright flashlight to attempt to make the picture as clear as possible. If you couldn't tell from my drawing, this is my attempt at making a cave environment that opens up to a moonrise of sorts. The human figure is purely to give a sense of how large this cave really is. I did have some issues sketching the cliff sides for each of the two pieces of land that reside inside the cave, but hopefully with practice and research I will be able to get that worked out. The central portion is supposed to be water as well and I personally can make it out to be water, but that's also coming from the creator's perspective.

The next picture is of rather simple thumbnails that I drew for environments so I could test the waters in just coming up with ideas for environments.

The top sketch is another cave idea, but much simpler in detail. The bottom is not my favorite honestly. I really dislike the tree on the right and the water doesn't look like water. The sky is not seperated from the mountains very well and that pillar/rock formation in the center was going to be another tree...but it totally failed so I made people worshiping it instead which is the saving grace for me on this piece actually. Now that I look at it, I see all the flaws and such but I also see how I turned a mess up into something that actually was kind of neat! Sure it isn't much to look at, but I bet if I re-drew this with more detail and on a larger scale I would be able to make it much more appealing. Maybe that's what my next environment sketch will be of. You know what, I'll challenge myself to drawing that bottom sketch to try and grow in some area on it.

This final sketch goes back to the cave environment theme, but is about the sort of creatures that reside in it.

I decided to go with a bat like creature since bats live in caves (and I totally failed at drawing a snake which is the random scribbling above). I would like to continue this sketch into further detail as well because I see potential in it! It was at first going to be a spider, but then it morphed into a bat when I didn't narrow the chin as I was going to. I am not sure how I want the body to look however? I see this face and think of a couple different body styles. The first is a muscular, more human-like figure with enormous wings. Bulging arm muscles and rippling legs, etc. But the other is more frail, yet still powerful. Thin legs and arms, but still show signs of strength. Built more for speed rather than brute force. I am leaning towards the thinner, faster body style as that fits better with the bat idea, but the other could be an interesting twist! Any thoughts on that?

Well everyone, that is all that I've truly worked on in the past couple of days! I'll try to make a new post in a couple of days, but I am going to steer clear of quick, daily posts as those bore me  and probably you as well! Have fantastic days and wonderful evenings!

Starting Concept Artwork

It's been quite some time since I last posted, but I'm back with another post! I however am not going to be talking about Landmark this time, rather I am going to be sharing some of the concept artwork that I've been working on. I am quite new to drawing concept art and I am not the best equipped right now, sadly. I have drawn everything on my two-in-one laptop/tablet so I haven't had any sort of pressure sensitivity available to make decent drawing marks. Most of the time I start off in grayscale and get the shape defined and then go back to add in some slight coloration, but I think I am going to stop drawing on my laptop until I can get an actual graphics tablet. I am going to be making a set schedule of drawing every night after 10pm which should give me a fair amount of time to get creative!

Now this picture is not my own concept, but it led me to the first piece I created. I wanted to try and recreate the image above by as closely as I could, while also giving it my own look. 

I realize this looks rather different than the original piece of work, but I did my best with the tools I had! I've realized that it is very hard to draw with depth when you have no pressure sensitivity like when you draw with a pencil. Hopefully I will be able to get a graphics tablet of sorts for my coming birthday/Christmas. 

This next piece was just me messing around with a different brush style. I like this piece because I was looking off of a picture that I was going to try and recreate, but I ended up just turning it into my own piece because I thought of different things to do.

My most recent piece I have two renditions of it. I was first just creating a somewhat cave environment, but wanted to see how a village would look in it so I also added a village. 

With this piece I've realized I struggle again with depth and a lot of the midground detailing. I find it hard to add textures to the terrain and making it look good.

I will say I'm not a huge fan of the village I put into this picture. But it was just a fun thing to add in to see how I'd do on it and I will say that you at least know it's a town of some sort. It was getting rather late when I made the mountains to the right of the town, so I could definitely work on them more. The mid ground flooring also is very very sparse of detail which is where I'm really struggling. 

I do like the foreground of the picture. I like drawing jagged rocks in the foreground, but I always fall short in the mid and background which disappoints me, but I know with practice I will get better. I know I will be my harshest critic, but I would love other people's opinions on each of these drawings. 

