It’s a Christmas Miracle.

Feel like 90% of my posts start with me acknowledging how long it’s been since the last one. That won’t be the case this time! Or… next time. I blew it.

A lot’s happened since the last one, and the reason I’ve been so quiet is twofold;

1.) I’ve been studying a Master’s in Uni and it’s mega hectic, literally project after project. Alongside this I’ve been working part time.

2.) I haven’t really done anything relevant to Meridian Six because of point 1.

But I’m free (sort of) over Christmas, so I’ve sketched out a few things here and there, and a new promo teaser (you know how much I love doing promos) for the continuation of Cold Reset!

COMICS.

Here’s the juicy promo. Gonna be posting it on the ol’ social medias soon.

Feat. three previously unseen characters who show up quite briefly but who I wanted to draw anyway.

TV.

Big month.

The Expanse Season 4, fucking FINALLY.

The Witcher, fucking FINALLY.

So much love for them both. The Expanse blew me away. When it was cancelled last year I felt like someone close to me had died. I’m so heavily invested in the books and the characters, I couldn’t quite process that it was over before getting to the meat of the story. But damn, Amazon galloped in with an almighty army and pulled it from the abyss. They also renewed it for Season 5 almost immediately.

The storyline on Ilus was cinematic and impactful, the cool way they worked the Gods of Risk novella into Bobbie’s storyline and tied it together with Marco fucking Inaros! And they gave Ashford an actual meaningful end as opposed to his mediocre but satisfying death in Abaddon’s Gate. When he went, I was crushed. David Strathairn, I applaud you for bringing a human side to Ashford.

I desperately need to find someone who can fangirl over this show the way I do. So far, nobody I’ve talked to about it seems very interested in what is legitimately one of the greatest TV shows of all time.

I’m just over halfway through Tiamat’s Wrath and I’m currently still reeling from a main character death that I hope doesn’t stick. Anything’s possible on Laconia…

I was so afraid that the Witcher would be disappointing. I love the games, I loved the first two novels, and The Witcher III holds a top 3 spot in my favourite games of all time. So I’d obviously built the show up too much for myself. As the air date neared, and the trailers were popping up, it was looking more and more promising. I had concerns about them bringing Ciri into the story so early in Geralt’s life, it didn’t really add up, as one of the stories in the first book had to do with Geralt enacting the Law of Surprise and claiming the unborn Ciri unintentionally.

But they did it the way I thought they wouldn’t, and I am not disappointed. However, I do feel that a viewer who isn’t so familiar with the Witcher would be a bit confused with the time-jumping from episode to episode, as they never really state how much time has passed. So by the time it all links up, I can see how one would be confused.

Henry Cavill is a slamming Geralt. Ciri was great too. Yennefer grew on me, and I loved how they showed her past as a hunchback, as that was only briefly mentioned in the book rather than shown in such detail. So it was all really cool. It was only Triss that never really took. But that’s such a minor thing, as she isn’t really a big deal yet. Plenty of time to turn it around.

Anyway, enough fangirling, I’m here to show off art.

UNI.

The first two modules of my course were structured as three “game jams” each; game jams being short projects where a team works on making a game from scratch. I put it in quotes because it wasn’t exactly as simple as that. Module 1 focused on design and aesthetic – all the conceptual and planning stages of a game with none of the actual game. There were three two-week projects in this one.

1. Wild Gunmen

The brief here was to design a game based on games that were never made. We had a list of all these fictional games that existed only within movies, TV shows or other games, and we had to make something out of it. The one we went for was the arcade game Marty McFly plays in Back to the Future Part II – Wild Gunman.

Our take on it was to make it into a modern mobile multiplayer game, called Wild Gunmen, making it plural to emphasise the multiplayer aspects. In the original game, players would hold a gun and would have to shoot cowboys that pop onto the screen before they draw their guns and shoot you first.

Our game would see two players going head-to-head, drawing weapons and firing, but instead of controlling the cowboys, they’d control the bullet. The aim of the game would be to ricochet your bullet from objects made of different materials, with each object giving a little speed boost, and then upon reaching “kill speed”, you had to navigate your way to the enemy player and hit them. That’s it. Each material would give different bonuses, and there’d be various Wild West-themed environments of differing complexities. There’s a little more to it but that’s the gist.

My main role in the team was concept art. The four of us of course discussed the idea in great detail and the final concept was a group input, but the visuals of it were my job. And I feel like I’ve already set it up enough, so here’s just an art dump of everything I did.

And one of the guys on the team made a cheeky little prototype of how the game would work in Unreal Engine 4.

Pretty neat, eh?

1. Black Hole

The second brief had us making a game without using any screens. That is, the game itself would not be played using any screens. We were still allowed to use computers to work on the designing of it.

