The Yumemi Hoshino She Told You Not To Worry About

Next was doing a very rudimentary functionality test with a static enemy. This is showing lots of promise.

So, in so many words, the horizontal tests did not pan out. Instead, I'm deciding to go hellbent for leather, keep playing with the trick perspectives I've been experimenting with for the past couple months and do a twin-stick game.

Had about a month of distance from my game project and after some tests, I really didn't like how some of my visuals worked in a vertizontal perspective. That one's gonna be for if, or when, I learn 3D modeling, I feel.

So what's my next step? I'm wrenching at some horizontal assets.

This is the planet the Last Dancers must invade to rescue Mimi in the game I've been cooking: Cydeps Major. Roughly 80% of its surface is covered in ocean, and its major landmasses are the two polar ice caps. The equatorial landmasses are less like continents and more like extremely extensive archipelagos, and pretty much everything has evolved to live in brackish estuaries. It's a bear to find anything in the cityscapes and mazes of islands if you're not actively searching - the bad guys set up here for a good reason.

This zoomed-out asset picture shows it's supposed to have an orbital ring. It'll be a special effect I'll have going to go zooming past sections of it in the second level, but in the first you get to see the ring as...well, a ring. It's a background element; you're nowhere near close enough to see proper details.

As for the place you're fighting across in the very first level, this is Cydeps Major's moon, Cydeps Minor. It's zoomed way in on the actual level, so you get to see all sorts of greebly little details on the surface as you go. The crustier bits of Cydeps Minor's borders were a result of me creating these surface effects by continually shrinking and blowing the sprite up to jumble pixels, blur them, re-jumble them and generally direct them to get this pitted, irregular, craggy surface. Looks like it'd suggest some gnarly rock formations though, right?

I know I said earlier that asset creation is sometimes unsexy, but these ones are ones I liked doing. I used a bunch of tricks with Aseprite to cheat my way to these greebly planet designs that look interesting close up or as background elements for the first couple levels.

First off is this rolling Wyvern sprite, which banks back and forth when you move left or right. The visible hitbox in the middle was something I was sort of forced to add after realizing that pretending I was a high school freshman again and playing Gradius Galaxies didn't work. Eyeballing the cockpit as a hitbox sucked and the orange diamond became a much saner solution.

This is an asset I'm designing for the first actual level of this game. It turned out to be too beefy-looking to be used as what I originally intended, which was an enemy that was seen in groups and took a couple shots to kill, forcing the player to pick between getting used to the missile mechanic or to concentrate their fire with their guns. That became the job of the other sprites in this post.

That would be these fighters here. You'll notice they're part of a color language I have going: enemies that are the end of a spawn chain are black, or some other color that makes them pop like all the yellow bad guys in my previous posts. Red enemies, however, are signals that you have to kill them to trigger other enemies to spawn, which in turn makes them spawn more enemies that are timed so they can keep your multiplier alive.

You have three seconds from the first enemy you kill to at least hit another enemy and keep your multiplier growing. Fail and you're back at 1x score. Black enemies, especially the ones spawned from combo chains of red enemies, are worth extra and spawn score items that fill your special weapon meter as well as paying out. As for what these are in-universe, these are Onyx fighters, patrol craft and sort of area defense interceptors that fit into early warning systems placed relatively far out, like at a planet's lunar orbit, where the game begins.

If anybody's been following along, sorry I've been so quiet. Asset creation for this shooter isn't exactly the sexiest thing ever, but I can share some of the things I've been designing.

A rep as a bad bounty hunter is a wide target…how bad we talkin', here?

Progress now that I've made enemy patterns, a new background, new clouds, new lots of things.

Making patterns is surprisingly tricky, but I like this flow I've got going.

What's next? Probably changing those missile sprites since I like them less than the bullets.

Trying out a new enemy warning system with more telegraphing, along with adjusting the cloud effects and enemy missiles that require more active dodging. Score items are also now attracted to the player so there's no pressure to go through fire just for some more points.

I've been getting over some artist's block by relearning Shmup Creator. This is the product of a weekend, plus tonight.

Contemplating making the delay for the larger missile wave during special attacks longer, but there's a nice feedback loop with using them aggressively, so I might keep it.

A ship design and some color schemes, that's all. I'm just glad I got a design down for the Persuaders, at last.

