As every year, I like to highlight some of my favorite moments of the past year. Especially in a year with so much bleh, it’s nice to look back on the good times.
(more…)-
-
Hello there, nice to see you again. I was going to write one of these each quarter, wasn’t I? Well, it’s been a weird year. I hope you’re all doing okay out there.
It’s been 9 months since I started working exclusively from home. In the beginning I loved it, then I hated it for a bit, now I generally enjoy it. I built a really nice home office, but, I don’t think it’s been my most productive period. Not because of working from home, but mostly I’m missing people. People to bounce ideas off of, laugh with, motivate me, and experience new things with. I’m super thankful I have a great wife here with me or I’d probably go a bit mental, but I definitely don’t feel as inspired as I normally would. I didn’t expect that to be such a thing, but here we are.
Still, I did things:
(more…)
-
-
Some of you may remember my webcomic about music and life in Amsterdam, Off-Stage. I worked on it during the twilight years of the traditional webcomics model, where you have a website and post pages each week and maybe earn something from merch and book sales (I never got to that point). It didn’t feel like the right format for that story anymore, but I wasn’t sure what was.
Fast-forward a few years, and we’re in a new era. Comics exist on social media now, and in a way that makes sense for our mobile-first world. Pages get chopped up into panels that fit the portrait-orientation screen of a smartphone. Platforms like Tapas and Webtoons are bringing a whole new generation of comics to readers.
So this week I re-launched Off-Stage on Webtoons! It’s a full remaster at a higher, crisper resolution, optimized for a vertical scroll.
I was not looking forward to having to chop up all the existing pages, but I must say the process was fairly quick, and it is opening up so many possiblities to write more naturally, now that the length of an update doesn’t matter anymore. Once I get to the point where I can start making new material, I’m sure that will feel great. For now I’m busy reworking all the existing pages and posting them week by week.
Head on over to Webtoons and subscribe to stay informed!
-
I put the question out on my Instagram which characters I should draw for the #sixfanarts challenge, and here’s the result!
It was a lot of fun to work on these, and I still have some good suggestions laying around, so I might do another one. Got more suggestions? Drop ’em in the comments!
-
Hello and welcome, to the first Hedgefield Quarterly Review.
As the name implies, this will be a place for me to take stock of what I’ve accomplished in the past three months, and share it with you. It’s a nice middle road between a handful of tweets, and a yearly review, which I tried to do last year but resulted in an OVERWHELMING Google Doc that I haven’t dared look at since. The plan is to write these as a bookend to the close of each financial quarter, a good a time as any to look back and see whether I made any duckets (or not).
(more…)
-
When I started working at Yoast, making new illustrations for each blog post was still a thing. We’ve scaled that back now to spend more time on the products, but in those first few years Erwin and me drew quite a few of them. Now that we’re all quarantined working from home, we decided to let everyone pick out one to print and hang on their home office wall. Looking back through the archive, I came across a lot of good ones again that I had forgotten about.
So these are, in no particular order, my favorites from the 150+ ones I drew.
10 steps to writing better content 
Dealing with 404 errors 
Contributing to WordPress core 
Crafting great titles 
Ecommerce filters 
Engagement 
Findable content 
How Google parses JS 
Protect your site with HTTPS and SSL 
Yoast SEO importer and exporter 
Keyword research 
Planning your content 
Managed WordPress hosting 
Mobile design 
Setting up a permalink structure 
Preparing your blogpost 
Reduce HTTP requests 
Related posts 
Tips for small businesses 
Site structure mistakes 
10% discount for Star Wars Day 
XML sitemaps 
How to Yoast
-
Figured I’d try my hand at a #drawthisinyourstylechallenge, this one set out by the wonderful @izzyburtonart. I tweaked it to look like my wife and our dog, set against the cliffs of Scotland, which we visited last year. Indeed, not a lot of things can beat a foggy beach.
-
-
Picked up the iPad again to do some sketching. I might color this one later. I like doing brightly colored drawings, but the elegant simplicity of a sketch often convinces me to stop there.
-
-
2019 has been a fine year. It started off strong with high hopes, then it dipped in the second half, but it finished off on a high note. As every year, I’d like to highlight some of my favorite moments.
(more…)
-
One of my favorite commisions from this past year was for a charity. They wanted a vision board in their office to remind themselves of their mission. I got to go wild on a great image collage drawing things I don’t normally draw, which later got overlaid with their mission statement and goals.
-
I did a light version of Inktober this year – I was too busy in october to participate, so I saved the prompt list and spent some days in November drawing my favorites from that list. That resulted in these illustrations:
-
Talking to indie devs, the topic of backing up game projects often comes up. They know they should, but they don’t know how or it seems too complicated. I was there too, but since I started using GIT, I never want to live without it. So I thought I’d write a GITting started guide (sorry). This isn’t by any means the way to do it, it’s just what I’ve found to work best for me.