I hope to be able to save up enough money to be able to get a graphics tablet as well as buying a subscription for photoshop. I'm currently drawing all of these in Gimp. That is all I have for you today! As I said early, I will probably stop or slow down on the tablet drawing as it is a much harder process without having the control of pressure, but I will be doing pencil and paper sketches. I hope you have enjoyed reading and leave a comment if you like!

Quick Update and New Build!

Hey everyone! I don't have much time today to write so I'm just going to show my latest Landmark build! It is possibly my favorite one yet! It's very...pretty. The desert igloo that I recently made and showed in the last post has been transformed into a greenhouse! It actually turned out a lot better than I thought!

I'm sorry that this is all I can post today, but I will have more time this weekend hopefully! With school wrapping up it's crunch time and I might have procrastinated a bit...oh well! Have fantastic days and I'll talk to you later!

Catching Up

Hey everyone I am back finally. I haven't written in a while and I apologize for that. Life has been busy and rather tough lately. I have been keeping up with my Landmark building so I'll show you all some pictures of that at the end of this post. I am going to take some time to talk a little about what has kept me from writing but I won't get into a lot of detail because it is more personal stuff than anything.

Ok, well for the most part the first two weeks of not writing was out of sheer laziness. We're all lazy so I figure you all can relate to that, but the past two weeks have been a rough time for my family. My grandpa went to the hospital about 2 or 3 weeks ago. He was feeling rather weak and found out his hemoglobin levels were really low so he had mutliple blood tests and blood transfusions. The testing came back to show that he has Leukemia (cancer of the blood) and he is now in the process of treatment for that. The whole ordeal has been rather stressful for my parents and my brother and sister and me because my grandma cannot take care of herself properly due to a head injury last June which advanced her dementia and alzheimers a lot. So I have made multiple trips home to help out in any way I could and as such have sacraficed games and writing and the like for that. I do not know how often I will be able to write, but things seem to have calmed down a it now that my grandpa is receiving his treatments and all is going decently. I'll be finishing up school next Wednesday so I should be able to write more often during the summer. So that is why I have been away for a while. It's been tough, but we're making the best out of it.

Ok, less saddening things and more video game happy things! I'll show you my builds first and then I will talk some about them and try to catch you all up! Here is the finished town that I submitted for the scholarship. I like how it turned out a lot!

As you can see, it looks very nice! Sadly the interiors did not get finished but that is ok! I finished the outside which is all I needed. The last picture is the picture I sent in to that scholarship. It's my favorite one.

I do not remember if I have mentioned before about the wipe that is coming up on May 6th, but regardless I'm going to tell you briefly what it is. The Landmark team at DayBreak Games is going to be doing a character and world wipe on May 6th which will remove everything ever made in Landmark up to this point. The good thing is that they are bringing the system back up with entirely different islands and the game should run a lot better with all the fixes they are doing. Also, Landmark will be less of a "survival" "gathering" sort of game and more of a straight building game, which many of us builders want. The simple materials that it generally takes a lot of to make things like dirt, sand, and stone will be free to use. So many of us builders are making templates of starter homes for after the wipe. We get to keep all of our templates so it makes it nice given that the game developers will be templating all of the current claims FOR FREE. No template space is going to be used, so my town will be able to exist in my template space for free. That is good considering it takes up about 60 million voxel space and we only have 2 million. With the wipe coming up, there has been a community build going on called "End of the World" or EOW. Basically someone made a "Wipe Monster" coming out of a portal and everyone is making Mechs (robots controlled by a human inside of it) to fight the wipe monster off. I made two mechs, which I will show, but I also took it further to destroy my town. There is a video that is being made to show the end of the world and the developers were wanting people to destroy claims to show that the wipe monster had destroyed it. So here is a before and after picture of my town. Warning there is a lot of fire.

This was my first mech. I call it a trollbot because he looks like a troll with his big teeth. I have also realized that he looks like the Shrimpanzee from cloudy with a chance of meatballs 2.

He breathes fire and flies

This is my second and largest mech. It's a re-imagining of the Iron Giant. He is basically an entire claim size tall. He required about 130,000 iron ore to make him.

This is just a night shot to show off all the effects he has going on.

