More Weeping Pines! And Some Site News...

Working on several things to post here over the course of October, but for now, enjoy another page of Weeping Pines! This poor kid may not be prepared for what's in store for him.

Not a good start to his adventure... is this comic terribly paced? Could be, But I'm working on it.

Anyway, made a big decision this week. After a year on the job, I decided to leave my current employer to pursue personal projects, and return to freelance work. I've found myself absolutely overflowing with ideas over the last twelve months, but left without any time to really execute any of them. Although I learned a great deal on the job, the truth is that I desperately want more creative fulfillment out of my work, and I just didn't feel like I was going anywhere.

What does this mean? Well, I'll probably be posting here much more frequently. Although most of my time will initially be spent finishing Nova Phase (finally), eventually I want to really focus on my own comics and games, even if only to bolster my body of work so as to make getting more interesting jobs easier. I have a fair amount of goofy stuff to post here for October, including some game related stuff, some stickers, and some more comics. Should be a fun month!

I'll also probably be hitting deviantart again to drum up some more traffic on my work, so keep an eye out there too, I guess.

Also, I got Mario Maker! My levels are probably too hard, but I try to make genuinely thoughtful little puzzles in them, so maybe I'll post the codes up here this week.

Okay, that's all for now!

An Unexpected Return! October is the Season for Horror Comics!

Well, I WAS actually posting on the tumblr pretty frequently as of two weeks ago. I even had drawn a bunch of monsters and managed to keep up with the whole daily monster thing for a while. Of course that kind of consistency couldn't be allowed to continue. The universe just had to intervene and make sure that any endeavor of mine had to be interrupted ASAP, so as to prevent it from getting any kind of traction. In this case, the universe took the form of an ill conceived update for the tumblr app that resulted in tumblr simply shutting down everytime  I try to post a picture. Oh well.

Now that I've gotten that little bit of ludicrous self pity out of the way, on to more important things. Today I resolved to sit down and do something to post here, which I haven't done in a very long time. I had a few options in terms of what to work on, I suppose, but what with the Halloween season right around the corner, I thought it would be most appropriate to get a a new page of my barely started venture into horror comics! Without further prattle, I present a new page of Weeping Pines:

Can you tell how much I love drawing that face? Can you? I seriously considered jumping to a different scene altogether after the car crash, but screw that. More nightmare face guy. Or girl, maybe. Hard to tell.

In other news, I'm interested in trying to make some episodic game content for this place. Working on a Halloween themed mini-RPG, sort of like a western take on Yokai Watch, in a way. I'll post some of the assets later. Hopefully before Halloween. Maybe...

Also! Did some pencil work for a potential comic, partially for fun and partially to help build a better portfolio for that kind of thing. Who wouldn't want to read a mainstream comic penciled by yours truly? Don't answer that. Anyway, I might post some of that later too.

Okay, that's it! Maybe more Weeping Pines this week.

Tumblr Halloween Fun: Monster Collection!

I know I'm a horrible slacker that hasn't posted here in forever, but I promise I'm a busy guy. Kind of. Whatever.

Anyway, I have actually been using the Doki Doki Arcade tumblr an awful lot lately. As I mentioned long ago, the tumblr is basically a sketch dump where I post cool doodles from my notebook, the kind of thing that mostly gets lost forever. If you dig my art at all, and want to see the stuff that eventually becomes the nonsense I normally post here or on Deviantart, then definitely check it out. Especially because I am actually doing a thing. A cool thing. Yes.

Whether out of some misguided desire to extend the Halloween season at every opportunity, or out of a recent madness involving playing way too much Fossil Fighters, I've been drawing ALOT of monsters lately. Initially it was just a fun way to warm up, but as I was driving to work this week, I had an idea; what if there was a monster battle game that played off of ACTUAL monsters as its theme? Sure, Venusaur or Metal War Greymon are kind of monsterous, but they're not exactly scary. I'm talking like, horror movie creatures done up like adorably collectible little imps. With that in mind, I started doing a daily doodle, every day a different monster, leading up to Halloween. No clue what I'm gonna do when I'm all done, since I should end up with like 60 distinct little nightmares to play with, but stickers or cards are definitely possibilities.

I'm gonna post the first three here right now, because I just can't post anything without a picture or two, but definitely check out http://jmatchead.tumblr.com/ to see more as the days go by.

 First up is an adorable Frankenstein's monster style creature. Part Android 8 from Dragon Ball, part Viktor from Dark Stalkers, I love his everything, but his mismatched arms and electric power are definitely his strong points.

 Next up, a frantic Wolf Man style creature. Inspired mostly by the original Universal Lon Chaney Jr. look of just a hairy guy, but also has shades of the wolf guy from Shining Force.

I wanted to subvert all of the mystique that vampires have accrued over the years and make this guy goofy as hell.

Can you imagine catching these guys and having them battle for you? That Frankenstein, which I am now realizing should definitely be named Frankenstrong, would have some absolutely sick attacks.

Anyway, definitely check out http://jmatchead.tumblr.com/ for more monsters! Tomorrow may just be a mummy!

A Little Ja-Ja-Ja-Janken Update!

I know that I wrapped up Janken a VERY long time ago at this point. Things are busy. That said, I go crazy if I don't work on something fun for myself, so I spent a little time putting this together tonight. I need to fix up some mistakes in the dialogue, and I really would like to do an epilogue or something to give a little closure to the story, and maybe a summary of the events of the hundreds of chapters I skipped to get to this conflict. Could be fun. Need time.