We did some research on board games and party games, briefly looked into maybe doing an AR thing, but nah. In the end, we settled on making a board game version of the popular drinking game Ring of Fire, in which playing cards are placed in a circle around a pint glass, players add bits of their drink into the middle glass, and then the game is played with each playing card being assigned a rule, and with the ultimate loser having to drink the pint in the middle. Rinse and repeat until taxi arrives for the night out or whatever.

Again, I was doing the artwork, one of the other guys was fine-tuning our rules, and then the other guy was working on the documentation we had to submit along with a live presentation of the project.

Here’s my design:

Each ‘ring’ or ‘tier’ would be rotatable, and players would have to avoid landing in the centre of the board. If you land on a tile joined with a bridge, you follow the bridge to the adjacent tier. We had some rules in place to balance the gameplay so that it didn’t last forever, but I won’t go into that. Let’s just say, we playtested it and each game averaged about 7 minutes!

Here are some more images from the project, showing some alternate designs I made, as well as some photos of a real life prototype of the board I spent £25 getting printed!

We were the only team in the class to also present our finished project without the use of a screen. That’s commitment!

1. The Fall of Exodus White

You ever play Destiny 2? Yeah, me neither. Until now.

This random and obscure brief had us designing a Raid for Destiny 2. We were given an actual 45-minute presentation on the lore of the games, and a Raid breakdown of a well-known Raid called the Vault of Glass.

Our project was to detail every stage of our Raid, the loot drops, the enemy types, the story, the setting, and also working in our own unique mechanics, which Destiny Raids are known for having!

Destiny Raids are fucking long! And so complex!

And another kicker – all the weapons, gear, enemies, environments and the story had to be lore-friendly! As in, it had to fit into Destiny lore without contradicting anything already established by the games, and without there being any inconsistencies. Do you know how much of a challenge that is? For a two-week project?!

I got to reading. Luckily, huge Destiny nerds have basically documented every lore-book and every possible bit of detail found in the games on Fandom Wikis and something called the Ishtar Collective, which is a database of all the in-universe lore from Destiny and Destiny 2. God damn.

I was reading about the Colony Ships that left Earth before the Collapse and discovered a little tidbit about there being a Black Hole weapon called the Graviton Lance that was found in the ruins of Old Chicago. Now, Old Chicago was intended to be a location within the game, but it was abandoned, leaving its many mysteries up to me.

I jumped on it and crafted a story about an old pre-Collapse Colony ship called the Exodus White that was launched in secret by government scientists, equipped with a Black Hole drive that made crossing the void between solar systems a lot faster. It was sent out to colonise an Earth-like planet in an adjacent system that would otherwise take hundreds of years to reach. Something goes wrong, and the drive is set off prematurely, sending the ship through time instead of space, into the present-day of Destiny 2. That’s the bare bones. But the team liked the idea and we rolled with it. A few of the other guys worked on weapon designs, armour designs, the game mechanics, the level maps, and I once more took to the drawing tablet and got some concept art smashed out.

Just some enemy concepts and environment art. There wasn’t much time for anything more to be honest, but yeah, we came away with a fully functioning Destiny 2 Raid and we got some great feedback on it too.

Plus it was cool to be able to say I was legitimately doing research by playing Destiny 2 non-stop for a few days.

So those three projects made up my first module, focusing on design and aesthetics. The second module focused on technology and engine, meaning the actual production phase of the game-making process. Now, since my game engine knowledge is lacking, and seeing as there really isn’t any time to learn the basics just yet without fucking over my team, I stuck to what I knew best – 2D concept art and some 3D modelling. Yeah boi.

1. ACE, Private Eye

I really enjoyed this one.

So we had an outside company called Martha Stone come in and brief us on a new project they were working on and had enlisted the University’s help with it. ACEs are Adverse Childhood Experiences, things that happen to people and cause their lives to take a much darker path than they usually would have, leading to things like homelessness, depression, drug dependency, etc. Pretty dark and heavy stuff, right?

The company want to make a game that’s accessible to non-gamers and will help educate people training to be ACE professionals and carers, for example, to help them understand these experiences and build a sort of empathy for when they need to deal with these cases professionally. Now, I know what you’re thinking – how could a team of videogame nerds have the first clue about this shit, let alone be able to make something that would aid real life professionals? Who were we to have any part in this?

So, the idea is that we are only coming up with ideas, and having to demonstrate some design and a proof-of-concept sort of thing, so after the two weeks we could present our ideas to the Martha Stone guys and they could take our ideas away and brainstorm which ideas they liked and which ones they wanted to develop professionally.

We were only laying down the foundations for a game that would be taken off our hands and developed more sensitively with people who have more of a clue about this stuff. Make sense?

So the 4 of us hammered out some ideas and eventually we went with my idea about styling the game like a film noir, making it episodic, and reusing the same player character – a gritty film noir Private Investigator – for each episode. Each episode would deal with a different ACE. The one we chose to focus on for the demo was Homelessness.

