Finding The Style
When I first started working on the art for this here videogame, my intention was to veer off into something a bit more cartoony than what I’ve settled on. Think something along the lines of what Rare did rebooting Jetpac for Xbox Live sort of thing but more Beano than cool because I am more Beano than cool.
In the end, it was two things that sent me down a different road. The first is, frankly, the amount of work I’d need to do to bring that up to a level I’d be happy with. Once I’m a bit more practiced? Sure, I’ll definitely look into taking something like that on. At my current level? Oof. No. I’ve already got a ruck of stuff to learn on the go as it is. That sounds like a recipe for disaster to me.
The second is, well, I already have a perfectly good art style for DRM! There’s a lot of things I can say about my own work over the years but I still love looking at pictures of Death Ray Manta’s last incarnation. It’s great. It looks like no other videogame, still. Not mucking with that seems like a good idea to me, given if I still like the look of something after a decade, it must be doing something right.
So most of what I’m fiddling with at the moment is taking a bunch of ten years old chunky pixels and reimagining them into something I can draw that still fits with the aesthetic. In some ways it’s landing more into remastering work than I’d originally bargained for but that’s fine with me, I started with remakes after all!
Even though everything is rather abstract, I have long had an idea in my head of what each thing is in Death Ray Manta. I am having to forget that! Not entirely, but enough that I can still draw something pretty abstract that absolutely is not a broom or something. I’ve got most of the regular cast somewhere I’m happy with, except for the two main baddies, so it’s working out so far. I’m having to take a small sit down to think about what I want to do with those two.
There’s a few things I want to try out. Something reasonably close to how they originally appeared, something more geometric and something more I, Robot-y. That’s the plan. In reality, I doubt anything will be that clean cut and it’ll be far messier.
Let’s see how that goes.