Recently wrapped up a project that had been on the back burner for a little while, but it could be some time before I ever have anything worth showing off on that front, as it is a collaboration and my contribution is pretty much over. I'll see if I can post anything related, as some of the concept art and stuff is just plain cool.

Also! I went to San Diego Comic Con to sign stuff and help sell Nova Phase to people! I met lots of really cool people, some of whom even bought stuff from me! If you came and saw me, thanks! I hope you enjoy your book! And if you're one of the people that just asked me to draw them Steven Universe for free, I hope you enjoy your drawing of Steven Universe!

Oh, and on a much less important but still potentially cool note, I have actually been posting stuff to the Doki Doki Arcade tumblr with some regularity lately. Mostly marker doodles of super heroes, so nothing super exciting, but take a look if you want to see a hastily thrown together illustration of the X-Men that screams "I grew up in the 90's".

http://jmatchead.tumblr.com/

That's it!

Game Development Fun: Shooter Mock Up

Wild west light gun shooting mixed with intense boss fights! Think Wild Gunmen meets Mega Man, but with a bit of Zelda style overworld exploration mixed in. Basically all of my games are something with Mega Man and Zelda mixed in, now that I think about it, but I genuinely believe that those games have a ton to offer other genres. As much as I love the Zapper, most of the games that utilized it were pretty simple diversions. Sure, it took a fair amount of time to get good at Duck Hunt or Barker Bill, but once you hit that plateau, there wasn't much else to do. It was hard to really get lost in those games.

Of course, other light gun games came as the years went by. Favorites like House of the Dead and Time Crisis are basically just more dynamic Zapper games, but even those end up feeling shallow. Even on home consoles, the arcade origin of the shooting gallery genre is very apparent. I think this is owed in large part to the lack of traditional control options on the light guns of the past. While I seem to remember my Dreamcast guns having some kind of buttons and maybe even a d-pad, actually using it for a game was out of the question. It just wasn't comfortable.

Now, I am admittedly a huge Wii nerd, and though most people look down on the Wii remote's design, I've always been enamored with it, and I don't think any game managed to utilize it's core value better than Metroid: Other M. Switching between the NES style sideways orientation for platforming and exploration and the light gun style pointer orientation for first person shooting and scanning demonstrated both the versatility of the controller and a kind of economy of design that made the control set up of virtually any other modern game seem convoluted.

Taking that dynamic as inspiration, I designed this game with the Wii remote in mind. All of the fighting and shooting would be done in these first person scenes using the controller like a pointer or light gun, while exploration and adventuring would be done Zelda style with the controller held like a NES game pad. While I don't have all the details hammered out (should there be random encounters?), I think the idea of going back and forth between world exploration and intense first person combat could be pretty cool. With lots of different guns, locations, sub weapons, and bosses, I'd like to imagine this as the first fully featured light gun game.

No actual programming work on this game yet, as it is still in the EARLY early phase of planning. That said, I have actually made some for real progress on Super Bird Force as far as programming goes, but I'll share more on that in the near future. Some actual in game screenshots could be right around the corner!

Okay, that's it! Stuff from my trip to Comic Con later!

Some Bird Force Bits!

Been a while since I posted anything, and don't really have anything to show, but I have some Bird Force related stuff from a bit ago that I took a little time to finish up this weekend, and felt like showing off a bit. First off, some planes!

This is for the four main characters, although the plan is that there will be a ton more of wingmen to find and recruit, each with their own ship and weapons. I don't think I've shown these in sprite form before, so I hope this is cool! Next, some bosses!

Just three for now, based on a fly, ant, and bee (or maybe wasp) respectively. The enemies would be bug inspired planes, but the bosses would be full blown mecha monsters. Had a hard time nailing the look for the enemy mechanical designs, but I'm happy with how these turned out.

Sadly, that's about it. I'm hitting a brick wall on backgrounds, but I think I might just be tired... I'm changing my development tools around a bit, as Construct turned out to be a little too temperamental during the development of the original Bird Force last summer. I'm gonna try Multimedia Fusion this time around, so hopefully that will be a little more consistent.

And yes, development was definitely inspired by the Star Fox announcement. So cool!

Bad Habits Die Hard

Argh. After keeping up with postings here for like, almost 5 months, I broke an otherwise excellent streak. What have I been up to? Well, work. Work factored into this tremendously. After moving into a new office, which was itself exhausting, my workload increased (which I didn't think was even possible) and has been more or less non-stop since. Meanwhile, several developments lead to me returning to actively working on Nova Phase, though of course in a much slower capacity, since I can no longer spend entire days at a time drawing pages. Any of the time that was previously being spent doing Heckbringers or Weeping Pines is now being dedicated to slowly making my way through the last two issues of Nova Phase. I'll post some particularly cool panels as proof that I am in fact doing something important with my time. 

With work going nuts and Nova Phase back in my life, I don't have a ton of time for other projects for the time being. I took the month of May to more or less focus on establishing some kind of regularity to working on the comic, but now I want to try to spend some time back here, though that may not take the form of any major art or comics for a little while. Maybe I'll stick with little features, or more stickers for the time being. 

Head over to the tumblr to see some poorly photographed drawings of Daredevil and WWE Superstar Brock Lesnar.