Mark II crew

Fiddled with the cannoners and the misc pirates a bit. They were just outside of my tolerances. Barely worth posting the updated versions, but I can't see any harm in it.

The pirates were leaning too sharply. It's a common mistake I make, since I like to sit at funny angles I'm seldom looking at the screen straight-on. What I should do is horizontally flip what I'm working on to see if it looks wrong the other way round. I didn't bother this time and they ended up all Pisa for it.

Easy enough to fix though. Isolated the hands, weapons and heads, then skewed everything else back towards the normal, then moved the unaltered bits back into place. They also got some colour changes because i saw room for improvement.

The cannon-luggers' feet really bugged me - totally sloppy. So that got fixed. Redoing the cannon entered my mind, but they don't bother me nearly so much as the feet did. The colours could probably be tweaked, but really the feet were the main irritations.

I've still got those desert swordsmen to fix up. I'll leave them for now though - maybe when I do another desert-themed character and have more ideas for detail styles.

Scurvy

A pleasant change. These came easily and, while I can fret over certain details, all in all they please me. These are your generic deck-clogging sea-dog-type pirate.

No eye patches, hook hands or peg legs you'll notice. I don't want to overuse that kind of powerful cliché if I'm going to be doing more than just a couple pirate-themed guys. I figure that in any given trinity I can use one (1) of those on one (1) of the characters. For example the dock thugs (who are still borderline pirates in my mind) have one eye patch between them. I think one of my old pirates has a peg leg, so that uses up that. Hook hand I have an idea for making huge and weaponised, theming a whole character-type around maybe.

Anyway - these guys. They flowed nicely. Originally I was thinking that I could swap about the sword and pistol hand between them, but it always looked best with the pistol up and the sword down so that idea was nixed.

I've got a good set of swappable components here. Head, torso, sword, pistol, legs and even feet. The clever bit though is accessories. I managed to rig it so that the sash and epaulettes are swappable too. #3's gloves can be the third accessory type, but they're not as itneresting as the other two. Of course this all gives me way, way more combinations than I need. No big deal.

I'm rather fond of #3's hair; I don't think I've done that style before. Just four V-shapes, nice and clean, but implying some nice messy-spikey-hair. His tailed coat too actually - I figure it used to belong to a marine officer, or maybe he even used to be a marine before getting captured and joining the pirates. Made sure he didn't look too sharp by putting a bare chest underneath it. Same kind of thinking behind #2's epaulettes.

Trivia: If you take the big hat, the epaulettes, tailed coat and long boots you end up with a rather official-looking marine-type person. May or may not be useful.

I'd like to do a gunslinging pistolier pirate, but it's not coming together yet. Also perhaps a spyglass/sextant/compass-brandishing navigator. I also wanted a booze-themed barrel/crate carrier, but I'm just failing embarassingly in that direction. Combined with my old pirates it seems there's a lot of space to be explored.

So far I've been thinking that each set is good for one, maybe two missions. But if I can get a large enough set, I could have multiple missions based around the same theme, but each with a different selection of enemies.

Jezzailachis

Another set that I kind of forced through. There's quite a few areas that I consider questionable. Feet again. The designs of the cannon. Some aspects of the pose. I liked the sketch though and wanted to bring it to a finished state before I lost the love.

I experimented with some shine on the cannon barrels - they didn't look right without it. A 40% transparency layer of stark black and white seems about ok. I drew the shine bands manually, with a mouse, and it shows. When you zoom out though the wobble seems natural. That's probably just my laziness talking, but it's on its own layer so it'd be easy enough to tweak later.

Still, the cannon didn't look right until I dulled down the whole body to something closer to black to make ti stand out from the bright clothes of the gunners. Reminds me of TF2 where the weaponry is all a very subdued black and grey to be visible against the character models.

Pirates are a new set. I've done four or five good solo pirates previously, so I can fill out their ranks easily enough even if I find myself unable to come up with anything else. The dock thugs could be pirates too I suppose, though I intended them to be unfriendly locals for the harbour. Uncertain how I feel about that kind of crossover. Then again, I do like the idea that the sets aren't toally foreign to each other. Even the jungle natives, if they're on an island or a foreign coastline could be geographically close to a pirate base of operations.

