Javelins and squires.

I've been vacillating about whether to put this up. It seems a little like admitting that the previous linearts aren't getting coloured any time soon. But, if I'm not then they're not so I might as well keep going with what is getting done.

I'm hoping that I just need something inspirational to jump back on the colour-horse again. In the meantime though it's linearts.

I was really happy with javelineer pose, but the more I look at it the more limp and noodly it looks. Still, it's at least an attempt at something a bit more dynamic - I really don't want to fall into a rut with posing.

I like the heads; hair continues to be a difficulty but it went ok here. Torsos took ages to detail in a way I was happy with. The funny angle and a lack of space really limited what I could do without it looking cluttered and messy.

The legs are... bothersome. Those crotch-crescent thighs aren't working right, but I can't seem to fix it. I'm calling it done and moving on rather than obsessing though - for all the bits I don't like, overall I'm going to call the javelineers "adequate". They're characterful enough to me that I can let myself overlook the dodgy bits.

Speaking of characterful, I'm very happy with the pose of the squires. Not exactly dynamic like the javelineers, but different and with a sense of motion. Stumbling forward with someone else's weapon and armour.

I like the pose so much I wanted to give them more variation - perhaps a sheathed sword rather than a lance - but I couldn't come up with a third option and this way they're all themed and can go alongside the heralds.

It occured to me that the pose was perfect for soemthing I tried to do when I was paying more attention to the mad surgeon theme - an assistant stumbling forward with a comically large syringe in his arms. Now that I have an idea of the knid of lines that pose needs I could try and do a different version for it, but I also wonder whether I oculd get away with a novelty reskin.

I want new models in preference to reskins, but it seems like an interesting way to do "rare" characters: reskins that completely change the character of the model. It could be kind of cool, or it could be kind of lame. It would add more variety than just an on-theme reskin, and would be an easy way to get a new character without having to make a complete new model. But easy is often a trap. The big thing turning me off the idea is what if the "rare" variant appears alongside a regular? It'll probably look obvious and cheap.

In the works: masked jungle natives and small nippy dinosaurs. Will they make it past sketch? Who can tell!

A change of tack

So, I know the name of the game was supposed to be "keep ploughing forward" but that ideal wasn't terribly useful when I was hitting feldspar.

I did the rightmost guy first, using the same block shading method. But I just couldn't summon any motivation to do the others. On the one hand i think I failed to come up with interesting colour schemes here. On the other I might just have OD'd on amateurish block shading. In any case, I tried something different on the other two.

Rather than worrying about light sources, I embraced the flat cartoon look of the veeps and did a sort of graduated fill, darkening towards the bottom to draw attention upwards. I'd pondered using this method at the start, but (lazily) never actually tried it. I'm not sure what to make of the end result, but it was very fast and a fun break. Trying new things is good.

It's not actually a graduated fill - instead it's multiple passes with a low-opacity brush of a different colour (hence the banding). But that's not important. Middle guy I carefully selected the shades to work down to. Leftmost I used a universal grey-purple shadow colour. And as a result the one has no contrast and the other is way too dull and dark. But there might be potential here.

I kept working on linearts while i was trying not to finish colouring the monks. Heralds!

I expected difficulty making meaningful variants, but it flowed pretty easily in the end. The tabard designs were fun and they could look nice with some bright heraldic colours on them.

I think these guys might be part of another themed group like the (neglected) brine mutants and the psycho surgeons. Some kind of knights, squires and chivalry thing. I can think of two acceptable armoured knights I've done in the past that could be purposed for that. I've avoided making variations for old veeps so far because I wanted to be making new stuff rather than going over old stuff, but it remains an option.

Speaking of redoing old stuff - trivia time! The heralds were me idly re-doodling one of the veeps I drew way back when I first started playing around with vector stickmen. Of course looking back now they're all abominable, but there's brain fodder to be had there. The cutthroats from a little while back were another example of trying to modernise one of the original bunch.

I've deviated a fair bit from the original idea. I'd wanted to see how few lines you needed to make something identifiable. Which is how I came up with the basic skeleton pattern. But I've gone the way of packing in more detail instead, with the minimal lines thing being just a stylistic quirk.

Saturday night ninjas

I've failed at giving these guys a good name. The title above is a placeholder until I come up with something good. They're supposed to be vaguely city-ish unjapanese ninja-ish people. And the one in the middle turned out a bit too John Travolta as a result. I'm not entirely unhappy with him though - he's just a bit weird. Sporadic weirdness is good.

The linework's a bit borderline. The idea is they're drawing those cleaverish swords from where they hang on their backs, but I didn't get it looking right. It might have worked better with an actual visible sheath, slung like a bedroll, but the twisted torsos made gatting a working angle a bitch. At least the legs aren't as bad as they were - until i realised and fixed it, their left knee was roughly three inches below their hip.

