Thursday, June 7, 2012

New Projects + E3 Impressions

Things have been a little hectic, and I've been drafted into a few projects which have taken up a fair amount of my time. First and foremost, I've been asked to do a full graphical overhaul of Flip Industries' Super Kid Icarus flash game. It's basically a Mario All Stars style upgrade to the original, with recolored and reshaded sprites and backgrounds to upgrade the game to 16-bit style. Think Ninja Gaiden Trilogy for SNES, but better.

Here's some samples of the new enemy sprites:


It's coming along nicely.

In other news, e3 has come and gone. Anybody that knows me (or has even taken brief glances at this blog) probably knows I'm a big Nintendo fan, and there's a fair amount of debate as to how they fared this year. Although I can totally see how this year was somewhat underwhelming, I walked away fairly pleased for a few reasons. With a new Pikmin game (finally) a new Warioware, exclusive access to Rayman Legends, a quirky return to insanity from Platinum games, and the first FPS roguelike in the form of ZombiU, I found plenty to catch my interest. Quite frankly, even Nintendo Land, which I initially dismissed, looks like tons of fun.

The big event for me, though, was seeing Castlevania finally make its way to the 3ds in the form of Mirror of Fate. I wasn't totally enamored by the approach Lords of Shadow took to the franchise, but I think that the 3ds followup is looking like a solid game in its own right. I quite like the new designs for Trevor and Belmont, and can't wait to see more of the game as it draws closer to release.


Since I haven't had much art on here as of late, I thought it might be good to seize on this opportunity to get some fan art done. Here's a little piece based on the upcoming Castlevania goodness.