The next 20 sketches!  I thought I was starting to hit my stride with this batch in terms of design, but unfortunately the art directors disagreed - most of the designs from this set got scrapped somewhere along the way.  We’d established a couple of general themes that we wanted to incorporate, but the specifics were still fairly wide open – allowing me to play around with things a bit and giving me plenty of room to produce axeable creatures sketches. 

So check them out!  And as always check out www.mindstormlabs.com or www.alphaomegathegame.com to pick up the book “The Encountered” and see what made the final cut and how the final illustrations turned out.

On every job you have the occasional obvious misstep – The Alpha Guardian (#61) was one of mine.  We were still desperately trying to figure out how to incorporate Alpha and Omega energy based creatures into the book.  This idea was for a random mutant that had been granted sentience by contact with an Alpha source, and now acts as something of a wandering guardian that wields psi-blades of pure Alpha energy.  I liked the idea, but it was a little fantasy/greek in its execution… not really a good fit for the game.  But bad designs have the benefit of eliminating huge swaths of possibilities - making future choices a little easier

The Radiant Spirit and the Void Spirit (#62 A & B) were very simple starting points for the idea of Alpha/Omega energy beings.  Take a human form, make it glow, and viola!  You have an energy creature that you can use.  Invert it and suddenly you have a dark energy being.  Quick, cheap and simple - but they worked as a good conversation starter with the writers for some other designs.

The Butchers!  (Initial ballpoint pen scribble and the refined sketches) These were designs #63 A & B – and were probably my favorite monster designs that didn’t make the cut.  I’m not sure why thepeople in charge didn’t give one of these the green light.  I thought it was a really dark and creepy idea, having a spider-like creature burrowing in someone’s spine, and slowly turning the host into this ravenous, bloated monster with the demon spider’s legs protruding from the back and wrapped around the body to hold up the rolls of fat.  The first phase stays closer to humanoid, with cleavers to butcher their prey and slowly evolves into the completely wretched demon form with scrap-metal flails replacing the hands and a gaping maw of razor-sharp teeth.

The next three designs didn’t make the cut either.  The Omega Brute (#64), Bonehead (#65), and Fungus (#66).  The only thing to survive from this batch was the skull of the Bonehead; they liked that part so it was co-opted for a later design “The Champion of the Damned”.

Sketch #67 was the Scarecrow – here’s the original ballpoint pen doodle and cleaned up sketch.  Envisioned as one of the Damned, some poor victim would be crucified, have their eyes and mouth sown shut and have a demonic imp take up residence in their guts, tapping into the spinal cord and controlling the victim’s movement from the waist down (thus the need to ‘restrain’ their upper body).  Wow.  Looking at these ideas you’d think I have a seriously twisted mind… but I really don’t – I don’t even like hardcore horror flicks because I think they’re too gruesome.  I must get all the disturbing things out of my head while I’m working. 

These two are the rough sketch and the refined sketch for design #68 – Scary Scoliosis.  Just your everyday dismembered and reassembled human with steel horns and teeth, metal spikes protruding from his spinal column, and radiation venting from ports along his back… pretty run of the mill stuff. 

Shadowstuff (#69) (& ballpoint scribble starting point) was a simple idea of a tattered corpse being animated by a being made of black smoke – this design was turned into the “Necophilious Corrupter” in the final product.  The Stalker (#70) was an idea we kicked around for a semi-invisible creature that has the natural ability to bend light around itself (obviously inspired by Predator).  In the end they named him the ”Invisible Predator” and illustration that was based on this guy doesn’t even show the creature… because he’s invisible – I thought that was kind of clever.

Ghoulish (#71), Occult Spirit (#72), Reaper Thing (#73), Redhead (#74) and Whitehood (#75) are all pretty self-explanatory - I was just messing around with humanish characters/creatures.  I did illustrations for 71-74 that I’ll post later.

The next batch are all creatures that were designed to be part of The Damned faction (check out the previous post for details on them).  First up is sketch # 76 – Twisted, and then (with their original thumbnail sketches) there’s the Freak Queen (#77), Cursed (#78), and Frankenhound (#79).  Cursed was cut from the book and Frankenhound somehow found his way from a disturbing little freak of a beast with a deformed little fetus-like human growing out the side of an abomination of a hybrid between dog, ape and god-knows-what… all the way to something of a dog-centaur that was a full-grown human torso growing from the back of a giant mastiff.  Not a design decision I was thrilled with – but in this case it wasn’t my call to make.

