Hard Target was Underrated, IMO

@lordmo: grats

TOJam 2016 is over and, with that, I get to share some of the assets I worked on this year! These are enemies/encounters from… uh…

I’m not sure we got a name, yet! But I’ve been chomping at the bit to upload these, soo…. 

The executioner was gonna be Abdullah the Butcher, in the vein of Shin Megami Tensei II, but tbh it didn’t jive with the description I got, which was of an executioner whose faith kept him carrying out his duties hundreds of years later. So I based him off of woodcuts of Giovanni Battista Bugatti, the final executioner of the papal states, and ended up referencing his axe directly from the real thing (thanks to the Criminal Museum of Rome)

the evil painting was based on a perversion of El Greco’s biblical paintings, and I think I got that particular pose from his portrayal of the resurrection of Christ. I was pretty dead-set on going to hell for this one.

the purple/blue troll guy was kinda inspired by monsters from the first Quake game, but I ended up leaning pretty heavily on the works of Jack Kirby. I’m pretty sure I owe the hands almost entirely to GOOGAM, SON OF GOOM.

The cyclops creature was kinda taking some inspiration from all the various mythological chimeras, so I kinda put a boar’s head on a panther’s body and combined it with a cartoony anklyosaurus. Also since it had to be a cyclops, I tried to base its skull partially on that of an elephant, to match the supposed origin story of the actual Cyclops myth.

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The goblin knight was just described as “a goblin knight.” I love goblins and all but... man. Was not in love with that one.

(update over a year later starts now:)

Not sure this game is ever getting finished, so I don’t feel bad un-private’ing the original post and letting loose some of my influences.

Slime Man was just generically my sloppy attempt at imitating DOS and/or PC Engine-type pixel art and another nod towards Marvel-style grisly monster people. Didn’t get much time, understandably.

Imp (little guy between slime monster and goblin knight) are what they are. I don’t remember if there was any specific inspiration for the imp, tho I think I tried to give him a dachsund-y face for some reason? It might’ve been inspired by old woodcuts of imps. Maybe? I think maybe I just wanted to make a little doggy monster guy.

Finally, KRASGAARD (not the name of the monster ingame, Krasgaard is a dumb old college in-joke of mine) up top, I only had a prompt something along the lines of “enormous beast crawling the catacombs”. And I like drawing alligators, so.

There were a few more characters I touched up a lot but they weren’t my base sprites, so I won’t be reposting them.

And then there’s the boss (an archangel) that I never finished the sprite for:

The hand pose is the “blessing” symbol in early Christian art. Leg stance was very deliberately an attempt at a classical contrapposto pose. The six wings (two as wings, two as a mantle, two as a cape) was also my cheeky nod at the biblical descriptions of angels, without going full-on with a giant circle of eyes with eight animal heads or whatever.

The cloth hanging off of his blessing hand signifies something, I’m pretty sure, but I’m blanking.

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@lordmo / @imnotcryingillfightyou Puroresu Buddies x Shin Megami Tensei