Basically a boiling, seething, puddle-like mass of mouths and stuff - sort of like miniature Shoggoths, but not very threatening-looking. Could be an incredible hassle to animate, but it'd look so boss if I could pull it off, and as small chittery gribblers they don't need to be particularly large or complex.

I'll concentrate on getting the designs and sprites done first, but I like the idea of an entity directory; I'll do some more polished and dynamic versions of all these when the actual game graphics are finished. It'd be far too easy for me to get distracted doing these and end up rushing the important bit.

I really like the idea of the Segfault as a sniper class.

Stack/Buffer/Arithmetic Overflow



Still a ways to go with this guy, I think...something's missing. I had an idea about how his attack could work that I'll try to diagram for you.

The other thing I was thinking was that, although I gather that the three overflow types are for all purposes identical, would there be any merit in having them as three classes of the same monster, maybe with similar, but slightly different attacks? I mean it'd be pretty straightforward to do a couple of palette swaps with different "eye" gauge configurations or something.

Holy fuck, Mooch, that is bananas.

There's a couple of rapidly-turned-out character concepts in the Bugger! devlog thread; I'd super appreciate any feedback (more on the design than the rendering; I know that's kind of sloppy, but I want to get these out the door as fast as possible).

Concept for the Floating Point / Divide By Zero error.



I'm seeing this dude as a charger, using that big ol' blade deal to ram you all up in the stuff.

Wyndham is the business. I have a lot of time for his stuff, although I read a short story collection of his called Jizzle (seriously) that was nigh-unreadably awful.

Well, there's nothing stopping me jimmying up the two forms you just mentioned, and then adding or changing stuff as the game goes along.

I was thinking yeah, materialise the projectiles in front of him, but it seems kind of lazy on my part...maybe have something like a floating text cursor that spawns the code-nuggets for attacks or something.

Have you had any thoughts on how you'd like this thing to look? I can run with the flat-colour-simple-shapes aesthetic in the player concept if you like it; I'm a little rustier at pixel art but I'm game to have a go.

That's not such a problem if weapon drops are frequent enough - it just needs to get you to the next upgrade, it doesn't need to be a staple weapon.

Sorry I've been so late getting any artwork done, that commission has graduated from kicking my arse to kneeling on my throat. Here's a quickish player concept I came up with.



If it's not clear, that platform jobbie's meant to have three legs, not, as I seem to have accidentally drawn there, two legs and a pointy dong.

Edit: here is a photograph of my genitals, in action.

Guys you would not believe how good this sandwich is. It's good like cloth mother.

first official screenshot of stryker

i particularly always hated the guy

While I admire the gumption of The Only Guy Who Brought A Gun To A Fistfight, he did bring a fucking gun to a fistfight. Fuck that guy.

But he did become my new hero!

First-world problems, amirite?

The inability to think of a good comeback.

On facebook, some idiot girl wrote 'Happpy Birthhday, Justin Bieber ♥' and I commented 'Seventeen and still not one single armpit hair.' and some idiot asshole guy commented 'Yeah... maybe so... But he's also 17, makes millions of dollars, has millions of fans, and is probably the most famous 17 year old in the world. So, you can stop hating now ♥'. I need to think of a comeback that will make him feel like an idiot. This asshole guy is also an actual homosexual... hence the heart?

Holy shit, no way! An actual homosexual? I THOUGHT THEY WERE ONLY LEGENDS

Having finally found a (sadly rather hacky but functional) Sculptris port for OSX, I spent half an hour fucking around and this started to take shape:



Obviously needs a lot of work, and will probably never be game-worthy, but it's the first 3D modelling I've done in any capacity since...shit, when did Quake II come out?

3D Body Adventure had some solid gameplay in certain parts, and it taught me a lot (for an eight-year-old) about anatomy and medicine. I'll never forget the "futuristic hospital simulation" part, wherein I zapped clumps of plaque in the interior of some guy's heart or eradicated rabies viruses from his nervous system. 3D Dinosaur Adventure is less of a game, but it was just as much fun, allowed some exploration, and taught me a lot about dinosaurs.

The first IBM PC my family got had these! I guess I would've been about 10 or 11? Anyway, I had a lot of fun with both (particularly 3D Dinosaur Adventure). My dad's a doctor and thought Body Adventure was an absolute hoot, but was a little more dubious about its educational value.

Europress' Fun School series is pretty good, albeit aimed at very young children; an amount of quizzes, sure, but a lot of logic puzzles in the later ones. The early, pre-PC ones (I played the first...four, I think? on an Amstrad CPC) were for real young kids; one minigame in (I think) the first one was about waiting for a traffic light to change so you could safely cross the road, stuff like that. Oregon Trail is a classic, of course, but Amazon Trail deserves some respect as well. Hilariously, Wikipedia lists the Ace Attorney series under the category of Educational Video Games, and they're meant to be pretty good (I've not played them).

Does Typing Of The Dead count? You learn to type pretty good when the penalty for failure is having a sixty-foot armour-clad ogre-zombie turn you into paint.

Nononono, I get that; how can I put this? I thought Wind Waker looked absolutely amazing ("Holy shit, new Zelda is a 3D cartoon movie that I am the main character in") and was thoroughly underwhelmed by the visuals in Twilight Princess ("Oh sweet, new Zelda looks like every other game"). Not that Twilight Princess didn't have strong design, but stylistically, a lot of it's rather generic, you know?

Plus, there's the fact that this is a visually enhanced port, not a sequel - the character dimensions are related to what's going on in the game. Think about it; platform spacing, tunnel sizes - hell, enemies and their projectiles even - are based on the size of the player model. You could re-proportion it to more human dimensions without changing the height at least, but you'd end up with a much narrower (and probably less readable) avatar. You could redesign every enemy, shot and passageway in the game to accommodate a taller and/or skinnier player, but come on. Quote is not a super physical character; his job is to be an origin point for projectiles and to have a clearly-definable hitbox. Squat design makes a lot of sense for him in this game. I'm interested to see if they take this as an opportunity to make his face more expressive, too; I think that'd go a lot further towards giving him more personality than giving him longer hu-man legs (although whether Quote, a silent protagonist and amnesiac to boot, needs more personality is another debate entirely).

A couple of elements - particularly the logos in the bottom corners, and the label text to a certain extent - work better on the second one, but overall I'd say the darker version.

I for one am delighted that they didn't take this charming story about a robot rescuing a flying island populated by rabbit children from a mad scientist and his wizard boss and try to make it "realistic".

Once in a while, though, someone will call you poopdick and you'll get all mad, but then, when you check, it turns out you did have poop on your dick! And then you have to apologise.

Sent a rather tetchy e-mail to a client who hasn't paid me yet whilst my iPod synched. I finally got around to actually putting music on the iPod I got for my 25th birthday; I turned 27 on Saturday. I AM BEST.

Selling your bone marrow's pretty great unless you're centered outside the US.

So this opened last week (and will hopefully be moving to NYC after its run in Stoke); I contributed pixel art to the arcade cabinet mentioned briefly at the end (you can juuuuust see two of the characters I worked on in the bottom two images; yeah, they're modified KOF sprites, as the author notes, but dayum do KOF sprites ever have a lot of frames).