BYOB - SMG Concept

A big goal of ours for these weapons was to create something that was 80% plausible and 20% pure fantasy. In this way, all the weapons have proper alignments in regards to ammo feeding and ejecting however the reciprocating actions on top and moving magazines and magazine wells are purely there as juice for animation.

The SMG's secondary is a fairly slow moving missile that can help the player zone enemies at medium range or to blast down a few walls when need be.

 

Keep up to date with our progress atwww.bringyourownbase.com andhttps://twitter.com/anvilheadstudio

BYOB - Rifle Concept Art

Ever since I helped cofound Anvilhead Studios, a year or two ago I had to keep it on a back burner and devote what limited focus I could spare towards business dev and game design / project management.

Recently, due to some very generous friends, family, wife and a great state grant program I've been able to transition into a temporary full-time capacity to help us accelerate towards the launch of Bring Your Own Base's (BYOB) MVP release.

The default rifle shown here is one of the first pieces created in an attempt to polish our game up enough to stand out, but not so much that we run out of money and find ourselves without a solid game foundation - a tricky balancing act.

Keep up to date with our progress at www.bringyourownbase.com and https://twitter.com/anvilheadstudio

Grave Danger - Flying Ranged Enemy

Here is the ranged version of the flying enemy for the Train World. I wanted to add in a tech element that matched the world and give it a more armored feel so it will exist as more of a threat.

15 Frame idle animation - for when he is chilling.

Flying with intent.

Firing loop.

And a bonus 15m sketch. The prompts were for a vehicle with the tags "Loner" + "Prairie".

Grave Danger - Flying Melee Enemey

This was one of my first concept rounds at JB gaming - so lots of range trying to figure out the right mixture of scary and goofy.

We needed a generic flying enemy for Grave Danger's initial development. I started out a few months ago with a blob enemy covered in tentacles but didn't know enough about Spine to make it work. Here I am coming back to a more general purpose design with a bit more work under my belt and things are working out better.

I decided to animate the wings by hand and not with a rig due to the complexity of the perspective and animation, so started up drafting a few tests in Photoshop before drawing out the sprites and putting it all together in Spine. 

Initial test.

Initial test.

Revision 2 with the body assets blocked in.

Blocked in the wings.

'Slow' 15 frame idle animation. The up and down strokes are held for a few frames and the tips of the wings are deformed with bones for a bit more organic look.

Here is the desert skin in the "Aggro" animation. The mouth can't open much larger than this at the moment.

Next stop will be to duplicate this project and create a ranged version with a projectile weapon below where the tenticals are.

Update: Removed the blur on the wings for now at the suggestion from a friend and I feel that it matches the game style much better than before. It was his opinion - and I agree - that the path blur I was using before looked more like a DoF effect and not like motion! Thanks, John!

 

Also tweaked the wing membrane color for the desert themed bat. Will hold final judgement for when he is in game.

And a bonus melee attack animation I forgot to export last time.

Grave Danger - Enemy Skin Test WIP June 16 2016

Finally got around to adding in Spine's really solid skin system and applying it to the default enemy rig. 

Because the heads are all slightly different (and have different bones and animations) I had to kind of work around that by creating and attaching empty blank images to the skins for inactive heads. Im sure there is a better way but a brief search didn't reveal anything and we are on a deadline! This seems to work, but I'd love to know about other approaches.

The standard weakest 'train engineer' variant. Right now only the weapon, skin color, headgear and wrist strap are different, however if given the time I can make all the assets custom. 

Maybe a bit too aggressive for the game, but will see if it grows on me. I think he is pretty badass regardless.

Next step is to create a "Caster" / "Shaman" version and add in some more general use animations.

Grave Danger - Train Level WIP June 10 2016

Here are some early shots of all the pieces finally put together in Unity and set in motion along with an 80% final train interior asset set. 

Many of the exterior assets have simple scripts attached to jitter them in place however the wheels were animated in Spine.