Alpha makes me think of white chocolate and raspberry though, which is nice. And Beta and Gamma's hairstyles have pleasantly low nodecounts.

They're done though. Post 'em and keep moving.

About nailguns.

So I got into the beta for quake live. Which is nice. I played quake 3 to death when it came out, but I never got the team arena expansion, what with it being a little lacking in content and all. But being a part of quake live, I've finally gotten a chance to see the only interesting-looking part: the new weapons.

The proximity mine launcher does what it sounds like. But it's only useful for speculatively mining areas of the map. I suspect you'll almost always be better served by hunting people down with a real gun.

The chaingun is what you'd expect - high RoF hitscan weapon with a spread. Rate of fire ramps up to the maximum relatively slowly as you hold the fire button down. You get into the habbit of starting to fire when you hear a combat, before you see it, so it's firing at full speed sooner. And the spread makes it more like a fully automatic shotgun than an alt plasma gun. Fun in context, but nothing terribly unique.

The nailgun though is a real prize - a weapon not quite like anything else I've used before. It really impressed me. It's like the UT flak cannon (primary) - fires a hail of nails that do massive damage if they all hit. But that doesn't do it justice.

First of all the nails are quite tightly packed and don't seem to spread that much in flight. They fly fairly slowly - there's a very noticable travel time for the projectiles. You always have to lead the target if there's any kind of lateral motion going on. The small spread makes it great fired down tight corridors though. What was most interesting to me is that it doesn't just fire a spray of projectiles like traditional shotgun weapons, it fires a cloud.

When you get a solid hit, you hear a succession of "shunkshunkshunk" as the nails slam into them in succession. While the railgun projects a line of damage, and the rocket launcher creates AoE damage where it hits, the nailgun launches a moving AoE.

One of the reasons the rocket launcher is such a great FPS weapon is that there's so many variables involved in each shot., all depending on the skill of the firer, the target and the situation. Travel time for the rocket means you need to lead the target proportionally to the distance. Direct hits cause the most damage, but are the hardest to pull off. Catching someone in the blast is easiest if they're against a surface, especially if you have the high ground, but does less damage. It's easy to clip someone for a little damage, but satisfyingly lethal hits are also possible. For any given shot the skills of the firer and the defender have all had an impact on how much damage was done

On the other hand is a very binary weapon. Was your cursor over the enemy when you clicked: yes/no? This weapon rewards skill and punishes ineptitude like no other. If you're good enough you do 100% damage. If you're not, 0%.

QL's nailgun is like the rocket launcher. The tightly packed cloud means that it's probably a one-shot kill with a perfect hit, but the difficulty of a perfect hit degrades rapidly with distance because of the travel time. Like direct hits with the rocket launcher. More frequently you'll clip someone with the nails, or hit them with the front runners of the cloud before they step out of the way of the rest. Lateral motion is the best defence against the nailgun.

The flak cannon is great point-blank, but because of the spread it's useless at medium range or longer. They could up the damage or number of projectiles, or tighten the spread, but then it would be too strong at short range. In its own way it's nearly as binary as the railgun, but weighted towards situation rather than skill.

The genius of the cloud is that it allows the nailgun to be overpowered in its ideal situation - at close range or against a target moving along the same line as you - without being either overpowered or useless at longer ranges. It retains its full potential in a wide variety of situations, but there's a sliding scale where the less ideal the situation, the more skill is required to make the most of it. And so, like the rocket launcher, using movement and tactics to create that ideal situation becaomes a part of the skill in using the weapon.

Unfortunately it only appears in a couple of maps. And I've not seen anything like it in later games. Shame.

They have questions.

Androgynes with axes. In a curious pose that is either pivoting on one foot or dancing - hard to tell.

I was really playing about with metallic-looking shading here. Not satisfied with most of it, but I got to try out a few new things and practice others.

I'm having contrast problems again I think. I need some kind of standard to work from, rather than just daubing colour over a neutral brown. Maybe go back over the old ones and find a few that I'm happy with, then use them as reference?

That sounds distressingly close to the correct way to do things - not my scene at all. I'll probably just make a half-assed effort to triple-check before I call them final.

I did more three-tone shading on these than normal. Not the skin as I said I was going to do - that's turning out trickier than I imagined - but on the stronger metallics. It seems like a good idea and I should probably have done more of it. Making life harder.

I'm not sure if I'm making any progress. It doesn't feel like it. But then it never does, until I look back at what I was doing a couple of months ago and I decide that they're all no longer up to par and must be scrapped. Still, even if it doesn't feel like I'm getting better, it feels productive to be adding to a growing library of these guys.

Layout of a scuffle.

I'm going to talk systems and mechanics now I think. Do excuse me if it seems a little presumptuous.

