Niklas Jansson

Line Art Extraction in Photoshop

Line art seems to print better if in 1-bit (no anti-aliasing). I discovered this during my various boardgame projects where often the reference scan was too low resolution and blurry for print. What I used to do then was to scale up to 500 ppi, sharpening, then go straight to threshold to produce...

Mutoid - Loose Docs

I mentioned posting some text stuff for the RPG project previously, and here it is, still a mess unfortunately. Even if I exclude the rules work and refer people to the Basic RolePlaying System, there is still a lot of world buildey stuff to write. I need regional loot tables, and big character g...

More Mutant Sketches

I've decided to gather up some of my Mutant images in a post. I did post them on Twitter, but it's difficult to browse (seems you need an account there to even view the site now?). My ultimate goal is not to make a www page for this, but PDF books (for drivethruRPG?). I've written quite a it of t...

Pixel-over Process - Part 1&2

Here's a 44 minute video, and a 1hr video where I wrestle with pixels, painting over some 16 colour PC Engine sprites (from spriters-resource).

Probably best to watch at 2x, keep in the background or skip around.

Part 2:

2022-10-29 17:44:40 +0000 UTC View Post

Mech Cleanup

Not much to say about these. Same procedure as every day, James.

Robots in Mutant don't are sometimes (30% chance) obedient to humans, Asimov style, but I think removing player agency like that in an RPG is a bad idea, though might include it as a defect one can get during character creatio...

Creature Cleanup

I've begun cleaning up some of the thumbnails from the previous post, figuring out colours and nudging shapes. There's not much extra detail. There are a few I might discard, but the rest might make an interesting fauna. Turning birds into larger raptors is a bit too fun perhaps. Quite pleased wi...

Idea Buildup

I've had the opportunity to catch up on some movies and series so I've been a bit distracted the last week, so I haven't had a long drawing session. But, I'm always drawing in some way. It's easy to carry a paper an pen around. This is such a paper – an A4 that I keep on a clip board, rotating ...

Creatures in Context

Here's a bit of cleanup work (see previous video), testing out animation, as in bringing life and scale into the designs.

The outdoor electrical cabinets are kind of the Swedish version of the fire hydrant. I'm guessing they'd last a long time since they're made for all weathers.

Sinc...

Mutoids Thumbnail Sketch Cleanup Process

Here's how I clean up my thumbnails sketches done on paper (15cm squared  in this case). I heavily used reference here (gathered beforehand as I  couldn't do it during video) because I need some Swedish animals and  plants as a base for this project. They'll be heavily distorted, b...

Duck Woman Drawing Process

I managed to make a video, though it almost broke my old machine (4GB RAM and only a few gigs of drive space left).

It's an hour long screen recording without commentary. Had to record a crop to keep final size down (1.3GB). Not all tool selections are in view but my tool presets are. I'm u...

Traveller PSDs

If you've been following my activity on Twitter, you may be aware that I've been drawing some Traveller RPG art, which is related to my Last Imperium art... I might migrate some of it into my own setting. I've also made a Traveller page on my site:

2022-08-26 11:42:05 +0000 UTC View Post

Last Imperium - Ship Continuation

I've been working on ship language and scaling a bit more.

A party is probably about 3-6 people, which might call for a Millennium Falcon sized ship. I'm generally not a fan of obscene ship sizes, so perhaps the current warp core technology (a single known working design?) puts a limit on t...

Last Imperium - Direction for Weapons

For the weapons I wanted to do something a bit different from what I've done elsewhere, and different from say, fictional modern looking guns, and different from sci-fi cool-guns with lots of mystery greeble. Since I have a slight medieval thing going on, I decided to mix antique forms with sci-f...

Last Imperium - Slimes & Ships

The Slimes might have a natural base form that's the most comfortable for them. Taking on a more elaborate human shape might require a lot of strength, time and training if it's something more elaborate than squeezing through a crack. While it could be fun for a player to instantly change shape i...

Last Imperium - Stuff

I've been thinking a bit on what humans would look like in the far future, and it really kind of depends I guess. In my setting I don't really isolate ethnic groups on various island planets as that would be cliché and tasteless ("planet Danish Wienerbrød"). With my 12000 years of space faring ...

