Crys Odenkirk

Uncle Saam Wants You

Posted on July 6, 2013 by Crys

Digital painting and retro poster design, for recruitment purposes of Nexu Company gaming guild.

Nexu Company, Guild Website and Logo

Nexu Company is a Republic guild on Jung Ma, in Star Wars: The Old Republic. Their “story” is that they’re a special ops unit created after the Treaty of Coruscant.

The elements were chosen by one of their officers (the republic sigil, the colors, the font, and inclusion of a Nexu). I wanted to invoke the aesthetic of the old hand-painted World War II era unit logos, the kind you might see painted on the side of a bomber or a tank, while still fitting it into the sci-fi setting of The Old Republic, so I chose to contrast a “sketchy” nexu against the cleaner and slicker name and sigil.

Oh and if you’re wondering what a nexu is… think… a giant tiger with the Chesire Cat’s grin, full of sharp teeth, spikes behind the head (here hidden by the name), and the claws and attitude of a velociraptor… swinging down on you from up in the trees. They’re agile and use speed and sharpness instead of bulk and brute force — perfect for the mascot of a first strike unit.

I’m also one of the webmasters for the guild’s website. It’s built on the webs.com platform, so there’s nothing that I can do to affect things like the positioning of the main menu. It was a challenge to design around these immutable elements while making it look like they’re there because that’s what the design calls for. For the header graphic, I designed around screenshots of the basic website and made it semi-transparent to allow the template’s background to be changed by the webs.com interface without it interfering with the graphic.

New character wallpapers

Posted on April 18, 2013 by Crys

I play video games. Particularly, I enjoy games with lots of other people, “massively multi-player” games. Part of the fun of those games for me is in interacting with the other players and doing fun creative projects for them. I will always pick the creative project that someone else will use over the one that’s just going to sit on my computer or in my art folder.

Something I like to do is make computer wallpaper for people using their characters, and also avatars or forum signatures. Here’s a few I’ve done in the last couple weeks. These are all for characters in Guild Wars 2 using photo manipulation techniques to composite in-game screenshots (warning, the linked wallpapers are fairly large files).

Wallpapers

Jennen Phoenix

Mari Seelund

Srax Swiftmind

Forum Signature

Srax Swiftmind

Character Module Design Process: Wireframing

Posted on March 24, 2013 by Crys

Tonight I finished the low fidelity wireframes for the Character Module. Just how “low-fi” is low-fi is different for every designer from what I’ve seen; for me it’s the starting point for determining the format of the controls, not the final decision on it. Before the final design is finished, some of the text controls may be replaced by icons, for instance, particularly the edit controls in Screen 1.

The number and type of wireframes that I generate is dependent on the nature of the project, and on whether or not I am handing off the wireframes to someone else to develop from or doing that part myself. These wireframes are bare bones; I will be stubbing in code and clarifying pieces of the wireframe with a high-fidelity prototype, but this is sufficient for me to work from. If I were handing them off to someone else, I would do a second draft that specified icons, dimensions for components, font sizes, and any other information that a person would need to work from them. Depending on the project I might also create a wireframe with working interactive transitions. In this case, the only major transition is the edit mouseover on Screen 1, whose function seems pretty obvious to me from this static wireframe.

I’ve included a reduced view of Screen 1 and Screen 2. You may recall from the userflow discussion that this module has three roles: Guests (publicly viewable), Users (who are logged into the system), and Admins. Each screen will have at least one view for every role that has different content or controls. Screen 1 has one each, whereas Screen 2 is the same for all users so there is only a “guests” view.