Judge Woody from "Super Omega Deathbattle Warzone Apocalypse" has announced his first round of Honorable Mentions today on the game's Facebook page. He'll be doing that all week, leading up to the nine winners on Friday. Your best bet is to "like" their page, as everything will be announced there first.
Ladies and gentlemen, your first batch of Honorable Mentions, along with Woody's comments. Congratulations to these folks on jobs well done!
Coyote
JohnnyGear's "Coyote” was possibly my favorite design out of all 400+ submissions. There's just something about this design that I absolutely love. His left arm is hidden, indicating his covert nature, but his left hand is tossing a lit bomb, which is about as overt as you can get! His costume is so simple, but he still manages to look fresh, unique, and dangerous all at the same time. I picture him as some sort of Deathstroke-esque assassin or Batman-esque vigilante. I tried my best to work him into the promo piece, but when it came down to it he just wasn't quite colorful or diverse enough to fit in with the other characters. It should be noted that Livio was just now able to see Coyote and is devastated that we won’t be able to include him in the promo.
Lillian
First off, I just want to say how incredibly talented designer HeadlessGeneral is. Almost any of his designs could have been chosen as Honorable Mentions, but I believe Lillian is the design that trumps all the others. This is a truly impressive piece of Hero Machine work. It doesn’t even look like it was done in Hero Machine. It looks like it was just straight-up hand drawn! I think Lillian is a very cool character who would be right at home in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I looked at different ways I could fit her into the promo piece, but she just didn’t quite mesh with the other characters as well as the rival design I ended up going with. I came *this* close to swapping out a few of the winning submissions just to fit Lillian into the final piece.
Biohazard
Myro’s “Biohazzard” spent quite a while sitting in my “winners” folder, until he was dethroned by a rival design. I think this design is absolutely killer, but unfortunately we got more tech-based designs AND radiation/”green energy” designs than almost anything else, making that a very tough area to excel in. Regardless, I would have loved to see what Livio could do with this design. Myro should know that taking Biohazard out of the “winners” folder was not an easy decision.
Abominal
Abominal’s self-titled design was a perfect example of an incredible piece of work that was just too hard to see behind the complicated pose and special effects. I was totally blown away when I saw this piece, but was unable to really see enough of the actual character design to make it a winning submission. This is still an amazing example of not only Abominal’s incredible talent, but also of the power and versatility of the Hero Machine system.
Major General Benedict Davis Brassington
Starfighterace421’s “Major General Benedict Davis Brassington” was an early submission, and has consistently been one of my favorites. Not only would a character with his name be right at home in a game with a 23-syllable title like ours, but he just looks so badass. I could totally see him chilling with Teddy Roosevelt and the Dos Equis guy right before they rode some hippos bareback into the Amazonian jungle to recover the lost gold from some sort of evil jungle demons. The Major almost made it into the winners circle, but eventually I was forced to go in a different direction and give the Major an honorable discharge.
Asylum
DiCicatriz-9’s “Asylum” was one of the more visually stunning and original submissions. She is just so cool looking, and was completely unlike any of the other submitted designs. I would have loved to include her in the final promo, but I just couldn’t figure out a good way to work her into the design. I know there are going to be more than a few designs I regret not going with, and I imagine Asylum will be near the top of that list.
Awesome, honorable mention, is better then I though I’d get. And I’m in such good company too. Amazing designs all around.
We did get some just plain mind-blowing designs, but both Livio and I agree that Coyote is one of the coolest characters we’ve ever seen. He just looks so unpredictable and calculating. I really can’t express how awesome this character is. When we start working on additional promo artwork, I’ll probably approach you to see about using Coyote as a featured character!
I’m glad Asylum could get a shout out. I’ve always been kind of fond of her 🙂
I don’t know what to say about the praise, Woody. I almost didn’t stick Biohazard in, given that my own submission folder seemed a little tech-heavy, but I did like the very comic book-esque look to the picture. Thanks.
Funny story: Biohazard started out as Syndrome, a redesign of one of Blue Blazer’s characters. I didn’t think it would be cool submitting him under the original name.
Well you can rest assured he would have been included in the promo had it not been for a single rival submission. Hopefully you’ll agree on my decision when you see the finalists. With Livio’s background making Transformers look as awesome as possible, I was incredibly excited to see what he could do with your design.
Congrats to the Honorable Mentions, I enjoyed the reveals throughout the day. Good luck to everyone tomorrow and for the rest of the week as well, looking forward to seeing what comes down the pipeline.
on a side note so everyone can get use to my name change, I’m going to end my posts, for a time, as …
(formerly MartianBlue)
I don’t see any of my nine here so I guess I made it past round one 😀
Got a quick update for you guys. Our original plan was to release 5 Honorable Mentions per day from now through Friday, meaning 25 total Honorable Mentions. However, after a change of heart, we’ve decided there won’t be a set number of announcements per day. We might release 3 one day and 7 the next. This should make the whole thing a bit more unpredictable, and remove my limit of 25 designs. This also means I can just get all of the Honorable Mentions announced by Thursday night, and reserve Friday purely for announcing the 9 winning submissions.
