Jonathan Price Art Mid-Year Update

Hello all. Sorry for the lapse in posting. Things have gotten quite busy and I didn’t have enough art to justify a regular art post for a while.

Things have changed. I have temporarily moved away from my pursuit of learning ZBrush and returned to my passionate desire to make video games.

Amari Rift – Space Adventurer

Between April and May, I built a prototype of a game based on one of my Random Practice Babes, a green-armor clad woman I drew back in March.

I’ve officially named her Amari Rift. Sounds science fiction-y enough?

I decided to make her into a playable character sprite and import her into the Construct 3 game engine, making a quick platformer with some Metroid- and Mega Man-like elements.

Some test poses I created before going all in on the character animation.
The video has no sound, but does a fine job of showing what I’ve built.

Development hasn’t gone far, but one thing I’m proud of is how I made her swing on a grappling hook. I followed a tutorial, and then made it my own. I can build on this any time. Already implemented a mini-map and I have ideas for different attacks, enemies, etc. But right now, this one is in a paused state.

WEAPON Combat League

Sometime in early June, I started thinking about how I can stop changing my mind and focus hard on something. So after some debate both internal and external, I decided to act on something I’ve been wanting to do for years: I started building animation-ready sprite rigs of WEAPON Combat League’s twenty-four competitors.

I’d spent years trying to come up with ways to make sprites of the cast, and I always struggled. But for some reason, this time I felt more confident. I established a method of building sprites based on the flexibility of the girl I put in the game above. Through that, I breezed through all 24 characters in little over a month’s time.

Now that they’re done, I’m thinking about what to do next. I have several ideas for a WCL game, but my goal is to build something that plays well to my strengths. I’m not great at building detailed, scrolling levels with backgrounds and enemies and power-ups and all. But I am good at developing characters and coming up with interesting ways of battling. I used to do it a lot when I made up board games as a kid, and even more recently when I produced a tabletop board game based on WCL’s battle system.

My kids and I had a great time testing this game back in the day.

I did try to build a digital version of the game. Then I realized I had the opportunity to take it much further. So I am building something truer to my original vision for the concept. I’m in a deep brainstorming phase.

I’m less focused on illustration, but still open for commission work, so feel free to contact me. Or hey, maybe you’d like to see one or more of your characters in a poseable, animation-ready sprite rig?

And an art post…

But I know some people like to see the occasional pretty lady around these parts too. So, here’s a pinup girl I drew a while back. She was going to go in an art book, but I’ve moved onto other projects.

I call this one “Beast and the Beauty”.

Thanks for reading!