🌳Crossy Road Castle on console is being showcased at BitSummit this weekend!!🦄🐔🐈‍⬛🦆

🎮クロッシーロード キャッスル is at Bitsummit! Some of the Hipster Whale team are hard at work over there, showcasing Castle on console! [official instagram, twitter posts]
Much credit to art boss Alice Walsh’s postcard concept & feedback!

I did the environment in Blender, rendered the characters and put this together as to her concept! I ended up doing pixel art for こんにちは (Konnichiwa, good day, hello, greeting for good day) and the back of the postcard.

I picked this as my Kyoto attraction to do – the Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Kinkaku-ji).

Many of the Kyoto attractions are spiritual, historical places so I picked what I felt was iconic, beautiful and peaceful.

As a newbie Blender person here’s my lessons from this piece:

• I got ambitious and got carried away making the temple to scale with the characters
• originally with version 1, it was much more detailed than this and noisy with the surrounding forest trees
• I did a whole 3D voxel illustration of the Golden Pavilion and set it up in Blender
  • it was overkill for a social media image
• did lots of things the hard way; lessons learned and processes/things to get used to
• spent too much time
• I had so many trees and I even did the little sign, islands, rocks, moss, trees coming out of the water, sky and path haha
• struggled with importing and using obj files when I should have used something else
  • it would have saved me time assigning materials to every single mesh…
• ultimately I couldn’t really use the 3D illustrations I made – I agree and it’s fair :’)

I was happy with them though, it’s just:

• not what was needed,
• it’s breaking the art style
  • (alas when you experiment and push the art style too far)
• understandably, characters can’t be depicted within the temple out of respect to the place
  • (I had one reference photo of formally dressed people standing there, I guess they’re the select few allowed to be there – politicians/famous people perhaps).

Understandably I had to tone things down to keep it to style and keep it abstract, simplified (with the temple) and compose as per Alice’s concept. Much thanks to Alice’s art direction again! Bringing me back to the big picture!

Anyhoo I think these didn’t end up as real postcards at Bitsummit but I don’t know right now :0

If you happen to be at Bitsummit, Castle is playable on console there!

Little personal venting

Mice troubles update: well more faint scurrying in the walls and another dedicated all day cleaning and moving big, heavy trash tomorrow. Not sure if there’s time to remove some more droppings and sanitise those places. I’m not sure how much will get done as it depends on energy levels and timing.

This is why I’m trying to post this now since I’ll be busy tomorrow with this. I dread it :’)
I think there’s more cleaning days to come but it’ll be slow and spaced out.

I fear they’d come in just like they did the first time I encountered them at my room :'(

I’m on edge still with all the noises ahhhh

I hope they’re not as bold anymore though and keep away!!

And bummed with having so much things I want and need to do but I can’t do it all. I’m just tackling things slowly day by day depending on my mild/low levels of energy. I’m going to be exhausted again :<

Catch you in the next one! I hope I get some more personal learning and arting time by then!

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