I’m finally releasing the early Beta of the HeroMachine Warrior Mini for you all to play around with. You can find the page here; I hope you’ll let me know what you think of it, preferably in the comments to this post, but the site’s Contact Us form and my email are also fine.

It’s going to be buggy, so don’t be shy about letting me know what you find broken or what you’d like to see work better. Let me know if something is confusing, or doesn’t work how you’d expect it to, or if something strikes you as counter-intuitive, or pretty much anything else you think about it.

Hope you all like it!

Time passes so quickly that it hardly seems to pass at all until, every once in a while, you see or hear or do something that brings you up short and makes you take stock, realizing with something of a shock that you are not, in fact, the same person you were ten years, or five years, or even three months ago. These tire strips on the road of life can be good, horrible, or anywhere in between, but they all have the same stopping power to break the chain of continuity from moment to moment to moment that ties us in our current mental state as if it were the only one that ever could, or ever has, existed.

All of which is a long and flowery way around of saying “Holy crap, I was drawing some real shit two years ago, and I’m much better now. Has it been that freaking long?!”

Specific case in point, these two “Boots”, one from the Expansion Pack and the other one I just finished for the Warrior Mini:

Jiminy Christmas, that one on the left looks like it got partially melted in a laser firefight. I mean, come on, let’s be honest — it’s crap. And yet at the time I thought it was good. Which makes me wonder, is the one on the right actually crap and I am kidding myself into thinking it’s good?

Luckily deadlines exist so we creative types can’t keep plunging knives into our own hearts, never actually completing anything. I hate to think how often I have sent out work that was just “good enough, it needs to be finished”. On the one hand, I hate that I sent out something I knew wasn’t as good as it could have been. On the other hand, it got done.

I have to say, though, I’ve learned a lot over the last two or so years of doing character illustrations for the Caption Contest and, I think, finally getting a good handle on how to draw with the digital pen. My work’s getting much, much tighter and more solid looking, which I am so happy about.

Anyway, back to work, I am still cranking to get the Mini ready for beta tomorrow. And this time, when it comes to actually launching it, it will be the best I can possibly make it. Which will make me happy until the next time my life is brought to a screeching halt by looking at the boot on the right and thinking “That sucks!”

In the last two days I’ve made a ton of progress on adding more items to the upcoming Warrior Mini, including the Backplane, FacialHair, Shoulders, and Legwear slots. Here’s a quick character I whipped up just to try out some of the new Backplane items:

Things to note:

• The Backplane slot has a muscle-posed arm with no hand on it, which seems weird at first glance. I added it to the stage four times, flipping and rotating it, to get the extra limbs on this guy. I matched their color to the basic uniform to make it all look the same using the new Paintbrush tool. I added extra hands in the same way, rotating and moving them to fit on the ends of the arms. Doing it this way instead of how it is in the HM2 Expansion Pack lets you fit different hands on the arms for cooler effects. And, the hands themselves still have masks built into them, so you can stick extra weapons in them and they fit.
• The belt buckle is actually an Insignia, scaled down and moved lower.
• The robotic/mech Legwear item is Capri-pant length, ending at the calf. They weren’t quite long enough, and skin showed over the top of the Boots. So I just scaled the boots up until they matched, which you couldn’t do in previous HeroMachine versions.
• The vest Top turned out neat, using a light blue as the Line Color so the interior black showed through.
• The stubble beard’s color area was overlapping the line of the chin, making it look blobby and weird. So I Masked the stubble with the Head, and the lines now overwrite the color area of the stubble. That’ll make it possible for the stubble to fit on any of the Heads, no matter the shape of the jaw or chin.
• I was careful with the sunglasses (and the Headgear that has a glass front) to make the glass parts only affected by transparency. So in this case, you get the lenses see-through, but not the (admittedly very small) frames. This is important on helmets, because you might want to see through the colored glass but not the similarly-colored bits of the head cover part.
• I am having way more fun building this than ought to be legal.

Hope you like it! I am cranking along on this; I hope to have a testable version up this weekend, so be sure to check back for any announcement.

By popular request, for the first time I am using a panel for which you’ve already seen the dialog as our Caption Contest. The hand gesture is just too priceless:

The winner will receive their very own custom black and white illustration of whatever they like (within reason) by yours truly, so put on your thinking caps and come up with the best/funniest dialog for the balloon!

As always, the rules are simple: no more than three entries per person, left in the comments to this post, and which are reasonably clean.

Good luck everyone!

The winner of Caption Contest 33 is … MLS!

MLS wins a custom black and white illustration of whatever they like (within reason), which I’ll post to the blog when completed.

There were a lot of really good entries this time, I guess everyone gets inspired by floating wienies. I know I do. Here were the ones I thought were particularly funny:

• Meg: Unidentified frying objects!
• Vengeance: Cry havoc! And let slip the pies of war!
• Will: Oh no! My “dinerkinesis” manifests itself at the worst times!
• Niall Mor: This is the second weirdest breakfast buffet I’ve ever seen.
• Kaldath: I know I said I wanted my order to go but this is ridiculous!
• Rick: I said I like the same thing every day not everything the same day!
• Danny Beaty: I’ll never eat at Chez San Andreas again!
• Yusuf Mumtaz: The Telekinetic Waiters union is getting too powerful.
• Whit: This isn’t what I meant when I ordered a float!

It was a real toss-up for me between MLS’s entry and Meg’s, Vengeance’s, Will’s, and Niall Mor’s. All of them I thought were especially creative and funny and I had a really hard time deciding. I particularly tip my hat to Will for coining a wonderful new term; I look forward to Marvel’s upcoming “Dinerkinesis Man”, I think we can all agree that would rawk. I think what finally decided me in MLS’s favor was the whole concept of a guy deliberately setting out to create — on purpose — lenses whose whole purpose was to levitate food. That’s just awesome. And then imagining what kind of outfit that kind of guy would come up, that just cracks me up and tickles my brain in just the right way.

Many thanks to everyone’s awesome entries this week, they are truly inspired. Congratulations to MLS, and to all of the honorable mentions as well. Great job everyone!

Your chance to win your own custom black and white illustration of whatever you like is coming up in just a bit, so be sure to check the site often!

Here’s a screen grab showing the way the Insignia slot is really going to make some cool things possible:

I’ve chosen the banded shiny metal Top here to serve as the base. I selected a round Insignia, colored the outside orange and the inside light bronze. I checked the “Dupe” box, and added a chevron-shaped insignia, made both color areas orange, flipped it top to bottom, and scaled it narrower to fit inside the previous circle. I then set the outline of the chevron to 0% visibility, so I just had the color areas.

Finally I chose a square Insignia and sized it to fit the width of the character’s waist. I chose lighter and darker orange for the two colors, and changed the alpha for the inside color to 60%. I added the scale pattern to make it look like chain mail, and finally Masked it with the Top item, so you only see the Captain America-ish stomach band.

Pretty neat, ain’t it?!

(With thanks to Superdickery.com)