Still has a lot of polish to go! Check out https://twitter.com/GraveDangerGame to follow along with development.

Characters and character animations were created by Tony Ferguson 

Currently the chairs are too big and nothing is animated, but things are snapping together pretty well. Other than the insane amount of layers to work with contraction and expansion things are pretty straight forward.

Loco-Motive

Ever since completing the Wasteland vehicle powered by a retrofit propeller airplane I knew I wanted to play around more in the realm of nonconventional propulsion sources. This was a first round sketch turned refined version of a steam locomotive that has broken free from the shackles of tracks.

Hopefully, I'll find the time and drive to do a few more revisions and make a finalized illustration in the next few months. The next one will be some sort of boat-turned-truck, harnessing energy from the propeller shaft (and possibly sail)!

Jumped from some rough bones paintover of a train image into this without much time spent fixing wheel perspective. I was also using Procreate on the iPad pro so no fancy elipse tools im afraid. I think this design is far more appealing than the two other versions below visually, but the engineer inside me really wants a more capable looking turning solution besides the two front wheels being on casters... 

An evolutionary dead end I'm afraid.

This one has some promise to me. I really like the airplane landing gear in the back to help steer the beast. I also hope to create some sort of machine that turns the reciprocating motion of the steam piston into something a transmission can use to power the wheels.

Grave Danger train level animation progress

The wheels worked out better than I had hoped! Due to the construction method of the asset however, I still haven't seen everything moving together so the next step will be to assemble in Unity so I can have an easily* updatable file in motion that I can use for reference. 

I suspect the amount of z sorting will be a holy hell to work through, but it SHOULD all work...

Thrumming with life!

... never synchronized /o\

Activated and ready to kill

Firing but without any particle effects...

Disabled!

3D Printed Gift + Early Animations in Spine

I've picked up a contract working at JB Gaming - creating concepts and assets for their new title "Grave Danger" (Facebook Page)

It's taken a month to get spooled up to the title's art style and into animating in Spine but I'll be trying to post up more art as my time allows. Otherwise, check out the game's Twitter Account for frequent quality updates!

Below is one of the first animated units I created along with 2 other skulls (not shown). I'd consider these game ready, but 80% done. hopefully, I'll have time to polish them up as I learn more.

I am also creating a train level asset that will use various static sprites and spine animations working together to create external platforming environments. Internal environments will be created in Ferr2.

Second draft proposal for the train level colors and high level details.

Current working document. The top assets are a combination of sprites (folders with image generator names) and Spine animations (Linked smart objects)

The original design featured cog wheels that were supposed to be turned using a chain drive, but after a bit of deliberation, I wasn't sure that the effect could easily be animated in Spine so I am working on switching things over to a push rod system which will probably look way better in the end anyway. The gear was animated with 10 offset layers to achieve the illusion of slight 3D depth. Hopefully, it will all mesh together well!

Also, my friend Max surprised me with this 3D printed metal keychain of my signature block! He makes way more creative and wonderful stuff that you can find over on his facebook page.

 

Bots Battleground - "Berserk"

One of the last designs for the second round of Bots Battleground work. Billed as a falling apart psychopath I incorporated lots of haphazard elements including substantial battle damage and "Jokeresque" face paint.

As the last step of finalization, I went in and activated the long dormant gradient map layers to create each of the 4 team's colored variations. I then created Layer comps in conjunction with the image generator to automatically export out all 4 versions every time any changes were made to the files. Adobe's automation stuff is really kicking ass, and other than a few issues did everything I hoped it would. 

One of my biggest hangups that I knew would be a problem was not having all the files loaded into a master document. I had heavily considered it, but for the scope of the contract I wasn't convinced that the efficiencies would pay off... I also didn't know how the client's computer would react to 100+ smart objects and 700+ layers...

This was a great full spectrum project. It helped me work out more efficient pipelines and introduced me to a great guy and team to work with. Can't wait to get my set! 

For more information about the game, check out the successfully funded KickStarter page!