Martians and Monsters for February 2024! (Patreon)

This month I have a few horrible little villains to share with you, one from the Monster of the Month, and four from the Martian series! The Monster for this month is the Trundlefoot, which should have been a nice, easy little lay-up. It somehow ended up being a slog where I got stuck in a loop. I think it was all because I tried to dive in without really nailing down my shadows first. I think I got cocky and was still riding high on previous successes, and took for granted just how important it is to establish the lighting early on, before getting into details. 

Overall, I like how it turned out, but it seems like I made the classic blunder of skipping some vital prep work early on in order to save myself 15 minutes, only to then pay for it with 5 hours of unnecessary back-tracking and fixing. It's a bonehead tax, the kind you pay for absent-mindedness.  

I want to take a shot at a similar character next month, and do it RIGHT this time! 

Next, and on a happier note, I have some spiders for you! 

This set of creatures is a little self-contained experience where the player will have to kill hordes of spiderlings and piles of vile spider eggs quickly, before they grow into much more dangerous, larger adults. The spiderlings are practically harmless, while the yellow ones have dangerous venom-focused attacks, and the red ones use webs to ensnare and drain life. 

I haven't animated these yet, so no GIF today. We have been working on the effect system, and making it so characters burn up in interesting ways when they are defeated. I should have some really good previews of that next month! 

I'm having a lot of fun with these spreads and am very pleased with the progress we've made on this one. Not sure when we will have a print date, but my tentative plans are for when we hit about 30 of these spreads to start organizing them for print as an alien field guide book.  

-jg