Dont see any of mine. Dont know if i should be happy or disapointed. Fingers crossed Ill at least get an honourable mention
I was going to say pretty much exactly that…
But I’d also like to add, congratulations to Johnny Gear, headlessgeneral, Myro, Abominal, Starfighterace and DiCicatriz for the Honorable Mentions. Hey, it sounds like you all got very close to winning, so I’d say that deserves a “well done”! 🙂
Congratulations, Honorables! From the looks of it getting an Honorable Mention is going to be quite a feat.
So well done and Dog Bless!
I feel I should mention that this contest was judged on a per character contest, and not per designer. That means that having a character win an Honorable Mention does not exclude that designer from also having a winning design (which did end up happening…). That also means it was possible for a single designer to have more than 1 winning character (I believe 1 designer had 2 winning submissions). So please don’tbe discouraged by an Honorable Mention. They have absolutely no effect on your other designs’ chanced of winning.
That last post was sent from my phone, hence the typos.
(OK, I’m at my computer now, so let’s just try that again…)
I feel I should mention that this contest was judged on a per character basis, and not per designer. That means that having a character win an Honorable Mention does not exclude that designer from also having a winning design (which did end up happening). That also means it was possible for a single designer to have more than 1 winning character (1 designer had 2 winning submissions). So please don’t be discouraged by an Honorable Mention. They have absolutely no effect on your other designs’ chances of winning.
I just saw mine on the honorable mentions, that’s great news for me since I had a lot of work done on that character (as well as the others). By the way just a slight correction Woody: my nickname is “Kingslaughter” and the character’s name is “Archon Cybermage OlethroN” not “Kingslaughter_Archon” (nick) and “Cybermage OlethroN” as I saw it on the fb page. Just mentioning it and sorry for any inconvenience.
Also i realize the chest piece was a bit too much, i just wanted to show that he draws his powers both from tech and traditional magic as well. But any remarks (either positive or negative) are welcome so that I can improve my skills on heromachine in the future, so thanx for the advice. 🙂
Oh, ok. I’ll get that corrected on Facebook right now. And I don’t know how much advice you actually need. I believe you were the only designer to submit characters utilizing dynamic poses, backgrounds, and effects, where those things actually enhanced the character rather than getting in the way. And with about 90% of the submissions being primarily black or grey, it was very nice to see the explosions of color that were your characters!
Thanx a lot Woody! I always try to give my best for each character (in work, style, effects, poses, etc) and everything comes purely out of my imagination. but I still keep learning a lot in the process of using HM since it has so many amazing tricks and capabilities!
Congratulations, authors of these honorable mentions. You did a great job (at ruining all my hopes of getting any sort of ranking in this contest). Awesome creations all around.
Aw, man! Now these are the tasty tidbits that will keep me up at night with fanciful speculations. 🙂
An early congratulations to the designer who scored two wins!
Like in Facebook i also wrote here to I see how hard to choose the perfect nine. Everybody make a great work. I personally interest the other honorable mentions.
I assure you, it was not an easy decision. There were more than a few days were I spent more than 12 hours just clicking between 3 or 4 submissions, putting them in folders together in different combinations to see which ones worked best together. If it was just a matter of choosing the 9 most awesome submissions, it would have been a bit easier. The fact that all 9 had to work well together meant I had to make the painful decision to take out an incredible design more than a few times.
“If I had to give an award for best overall designer, it would have to be either AMS or Kaldath. Some of their designs are so far beyond anything I thought Hero Machine was capable of, I am inclined to believe they belong to a lost species of extremely creative bat-like creatures that sleep during the day and create mind-blowing Hero Machine art at night. ”
Well I do sleep during the day and work at night on the Graveyard shift!!!
I knew it!
The good inspiration coming in Midnight 😀
Some well deserved praised, Kaldath! 🙂 Now back! Back to your subterranean haunt and create us some more pretty pictures!
As I’m writing up these Honorable Mentions, I’m seeing a common theme of characters being outclassed by more colorful designs. I’ve included a side-note in an upcoming Honorable Mention write-up, but I figured I should include it here in its own section. So here is the excerpt from the upcoming write-up:
“As a side note, being colorful wasn’t a requirement for characters to be chosen, but each character’s colors needed to work well with the surrounding characters. For instance, the only spot [this character] could have fit into the final design would have been the middle of the right group, based on the other winning characters. The characters above and below that spot were both neutral colors, meaning I had to fill that spot with a more colorful design.”