Feeling gloomy....

Eh, I hate this time of year. Everyone's so miserable and I can't exactly blame them, with the recession and all. Probably means my hopes of getting a part-time job this term are zilch - yay for starvation during deadline time!

Anyways, my main Xmas present still hasn't arrived (damn you United States Postal T_T) and I smashed my head on the card door a few days ago so I have this horrible achey patch on my left temple and forehead. Grah.

However, I was bought two books for Xmas on the unexplained - ghosts, UFOs that sort of thing. There's some nice stuff in there on Cryptozoology, specifically mentioned the Jersey Devil and "giant" creatures no one thought existed but do, such as the giant gorilla and giant squid. I even read up on some jellyfish 40m long that attacked a small boat - scary thing is, said jellyfish actually exists and the longest recorded one was 37ft long. So, yeah.....scary.
I've done some drawings and sort of come up with a Swimmer design I quite like, but I can't scan it in (don't have a scanner here). Talking of monsters, my brother bought me Dragon Quest Monsters Joker for Xmas - it' basically a DQ Pokegame but with Akira Toriyama's designs, giving it a very unique, humourous edge over it's competitors. More like Monster Rancher and Megaten than Pokemon, your monsters can be Synthesized together to create more powerful monsters in an alphabet tier system (lowest to highest: F, E, D, C, B, A, S, X) which gives you a good inidicator of what strength it's going to achieve. I've really been enjoying playing it and the monster designs are really, really good.




These are just some examples of the monsters I've seen in Joker. They're very cartoony, but look so bright and colourful when rendered in 3D, cel-shaded graphics. I just think they have a distinctive look, something I'd like to incorporate into my game. I've been looking at headresses for my None Walker and have been looking into The Endless Forest and Shadow of the Colossus, two games which certainly contain pagan themes in my eyes (masks, gods, nature etc) and have come up with some designs in which the headresses are "alive" as in they are either one with the creature or with their surroundings. I can't post them (yet) but I will continue doodling.