Shop talk

This hypothetical game that I'm bearing in mind when I make these graphics. The basic idea is a Kingdom Of Loathing-like browser-based vaguely multiplayer game. Not exactly like KoL, nor an optimistically conceived "KoL... but better!" I am inspired by KoL, and I don't mean "I want to rip KoL off". I mean that KoL spurs me to be creative in my own way, that it serves as an example of what's possible.

The basic idea is that you, the player, is in charge of a guild of fantasy adventurers. You start off founding the guild with your leader character and gather more guild members over time. The central gameplay system is the "group of characters vs group of characters" battle as described previously. Outside of those battles there can be economic gameplay based around hoarding and consuming resources. Other gameplay systems could be "plugged in", but those two are what I see being where the bulk of the fun living.

The importance of the setting is how much it allows for. A fantasy mish-mash milleu allows for an almost unlimited variety of styles, characters and monsters. And it immediately lets the player know the sort of thing they should expect. Such as guilds of adventurers. The guild setting is far more important than the world though. It provides a rationale for managing a stable of characters, gives you an identity to become attached to and a good reason for your characters to seek out trouble.

Multiple axes of advancement are in my mind, what makes this setup particularly good for a game. You can level up and customise individual characters to improve their stats and unlock additional attacks. You can expand your roster of characters (who can then in turn be levelled up...). You can earn money to swell the guild coffers. You can expand and upgrade the guild house with new facilities. You can increase your stash of loot. You can complete missions to improve your guild's reputation and unlock more content.
And consider how these can interact - you take characters on a mission and they get stronger and earn the guild money. You spend the money expanding the guild house so that you can support more characters, or to provide facilities for those characters to use. And these interactions can be "squishy". You might decide that upgrading the guild is boring, so you focus on getting as many recruits as possible, just barely spending enough on the guild that they don't leave in disgust. Or you might really go in for pampering a few favourite characters with sweet bonuses from a nice guild house, and sweet loot made in your guild's armoury. And that's not touching on the economic gameplay, which can be used to enable guild progression or just an end in itself.

To enable replayability I think the KoL method is best; make play cyclical. I'm imagining a "valhalla" where legendary champions live. When you "complete" the game, your guild's leader (usually the character you started with, but there can be options and events that give you the option to switch who your focal character is) becomes a legendary hero and becomes saved in his current status to your account. And then you start again from scratch.
But as you play, you slowly build up a roster of legendary heroes in their "maxed-out" state in valhalla, and that's almost like a meta-guild for you. I imagine that this would be where player-vs-player competition would occur, though there's no reason there couldn't be a bit of single player content there too as a final tier. You could also get various benefits in the normal game from restarting, like access to new content, guild upgrades or loot. Perhaps the old champions could become a wandering heroes that you can meet. The possibilities are too wide to go over in any specifics here.

The currency of play would be in character actions. Like KoL (again) this would be a limited play-per-day game. Each day, each of your characters can do one thing. This will often be going on a mission (in which case you'll be using up several characters' actions to do it). For characters who don't join a party for a mission, they can be put to work at the guild. Maybe they can craft items. Perhaps they could be hired out as mercenaries, or sent to compete in an arena - simple things with results based on character stats/skills that don't involve active gameplay like battles do, although they could be expanded to minigame-status if needed.
Downtime skills could be a class of character skill that gvies them a special option when idle. A burglar might bring you extra money. A researcher might come up with a new spell that one of your wizards can learn. A chef could make delicious cake. This means that even when you have enough characters to form multiple parties, you could just select a bunch of downtime options for your characters and call it a day.

Lots of things I've not talked about. Interaction between players. What would matter from the economy side of things. Potential for expandability. Structure of missions and how they're dispensed. Inter-character relations absed on a few simple personality checkboxes. Special events and challenges. How collectability would be implemented.
But this isn't exactly a proper design document. Best to make sure of my big picture before I start getting all fiddly and specific.

Something from the cart

I can't seem to get this kind of pose working right. Same problem with the sutured stalkers; on the sketch it looks nice and dynamic as if they're balanced on one foot and bringing the other forward. But after the "inks" they're slouching into the foreground with their rear foot resting on invisible ground. It's probably my fault for using a perfect flat ground line way back when. I guess it wouldn't be that difficult to go back and give everyone rounded feet but... what a chore. I'm not even sure it would be a good idea - the uniform flat cutoff lets me do things like the tentacles and the rockworm more easily.

