In the last few months, I have been working on artwork for Shadow Balance Games, for their tabletop game ‘Elemancers’. I’m excited to play the game and see how the artwork was used. For the characters and buildings I was given 3D models to base my designs on. You can find out more about the game and the kickstarter at Shadow Balance Games .
Last month, I participated in a game jam (Ludum Dare 44) and with a small team created a game: Methods for Instructing Thine Dragon. It was a wonderful learning experience for a variety of reasons, namely that I couldn’t use my favorite 2D animating software (Spine) and had to learn how to use Spriter instead. Spriter is working on implementing deformation, but since they haven’t yet I had to create the dragons in parts (visible in the image to the left). It turned out a little chunky, but I was still able to make it work in a satisfactory enough way. I’m adding a few animation goodies that didn’t make it into the game to this post. I also had to learn a little about creating parallax environments in Unity, which I am implementing on a small game project i’m working on now. I’m using this new project as a method of learning c# in unity… updates to come!
"Kabuki” Nayaki Anandan 2019
I finally finished my submission for this month’s character design challenge. I based this illustration off of the main character from the book Empress of All Seasons by Emiko Jean. This was really fun to work on, and I learned a lot about color from this illustration, which was particularly difficult thanks to the lighting setting. I noticed that adding a lot of detail that can be rather simple (Like the lining on the cloak) can draw in the eye pretty effectively. I think the toughest part of this illustration were her legs and feet. definitely need to do better about getting reference for that next time, but overall i’m okay with how it came out.
Last Month I was lucky enough to be elected to give a talk for UW Reality Labs. This was the first in a series of talks about virtual reality, and mine specifically centered about bringing a traditional medium into virtual reality, and using it to drive a narrative forward. I also discussed how i made the game ‘The Forest Temple’ and what inspired me to do so, specifically citing other games I played growing up, other artistic sources, and new experiences. At the end I had some time to take questions from the brilliant students at the University of Washington.
More about the game here
