Friday, May 31, 2013

Creature of the Deep

The cold steely eyes of a killer.

Avast! Another entry to the Jinx Unsung Heroes of Minecraft contest! This one's a squid, and I love it for so many reasons. It has a pixel aesthetic that compliments the game, it turns the unobtrusive li'l squid into a ferocious beast, and the ship itself is just all sorts of cool.

Working on the ocelot now, and I might have a design before the end of today. I don't think I'll have time or creativity enough to do all ten of the featured mobs, but I don't see any reason not to try.

Thursday, May 30, 2013

Super Happy Funtime Fungus Cow Go!

モー モー

J!NX is putting on another design contest, The Unsung Heroes of Minecraft. They're asking for t-shirts designed around ghasts, squids, wolves, enderdragons, ocelots, blaze, sheep, iron golems, or mooshrooms, which all seem like pretty random characters to group together, but whatever.

The deadline's June 3rd, and I've spent the last few days working on a few submissions. This is the first one I've completed, a li'l Japanese mooshroom. The text under him just says "Mushroom Cow."

I made the distressed t-shirt overlay myself and I'm really proud of how it turned out. Makes it feel like an old thrift-store purchase. Adds character. Yeah.

I've got a squid design in the works, so I'll probably post that one tomorrow.

Saturday, May 25, 2013

Expy

Glowy!
A New PVP Game about Improving Yourself
Downloads



This random pig wants to play Expy. Don't you wanna be as cool as a random pig? Peer pressure!

Expy is a game that allows you to grow as an individual through learning new things, practicing your skills, and senselessly killing your opponents.

The concept is simple and builds upon a core mechanic of Minecraft: that of gaining experience. For every five levels of experience you gain, you'll unlock new abilities, such as increased mining speed or strength. The first player to make it to level 50 wins!

Expy is a stand-alone set of command blocks and piston gadgets neatly packed into a small box that can be imported to and played on your favorite custom maps or in a randomly generated world. Expy puts a dynamic new spin on the way Minecraft is played, creating a fun competitive experience that you can enjoy with your friends. Or, if you prefer a solo challenge, see where your journey of self improvement takes you.

Expy is available now for download, as a schematic file ready to be placed in your favorite world or pre-placed in three randomly-generated environments. Try it today!

Downloads

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Give it Time

What is a day to a sunless void?

A work in progress for a Minecraft game I'm working on. It's similar to Capture the Sword in that it's a two-team invasion game, but it's got a lot of fundamental differences in play style. I'll be making a post about the official rules and all that as soon as I get the game finished, which shouldn't be long now.

This clock tower took me a crazy amount of time to make and is one of my favorite builds in Minecraft currently, so I'm just going to gush about it for a bit here:

The tower is 125 meters tall, just a bit shorter than the Great Pyramid of Giza. It has ten floors, including a lobby, a gallery, a balcony, a ballroom, a storage deck, a machine room, a wiring bay, and an observation deck. A lot of the inspiration for the design interior and exterior was taken from Gothic architecture.

The clock is fully functional. To speak a bit more to the technical side of Minecraft, the timing mechanism is powered by an item despawn loop emitting pulses into a ring of hoppers that transports a small amount of sand around in a circle, powering the various comparators and sending a signal up into a series of interconnected redstone wires that either activate or deactivate a lamp, depending on the position in the cycle.

Lights progress once every five minutes and complete a cycle once every hour. There's a clock face on all four sides, which required a lot of wire to hook up to one timing mechanism. Just an unholy amount of wire. (Left: timing mechanism. Right: an unholy amount of wire)

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Shoot the Zombie


 
This is a quick, silent animation I threw together in an hour. I had a whole storyboard put together, and I've since recorded some voice bits. I might put together the full thing yet, but in the meantime feel free to watch this version and learn the joke ahead of time so that the official release holds no meaning to you whatsoever.

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Happy Birthday Shan!

Today marks a very special occasion, the birthday of a very special person, who is celebrating a very special milestone in her very special life. So I made her this very special hand-drawn card that looks like a very special expressionist sketch.

And that's pretty neat.

No two areas that touch directly are the same color. If you have time, look up Four Color Theorem on Wikipedia. Interesting map coloring stuff.

Thursday, May 2, 2013

Zoom in! Behance!

Line mustache! Technically pretty thin!
I've gone and set me up a Behance profile!

Basically I was looking for a fast and cheap way to put together a portfolio in a way that could be easily shared and I had heard some of my classmates and teachers recommend Behance. After I spent an hour setting up my profile and projects and several hours browsing the crazy selection of amazing design. It's pretty incredible. It's sort of like a Linkedin for artistic inspiration and a Pinterest for professionals.

There's going to be a lot of overlap between the content of Pixeldin and the content of my Behance account because both focus on my attempts at design. The main difference between the two is where I'll be using Pixeldin as sort of a clutter drawer for works in progress, school assignments, and news updates. I'm going to try and keep Behance looking more like a portfolio of selected works, so odds are if you're seeing it on my Behance, I've already uploaded six sketches of it to Pixeldin.

I typed out all this additional information just so I could get the text to wrap nicely around that big ol' linehead icon up there. And I added this final paragraph to balance things out a little bit. And then I broke the fourth wall to talk about text shapes. Just nine more words should finish things off nicely.

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Burst Calendar: August

And here's August!

This one is really sharp, but that's how the inversion of the July theme works. Turns out filling in letters with an arbitrary number of points off them is a sloppy process.

Also there is no proper color scheme for August. Trust me on this. I've tried.

Is It Windy Out? Nah, Just August Or Two.