Niklas Jansson

Creatures for Book Thing

I have worked a bit more on the story that I mentioned earlier. Well, actually I derailed and drew a bunch of animals and creatures.  Here are some more highrez images than those seen on my Mastodon. Also daringly attaching a WIP of the chapters I've written so far. I really need to get an editor to go over it... will probably use the Royal Road critique system / forums.

The animals are all based on some shared morphologie...

Another Hardwar Sheet

So I did another sheet with random shape ideas, then I started writing another isekai story which I might upload on Royal Road – if I dare, that is. The place has an elaborate critique and reputation system and might not be the place to share "early work".

Attaching some doodles I've made for the project. I'm 13 chapters / 40 pages in.

Edit: it appears this post is public/everyone (member mode posting is grayed out). Ot...

Hardwar Yet Again

I keep getting little visual ideas that I want to jot down, so here they are.

In Hardwar ships can't leave the craters and sort of magically stall. Perhaps this can be addressed by coming up with a repulsor-drive system, where the drive is set to different altitude tiers. It becomes prohibitively expensive to go higher due to how the whole repulsor techomagic works. Going closer to the ground means the drive can grab onto somet...

Hardwar Continued

I've always liked yellow construction crabs. I think Half-life 1 had one on the into level. It's questionable whether people would bother with legged and wheeled vehicles in a world with solar powered anti-gravity though. I don't know what kind of atmosphere is on Titan at this point and to what degree the surface is developed. There are air-locks, but there's also some green on the ground textures, and blue watery liquids. IRL Titan...

More Hardwar

I managed to get the game running on new windows (using the fan patch) and got some more ideas for a Hardwar type game.

Perhaps going for an untextured look would make asset production easier. Objects could be coloured as flat polygons, with some subdivision to help making patterns and such. This wouldn't help to push the dystopian feel though (unless there's a grime & dust overlay effect, which could be pretty cheap, labou...

Hardwar

Hardwar is an elite game, but set in the misty craters of Titan out in to orbit of Saturn. Society there has collapsed, and the player is tasked with... well, basically just managing to leave, or fool around.

I bought it back in the day but only played it a little. I didn't like the FMV stuff (which was also in Privateer 2 and later Wing Commander games). Also, the Moth/ship designs were... well okay I guess, but I think an Eli...

Space 1999 Redesigns

I've been drawing some Space 1999 stuff. I've posted it on my Mastodon, but here are some more high-rez versions. Perhaps I'll make a page and do some rewriting as well.

Space 1999 was a two-season sci-fi show which aired from 1975 to 77. Initially it started out as a continuation of UFO... which was the better show writing-wise I think. Still, Space 1999 had some very neat ship and set designs. The only real flaw of the Eagle ...

Rewrites

Edit: Attached an early version of a few chapters. It's in .RTF format, pocket book size. Written in Textedit on mac; I'm not sure how it displays elsewhere. A preview and not final.

Also added a few creature ideas to an image, added a world map, and added a mutant pic I did a while back but forgot. A Bauer troll, hedgehog and water salamander animaloid.

--

After failing a bit with characterization,...

Imperial Map

I took some time to line the map (coastlines and mountains). Trying to keep the squiggly-ness natural.

The shape was based on UK and Scandinavia, with hints of Indonesia.

In my story the isle is ruled by the Imperial Seat, which is actually three individuals (Kings) chosen in some nasty competitive manner. The empire is split into 15 baronies (with somewhat fluid borders) and three imperial command cities. The baronies ar...

Notes for Another Short Story

I started on a new writing project (skeleton + maids cultivation isekai), but it's difficult for me to keep track of all the character descriptions, creatures and locations, so I made some visual doodles to help me. Haven't gotten to the part yet where the skeleton rides the giant centipede, but I'm thinking it's a thing which could happen. If anyone's interested I could post the text (only 4 chapters so far)... however, my writing i...

Space Stuff Continued

Did these today while listening to more audiobooks. I always liked how the PDP-8 looks (with the arrays of coloured cartridges) so I wanted to try making a radial version. I also tried to come up with some sort of monster to fight. They ended up on the sillier side...

Space Stuff

I felt like elaborating on the design for Textile Plant 1051 as I got a sudden image of it in my head... a sort of floating sandwich factory oil rig. I guess I had a subconscious image of the ill fated Texas Towers oil rig in my head. It had these Amiga Boing Balls on it, and it sunk (just like the Amiga) so that's why it stuck in my head. There needs to be spacious factory floors inside so I clustered up the greeble at the center gi...

Monster doodles

These monster roughs are for my edutainment game. I'm just borrowing some shapes from my Digimon project here. I think Digimon desigs will be a bit easier to do. Pokémons are hyper efficient and stylized designs and I can't really handle that sort of laser focused clean simplicity. Well, I suppose the first gen were slightly more organic / les...

Just some doodles

I'm starting to think about the Monster project a little. It's very daunting to approach, but maybe it's doable if I try not to overthink things and just draw a bunch of stuff, then tweak the weaker designs at a later point.

Also attaching some pantsu nonsense.

Last Imperium - Weapons Cont.

I have made a little progress on the weapons sheet. Because of the medieval undertones I've angled back the handles a bit, like on pirate guns. I'm unsure if these are compatible grip-wise with all of the playable aliens. I think I'd rather change the alien hands than making a bunch of variants of all wieldable equipment.

I also want to stay away from designing modern looking weapons, visually and functionally, so I'll have to ...

Last Imperium - Bugs

I've done a few more variants of the Bull Ant, thinking it's a successful family of common bugs. There's the desert-dwelling Bone Ants, and forest-dwelling... uh- Antler Ants (based on forest/horse ants).

