Two more dogs to go.

First one is “Bouncer”
He’s bulky, hyped-up, and blocks you from going forward. Be aware of him!

Last one is “Boink”. He’s extra sensitive and has a special ability to track you down. When you see him on stage, steer clear of him!

Now all four evil dog designs are drafted, and they will be reiterated for color, skin pattern, and minor details. One of challenges for making good iPhone game is to, I think, deliver properly formatted graphic assets for small screen; small details get lost, lines and major features stand out, light plays big role there too. I don’t really think that I can make solid assets with just one stroke. I might need to go over few more time until I ‘get it’ and using vector oriented graphics such as Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape, or even Blender could help very much in doing so.

I will make another post about how to render your still image properly next time.

It’s been busy. That’s all I can say. I’ve been re-writing my iPhone 3D code for OpenGLES 2.0, porting few apps to mobile-web-based hybrid app, as well as reiterating dog designs for Catstrict 7. Been doing so, I’ have some words to say but I’m just boiling them down until they are worth to say. So please be seated for one or two more posts in the future.

Anyway, I’d like to show you new dog designs. The response from people for previous shots were pretty disappointing; ‘mediocre’, ‘rubber doll’, ‘you are not working hard enough’. Ok, that’s pretty much what I was expecting because even I myself was not that impressed except the fact that using blender could be very effective for 2D character design. So, I reiterate them and here are two of them.

First one is bullterrier.

I tried to capture its signature head and butt and it turns out to be ok to me at the end. It looks a bit dodgy, on alert, and a bit aggressive. It suits perfectly in its role.

And here comes the second one.

I tried to capture Pug into it, then it turns out some kind of mixed bleed with uptight, anxious look. Pug indeed seems a bit relaxed and gives “please hug me” look while this one looks a bit uneasy and stupid; that’s really good for its role in game.

Dogs play evil role in in Catstrict 7. Evil characters hence need to be edgy and dark-colored, and should look a bit upset. Two of them above so far suits fine for 1st-time iteration. I will however reiterate their skin color, pattern, and few more details such as ear-shape so I will much more unified feel across all the characters, background, and platform as well.

Good thing about using blender is designs are all in vector format in essence. However I want to reduce a rendered image size, the fidelity of designs is preserved. On top of that, the one single lighting scheme could be applied all over the characters so that all of them mix well together. In fact, four shots above are taken with exactly the same lighting scheme and I could reuse that lighting over and over again. How do you like that?