Distractions. These are new. Armoured desert-dwellers. Dervish is such a cliché name, but it'll do for now. I also have a spear and shield-wielding guy in this style in the pre-triplicate batch, but he's so old that I'd need to re-do him to fit alongside these. My node discipline is totally shot here. Maybe even too far - I might go back and prune. The thing is that they're so spindly that I end up using excess lines just to get some emaningful differentiation on such small surfaces. Maybe I was taking the wrong approach to begin with and I should try more drastic styles rather than crowding and cluttering the lines. I did kind of push myself to finish these.

Colours were a cheat. They're mainly just hue-shifts of the first one with some manual touch-ups for the masks and contrast areas. Not awful though. Might be a good time-saver when dealing with "uniforms" - a starting point at least.

So, not as big a failure as those horrible ogres. I might revise these, but I feel slightly better for the work done.

Mountain ogres

These are experimental - that's a partial excuse for the crappiness. While so far I've been tackling bigger, monsterier things by drawing them pretty explicitly, for these I tried to do them as stickmen like the human characters.

Results are mixed. They look disappointingly like a bunch of details pasted on top of a really crappy skeleton. I might have to give the arms at least volume. maybe i could shrink the legs to sticks - giving them a top-heavy look - to clear up room.

Notes:
The shields are meant to be made from multiple pieces of scrap.

Too many greys make these really boring to look at. maybe they could do with some reds.

The metal areas really need some kind of shine or texture that I can't do with flats. I should probably look at reference pictures to come up with a good gimmick.

#2 gets a shoulder pad because his mask left that area looking really empty.

I wouldn't be surprised if I junked these. Though I might recycle #1 and #2's masks. I'm unhappy with the eyes. Might promote those to triangles or circles or something so they look like holes in the mask. The line-eyes really aren't working for me at that size. A node-light solution would be ideal. Maybe some kind of letterbox gap. That would also make them look a little more sinister rather than bemused and gormless.

The dangers of unbounded science

Someone prompted me to make a warning sign for causality violation. I came up with these two. And a related "closed space" warning sign. Made very quickly, hence the wacky font; I re-used the basic warning sign template from a team fortress 2 spray I'd made.

I think the one with the question mark is the best. It looks properly geometric as well as symbolic. or at least it would if it was in a serious font. I could easily see it become the kind of sign you end up recognising as a holistic image rather than a combination of symbols. I like the idea of the closed space one, but am unimpressed by the picture.

Taps

Gribblies. I suppose these would go along with big burly beetle guy, but I have no specific plan. These were drawn for fun. There's a common theme of four eyes - I couldn't help coming up with some unifying features, but other than that they're not really terribly similar. I guess the maggot could be a larva, the skinny guy and the burly beetle could be different castes, but the rockworm is blatantly a different species altogether.

Maybe they'll end up being wandering monsters or something equally random. They were fun to do and that's all that really matters. I can come up with a theme after the fact if I end up doing enough of them.

I tried being a little more adventurous with the colour here. Lanky and worm have highlights in their eyes (maggot's eyes were too small to bother with) and worm has a two-tone body. Even maggot has an unusually smooth colour variation across his body. I like it. I might try more deviations from flat shading in the future.

Lanky was hard to colour. The angular body shape and odd pose meant it was hard to parse what you were looking at. Eventually I just coloured the chest+arms a different, stronger colour than the legs and trunk. The hands and hooves were used as details to unify the two schemes across the body. I think it just about works.

Worm caused me to doubt myself. That chunky hide is really detailed. I think two of the chunks are pentagons, and all the rest are either deformed triangles or quads, but even so it gives the impression of a lot of fiddly detail. And even if the total line count isn't that high compared to some of the others I've done, it has a more naturally detailed appearance that I worried would make it stick out. Still not totally convinced that it doesn't, even if the main body is just three S-curves. The beak too is a little more detailed than I'd like, but the hide steals the show. Monsters in general need more lines. I'll let it go for now.