A look at all of the different mechs other players built! This is not even half of the total mechs.

Me being stupid on my trollbot

A previous home in my town. Obviously now it is uninhabited.

The clocktower now lies in multiple different pieces. The top part was chunked off and is inbetween the middle island and the outer ring. The top part and bell flew into a nearby house.

The amount of fire emitters that I used made so much smoke that you can't even see half of the claim!

I had a lot of fun destroying this house

I had my trollbot trying to douse the fires but he didn't last very long. If you can't tell, he's spiked to the ground by a giant wipe monster spear.

This is my favorite destroyed house. Mainly because I spent 40 minutes destroying it and it turned out really great. I finished the interior in it and then destroyed it all! 

This is just a look from similar angles of the town.

So as you can see the town is rather destroyed. But it will be completely templated and I will be able to restore it to its former glory. Now I shall show my two starter homes that I have made.

This is the house I am going to go with I think. It's a Desert Igloo as coined by a fellow Landmarkian. I just had the top portion but I am going to make a small town of these homes after the wipe so I made a blacksmith addition.

This is the basics of the basement addition. 

A look of the interior. Very simple but nice and cozy.

Another interior shot

Secret door to the basement. I'll probably change this after the wipe, but for now it will remain a secret.

I have another starting house that I built but I am unsure if I will actually use it. I might just put it out on the player studio along with this one for people to buy. We shall see! Well I hope you all enjoyed the pictures and what I have talked about! It's always fun to sit back and write about what's going on in Landmark! I'm going to sign off for now! I'll talk to you all later! Have great days!

Landmark and My Thoughts (Little Controversy)

Well hello everyone! It's been a while since I last posted and that's because I've been working on my Landmark scholarship build a lot. It is coming along very nicely in my opinion! I am working on getting half of it done so I can take a screenshot of that half for the scholarship but I will finish it even after the scholarship due date has passed! Here are some screenshots of my progress! I'll put a before picture so you can see how much I have done in the past few days!

This was in an earlier post, but this is what I had 2 posts ago. Flat land with a few houses. Nothing too interesting.

And this is where it is at now! As I said it is only half way done, but I like it so far! 

This is the view I will use for the screenshot I think. It shows how the town feels and also reveals how it is centered around the clocktower. 

I just love this picture. Landmark is such a beautiful game. Knowing I can make something that looks like this is very cool for me.

Of course you have to make it blow up :D (No buildings were hurt in this process)

Well that is how my build is going so far! Going smoothly I think! I really like how it is turning out and even if it doesn't win me the scholarship at least I had a good time making it in the process. That's what I like about designing things. It may not turn out how you or the company wants it to, but while you are creating it it is enjoyable.

As the title of this  post says I am not going to be talking about just Landmark. I just wanted to take some time to voice my thoughts. There won't be order to this and there won't be any end point that I am getting at! Just me saying what's on my mind.

Well as many people who are interested in video game design know, the best place to be is California. I've been having some thoughts on that and I cannot tell whether or not I am excited or scared of moving that far away? I live in Indiana so it is quite the trip. My initial reaction is that of curiosity. I think of it and want to know more about what it is like to live far away from home. To live without any connections. From this I also get a bit scared because it's a huge jump. Going from knowing a lot of people to suddenly being alone in an unfamiliar place with unfamiliar people around you. A part of me feels like I'll be like a ghost for a long time until I have friends at where I work. Another part of me makes me think I'll feel like Xerath getting jumped on my Akali. 100 to 0 instantly. But there is a larger portion of my mind that thinks about it and gets an almost giddy sense of wonder at the thought of being on my own for once. Taking care of myself completely without relying on my parents too much and making my own. It's a very...peculiar topic for me right now. It's on my mind a lot and I think I'd like it to come true? I would hate to be so far away from home, but I also want to follow the path I think will be good for me. And I think that is where I am eventually going to be.

There is also the whole girlfriend concept that runs through my mind. I'm sold on her as is and I have every bit of confidence that we will get married. That is not my issue. My issue is removing her from her family and whisking her away to a foreign land with me. I am so torn on this. A part of me feels it is so unfair for her to be taken away from her family because of me. And I don't want her parents and sister to see me doing it as an act of finally getting her all to myself...I don't think they will but I still fear it! We have talked about this already and I am sure it will come up again. She does sometimes check in on my dorky blog posts so she'll probably mention something to me about it.

