GLADIATORS!! more or less.



not sure they’ll actually be called gladiators, but that’s basically what they are. I have some fun ideas and some unique (?) twists I’m looking forward to whenever I show them.
i’m cool making style choices that might seem anachronistic to us. turns out golf visors would be perfect for antelope ears. even if i doubt they would be familiar with a good 18 holes of the king’s game
there’s no reason that a baseball cap in our own history couldn’t have been invented way before it was. someone of a completely alien culture would decorate a cap much differently than us I’m sure.
playing around with some pixel art stuff.
inspired a bit by dungeon of the endless because i love that game.
probably would have fairly simple terrain. should help the characters pop and I think it could look good. but also because i am lazy.
I actually have a really fun game concept in mind. Some kind of roguelike hybrid with elements of oregon trail and also having party peacemaking as a main focus. you gotta try and make your party get along for the greater good and it would have branching dialogue options and stuff. lots of stats and crap too cause that makes me jazzed.
I would LIKE to make in the future but I have no idea if it’ll ever get off the ground. I am not a programmer. tried to teach myself some Unreal but it is slowww going. the sprites and game ideas are fun though even if nothing comes of it.
just some doodles i do to keep in shape and whatever.
got some silly expressions and some outfit designs. what makes the world go round 🙂
the wife helps with color schemes a lot lmao. color helps but it’s not really my thing. doesn’t really excite me and i don’t think in color. kinda sucks cause I think it would help differentiating the characters but B&W lets you do things color can’t too. color can get a bit messy and miss the silhouettes and body language if you’re not careful. which I am not.
sometimes I just play around with doodles and color those though. but most of what i do is doodles anyway I guess. do what you like i suppose 🙂
As mentioned previously, I spent a couple weeks before ch3 doodling the characters and trying to streamline them more before I had to draw them in motion. In hindsight I wish I did that more for ch2, but hopefully I learned my lesson.
Silne was based off of a sketch i did a couple years ago, and was originally going to be a specific different character. I ended up splitting Silne and this other character who I will still likely use. It wasn’t the right time yet. Though I don’t mention verbally it in the story, you can tell by the two sets of tattoos that she has that she was once married.
The story itself was one of the earlier ones I came up with and remained mostly unchanged, though of course I tweaked some details as I went. It was originally going to have much less of Arbo, the old man, but previous chapters focused quite heavily on two characters and I wanted to branch out just a little bit. I still think I enjoy working with few characters rather than a gigantic cast, at least in a per-chapter basis.
The armor of the rene took a little bit to get down too, since I wanted to show similarities with the armor in ch1 (for both Allano and Rene) without making them identical. they likely wouldn’t have much standardization between troops if this was real life, but you also want to make it recognizable to the reader. The allanos have armors similar to malwan’s outfit from ch1, but the militia organized halfway through the chapter is more rag-tag since they are not professionals. I ended up with the rene’s “shark tooth” helm because I thought it was cool and unique. All of these designs will likely show up in the future to some capacity.
sharp-eyed viewers of a previous post may be able to infer some interesting tidbits about the rene.
Oraq, the ancient god-empress of the Allanos. An important symbol for the nation, so I wanted to get the look down.
some concepts of her design. i wanted it to be elegant and authoritative without being too ornate. her mask would have a pearl-reflective sheen as mentioned in a previous lore excerpt.