Peter Rimkunas Blog

I’m very sorry to say that Slender Man is going to take a back seat for the next or two or three weeks. I’m not being lazy…actually a little bit, but the real reason is that I won’t have access to the large format scanner at MECA until the school opens again for the spring semester. I’m still producing the linework drawings that I eventually shade and color digitally, I just have no way to make them digital until either the school opens up again or I buy a large scanner that I can’t afford right now…and no, photographing them is not the answer. Just no.

No.

But just because I can’t scan anything larger than 8.5”x11” doesn’t mean I won’t be doing stuff. CELZ is completely digitally produced and easy to work on when I’m home, and I’m currently working on the art assets for another game project that may just be the most interesting we’ve worked on yet.

The term “Minecraft Clone” has been tossed around the internet a lot lately describing a bunch of silly little tech demos of games where someone has decided they needed to build a voxel-based game. Some of the cooler ones include Voxetron, which really isn’t a MC clone but it is voxel-based nonetheless.

What we’re doing doesn’t appear to be too different from the regular MC Clone at first, but there’s a lot of high quality tech going into the engine itself to make it far more powerful than any other voxel engine out there. You can read all about development of our Voxel Engine in the official Large Russian Games Dev Blog (scroll down for some sweet screenshots).

Now I’m going to talk about what I’m doing for this project. Currently I am in charge of all the art assets going into the game. *catches breath*. Daunting as this is, I’ve already started on some of the more important things, such as a debug character model – a really rushed Ice Elemental kind of dood:

And what he looks like ingame:

Some Monster concepts, although most of these have already been rejected and recycled into another project:

Finally, I’ve also begun, and nearly finished in the past week the background for the menusystem of the game – which also doubles as some concept art for the landscapes. Here’s a concept video I rendered in Blender showing how the images should scroll in the menu:

My next project before the “Teaser Release” is to paint the textures for 12 of our first block types. This will not be pixel art, and it will not be flat. We want to approach a level of visual quality somewhere between Braid and Skyrim (or at least, that’s my personal aim). I want to see some obviously painted textures for landscape, but more refined rendering for important things like trees and creatures.

So I think I’m at a point where I can safely look back at what I’ve done so far with the comic and think outloud a bit.

Slender Man was originally started, for all intensive purposes, as an experiment. The ultimate plan is to find my comfy place before moving on to a longer term, large-scale comic such as r_P.inf, which I hope to start once Slender Man is finished. I was looking for a project that was relatively short compared to what other people publish. Something I wouldn’t get sick of that I could make weekly changes to as I saw fit. Already I’ve moved from drawing and inking on cramped 8.5”x11” printer paper, flat colors, basic shading to fully digitally painted 14”x17” pages, and back again to flat colors because of time constraints on my painting time.

For the next page I tried out using a brush rather than a pen to ink it, and I must say I really prefer the new lines already. I love expressive, calligraphic lines. Maybe I’ll be able to make some someday. For now I experiment (the whole point of this project, remember?) and hope I discover more. Page 10 will be out sometime this week, I’m going to go work on it as soon as I publish this post.

I’m also feeling more comfortable with my craft and am beginning to play with more interesting content. I’m Hitchcock-ian in that I like weird camera angles, twisted compositions and high contrast positive-negative spaces – I haven’t really been doing this sofar and admit I am horrified by the last two pages (08 and 09). It’s an artist thing, I guess, to overthink these things and hate your own work, so I decided not to spend my time redoing everything but to publish them instead. Message to myself: this is how they turned out when I was being visually lazy. It’s too late now, don’t do it again, simple as that.

It’s so much better for my stress levels to let my past stay where it is – in the past. Plus I can treat it like a diving board I can push off from into more fun stuff coming up – soon the comic will take the natural course of any horror story, into the realm of actual horror. This is a place I am used to. However, it won’t be what you expect, as my sister’s writing often throws the reader the odd curveball – and I don’t mean your usual “shocking twist!” either. Check out her blog: Extraordinary Terrestrials to enjoy more of her stuff.

So, expect more changes throughout the entirety of Slender Man, every page is bringing me slightly closer to the style I want. I leave you now with a preview of the official poster of the Slender Man webcomic, at some point it might replace the cover page at the beginning.

It’s a little dark right now, might not show up well on some screens. Endlessly tweaking.