Bring Your Own Base is now on Steam Greenlight

Most of you probably know and follow me for my art, so It may come as a surprise that for the past year or so I've also been hard at work as a PM and Designer, making Bring Your Own Base with a small team of friends.

We've been in the planning stages for upwards of 2 years, but work only truly began last October when we got a local prototyping grant that gave us enough runway to hire 2 coders full time. Since then we've carved out a solid, playable alpha build after many prototype iterations, playtests and redesigns.

We still have a long way to go. ALL of the art is currently placeholder and there are still a lot of core features that we haven't started work on yet. Our goal now is to get Greenlit, find a community and shop the rest of production around to a publisher or investor who believes in the potential of our team and BYOB.

If you are interested, we'd love your support and following as we try to push this boulder forward!

Clark

After the 30th reading of Dr Seuss's "One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish" the creepiness of the last page's image compelled me to render my own take on things. I kept my illustration pretty consistent to the book's image but ramped up the creepy by a few notches to help things along. Most of the work was done in Procreate on the iPad Pro and then finished in Photoshop.

The subject and style aren't really in my wheelhouse so I was interested in how my process would change working primarily on the iPad. Due to all the layer blending styles and Procreate's terrible non-existant folder and masking options the end result included 30-40 layers with very little structure or cleanup - and no easy path to flatten.

LPT: Using Photoshop's Image Generator with Unreal Engine

Just a quick pro tip to anybody making assets (Especially UI) for Unreal and exporting them with Photoshop Generator. Unless you specify a .png quality level, Photoshop will automatically compress the files as much as possible up to and including indexed 8bit color mode.

It turns out that Unreal can't import alpha channels from indexed .png files - so to make everything work you will need to manually mark each layer to export at full quality. To do this, ammend a "32" to the end of the layer asset.

AssetLayer.png > AssetLayer.png32

My Photoshop to Spine asset Pipeline

A few months ago I picked up work at JB Games making art for Grave Danger. I had never used Spine before or animated anything really since a few classes in After Effects about 10 years ago so was coming into everything pretty green.

One element that I needed to create a workaround for in Spine was how the Spine exporter script used Groups to signify "Skins". This meant essentially that I couldn't use layers while painting different sprites because to export you would have to flatten everything.

One possible workaround I considered was turning each sprite (asset) into a smart object. This would let me have as many layers as I wanted but still allow the Spine exporter to read the 'flat' layer correctly. The problem with this method is that when you are working on a character comprised out of 20 smart objects, your painting flow gets really broken up when you can't quickly jump around adding and tweaking all elements at once.

Below is my solution. It could be wrong, it could be unnecessary because I missed something - or because Spine has since gotten an update - however, It worked out really well for me here and in a few other odd pipelines for the project.

Hopefully, somebody will find it helpful!

BYOB - SMG Concept

A big goal of ours for these weapons was to create something that was 80% plausible and 20% pure fantasy. In this way, all the weapons have proper alignments in regards to ammo feeding and ejecting however the reciprocating actions on top and moving magazines and magazine wells are purely there as juice for animation.

The SMG's secondary is a fairly slow moving missile that can help the player zone enemies at medium range or to blast down a few walls when need be.

 

Keep up to date with our progress atwww.bringyourownbase.com andhttps://twitter.com/anvilheadstudio

BYOB - Rifle Concept Art

Ever since I helped cofound Anvilhead Studios, a year or two ago I had to keep it on a back burner and devote what limited focus I could spare towards business dev and game design / project management.

Recently, due to some very generous friends, family, wife and a great state grant program I've been able to transition into a temporary full-time capacity to help us accelerate towards the launch of Bring Your Own Base's (BYOB) MVP release.

The default rifle shown here is one of the first pieces created in an attempt to polish our game up enough to stand out, but not so much that we run out of money and find ourselves without a solid game foundation - a tricky balancing act.

Keep up to date with our progress at www.bringyourownbase.com and https://twitter.com/anvilheadstudio

Grave Danger - Flying Ranged Enemy

Here is the ranged version of the flying enemy for the Train World. I wanted to add in a tech element that matched the world and give it a more armored feel so it will exist as more of a threat.

15 Frame idle animation - for when he is chilling.

Flying with intent.

Firing loop.

And a bonus 15m sketch. The prompts were for a vehicle with the tags "Loner" + "Prairie".

Grave Danger - Flying Melee Enemey

This was one of my first concept rounds at JB gaming - so lots of range trying to figure out the right mixture of scary and goofy.

We needed a generic flying enemy for Grave Danger's initial development. I started out a few months ago with a blob enemy covered in tentacles but didn't know enough about Spine to make it work. Here I am coming back to a more general purpose design with a bit more work under my belt and things are working out better.

I decided to animate the wings by hand and not with a rig due to the complexity of the perspective and animation, so started up drafting a few tests in Photoshop before drawing out the sprites and putting it all together in Spine. 

Initial test.

Initial test.

Revision 2 with the body assets blocked in.

Blocked in the wings.

'Slow' 15 frame idle animation. The up and down strokes are held for a few frames and the tips of the wings are deformed with bones for a bit more organic look.

Here is the desert skin in the "Aggro" animation. The mouth can't open much larger than this at the moment.

Next stop will be to duplicate this project and create a ranged version with a projectile weapon below where the tenticals are.

Update: Removed the blur on the wings for now at the suggestion from a friend and I feel that it matches the game style much better than before. It was his opinion - and I agree - that the path blur I was using before looked more like a DoF effect and not like motion! Thanks, John!

 

Also tweaked the wing membrane color for the desert themed bat. Will hold final judgement for when he is in game.

And a bonus melee attack animation I forgot to export last time.