And the last sketch for this post is the Ripper Eel (#80).  A bit incongruous for this post surrounded by demons and freaks, the Ripper Eel is just a simple design for an eel-like creature that can burrow through coastal sand or swim through water by undulating the barbs that run down its sides.  The challenge with designing “natural” creatures for the Alpha Omega world is that they need to be threatening to characters that are carrying assault rifles and wearing heavy armor – with that gear at hand, your average predator is not going to be much of a threat.  So we were constantly thinking of special abilities and situations where mundane creatures would be an actual threat to a squad of adventurers.  With this one, the idea of the large bony growth and heavy skull is that in the water they would ram small vessels, punching holes in the hull and throwing characters into the water – where they could be attacked directly and be in danger of drowning as their body armor drags them under the waves.  And on the beaches, the sharp jaw spur would be used to hamstring unsuspecting heros (who usually don’t wear a lot of armor on their ankles or the soles of their feet), bringing them to the ground where they can be repeatedly gouged or bitten and eventually dragged down into the sand…

That’s it for this batch!  More coming soon!

First off, if you want to see the product that all of these designs or for, head over the www.mindstormlabs.com. 

Time for another batch of monstrous Alpha Omega monster designs!  Sorry for the little delay – too much work and not enough time…  So finally, here are designs numbered 41-60.  At this point, things started getting a little more focused in terms of what the directors were looking for in the creatures, so a lot of these sketches (or later variations) actually made it into the final product.   I’m going to break it down in a little more detail for those that have asked.  If you have the monster book “The Enountered” you might you recognize some of the guys in this post as the starting point for some of the various factions.

You know them, you hate them, the Degenerates… (officially Design #41) they were first published in the “Milk Run” adventure, but they got a design overhaul and were fully statted out for The Encountered.  Conceptually they started off more like beasts in the wild, but at some point the original idea for the Degenerates got split into two separate creatures – the Ferals (you’ll see sketches of them in the next set or two) which are child-like, dirty little savages.  And the Degenerates, which behave almost like living zombies, former humans that are now completely bestial and violent.  This is the original sketch for the bestial Degenerates, and the illustration of an ex-human Degenerate that I did for Milk Run. 

 The “Springheel” (#42) would eventually (after a couple overhauls and reworks) get converted into the Rankar from the Gara Zanteer faction.  You can see that both the technology and the physiology were still directionless at this point, but the general look of the “demon on stilts” was accepted and flagged for future development.

First there’s (#43) the Guard Thing (just a random scribble of a lab-created guard dog/thing).  The next couple were a short-lived attempt to reimagine some generic/traditional monsters… (#44) Dragon (a dinosaur inspired dragon creature), (#45) Speedy Zombie (classic zombie… just slightly more decayed with some blast armor on), (#46) Armored Zombie (I still think that bolting an armored helmet to a zombie’s head and replacing his hands with swords is a brilliant idea for a necromancer.  No headshots?  Sorry heroes… you’re screwed.) and (#47) Ragman (I grafted some mechanical arms and some metal teeth and claws to a classic mummy.  Eh).  They didn’t work out extremely well.  They just lacked that spark we were looking for.  We decided pretty quickly that while some classic monsters might be necessary, reimagining these things had been done to death – and with only around 200 slots to fill we didn’t want to waste the space unnecessarily re-treading old ground.

Next up is the Colonial Warrior (#48).  This guy was started off as a personal project re-imagining the Chrysalis alien from the classic “X-Com: UFO Defense” (one of my favorite games of all time).  But I realized that he was the perfect fit for a humanoid addition to the Colonial faction, so I dropped him in with the other sketches and it was a really great fit.  He went through some pretty hefty color variations (I’ll post those later), but the design itself remained relatively unchanged.

 Titanisaur (#49).  The thought process behind this design went something like “The Wilds are like a prehistoric jungle… we need some dinosaurs!”.  And so I drew a T-Rex inspired beast, with some canine/ursid physiology thrown into the avian mix to allow for faster running speeds and better agility.  The Titanisaur didn’t make the final cut, but it was a touchstone design for a number of the other creatures that did make it into the book.

 With the rest of these we were starting to explore the more ‘demonic’ side of the monsters in the Alpha Omega universe.    A lot of the following sketches ended up being almost unchanged from scribble to final image.  Some sketches had a dozen reworks before they were approved - but these two were pretty much approved right out of the gate.  The epic and horrifying Kor’Du’un – The Reaper of Souls was sketch #51, ”Abomination”; and a big bad of The Damned, T’ar’gus – Lord of Chains was sketch #52, “Chain Boss”…  I guess it was one of those days that I managed to tap into what the directors were looking for. 

These are the first inklings of what would eventually become the Scag – represented by what I initially called the “Grunts” (#53).  They later evolved into the Scag Failures.  

And the basic rank and file soldiers of Legion, the Legionnaires, first saw the light of day as  a twisted take on the mythical Satyr (#54).