Alright, what's a swarmfighter? If you're a Star Wars fan, picture a TIE Fighter that's as sophisticated as an X-Wing. They're short-range and designed to be produced and deployed in massive wings, which are all networked to cover wide swaths of a battlefield in mass deployments. They also tend to be really light and optimized for the specific operational tempo of frenetic total war, minimizing downtime, maximizing replenishment when assets are lost, and being designed to crush an enemy under sheer operational weight as well as individual firepower. Swarmfighters are harbingers of truly bad times in the galaxy, since the maintenance costs for enormous wings of weapons that don't do great on things like long-range patrols or lower-intensity conflicts are prohibitive and they only make sense when the apocalypse comes. That said, a swarmfighter is typically one or two refits away from serving in a more peaceful galaxy...whatever that means, since it's utterly racked with conflict and has been that way as long as anyone cares to remember. So what's the Persuader, then? A success story. It's a ubiquitous swarmfighter that's getting on in years and is starting to lose its technological edge, but retains the raw performance to be a threat, and has enough modularity to be used in conflicts of any intensity or length. Mercenaries love them because they've served around practically any star, and there are as many official variants as there are operators - a truly enormous list. The custom variants flown by some Hunters are the stuff of nightmares.

Since @tonibabelony.bsky.social and I follow one another I'd had the idea of what the KYTHERA might look like in Waltz's universe - which means she'd be a carrier, most likely, and carry fighters. In this case, plentiful Persuader swarmfighters in a very familiar color scheme.

Even my Battlemechs are tall, leggy and shapely. I know what I like.

Felt a little drained tonight, so I did a black and white image instead of something fully colored. I wanted to see if I could imitate the art style of Battletech TROs with a custom Marauder rocking a Partial Wing.

Tag @swingfire.bsky.social as I think he's awesome and could always use the bump.

I really wish I had more original art to share. I feel like I'm repeating myself too much, but I have only so many "finished" pieces done at present.

1. Countach
2. Area 88
3. Ah My Goddess
4. Nana to Kaoru

I jump around between drawing Gio and his pals as children and adults, since they start their career as heroes as kids and carry on doing the superhero thing pretty much all their lives. Delia is Gio's best friend, bookish and sharp - I conceived of her as the by-the-book cop to Gio's loose cannon. As for her outfit, well, I saw something very much like it in a mall display window once and ever since I saw it, I wanted to draw a character in something very much like it.

I have some other settings; the one Gio is from is separate from the one the Dancers are from. This is a character from Gio's neck of the woods: Delia Kowalski, his best friend, as an adult.

Flying machinery from a distant, vanished time for humanity, when they went by another name, and so did Earth.

Darien Bryce, call sign "Waltz," leads the flight. Short on experience but bit on heart, it's his drive that rouses the other Dancers to action wherever they go.

Rati Loomi, call sign "Tango," is their close-quarters expert and knows all about every corner of the galaxy, its armed forces and its other mercs.

Silk Landstar, call sign "Foxtrot." Physical fighter, assassin and naive as all get out. The fact this clone left her creators to fight them at Waltz's side shows what the Dancers are capable of, and what galaxy-shaking threats they battle.

The Last Dancers. Guns for hire led by a bleeding heart from Earth, hired when time is of the essence and lives are on the line.

Rati's specialties are fighter and on-foot combat in close quarters environments. She's an expert and a hotshot who will prove her claims to being the best at what she does at every opportunity, who left her old contract to fly with the Dancers purely for the challenge - that, and her old wingmen just couldn't keep up with her where these two strange rookies could. With experience on her side, why is Darien allowed to still lead? He's the one with the vision, and the drive to lead the Dancers. Rati finds him very impressive and sees that he can learn the ins and outs of warfare as done in the wider Milky Way extremely quickly, but he doesn't know the relationships the galaxy's mercenaries have between one another. That's where she comes in: Darien finds the best fights, Silk holds her own in them, and Rati makes sense of the people fighting in them. Together, they can follow pretty much any request a client has of them, and every successful mission drives their contract prices up higher.

Waltz's other wingman is their only actual combat veteran: an experienced Hunter from the Ashtar stellar power, named Rati Loomi, callsign "Tango." Together the three are known as the Last Dancers.

Silk named herself after a thing she liked: the clothes she shopped for during exercises her creators had set up for her to pass herself off as a normal person. In her case, that meant a city girl in a habitat ship known as the Landstar. The trouble with making a really smart, highly independent supersoldier is that she decided she wanted to be free, and so she gave Darien a contract in secret to help her extract herself from this situation. After he helped her do this she became his first wingman, turning his mercenary work from a one-man job to a proper, if tiny, squadron.

Waltz's first wingman: Silk Landstar, callsign "Foxtrot." She's a cloned supersoldier known to her creators as "Asset R9F, Antibody Program." Give Yor Forger wings and the skills of an ace fighter pilot and you get why she's so dangerous. You also get a good idea of her social graces/lack thereof.

Slightly brighter version done without the wash effect I had to suggest nighttime. Lemme know what one works better.

So the question is; how do you kidnap a Pleiadean, much less a Daughter of the Light, anyhow? Trickery and things they can't detect, like things you can't read the mind of. Like these Tape Boy-like devices. Isolate somewhere they won't just run off, like a promenade or something, then make your move. Stunning devices are often used to aid in this, and a Pleiadean whose reflexes and telekinesis are nullified is pretty much doomed.