(more…)
-
2019 is going to be a good year, I can feel it in my bones. I can’t explain why exactly, but it’s a combination of coming off a successfully completed project with a creative high, seeing a lot of opportunities appear and knowing that really putting my energy into it can have tremendous results.
So, here’s a list of things I’m hoping to accomplish in 2019.
- Build off the success of Minimal Raider to create a similar game which is longer and has my own style and narrative.
- Collaborate with other indie game devs to create better games, and perhaps build it out into a nice side business.
- Build up a local community of creatives.
- Get back into doing frame-by-frame animation and post short animations based on songs I like to Instagram.
- Speak at a conference.
- Learn to really play the piano.
- Buy a house.
- Super secret stretch goal.
-
Happy new year! I’m starting 2019 off right with the release of a small game I worked on at the end of 2018: Minimal Raider, my submission for the #tombraiderjam on itch.io. I’ve always been a fan of the Tomb Raider franchise, so I had to seize this opportunity to play with the formula.
It was a great learning experience working on this game. I’m no stranger to 3D level design, but I never had a third-person character who is able to traverse the space freely and climb and jump and everything. It radially changes how you layout a level. I’m using the excellent climbing system by DiasGames.
I built 80% of the level out of standard Unity cubes with different colors, and then enhanced some areas with more bespoke assets from Beffio’s Lost Lands pack. In a way you can still see a lot of the greyboxing geometry in the final version, which I think is fun, it’s like seeing the brushstrokes on a painting.
A topdown view of the level. You can see there is very little geometry other than what is necessary and visible by the player. And after dancing around it for a while, I finally figured out how to lightmap a level properly. This gives everything a more natural feel, as sunlight bounces off of surfaces to illuminate others. It’s not super easy to set up and iterate on quickly, but I managed to get pretty decent results with fairly swift bake times eventually.
This is also the first time I’m using Unity Timeline in a production environment, and I liked it a lot. I had already made a 2D animation project with it previously, so I knew the basics workflow, which meant I could quickly achieve exactly what I needed for the intro and outro cinematics of this game.
And finally the post-processing effects tie it all together. Bloom is essential here ofcourse for the scorching desert sun and the contrast between inside and outside spaces, then there’s color grading, tonemapping, and motion blur to give it a more cinematic feel.
I’d love to hear what you think if you check it out!
-
2018 has been a funny one. Even though it’s technically been a quiet year for Hedgefield lots has happened still.
Intern
For starters, I had my first intern! Kim Leunen from the HKU asked if she could intern with me for a few months, so every week we sat down and spent the day making games.
It was really refreshing to work with someone from the game world again. And like me, Kim started from illustration and now wanted to tell interactive stories, so our design vision was very similar.
We wrote a new concept from the ashes of Black Feather Forest, and built a prototype for her girlscout forest adventure game (a recurring theme in my career by now). I look forward to seeing what she creates.
Read the rest »
-
I don’t usually get around to doing inktober, but this year I was doing a lot with my iPad Pro, so it was easier to roll into it. What helped me especially was not to try and do the prompts list, but just draw whatever was on my mind that day. If there is an emotion behind it, I find it’s easier to start drawing.
-
I’m enjoying Godless on Netflix a lot so far. Though as much as they market it as “it’s a western town full of women!”, it’s the small scenes with Jeff Daniels that steal the show. Like this one.
-
This week is Remake Jam on itch.io, which brought me back to my first (finished) game project, Coyote. I’ve been wanting to make a sequel to that for ages, but I’ve got enough games I need to finish first. But in the context of this jam, I thought it might be fun to rebuild the original in Unity, using everything I’ve learned since 2011. I’m not sure I can pull it off in one week, but it’s already been fun to rebuild the town in 3D (using this great asset store package) and recreating the intro. I’m excited to work on this further.
-
I realized recently that I have a fascination for the ocean.
It felt like it came out of nowhere, but when I traced it back, it was surprised to find that it’s been something in the back of my mind for a very long time. Check this out:
(more…)
-
I was looking at these excellent Steven Universe backgrounds when I remembered a project I was working on a few years ago that I did some background sketches for. They show a school campus with Bauhaus and Fin De Ciecle influences in its architecture.
There’s something really cool about designing a location for games or animation. It’s different from static shots, you have to think about camera movement and making sure all the interactive things are visible at a good angle. My favorite thing is to account for the camera perspective changing when it pans around, so it seems a little more 3D than it is.
-
Poirot and Bouc catching up, from Murder On The Orient Express.
Had to pause this movie a few times to snap drawing reference, the colors and compositions are fantastic.
This is the first digital painting I completed in Procreate for iPad. I miss some of the finer control of a Wacom + Photoshop, but it’s definitely powerful and fun.
-
I was at the Swan Market in Utrecht last weekend, and while my girlfriend was busy selling her drawings, I drew some attendees on my iPad.
