Latest Posts by phoenixsecretfire - Page 5

Dysfunctal meetcute bbkaz!

welcome to the first day of the rest of your life

I just had a massive realization.

in order to lead a happy life im gonna have to disappoint my parents a bit

Oh my god look at this Snake.

Some Axiom Verge critters

Self-reblog from my other game project, Unstable Scientific. I'm really proud of the way this pixel art came out!

RATE MY SETUP! It’s Chandra Cassini’s lab for the home base area in Unstable Scientific.  She studies the cosmic microwave background radiation, searching for signs of early collisions with another universe!

This is a custom NPC system I made for our game, Unstable Scientific. Because it's only Dustin and me working on it, I always have to consider how to make sure that the code load is low on Dustin's end. That means that sometimes I have to come up with my own code-free solutions to challenges. In this case, the system is now so simple that I might ultimately be able to write the code myself!

I created a system in Photoshop in order to generate sprites of custom NPCs with a wide variety of assets such as hair and clothing, all without writing a line of code! 

Major Tom would probably get this as a gag gift for Snake! "Look, we finally got you that gun I told you about! "

Snake Pistol (from 1938 Johnson Smith & Company novelty catalogue)

I made this cutscene for Unstable Scientific! It's a bit sketchy in some places, but mostly finished!

This is a WIP opening cutscene for Unstable Scientific!  I got a bit too ambitious and made FMV animation for some of it, but other parts are still just in sketch mode.  But you can see the characters and the backstory exposition dump! Original music by the Supermarcato Brothers! Funny story, I needed to make the wireframe physics diagrams but for the life of me couldn’t figure out Blender.  I ended up just screenshotting the wireframe model view and sticking that back into Photoshop!  

I just watched the new episode of Extra Credits today, "3D NPCs Please ", and this is a screenshot of the part where they say that mentor characters don't always need to be old men. I love it!

This is my new favorite MGS fanart. Also, Quiet on a tardigrade!

This is very important and it must be known that these 19th C. farting competition scrolls exist.

Japanese art scroll, HE-GASSEN (Farting Competitions). Edo period (1603-1868).

Our game Unstable Scientific is coming along slowly but surely!

Screenshot (Sunday)!  Working on new levels - Basalt Bluffs and Silver Craters!  We’ve got new enemies - shield drones and giant damselflies - as well as manifold fruit that sucks in everything toward it in a vortex! 

Axiom Verge fanart I drew in Procreate. It's just moments before Trace wakes for the umpteenth time in an egg chamber - though it's not exactly in one. Elsenova is just sort of observing Trace, curious, kind of concerned and caring. Though she hates Athetos, this younger, kinder version of Trace has made an impression on her powerful AI being.

Specifically I made this for Wildragon, because their AV art has brought me so much joy this month, when I got into Axiom Verge. You know that feeling when you share a fandom with one other nerd across spacetime in exactly the same way? They brought me it a million times over.

Looks like Tumblr compressed the hell out of this image for mobile, but this is one of the last bits of pixel art I worked on lately!

One of the trees from the Basalt Bluffs level.  I finished it this week, using Pixaki to get through a lot of the more tedious parts on my ipad.  I’m using a lot of bristlecone pines as a reference to get the ancient look for the trees, but I know, I know they’re from a different ecosystem entirely… And yes, it’s inspired by Evynd Earle!  

Posting this so I can't lose it in the pile of my Tumblr likes. And because it's the original artist, holy crap!

My “draw the squad” memes so far

Self-reblog from the other game I'm working doing art and animation for!

I’m working on the art for a swooping melee-attack damselfly right now, and wanted to get a more realistic wing animation.  This turned out to be fairly challenging, first because insect wings move so quickly.  Even a 12x speed video won’t capture more than a blur.  There’s plenty of dragonfly slow-mo videos shot with professional cameras, but damselfly videos are harder to find.