When two teams of characters go up against each other in a rousing game of red vs blue, it looks a bit like this:This is a five-a-side, the largest a game can be. You'll often be dealing with (or against) a smaller team. Now let's be depressingly conventional and have characters dealing attacks that do damage to the other guy's HP in a turn-based environment. Characters attack their opposite number as indicated by the grey arrows. The goal is usually to KO the other team while keeping your team as conscious as possible.

A few niggling details: Attacks are exchanged simultaneously-ish. The players make all their decisions (usually only one decision to make - more on this some other time) in secret, then check the "ready" box when they're done. Once both players are ready, the turn happens. Now, having everything actually happen simultaneously would be terribly confusing and mildly impossible, so here's what actually goes on: for each pairing a virtual coin is flipped (invisibly). The winner's attack happens first and then, assuming they survived, the loser's attack occurs. This happens for all the pairings, left to right as is intuitive. Not terribly exciting, but these mechanics have to exist.

So! A basic system for two lineups of people to use each other as punching bags.

One potential complication is what happens with uneven teams or when one character's opponent has been KO'd. Observe:
If a character has no opponent, then they direct their attack to the character next in line, moving towards the centre, as demonstrated by the grey lines of attack in this example. Note the blue centre-fielder. The poor bastard's going to be attacked by three different characters each turn. But he still only gets to attack the once, directed towards his opposite number.

Confession: I'm not 100% sure about the attack redirection mechanic. Look to the right of the diagram and you might see why. The right hand red is attacking the centre blue, but toally ignoring the right hand blue who will be pummeling her. This system is simple and easy to grok, but gives rise to the odd silly situation like this. Paired off combatants are neater.

And so! An alternative system would be to slide characters inwards to fill any gaps, creating as many pairings as possible. Characters left on a flank with no opposite redirect their attacks as described above. Potential problem: flanks collapse fast when a character is eliminated because their replacement is probably going to be taking heat from two opponents. But then the current system puts that same pressure on the centre.

I'm thinking that the "slide" method might be better, but it seems the kind of thing that would need actual testing. So this is as far as thought experiemnts and diagrams can take me.

Anyway - that's some basics described. Next time I'll probably describe what sort of attacks characters have and what decisions the players have to make.

Tracheaocide; now with R, G and B.

Done! Same day even. And... they're ok I think. I'm happiest with Mr Beta, but none of them are awful.

I suppose Gamma needs more contrast. I can handle that with levels. That's a point though - I should probably try and standardise how much contrast there should be between light and dark tones of the same colour. So far I've just been eyeballing it, but I'll bet if you took a bunch of these guys at random they'd look wrong together because the lighting doesn't match.

I suppose the number to look at is the V/B. Thinking about it, if I wanted to make different colour-versions for the same figure, I could do it by making a greyscale base figure for the light/dark definitions and then applying it as a transformation layer over flat colour. Hmm, no that wouldn't work actually - I'm always going to want some areas darker or lighter aside from lighting. I could define and save the /shape/ of the shaded areas though and use that as a guide.

I need better words to think about this stuff really. Perils of a non-technical education. I often find that - trying to talk about something new to me and I just don't have the words to say what I mean. Gives me a newfound appreciation for academic language, and a disdain for people who automatically dismiss it as pretentious.

Oops - that was almost proper blogging, and that's not what this thing is for. I'd best bugger off before I start trying to share my other profound, uneducated insights.

Tracheaocide

These are only linearts so far, but I rather like them. I have enough to say about them that I want to post about them now rather than just after-colouring. Besides, sod's law says that I'll fuck up the colouring and end up hating them, so I'm going to strike while I'm still enthusiastic.

Something that i think is interesting, regarding interchangability of parts, is the face-mask. It's exactly the same lines on all three heads, but the context provided by the three bodies changes what you interpret it as. I didn't plan it this way, but when I dressed the first variant (beta as it happens) in his scarf, I realised that I'd have to carry the face and neck areas over between the three variants if I wanted interchangability. And it worked out better than I'd have hoped.

These remind me of the nurses, in that I managed to make the three variants far more different than I usually do. Rather than just different cuts of clothes or hairdos, I've suggested quite different kinds of outfit. And rather than going for interchangability in the parts, I've themed them relatively strongly.

Alpha is a semi-classy highwayman type. He has the neck thing, a shoulder-cloak and a snazzy waistcoat. His daggers are the most elegant-looking to me, too. I'm thinking he should be dressed in expensive-looking red.

Beta is a more raggedy street-type. The daggers are ugly and brutal-looking. He has a cool long scarf-thing going on, which I've tried to tat-up a little, and looks a bit more desperate.

For gamma, my thinking was "world of warcraft rogue". Rigid, layered leather-armour with shoulder pads, and military-looking knives. Which is pretty much how it turned out.

Despite the strong theming, the heads, weapons and bodies are all meant to be interchangable. I was using the themes as inspiration to create individually interesting elements, not because i had my heart set on creating three very distinct characters.