Masked (#55) was shot down the second the writers saw it.  Can’t blame them.  This is an example of trying an idea that you know won’t work, just so that you can officially eliminate that option in the future.

The Weeper (now called the Damned Tormentor) and the Corpse Spider (#56s & #57) are where the idea for a species of twisted, demonic parasites originated.  The (admittedly disturbed and disturbing) concept was that these beings need living human hosts to survive, but instead of riding along unnoticed like common parasites, they abduct a host, introduce an infant parasite into the body and use amputations and physical restraints coupled with dark Omega energies to keep the host alive, conscious and aware while the nasty entity uses the body as a shell and feeds on the host’s perpetual psychic anguish.  In my original concept, the Weeper was going to be a grappler and Corpse Spider was going to be a Wielder – but those got shifted around a little as the book came together.  The Corpse Spider is one of the main beasties where I liked the initial sketch better than the variation used in the final design.  The illustration looks awesome, I just liked the juxtaposition of a decaying, bloated, obese torso trailing intestines against the Weeper’s emaciated and amputated frame… I thought it made for an interested variation of silhouette and feel given that they’re very similar in concept.  Although,  the change we later made to the tentacles of the Weeper (making them more like those of a cephalopod) was a really nice call by the art director. 

(#58) The Omega Trooper and (#60) the Omega Champion were part of a faction that I we were throwing around ideas for… it didn’t survive.  But (#59) the Trench Wraith was somehow the inspiration for the False Wraith… don’t ask me how.

Ok, that’s it for this block of sketches.  Many more coming up in the near future.  Cheers!

Here’s the batch of the next 20 beasties… more fast scribbles from the early design stages of The Encountered.

Enjoy!

My names I gave to these guys: Colonial Pygmy, Sasquatch, Screecher, Handstand, Chitin, Snot Lizard, Devo (get it?  He has whips for arms… whip it?  Whip it good?), Multicorn, The Sky Whale, Pyrosaur, BrainWorm, Webster A, Hooks, Ironclad, Underbite, Giant Rat (original, I know), Patchwork Crawler, Duct Wyrm, Greenman, CyberNaga and Webster B.

So  a major project that I was involved in has been released, so I am finally able to share some of my sketches here on the blog.    So that’s one Non-Disclosure Agreement lifted, 100 to go.  But there are a lot of sketches from this gig, so it should keep this blog a little livelier for a little while at least. The project was a monster booked called Alpha Omega: The Encountered by Mind Storm Labs, it’s just under 300 pages completely covered in illustrations and concept art.  I was involved with the illustrations to a lesser extent than I was with the Alpha Omega Core Rulebook but I designed somewhere in the neighborhood of 350 creatures (not counting the thousands of thumbnail sketches that will never see the light of day), many of which got the full ortho treatment… so it was a fairly involved undertaking.  Definitely drop by www.mindstormlabs.com and check out the previews and quickstart rules and maybe pick up a hardcopy… even if you’re not into roleplaying games they’re really beautiful art books. 

I’ve worked with the Mind Storm Labs team quite a bit so I have a pretty good sense of what they’re looking for – as a result I do a lot of self-editing at the thumbnail stage.  Since we (the team) are scattered all across the world all, work has to be digital (or scanned) and then e-mailed out to everyone… which gets to be cumbersome if you’re dealing with pages upon pages of barely legible scribbles.  So I only digitize the ’second tier’ sketches that make sense without an explanation or a two-hour skype conversation to wade through shape and silhouette decisions.

What I’m going to do is give you a fairly comprehensive look at the creature sketches that were submitted for review.  I’m going to publish in batches of 20 or so.  Keep in mind that most of these kind of suck, but they only exist to communicate ideas… not to put in an “Art Of” book.  So keep an eye out, or subscribe to the RSS, and you’ll get to check out a whole lot of stuff that you normally wouldn’t get to see (probably with good reason…).  So enjoy!

Here are the first 20ish scribbles.  We were still deciding what types of bizarre creatures would be explored in the book, so the first bunch were the ’safe’ ideas… you’ll see that the ideas got increasingly wierd as we went on.

I’ll include the placeholder names I gave them because it may give some insight into what I was thinking when I scribbled them out.  These guys are:   The Blister Cow, Mongoyle (Mongrel Gargoyle), Striped Ape (2 variations), The Uber Wolf (2 variations), The Snatcher, an Eel Otter, Ursid Behemoth, Spiny Simian, Bone Dog (it’s skin oozes fluid that hardens into chitinous pretective patches), the Colonial Reaver, Ursidial Lion (a bear variant built for ambushing larger prey), Redcap (rough and refined versions), a Pale Strider, the “Cheshire Cat”, Murder Slug, Blank (because I couldn’t think of an actual name…), Fluke, Stinky, Cephalofreak, and a Colonial Drone.