The idea of having a P.I. would be to more easily help the player build empathy and understanding. The player would be retracing the steps of a homeless person, learning about their life, their history and piecing together the narrative of how they went from a successful office worker with a girlfriend and an apartment to living on the streets.

Again, I won’t go much more into it, but here’s my work for the project:

And here’s an in-engine demo of the game made by my teammate.

Woah, that’s heavy Doc.

Bonus little point: We recently found out Martha Stone liked our idea enough to potentially take it further. We’re joining one or two other teams in January for a special meeting with them to, I guess, see what the next steps are! Exciting!

1. Wasteland

Project #5’s brief was a lot more open than the last.

We were given a list of songs on a University-made Spotify playlist and had to choose one right off the bat. We would have to make a fully playable game – not a demo, not an unfinished alpha build or anything. The core gameplay would have to last around the same duration as the song we chose, and the lyrics and theme of the song would inspire the content of the game.

Of the list we had, we thought The Mission – Wasteland sounded like the best bet.

God I love 80s music.

We also had 3 randomly generated mechanics, of which we had to include at least one, but if possible more. Ours were: “Bullet Hell”, “Switch Modes” and “Jumping”

I’d say we covered all but “Jumping” but we did discuss having a jumping enemy type that could clear your defences immediately. We just didn’t have time to pop him in.

For this one, I took a bit of a step back, as I felt a little like we kept going with my ideas all the time. So I let the other guys deliberate and refine the idea and then I was happy to just do some artwork and whatever was needed for the game.

We ended up with this cool little post-apocalyptic tower defence game where a cowboy/farmer was defending his ranch from rogue machines. He was an expert mechanic too so he could build walls and weapons out of the scrap he collected from fallen enemies.

I mainly worked on the HUD and the interface for the game. I stylised it based on a few concepts and some feedback from the team, and we ended up with what you see in that one image. Basically any sort of menu that pops up during gameplay, I made it.

I also designed some concepts for the robot enemies. And I modelled three types of walls too, but only had time to texture the first one properly (the map you see above) but you can see all my models in the actual gameplay demo below!

We’re gonna be working on this game a bit more in the future, as we all really enjoyed it and we’re super proud of how it ended up. You can also download this game yourself and play it if you want.

https://danielpaine91.itch.io/wasteland

I recommend learning the hotkeys, it’s so much easier to play that way!

1. Literally a Worm Eating Fruit

The final project of these modules was another very open one.

Our tutor drew a series of cards for each team. It was a deck of cards specially designed by game jammers FOR game jammers. Kinda like inspiration cards. They decided things like Genre, Rules, Goals, etc. There was an optional Wild Card we could go for as well if we wanted to, which of course we did!

We drew the following:

GENRE – RPG. RULES – Must not be seen. ENVIRONMENT – Supermarket. GOAL – Reach a destination. WILD CARD – Fruit.

…I know right?

We were also given a bonus constrain by the tutor – we could only use a maximum of 3 inputs. Just 3 keys to play the whole game. Joysticks and mice weren’t allowed, and scroll wheels counted as two inputs (up and down). So yeah, we were basically tied to a chair with no hope of escape.

Here’s what we did:

And here’s my contribution:

I don’t even know where to begin with talking about this. So I’ll just mention how funny we found it the whole way through once we started capitalising on how silly it all was. I ripped off the Skyrim perk trees! I designed this stupid looking worm and also modelled, rigged and animated him! And the cherry on top was changing all the fonts to Comic Sans for that maximum stupid-game vibe. Still very proud of it, and I still giggle every time I see it being played.

Here are some low-quality animation tests made by me also.

And that’s it so far! In the new year, we start the new module focusing on prototyping and playtesting, so stay tuned for an update on what wacky ideas we come up with for that.

MUSIC.

I saw Eluveitie live again, that was fantastic! They were supporting Lacuna Coil, who I also like but really it should have been reversed like it was in the rest of their tour. Not sure why it was different in the UK but whatever, it was a great time!

Been slamming a lot of Insomnium and In Mourning into my ears too, as well as Wilderun’s Veil of Imagination consistently. Don’t even know what to talk about music-wise, there’s so much.

Also Finntroll announced a new album for next year, YESSS.

BAND.

Last, but not least, I’m gonna chat a bit about my new band. I’ve had 4 gigs with them so far, with one left this year in about a week’s time. We’ve been recording in one of the University’s studios on this big expensive piece of equipment, and it’s all sounding super good.

I’m really enjoying being with them and having the freedom they’ve given me to make their songs my own. It’s nice being in an active band.

We got a bunch of shit happening next year, tours, a new single release, all that jazz, so keep an eye out!

This post has been super long so I’ll call it there.

Merry Christmas, take this tune, because of course it was gonna be this song, and I’ll see you in 2020.

SONG OF THE DAY.