Enough about California! Onto...music! Music in video games to be specific. Of all the music in the world, I think video game music is my absolute favorite. It's all orchestra music, but somehow game developers make it work? Most people don't listen to orchestras all day, but if you play say Skyrim for eight hours...well you just listened to Jeremy Soule's composition for eight hours! And he is a fantastic composer. I just recently, being tonight, discovered a group called Adiemus and I am enthralled by their music. They are not in a video game, but if you are looking for easy listening music then check them out. I have no idea what they are saying, but I don't even care. I discovered them from a guy known as Pantera in Landmark so thanks Pantera! You don't read this but still thanks!

I think I want to write about something controversial but I can't decide what. I was going to state my mind on the whole GamerGate/SJW groups are stupid, but I'll leave that for some other time I suppose(or not because I'm about to go on an unintended rant). I shouldn't say stupid. Overly zealous perhaps. They all just need to calm down and find the middle ground. All extreme people should take a step back and view the pros and cons of each side and then they can equalize and find the middle ground where they can all settle on an agreement of sorts. Nobody will get exactly what they want so quit acting like you will. The only reason why I thought of this topic was because Twitter was blowing up over the whole "National Cleavage Day" and the SJW group got offended by LionHead Studios posting of a picture of one of Fable II's tavern signs. It was a sign that said "The Foaming Jugs" and had a well-breasted woman holding foaming beer jugs. So they complained and LionHead took it off Twitter. Then GamerGate got all rallied up and bombarded the SJWs with a lot of hate. Both groups in my opinion are in the wrong. LionHead has every right to post what they want, especially if it is from a game of theirs. No group of people with a very narrow mind frame should think they have the right or power to control what LionHead does. Now on the other hand GamerGate should not respond to the SJW response with such zealous hatred. That's not how you solve problems? You don't put out a fire by throwing gasoline on it? That's just insane! Now I'm not going to say that one group is right and one group is wrong because honestly both are right to an extent and both are wrong to an extent. Yes the tavern sign could be offensive to some people. That just means you don't look at it? Yes the actions of a group can be infuriating. That just means you block them? Quit acting like children and approach the issues with some maturity.

Since I'm already ranting I might as well bring up what I think about the sexuality of girls in video games since it's an interesting topic to look at. I will say that I do not want to be offensive to anybody and if I do come off as that then please comment or email me or something and let me know. I don't want to be sexist in any way I just want to look at it from my perspective. Now many woman are fine with this but there are certain woman that think that woman are overly sexualized in video games. I agree with that, but to an extent. I do believe that video games make woman extremely "hot" or "sexy" looking, but I will also say that they make them that way for multiple reasons. For one, it is a good marketing strategy to use against guys because if we see a hot bodied woman then it will interest us slightly more. That is not something we take pride in at all. It is just a simple fact. Over sexualizing woman is a very touchy topic to approach for game developers. If they make extremely "sexy" woman then they get hate for being overly sexual. However if they make an average girl they will get told that they are giving woman a bad image. I personally have to say that woman are over sexualized in video games. I utterly agree with this statement. However in all honesty I don't look at the women that are created. I'm not interested in a hot girl for how she looks in a video game. I find interest in them for what they do. What powers do they have? What is their background? Honestly my character could be the ugliest girl in the world and I wouldn't care one bit. I'm just going to cover her up with armor so even if she's hot I won't see her? In my opinion, the overly sexualized women in video games argument falls flat for a lot of gamers because we're in it for the game not the characters. There are select gamers that are a bit off and are in it for the hot chicks but that's a tiny group of players. I am sorry to anybody who read this and felt offended. These are my opinions and I felt inclined to share them. If you have an issue with it contact me and I'll hear you out. I might not agree with you but I will not say you're wrong. Opinions vary from person to person so I don't expect everyone to view this like I do.

Ok well I think I have had enough with writing this time around! I hope you all enjoyed my pictures and what I had to say. I'll keep writing in this manner I think. I enjoy just free writing my thoughts out. I hope you all have wonderful days! I'll talk to you later!