Why damselflies?  Because they rest their wings folded atop their bodies, looking better for a 2D perspective in our game.  Dragonfly wings would look odd, seen edge-on.   My search for a reference took me to some fascinating places online.  Japanese researchers back in the 1980′s had studied the flight mechanics of damselfly wings, down to the forces acting on individual sections!  Check this out:

University of Tokyo, Flight Mechanics of a Damselfly -  AKIRA AZUMA, SOICHI AZUMA, ISAO WATANABE AND TOYOHIKO FURUTA  https://jeb.biologists.org/content/jexbio/116/1/79.full.pdf The black and white gif I included is from photos taken from this paper. Next, I found at a video that illustrated damselfly darting with fluid mechanics simulations.  https://youtu.be/erd8FibfPR4 (the other gif is carefully taken from this video and reassembled so it stands still, for use as a reference).   It’s like the damselfly swims through the air, using two sets of paddles - and still, the movement appears strange and counterintuitive.   The only reference I couldn’t find was on the color shift of an ebony damselfly’s wings.  I had to fudge it, half from blurry video frames, half trying to not look too busy in a pixel-art animation. This has been fun, challenging, and a deep dive into a rabbit hole I otherwise would have overlooked! 

I experienced pure joy when my dad got into playing MGSV this year. Until I went to show him the secret room on the medical platform and COMPLETELY forgot about the cutscene with Paz's "other" bomb. Goddammit Kojima.

commission for Gaby aka I Don’t Even Know This Series But Big Boss Needs To Blush 99% More

This is the greatest thing I've seen all day.

V is officially out so now you too can love dog to help the tears!!!!!!!!

This is amazing

The Boss and his taste in music

My $10+ Patreons can download the full HD image 

I know this show is problematic at best, but this just had to be made.

Many apologies for this.

Reblogging the devblog from my non-MGS life!

Running water turned out to be tricky to animate!  We needed a suitable background for the waterfall level in our game, but it needed to be a small enough number of frames, be looping, and also not be too distracting from the action in the foreground. 

I’ve spent a lot of time drawing things OTHER than water most of my life, but luckily we have a lot of streams and rivers near our home, so I went out to do some sketching and observe the flow.

Some time recently I got an iPad with a pencil, so that allowed me to work with color and maybe get some of the subtle changes.  But I’m not a painter by trade, so these clumsy attempts are more about observing and trying to intuit what color should feel like when you see it onscreen.

At first I thought this rushing river would be really cool!  But I had the scale all wrong.  There’s so much motion happening, and at the scale of the gameplay the animation looks choppy.  It would distract from the motion of the action in the foreground, and would make the whole scene look way too messy.  Back to the drawing board!  

I’ve settled on this calmer scene, which isn’t the rushing river I really wanted, but it won’t compete with the foreground sprites for attention.  The animation is much smoother too, except for the waterfalls which still may need work.  Making animations for Unstable Scientific has been one of the most challenging experiences I’ve had as an artist so far, but I feel like I’m learning so much in the process! 

I love this so much.

spy vs spy vs spy vs spy

Reblogging because I made a trailer, yay!

Unstable Scientific Pre-pre-pre Alpha trailer, mostly made as part of the Seattle Indies Expo submission.  It was so fun making the metal-impact effects for the logo!  

Reblogging on my MGS-themed account because I’m so proud I was able to draw hands.

This is part of a larger cutscene and will be in the trailer for our Seattle Indies Expo submission.  Lev and Tau working in the lab! 

Reblogging background art I'm working hard on!

Continuing work on the Waterfall Level background.  More columnar basalt, but the waterfalls need more detail!  

Just convinced this guy to join.  It was bound to happen eventually!

I'm in my local bakery, and one of the policemen is there talking with a colleague. I overhear him say, 'Now I know you're not very excited about this, but how do you feel about cardboard boxes?'

When Glowdust and I put down Peace Day we immediately began work on Unstable Scientific. You'll play as a physicist with a group of colleagues who are exploring a mysterious island while running an interdimensional portal laboratory! It's going to have the base-building mechanics of Peace Walker with a metroidvania-lite style of platforming. I'm still sorry that we had to stop work on Peace Day. But we're putting the spirit of everything we wanted to put in that game, into this one.