Daughters of the Light have a terrestrial dress they put on if they don't expect to fly around or explore too terribly much for their duties. Mimi's displaying her own while...being Mimi.

Poor girl.

I get ahead of myself a lot. What can I say?

I realized I never actually showed what the "lemon dress" looks like now. Oops.

Demonstrating how Pleiadeans are treated by some dark minds is Daphne. So, why are they treated like this? Well, as previous pictures mentioned, Pleiadeans are super-psychics. Psychic power is an easy thing to turn into energy, especially to weaponize, with entire wars being fought with psychic technology, and Pleiadeans are pacifists who refuse to go to war unless someone forces them to. So how do you force one to? Oh, things like using the tall super-psychic supermodels who look and act like Ah My Goddess on stilts to be living batteries for technological horrors beyond imagining. A combination of heavy restraints and painful focus-dampening treatments keep the Pleiadean from resisting until it's go time. No, nobody credible uses this. They're all pariahs. The age of psychoweapons is long gone because no arms treaty would ever allow it, and anyone who decides the Milky Way is big enough to flout these treaties learns they're not in levels of intensity measurable only in screams. This behavior is the reason why the Pleiadeans are all so allergic to war: there was a time when this was how they were all treated. During one of these Psychic Wars, they were a conquered people of slaves. It was the one and only time they ever turned to war: to revolt against their masters and destroy the fleet of monsters that were rampaging around the Pleiades. Nobody wants those times to return. Nobody. But people still try to force the Pleiadeans back into chains, and their eyes turn to Hunters like Darien to be their guardians, especially seeing that the Outriders were the last ones who really meant it when they vowed to protect the Pleiadeans. Darien, powered by love, seeks to keep an ancient promise...

This is older art again - note the lemon dress doesn't have its pink bits, and the shoes are different. I mentioned Mimi gets kidnapped a lot, right? So that happens for one of two reasons: Daughters of the Light are by definition snoops and spies when they're acting in a watchdog capacity, and being the least discreet things in local space by a lightyear, they get caught a lot, but the other reason is a problem with Mimi herself. Mimi pushes herself really hard - too hard, putting herself in too many risky positions because she wants to be the absolute best she can be, and it's only lucky that she has friends that look out for her because it leads to her getting serious cases of blinders. Her adventures with a legendary Outrider make her even more high-profile, so she's one heck of a target, albeit one that takes enormous resources to snatch. Where Mimi really excels is as a pilot, and above that, a negotiator and moderator, so taking her to the halls of power and letting her talk and get others around her to start talking is where she truly shines. That's why she's not being allowed to talk in this picture, naturally, if you don't count begging. True to her nature, when it comes to blows she'd rather run, taking flight with telekinesis and unleashing superhuman speed - something she can't exactly do if you box her in in a hallway or a small room.

More uploads of art I had saved for a while: first demonstrations of the hazards - a bunch of the hazards - Pleiadeans face out there. Also, enjoy the normalized proportions; can you see the differences between these and the prior post?

Placing the hips and getting leg length ratios I liked to use as rulers to all the other limbs was kind of a pain, and I struggled to figure them out as this older drawing makes clear. I studied proportions of characters like Umbra Witches and the ladies from Stellar Blade until I got it right. This is supposed to be one of Mimi's peers, Daphne Atavi, who is a good enough demonstration of Daughter of the Light dress codes: the bodysuit panels are set in stone and don't change, but their colors do, to a point: the yellow and bronze as seen on the panels at the thighs and in the decoration on the chest are always static, and the veil must have the golden color somewhere in the gradient. There's always piping, and the colors otherwise are up to personal preference. Daph herself is kind of the big sister of the loose group of Daughters that Mimi is a part of and is their de facto leader. If contracts from the Daughters of the Light for some daring Hunter action come to Waltz, they're usually through her.

See how the torso is longer here? I didn't like how that looked from some other angles and poses, so that's what had me tinker with the proportions. I'm also still a little agnostic on if this style of hair highlights and shine or the blockier style I use is the one I should keep to moving forward - I prefer the blocky style right now because it fits better with the really thick lines I incorporated. This is Clio T. Altair, who shows what a Daughter at the start of her journey in the Daughters looks like, also known as a "Younger Daughter." She has a head decoration with only one wing, doesn't have the full circlet yet, and doesn't have her veil: she's also not allowed to do any sort of ministry or watchdog duties without a full-fledged Daughter or higher present. What Clio is personally good at is medical duties: she became a Daughter after surviving a disease that nearly killed her in her youth, and decided to join their medical wing to be a doctor without borders.