So I finally got a chance to play Bionic Commando… and I liked it.  After so many negative comments, I was surprised that I enjoyed it as much as I did.  The negative reviews drastically lowered my expectations, so I think I was able to enjoy the game for what it is, not what I was originally expecting.  And what it is, is a great reincarnation of an old-school 8-bit game.  Just like the 8-bit Bionic Commando, the new BC keeps you on a strict path, gives you an underpowered basic firearm, and includes some frustrating grappling sections where you’ll fly off-path and instantly die… just like the old days.  There’s a lot of negatives that make this game annoying, but it’s a solid game once you accept it’s shortcomings.  And in my opinion Bionic Commando’s high points far out way it’s low points.

I could ramble on and on about the details of what’s good and what’s bad about the gameplay, but there are a thousand critiques out there by people far more eloquent, so I’ll just say a few things here about the visual design - I think it’s absolutely beautiful.  From concept to completion it manages to maintain some of the cheesy aesthetic quality of the 8-bit original (the enemies in brightly colored suits, the rotund robots, etc) but it uses the influence sparingly and combines it with some over-the-top yet modern sensibilities.  The mass of dreadlocks, the ludicrous muscles, the blue ‘radiation’ all serve to weave the kitchy old design together with the current trend of desaturated colors and post-apocalyptic imagery.  And the bionic arm design is a thing of beauty – a tip of my hat to whoever designed that stunning piece of machinery.

I finally finished my new website and portfolio.  I rebuilt it from the ground up, and now it’s formatted so I can update it easily and slip in new pieces without it being a major hassle…  At least, I hope it will work that way.   It now has a 3D gallery, and all the other galleries have been refurbished with newer work.  For my first foray into web design I’m pretty proud of it, so check it out – www.aaronpanagos.com.   And, as always, I’ll continue to put my random sketches and B-list stuff here on my blog. 

Yes, this year E3 deserves five exclamation points in the title.  Absolutely amazing expo this year.  I obviously wasn’t there, but I listened to 6-8hours of podcast coverage a day plus all the G4 coverage…  I had a LOT of work this week, so it was perfect timing.  There’s no way I could have consumed so much coverage if I hadn’t been chained to my desk 16 hours a day. 

I was really impressed by most of what I saw.  Rumors about some fantastic tech turned out to be true (I’m looking at you motion sensing cameras!).  Amazing stuff, assuming it all works half as well as the demonstrations suggest.  Only a couple disappointing things, like the price tag on the PSP Go.  Too many interesting games to even go into (Scribblenauts? Bizarre and amazing).  And a number of huge announcements.  After all, a second new Halo game was announced alongside a new trailer for the other new Halo game and it was ho-hum news… that would have blown people’s minds a couple years ago but there was so much going on compared to years past that it hardly registered!

I’m a little surprised that I followed E3 so obsessively, and though I’m completely burned out on videogame news for the next couple weeks, I’m glad I did.  If nothing else it was really fun watching the frantic dance of the PR peoples. 

I finished Fable 2 this week.  Really good game, if you liked Fable you’ll love Fable 2. The writing is absolutely brilliant, especially in the tertiary characters and the random townsfolk you encounter – it was a constant pleasure to listen to the dialogue and chuckle at the persistent flow of oddball jokes and bizarre characters. Buying property and managing the economies of the different towns, especially early on when I was working mundane jobs to get the seed money to start my real estate empire, was really cool.

The lack of armor was an interesting design choice, but it made customizing the character with clothes and dyes pure fun with little impact on gameplay. Without the need for considering an outfit’s armor value I was just able to dress my character in whatever I thought the coolest costume was – which is kind of nice change from having to tolerate a ridiculous avatar just because some horrifically ugly helmet gives me a +1 bonus.

Although I thoroughly enjoyed it, after a little while I started to feel like the combat was rather perfunctory (just like the original Fable). And when my character had a family to maintain it started to feel a little like The Sims with swords – I’d have to stop bashing bandits and run home because my virtual wife was unhappy with the relationship. Interesting the first time or two that it happened, but it got really old really quick.

All in all, a very good game and I definitely recommend it.

I’m rebuilding my portfolio right now.  In part because I’m overdue to drop out some old work and put in some new, but also in preperation for job hunting for a full-time gig in the video game industry.  So I’m going to be posting some of the pieces that didn’t make the cut for the new portfolio, and the new website with new work should be going live in a couple weeks…

I have no idea what strange little part of my brain that this sketch wriggled out of, but I find it rather charming. :) 

It’s ballpoint pen in my moleskine sketchbook.