I did a more scenic pic of the Bug Hound. Perhaps this comes in variants too. I like variants and taxonomy. 

The Nautilus-men... if playable characters, might need a mobility boost to work in a party with humans, so...

Last Imperium cont.

I've continued noodling on this project a bit, working on ships and inhabitants. Stylistically I'm going for a sort of  Bretonnian Space Knights feel. Heraldics, Knight armours – but in chunky coloured ceramics.

I'm not sure how good a fit the Cepheus Engine is, given my lore. Perhaps this more suitable for the BRP system. I think Star Frontiers used a % system too. Cepheus Engine suggested adding ship+30% volume for han...

Last Imperium - Creatures

I've began colouring up some pencil roughs from last year. These creatures will be general creatures common across the imperium – the idea being that the imperium is old and things have pretty much spread everywhere due to trade... like banana flies. I'm doing a few morphologies of some types. The originals may have come from different distant worlds so they probably don't share an ancestor and can have quite alien base anatomy, th...

Last Imperium Continued

I've made some progress on this sheet with some of the flora & fauna, and thought I'd share (fullrez 3x4K, flattened, sharpened). I'm not sure if I should keep the white and colour in one layer, or block in colours as flats in a separate layer like I do with some of the figures. Might settle for a hybrid after some experimentation...

Accumulated Updates

Sorry for the lack of updates here recently. I did update a few of my pages a little though so I'll upload some full-rez versions of the new stuff here. Unfortunately lost two weeks to sickness but I'm fine now.

http://androidarts.com/zelda/Zelda.htm 

http://androidar...

More Heroquest, and a Carnifex.

This time the tiles are a bit more in line with the colourful original game board (was it by Gary Chalk?). I also went back and popped the shadows in the Zelda room a bit.

That's... eight pieces total. I think I need nine for testing. Plus all the furniture, doors and character stand-ups. It's hard to say if it'll work together in 3D until I do the test print.

I'm putting mostly wood, bone and stone scraps/debris into the...

World Map and More Tiles

I decided to draw a world map in case I make my own fantasy setting. I wanted it to be a bit less on-the-nose than the WHFB one, but still not completely alien, so I swapped Africa with South America because it puts Lustria/Lizardmen a bit closer to the action. The rest of the world was perhaps explored in the distant past, but some mysterious magic storms isolated psudo-eurasia. The east is not well explored, being blocked by nasty ...

Tile Tests

I've done some tile tests. I guess I should be prototyping before drawing assets, but I'm not in the mood for that.

I like deterministic procgen maps, though mechanically they're more difficult to design. Still, I think I've gotten somewhat close. Basically, each unrevealed map block (6x6 tiles) is built from unrevealed stacks of smaller reference cards: Room, Doors, Furniture, Enemies. These can be in four rotated orientations...

(?Not-) HeroQuest Characters

I've made some progress on the characters and monsters. I think I'd rather have monster variants than pose variants. It keeps each enemy iconic. It's best to keep the poses a bit dull an neutral then, so it seems less like they're all doing the same pose. The original HQ poses are not very action'y.

I also think I like the idea of having variants of the same enemy type rather than trying to cover as much of the monster spectrum...

HeroQuest

So what have I been up to?

I've posted a new 40K page on my site.

http://androidarts.com/40k/40K23.htm 

And I wrote some 160 pages for my book, but I'll let that rest for a while so I can re-read and judge it better.

Anyways, I thought I'd return here finally with a new project: Some HeroQuest, and later perhaps Space Crusade 1" ...

Dungeon Keeper Cleanup

I've continued with these doodles a bit. 

The Maiden has some interesting concept art, but apparently ended up as a rather standard spider-woman in the game. I took some inspiration from the Quake Shalrath and crustaceans... while also trying to represent the upright postures of the concept art.

Horny is very different in DK2... a bit more generic Legend demon... I kind of like the Deep sea fish DK1 horny. 2023-02-11 20:02:11 +0000 UTC View Post

Dungeon Keeper

I've never managed to get comfortable with this game but it's still fascinating in some way so I wanted to draw something from it... perhaps a few small-medium-large variants of the enemies (iirc they level up in the various rooms, but maybe there could be variants on top of that). The troll and Orc are mostly model recolours it seems, so maybe I'll have to do some redesigns there. Fairy appears to be about man-sized. 

Sup...

Dark Reign 2 - continued

I've continued doodling on this while listening to audiobooks (currently Master of the Hoard). It doesn't really make sense to draw front views when the units are seen more from the top, but I suppose legibility is a thing which can be improved though iteration. Also, I often approach these projects more from a perspective outside of the games, just having fun with the world and its inhabitants. As far as I'm concerned here, these co...

Dark Reign 2 Redesigns, WIP

Dark Reign 1 and Battlezone II have some of the best RTS unit designs I know of, from a visual PoV. ( Edit: DR1 is unfortunately not playable on modern Windows. I installed from my original CD and got palette corruptions. The downloads/patches are apparently risky/compromised. )

Dark Reign 2 wasn't bad... or good. I guess it just suffered a bit from being an early 3D game. Anyways, I thought I'd do some redesigns of th...

Ducks Continued (and other stuff)

Good Yule, as we say here in Sweden.

I can report some minor progress on the Mutoid ducks, with humans added for scale/feel. 

Also, I'm mirroring my DeviantArt stuff here since it's behind an age-check on DA so it's not really available. I don't think I posted it on my main site, but maybe twitter. It's mostly pantsu nonsense.