HAPPY HALLOWEEN !! It’s finally the spooky time of year. I hope everyone had a good HALLOWEEN and didn’t get too scared from all of the ghosts. I had a little party with some friends where we overdosed on sugar and watched some scary films so mine was pretty ideal.
This month it is: GHOSTS, of course.
I made a VTUBER. It was inevitable. I have zero plans to become a streamer in any public capacity but the novelty of having a talksprite while streaming to friends was too powerful to resist. My condolences to my OC Ghost, who is cooler than me and perhaps too cool for this. Sorry to have done this to you. It’s put together with four sprites and an app called veadotube mini, which I wholeheartedly recommend.
welcome to the GAME ZONE [🔴 LIVE]
I’ve been rewatching DANNY PHANTOM as I generally do every few years. It’s a show that explains a lot about why I’m like this. There’s a lot I’m fascinated with but this time my focus was on the many gadgets and gizmos of FENTONWORKS, the name that Danny’s ghost-hunting parents operate under.
In one of the early episodes, “Attack of the Killer Garage Sale”, Danny’s parents greet him at breakfast by explaining that they have invented a way of cooking hotdogs faster. They then reveal a machine that contains multitudes of evil and possessed hotdogs. I decided that I needed to model this.
a completely normal express hotdog maker
Let me tell you, the UVs on this thing are hideous. I’m obsessed with crisp lineart whether it’s 2D or 3D so I ended up utilising a technique I learned from GUILTY GEAR XRD, which inconveniently takes a thousand years to do and at the expense of neat UV mapping. But I love how it looks, so I’ll pay that price. If you’re interested there’s a GDC talk you can watch here that explains how to do it.
I imported this into Unity so I could animate and see how it looked under my toon shaders – it looked great, but it bothered me that the lineart was also being affected by the shadows so I made some modifications – now I can exclude and modify lineart colours! Exciting.
I’ve started picking away at some of the other FENTONWORKS gadgets whenever I get the itch to work in 3D as it’s good practice for me. Here’s what’s next – the FENTON THERMOS:
I did some other sketches these past two months, mostly to do with DELTARUNE and Ghost, which is all I feel like drawing right now. I’ll probably work on these some more while I relax over the holidays.
I am foolish! I am overambitious! I know this! My triple haunted house zone will not be ready for Halloween 2021. There’s still a lot of work left to do and I refuse to rush or stress myself out during my favourite holiday, so I am sensibly pushing this back “until it’s ready”. Admittedly I was having some trouble mapping out the third house after hammering out the first two so it’s probably for the best that my brain takes a break from this. I will show off more things however. Thanks for looking at my scary pixels.
I added a new page to my website for PROJECTS! As I originally made this site to showcase my 2D digital art, this category covers “everything else”. Pixel art, 3D art, games and other dev work, you name it. It’s up there! Take a look if you so desire – you can find it by clicking on the nav bar’s new pixellated ghost friend.
It’s the time of year again…RAINBOW JAM. I teamed up with my usual jam buddies to work on a game with the theme of ‘LIBERATION’, and we quickly settled on a sci-fi racing game of some kind. A combination of being busy with other work and wanting to mess with 3D some more meant I ended up focusing on the environment design and palettes. A little scary but very fun!
After throwing together a moodboard I went away and coughed up some thumbnails for everyone to look at. Then – modelling! I continue to grow in power as I learn more about how blender works. I handled the track, the chains, the slime and the overall palette, while my pal Sid handled the vehicles, buildings, arches and some other track decorations.
The rest of the team worked on the gameplay, narrative, voiceover, music, vfx and cinematics, and then we spent the final few hours frantically piecing the entire track together because we realised that there was a lot of dialogue and the player needed time to hear all of it. We got it done though!! It makes for a great little experience.
If you’d like to play, head over to the itch.io page!
For more screenshots and a full credit list, head over to the project page!
ZOO TYCOON – I have been itching to play this game for what feels like a thousand years. ZOO TYCOON is basically my game of all time because I get to put on a show or a podcast and zone out and make animals generate little smiley emoticons above their heads. I can also unleash dinosaurs upon the general public. It’s everything to me. During a week in September that I lost to a zoo-crafting trance I became obsessed with making micro-zoos. I would start fresh with the smallest zoo maps and build them out into perfect self-sustaining microcosms, at which point I’d just sit back and watch for a while. There’s something very satisfying about it. 10/10.
welcome to my cool zoo. at this resolution you probably can’t see all the sharks
DELTARUNE CH2 – Toby has cursed me with new content (compliment). This release blind-sided everyone but boy am I grateful for it. It had jokes, it had neon colours, it had scary moments, it was perfect. My favourite post-playthrough activity is theorycrafting with friends until the early hours of the morning, often to the point of repeating ourselves, and the new chapter gave us plenty of stuff to cover. Anyway, no real spoilers here. Just go play it and have fun.
me at the arcade
OUIJA – A wishlist item for many years, I finally acquired it…a GLOW IN THE DARK Ouija board. I don’t believe in ghosts or demons so it’s mostly for decoration. I tried playing a few times by myself to no avail (the planchette doesn’t move so easily if you don’t believe it’s ghosts) and notably I have not been haunted in the weeks since. Perhaps they are all afraid of me, the ghost that resides here already.
That’s all for now! Happy HALLOWEEN !! 👻💀🎃
I’m not sure whether my next post will be a November/December newsletter, a 2021 roundup, or both, so we’ll just wait and see.
I also made some scary gingerbread (VERY TASTY)
Caspar 👻
