Squid Empire

It's been ages and I've only done a few small practice pieces since the last dump, but here they are: The guys from red letter media! I've always been trying to get better at more stylised portraits so this was a lot of fun A couple of small landscapes I went back and redrew a very old picture of mine, some improvement! More portrait practice! More portraits and a tank for a small game I've been making! Finally, I have some sprites I can show from my retro-futuristic RPG game I've been working on as well You can probably tell it's set in a somewhat run-down england... Until next time!

Quiet a few people have tried fps/rts hybrid games. It would be best to do some serious research into how those games did it and what worked/didn't work. Battlefield 4 had a commander mode (from what I heard most teammates on the ground simply ignore whatever the commander is telling them to do), there's many many indie mods / games like Nuclear Dawn on Steam, then there's FPS/Tower Defence which is its own genre (e.g. Iron Grip Warlords). Foxhole on steam has the idea of a persistant long term multiplayer campaign (MMO) broken up into discrete matches where player fight traditional rounds for chunks of terrain on the "global" map (as far as I know). There's plenty out there to have a look at, FPS/RST hybrids aren't new and they've never taken off. You might be the first to finally make it "click" but it wouldn't be a small feat. I'm interested in the genre (hence my being here) but I'm skeptical it will ever actually take off. I also have all my own fantasy dream game ideas that to me would make the perfect version of the idea, but I'm not under the impression they ever will... Edit: I would be remiss to forget to mention Battlezone Combat Commander which is another big FPS/RTS hybrid with a strong mod community

Made this to practise video editing and effects 🤘

Here's a remix of Valves from Tiberian Sun I did -> https://soundcloud.com/squid_empire/heavy-valves Also, I reached a milestone with my released music: it was played on the radio! An indie radio station in Christchurch, NZ played my track "Virtual Landscape" on the air as part of a showcase of new electronica! You can here that album here or on like spotify/itunes/tidal etc. https://micronode.bandcamp.com/album/personal-computer

Hello again, time for another short update! I've been busy doing a lot of isometric drawings: It's a ham steamer Here's a retro computer: A collection of characters Sort of hard dieselpunk styled An experimental game art style sprite using some interesting outlining You're a big guy! More isometric, this time game terrain tiles. I drew this and the next one while sitting in a cottage on a lake shore in Finland! Beautiful birch tree A return to a very old theme of mine, steampunk ancient Rome! This is an insula building Yet more game art, this is a mockup I did to see how quickly I could make a nice looking landscape. This took about a day and uses 7 sprites as well as a bit of terrain painting (water and path). I'd like to make a game one day myself but doing the art is still too time consuming so trying to program on top of this is infeasible at the moment. Thanks for having a look! Let me know any feedback!

https://micronode.bandcamp.com/album/megacity and here's album 2! I'm going to take a short break from writing music after this one to focus on my other projects and commitments. Hope you enjoy, and as always any feedback is great!

This is valve's Source Filmmaker. It's free on steam and very easy to learn

Using "Anarchy Road" by Carpenter Brut. It took me like 4 months because I don't have much time anymore and because I'm pretty shonky at animating but was really fun and I think looks pretty good.

I wrote an album! It'll start appearing on spotify and itunes and every other music site over the next few days, but you can listen to it first here. https://micronode.bandcamp.com/album/16k-cdms It's a retro future themed synth album, I had a really great time writing it Any feedback would be great, and I hope you enjoy!

It's been a while again: time for some new pictures! First of all I went pretty deep into the isometric practice. I'm finally at a point where I'm confident with isometric images, and am having much more fun with them now. Here's some nice trees A Queenslander style house (traditional where I live) with some guntrees A space rocket launch pad inspired by the movie Gattaca I also did a lot of practice with characters: Buck Rodgers and Wilma Deering from Buck Rodgers in the 25th Century A street thug Some experimentally styled space dudes As always thanks for looking! (Any feedback is appreciated and I still sometimes take requests if you have ideas)

It's been a while, here's what I've done in the interim: I returned to Rapture again, this time I did a piece from inside a crumbling tunnel. I spent a lot of time on the background details on this one, and then ended up covering it all up in glass and so on... I haven't stopped experimenting with isometric formats either. Here's a tired coal miner. I want to do more portraits but I always have trouble thinking of ideas for interesting people to draw. And this one's a small farm. Again isometric, and this time working on using a simple, bright pallet to try a cleaner style.

It stopped because the lead developer had to focus on other things, and the rest of the development team sort of dissolved after that. I think it's a pretty common occurrence.

You're right that it's cyberpunk! The game was a multiplayer strategy game where players attempt to take over a city by managing their crime syndicate. It was set in a cyberpunk future and was all about hacking, data, security and so on.

I'm still around these forums, lurking and watching. But I've also been doing lots of cool things around the place as well. For a while I was the lead designer on an indie game project (unfortunately it died), and I ended up writing a bunch of tracks for the game's soundtrack. Since then I've taken some courses at university on music production and have been fiddling around with things in my free time. If you want to hear what I've done you can follow me on soundcloud: Thanks for having a listen!

Here's a rare animated one: https://fat.gfycat.com/PreciousDelightfulBug.webm Static Render:

The Force Awakens was ok, but it annoys me that it was literally A New Hope: Reloaded. It kind of nullifies the entire original trilogy's conclusion when the next movie is all "oh great work defeating the empire dudes, here's another one. Also they have a bigger death star". Everyone seems to love Rey as a character but honestly I think she was pretty lame. No development except that she's a poor sad orphan, and within the first movie she's already a jedi with 0 training, a master pilot, a heroic fighter, and a leader. The whole movie left me with a bad taste afterwards, even though I enjoyed it in the theatre. Rouge One is looking good though, at the very least they can't just remake the original movies this time. I'm also excited to see the return of real empire.

That's why I haven't really posted anything. I started out wanting to make animations but I'm pretty lame at that so I switched to 'scenebuilding' - where you produce a nicely composed scene from various models and render that with lights and particles. I'm happy to take requests if you have anything you'd like me to have a crack at. This has been my most popular one so far: In a scene like this the actual map is an empty void. Here's a series of pictures showing how I made this: I like working with varied time periods to keep it fresh. The muskets and swords in this are from Assassin's Creed This type is my favourite, the mech here was built from generators, radiators, gibs, and pipes from Half Life 2 and Day of Defeat This is the only C&C render I've done so far. I was going to do a triptych from Dawn, Sun, and Twilight, with this as the leftmost 'Dawn' panel but I mucked up the formatting. And the rest!

Here's a soviet transformer building. My first big isometric building I've drawn

Variations on the same

Getting even closer now...

Attempt 2 at isometric, I got the tiling to work and I think the character looks better too. Still not perfect, and this is just a test picture but it's coming along!

I haven't done any more animation, but here's a bunch of renders of a mech I made by putting together bits from other models!

I have a plan to animate a video for "Blow it Up" from RA2. Maybe I should do that one next...

My attempt at a more game-like isometric character. I didn't quite pull off the isometric right, but I still like how it looks!