Last Imperium - Creature Process

I managed to look up the book format used by the old Swedish D&D and Mutant. It's called G5 and measures 169x239mm. I cut that out of a paper just to get a physical feel of it again since I lost my old RPG books. Then I inevitably jotted down some ideas on the paper (not very structured as yo...

Last Imperium - TTRPG

In Sweden we didn't really have American role playing games, but quirky localized versions, so I'm still learning about what's out there. This time I decided to look into Traveller and Cepheus which is an open version of it. Since I wasn't wowed by Traveller's setting, and since I enjoy making my...

More Monster Roughs

I've been meaning to post something, but designing monsters is really difficult. Perhaps part of the difficulty lies in the fact that new monsters have no narrative legacy to give them weight and justification as designs, so they just appear... arbitrary.

Anyways, I suppose the only approac...

More Monster Stuff

This is also stuff from a few years back, when I figured out which type of presentation to use. At first I wanted to do some hand drawn animated graphics, but I didn't actually want to draw a million animations. So maybe a gameboy style could work? But then the resolution would be too low for Kan...

Edutainment Prototype

So, the Not-Pokémon game I mentioned earlier is actually not much like Pokémon. I think the main appeal of Pokémon is probably not the battle mechanics, or the grind, but the idea of collecting/hoarding and levelling up/optimizing, the same kind of appeal present in MMOs.

A thought occur...

The Guardian Legend quickie

This game has a lot of fun enemy designs, doesn't it? The protagonist design varies a bit between cover, localizations, concept art and sprite. I thought I'd try something quite robotic since she can transform, otherwise it gets a bit too weirdly contortionist. 

Including here a bit of...

DragonMech Original Cover

This is my original cover done in 2004. It has some good points, with the glowy sparks, ruthless onslaught, and all the nonsense in the background. The composition is even more nonsense. I never could figure it out despite reading all sorts of tutorials on the subject. I was commissioned to do se...

Another DragonMech

Here's "The Dignitary", a type of secure transport. I'm not really sure if this style is working here, the lines are very subtractive and I tend to not push hard shadows to build form. I was perhaps more concern with working out the mechanical aspect of the design. Might be more suitable to make ...

Revisiting DragonMech Work

I illustrated an TTRPG called DragonMech (for Goodman Games) back in 2004. It was more work than expected, so I rushed most of the pieces (<1hr each). Back then I was in the midst of my one-work-layer-sloppy-brush period. Looking at the stuff now, I find it quite lacking, but I thought it woul...

Doctor Who Page

I've put the Doctor Who stuff on a Patreon version of the old page. It's mostly the same material as here, with some text cleanup. It's easier to browse on a proper page, I feel. I suppose it'll will become public at some point but for now it's our little secret.

2022-04-18 22:46:30 +0000 UTC View Post

V1-STRIKER

I've worked on this project some more, keeping it mostly 16 colours for simplicity's sake, or perhaps old habit. The Amiga gets a few more colours for free with the 3-colour sprites though. Since sprites are vertical bars a single sprite can be used to make vertical beams. The sprite bars can als...

16 Colour Shmuppery

Detour: There's a 1987 arcade game by Taito/Toaplan called Flying Shark that I looked into recently for no particular reason. It has a few ports for other systems, including the Amiga. Often Amiga games were actually limited by the Atari ST specs as developers apparently wanted to publish on both...

AOoo it's a Snake

Sorry about not posting recently. I've been actually working, almost like a normal person.

Anyways, I just looked at the Amiga OCS (500) version of UFO (X-COM) and got thinking about the GUI presentation. The DOS version probably runs in 320x200 VGA mode 13h or something. A PAL Amiga can ea...

X-COM UFO...ufo

I decided to explore the idea of a front even though ufos are traditionally radial. Perhaps it doesn't quite make sense for it to be pointing straight down at what's a 45 degree angle to most other stuff. It's unclear how walking on the roof would work with all the extra detail there. Could just ...

X-COM Avenger

And here's the Avenger. I was trying to give it a bit of a turtle shell look. I angled the hull sides inward to make it a little bit more interesting than a plain tile box. I put some Macross Valkyrie intakes on the front edge of the shell to echo what I did with the Skyranger intakes (and also b...