#equipment design

[shelandsorcery]

Astronomics Game Art : Designing Mining Equipment! Pt 2

Brainstorming and feedback loops One of the first steps of designing is always brainstorming -- sometimes this starts before research, sometimes I research first, and often I go back and forth, letting brainstorming push me to the limits of my current knowledge and then taking to the internet to open up new territory. For the equipment for Astronomics (demo on steam right now!), while the design team had a few key assets they were looking for, they were also still brainstorming and so we were all kind of discovering what the equipment part of the game could be as a whole.

For me, that brainstorming usually looks like a LOT of very rough drawings. I usually have my research sketches open nearby for reference, and I try and draw small enough that i can see all my brainstorming and seek out possibility spaces between ideas. Above is my first VERY rough brainstorming page, and on it you can see art from two passes - the softer, lighter drawings are the open-ended thinking; the darker clear lines are the second pass, where I start filtering, choosing which pieces to take to the rest of the team to start conversations with.

You can see how we would collect feedback above - i would write notes and do additional drawing on top of the submitted artwork as we went through things in screenshared video meetings, and then have these with me as I iterated further. One thing you might notice is that these are all drawn with straight lines -- Astronomics is a low-poly 3D style game, and it was fun to think about simplifying the shapes right from the beginning. While I didn't do all my drawing like this, it was a fast and quick way to get clean linework that had some connection to the style of the game long before we really knew anything about said style! Speaking of style... Next up, we had to make some big decisions. Astronomics has a lot of equipment with a big range of functions and scales and the most important thing was making sure it all read like equipment from the same manufacturer - that being CubeCorp, as you'll see in the demo. I narrowed it down to three possibilities:

I went in three directions -- "Star Wars" style, all panel lines and chamfered edges and a sense of overall complexity; "Safety" style, with safety bars and frames around everything, focusing otherwise on simple, chunky shapes; and "Modern" style, exploring simple silhouettes with hidden complexity. (none of these are official names for known styles, eg, the star wars style didn't actual aim for matching the style in those films particularly -- these names were more mnemonic devices to help me quickly sum up what I was thinking in a punchy way, and help my coworkers refer to the styles more easily in conversation while we discussed an debated direction together.) In the end, what we chose was mostly Safety-styled, but elements from both other directions made their way in too!

And here was my first sheet ft a pass on the drill, pump and vaccuum, containers for solids, liquids and gasses, a worker bot, a worker bot home, and a robust scanner machine. A few things we were thinking about: we wanted there to be a sense of a unit of size that everything fit into - CubeCorp, remember? - and so even our most complicated equipment needed to pack down into that cube. That meant that we were going to be animating equipment essentially unfolding, so I tried even at this stage to think about what that could mean for the drill and pump and vaccuum, and you can see packed and unpacked states up there for each design. They also were likely to be carried around by our little darling worker bots -- so everybody needed feet the bots could squeeze between to get underneath. Speaking of, they probably went through the most designs of everything, and what's in the demo does not appear in these pages at all, haha, but here, a few more passes:

In fact, you might not be able to find any of these exact designs in the demo -- that's just the nature of concept art in games! What the game needed then and what it needed later -- as the game design itself was developed -- well, it changed, as it often can! I think it can be easy from the outside to assume that everything anyone thought of was eventually brought to life, but that rarely ever happens. Concept art is a process, and so even if these designs didn't make it into the game, they were an important step along the path towards designs that did, and they taught us a lot about what we did and didn't want Astronomics to look like! Read the full article

[toyastales]

Let's spin a few records

[disease]

SYNTHESIZER [EMS, c. 1980]

[skimmeh]

Literally spent way too much time on this- BUT STAREATER SCAR DESIGN UPDATE yyyaayyyy

The old one is still a little useful as his Vindicator design hasn't changed, but he doesn't wear that for much of the series

Close ups and stuff ↓↓↓

[beyondborderlands]

Cyber

sooo I saw Impulse's newest Hermitcraft 10 thumbnail and I SPED to draw his new skin! Credits to @maxx-doodles for the super fun cyberpunk design :) I like to think he's surveying the landscape and coming up with his next build idea.

[389]

[mensfactory]

1957 Lincoln Continental Mark II

Courtesy: Havasu Speed Equipment,

The leather cabin was done by Ron Mangus Interiors.

[not-equippedforthis]

putting the funn in funerals

[beaft]

multiple people came by my stall yesterday at the art market and told me i was lowballing myself and i should be charging way more, and i'm like, on the one hand Thank You and you're probably right, charging £15 for a sculpture or painting is ridiculous when you factor in the costs of materials and how long it took to make. but on the other hand this art fair is mostly populated by gay twentysomethings who would not spend £100 on an original painting even if they had it to spend

[temeyes]

[OC] as fast as a race horse, as steady as a Chariot.

[dudukbazaar]

Durandal Value ●●●●○ ; Size ●●○○○ This legendary sword can cut through mountains. It can teleport, sometimes by itself. 

[jaysdoodlehell]

Sharp Claws

[valvarads]

What he is remains a mystery, but these could give someone the same edge against the Granutes. Someone like me… or you.

[oldguydoesstuff]

RIP Gordon Bell, computer architect and vice president for Digital Equipment Corporation, responsible for the design of several computers in the PDP family as well as heading up the VAX system development group.

I couldn't blame you if you never heard of him, his contributions were mainly in the 1960s through 1980s. But trust me when I say, whatever device you are reading this on can trace its lineage back through some project he was involved with in one way or another.

Bell passed away on May 17th in his home in California, he was 89.

[hibanny]

Module artworks for Laios, Marcille, Chilchuck and Senshi respectively for the Arknights x Dungeon Meshi collaborative event "Delicious on Terra"

[a-s-levynn]

fanart of your gentleman because i adore him (if you hate it pls just delete this and pretend it never happened tyvm)

[Adding in a cut for the text, so people might reblog it more willingly, because come ON, just look at it]

Okay okay okay hold on, HOLD THE FUCK ON. Panda.. Egg, love, WHAT THE ??? !? !?!?! I know i've yet to answer your other message but but but but but-- this takes priority over everything. How did it even cross your mind i could feel anything but immens amounts of love and appreciation? I am shaking you lovingly, how could i not absolutely be in love with this? My child never looked more handsome 😭🫶🏻

I posted the li'l guy expecting the usual 20-ish notes out of pity when i do something that's not ST related, and you whip out a whole ass art, this fast, looking genuinly better than what i did? (Which is no surprise, duh, you have actual skills and i'm just doing whatever at this point.) Dude this is the ultimate compliment. Hello?? I have no vocabulary to express how much it means and how much i love this and you, for doing it. Like.. i am speechless.

And you know what, Gentleman is a perfectly good name, so we might stick with it. And just to answer the question the little sketch (love the heart shaped nose hole btw) poses, the hind legs also supposed to end in hands. He is a weird little one.

Man i'm never gonna be able to cope with this. You made art of a thing i made. Just because. I am baffled and no idea what to do. Besides feeling and undigestable amount of love towards you, that is. You are one of the handful people whom i never met but want to hug so badly, and i am not even really a hugger by default. I'll cut the ramblings but man.. you are a genuin treasure. We'd be so much poorer without you around here.