Jelly Fish Named Azad and Marbles Blasted To XP

Talk about schizophrenic blog titles ;)

As I've said before, life of a mercenary is pretty cool in that you get to work on such different stuff. There's also that "freedom" bit although I find it kind of vague. It's true that as a freelancer you can always choose whether to work or not, but on the other hand, its like choosing whether to eat or not. What you can though, is choosing what kinds of project to work on without having to break a work relationship i.e. - leave your job for another just because your current employer has decided to tie themselves for the next year to a project that doesnt really interest you.
Which reminds me of a recent feature on Gamasutra about free agency. Quite an interesting read, if you havent checked it out yet. Clickity click here.

So I've been working on very different stuff for the last year. One, for example, was Marble Blast GUI reskin for Hasbro's PC based NetJet game system .
Plastic Games subcontracted me to spice up the original's GUI a little and also make it a bit more "kid-centric" since thats the target audience for NetJet.
The basis was original Marble Blast:




and in the end it was turned into this:




And then again, I could also work on concept art for sureal sci-fi shooter-adventure Galaxy Rage where player travels stars with jelly fish-like organic space ship named Azad, hunt for treasures happens in landscapes that seem to be pulled out of incoherent dreams and ship's mission control and news-filter computer has a crush on the main hero.
Here are some sketches for the ship's bridge, showing the evolution of concept. It was supposed to be organic in nature and we came up with an idea that it's floating in a swamp-like environment, with its very own mini ecosystem.





I was provided list of elements that should be on the bridge as well as things that player will have to do there and a basic layout done in Google Sketch that I used as the starting point.
I have to say that I cant wait to see it in action :)

Hmm.. did I mention in my title that .plan is image-heavy? Ah well :) Just to make it all worse for those on dial-up - here are couple of personal thingummies, not meant for anything specific.