As for what a Daughter ranked higher than Mimi or Daph looks like, and as an example of me looking for ways to design planetside dresses for them, here's the lady at least these three Pleiadeans are supposed to answer to: Elder Daughter Sagitta Aeternita. I kind of figured making the skirt and veils really long and embellishing the circlet into a full sort of headdress by adding more wings would be enough to sell the idea, and you can see that going for a sort of Imperial style skirt in where it starts works really well with these elongated shapes. At least, that's what I think.

It took a while to get both Daughter of the Light bodysuit designs and proportions right. So was coming up with other outfits that fit the look I was going for: the bodysuit look that people like Billy Meier reported in their testimonies, but with a pronounced flair to them.

I didn't like how dark the transparent one looked so I did some alternates with a couple gradients. I did some extra colors, too, just to see what the "standard" Outrider look would look like, and what a combination of standard red and instructor black might appear like.

Darien is the first Acheran Outrider to appear in Earth millennia. They were bio-augmented, cyber-enhanced, psychic supersoldiers who were designed to replace WMDs using precision special operations and devastating fighter strikes. He wears the colors of an Outrider instructor: they were black and purple in an aggressor scheme which was opposed to other Outriders, who wore white and red. The gold piping and markings are an indicator of high rank, since he's the only one and its highest ranker by default, and the emblems on his body are his personal symbol on his right sleeve and helmet, while on his chest is the emblem of the Hunters, who he answers to: a winged beast holding a sword and shield.

Took some time to do an updated picture of Darien in uniform, under his callsign "Waltz." Also finally solidified a design for his helmet.

Mimi Praesens. Psychic diplomat from the Pleiades, really tall, frequently endangered for her relationship with a charming mercenary that becomes her chosen guardian.

Mimi is a Daughter of the Light, which is what the Pleiadeans spend a defense budget's worth of resources on since they're pacifists that don't keep an armed force. The people from the Pleiades are super-psychics who are allergic to the ideas of war and combat, and Daughters use telepathy to preside over things like peace negotiations and summits. There's another side to the Daughters' service, though: they are able spies, watchdogs and whistleblowers who investigate the machinations of warmongers galaxy-wide, and there's plenty in a Milky Way where conflict is rampant and escalating despite the best efforts of organizations like the Daughters.

When she's actually doing official work, no, Mimi doesn't wear the lemon dress. This is what she looks like acting in an official capacity.

It goes something like this: design engineer and ballroom dancer Darien Bryce is a skirt-chaser from Earth who gets contacted by a UFO that explains to him that humans are ancient spacefarers, Earth was one of their bases, and that it's currently being overrun by an armed gang. He is recruited by the UFO's AI as a Hunter, an elite mercenary who's basically a fighter pilot/commando for hire, and augmented to use all of the UFO's technology, from its weapons to advanced stealth fighters. On his very first mission, Waltz rescues Mimi, a pacifist diplomat from the Pleiades who was looking for humans with psychic potential to teach. They find themselves getting into a lot of adventures as Waltz assembles a bigger and bigger collection of friends and wingmen, and Mimi and her friends get kidnapped a lot.

Introducing the two main characters of this fighter pilot story: Darien "Waltz" Bryce, that'd be the brown-haired guy, and Minthe Milione "Mimi" Praesens, who would be the tall lilac-haired space goddess.

You can tell this one's a little older because I hadn't quite figured out starfields yet.

This is one early concept for what his fighter is designed to look like. Called the Model 614 Wyvern, it has a lot of design details that are supposed to say "stealth," but they're open to interpretation. It's a work in progress, as my bad starfield in the back shows.

Dogfighting in the setting is done under heavy jamming and counter-jamming, at extremely high speeds thanks to mature FTL engine technology and primarily with missiles, "smartlight" guns and decoys. Also note: better starfield.

But what I'm really working on at the moment is a sci-fi thing about a mercenary fighter pilot and his friends, lover and foes.

This little guy is Giovanni "Gio" Escudero, from a setting I kick around where the arts empower magic. An action movie fanatic with tremendous magic potential, he took after the look of his parents' stash of 90s action movies and took the long-haired look entirely too far. He's a young crimefighter, though not in this ski jacket...

...that'd be his look here, in costume as Star Caliber, empowered by his vision of what an action hero should be. Clean-cut, fast, and the greatest marksman in his home city of Belle Woods, his arsenal of summoned and enchanted weapons don't shoot normal bullets, but magic spells that do whatever he needs them to, picking them with a snappy one-liner as an incantation. He believes that being an action hero means saving the day, getting the girl, and going home, to include even the bad guys being intact and ready for delivery to the slammer. His can-do, never-say-die attitude and friendly nature get him a lot of friends and teammates, which is good, because he never gets much of a break from his enemies.

Some samples of what I'm about: the full-sized versions of my avatar and banner.