Hi there! Welcome to my sometimes-dead, sometimes not dead blog. It mainly contains fandom-related stuff, my art, and a bit of everything else. My main fandoms are Megaman, Transformers, Steven Universe, Okami, and Vocaloid/UTAU, so expect the majority of the content here to be about those.
Longtime followers of mine may have seen my faux Mega Man Ultimate screenshots, which range from exemplary stage designs to full-on boss battles! However, it's been a little while since I've made another sprite piece of what certain in-game moments of Mega Man Ultimate would look like, and for my next screenshot, I knew just what I wanted to sprite!
My last faux screenshot detailed the electrifying battle against SLN-001, Zap Man, and seeing how easy it was to sprite full screens with the magic of tilesetting, I aimed to make a mockup of a battle against another one of the Synth Legion Numbers, Satellite Woman! And unlike Zap Man's simpler NES-esque boss arena...
... the boss arena of SLN-003 has a lot more going on!
Who doesn't love space? When it came time for me to decide which of the eight Synth Legion numbers to devote my next boss battle mockup to, Satellite Woman was my first choice, because that meant I got to sprite an out of this world background for her by way of tilesetting!
And there was a lot I could do with it, too. While I initially didn't have a whole lot of ideas as to what Satellite Woman's boss arena could look like, I did eventually come up with two goals: for it to have a Mega Man V feel to it as well as referencing her bio, which mentions her base of operations being exactly one hundred parsecs away from Earth.
This is what I came up with! One of the earliest design decisions I made was that I wanted to have Mega Man fall into the boss arena rather than walk into it— we haven't had a lot of robot master boss arenas of a vertical caliber since the original Mega Man! Fortress bosses have entrances of this type, so why can't more robot masters?
Secondly, the arena lacks walls, because I find that the quarters in which you do battle with Satellite Woman feel a lot more vast without them than they would with the usual boss-in-the-box formula. I first planned on having the satellite platform be shorter in width, where if you fell off, it'd be a one-hit KO, but I felt like that wouldn't be too fair (Even if Cloud Man did it first).
Perhaps the most appealing part about the entire background are the drifting satellites and the gorgeous view of Earth— both of which took me quite some time to sprite! The Earth sprite in particular (Which I think was the asset that took me the longest to sprite) fits snugly into a 32x32 tile, whereas the satellites make up a 48x48 tile.
The last design choice I'd like to mention are the colors in this piece. For Satellite Woman's boss arena, I wanted to stray away from the usual NES limitations and go for something a little more flashy— hence my decision to make the space background all kinds of blue hues instead of a solid black (Plus, if I went with the latter, you wouldn't be able to make out Satellite's complex sprites very well!).
I kept switching between purple and light green for the bottom platform, and when I couldn't reach a consensus, I tried a turquoise color to see what that would look like, and it made for a stellar in-between! It was always a given for the space station up above to be colored after Satellite Woman, so I didn't have a lot of trouble figuring out colors there.
And finally, as I've started to do for my art posts, this was the process I went about in designing the arena! Starting with a conceptual sketch of the room I drew in MS Paint, it follows up with a general layout made up of placeholder green and purple tiles, and from there you can see the final product start to form!
With design specifics out of the way, we can touch base on what it's like to be pitted against the connoisseur of the cosmos, Satellite Woman! Her battle takes a lot of inspiration from Star Man's battle from Mega Man 5, with the emphasis on the robot master constantly being shielded and zero-gravity jumping aplenty.
When she's not putting her Reflect Satellite to good use, Mega Man may attempt to land a blow on her... if she doesn't land a blow on him first! The only time you can do damage to Satellite Woman is when her shields are down or when she's firing lasers from her Satellite Buster (Pictured above), so it's very much easier said than done...
That is, of course, unless you arrive with her weakness weapon in tow!
Enter Glitch Strike, the weapon you acquire after defeating the bug-tastic Glitch Man! Glitch Strike allows Mega Man to speedily glitch a lengthy distance in any direction, passing through any projectiles without harm and— with precise aim— may ram into opponents. However, this ability comes with a hefty energy cost (Much like Tornado Blow in Mega Man 9), and you'll only see four or five uses of it with a full meter. Better use them wisely!
Well, that's about everything— this ended up being one of my biggest sprite pieces in a while, and it took a whole lot of thought and experimentation to look just right! I hope you've enjoyed reading through the design process, and more importantly the fruits of my labor!
MARCH US TOUR WITH CYBERTRONIC SPREE
We’re heading out in early March with our new friends, Cypertronic Spree, for a short knock-the-dust-off-our-cobwebs-before-we-head-over-to-Europe-for-our-very-second-European-tour tour! We’re super excited to get back out on the road to sample all the best burritos (we’re looking at you, Cosmic Cantina), Flying J chili, and Walmart parking lots the East Coast has to offer!
If you don’t know about Cybertronic Spree already, you should absolutely go check them out. They’re Transformers that play DiCola jams live. What’s not to love?
Grab some tickets below:
MARCH
12th – Atlanta, GA – The Loft
13th – Orlando, FL – The Abbey
14th – Gainesville, FL – High Dive
16th – Carrboro, NC – Cat’s Cradle
17th – Baltimore, MD – Soundstage (**tickets coming soon)
19th – New York City, NY – LPR
20th – Philadelphia, PA – World Cafe Live
**Baltimore is having a little trouble on their end with ticket links, but they said tickets should be live by tomorrow night (Jan 8th).
NYE IN APRIL
And in case you missed the last mailer, I hate to inform you that 2022 has been delayed until April 9th, where we’ll finally get to play our postponed NYE show at Exit/In in Nashville. Don’t think we’re not gonna do all the New Year’s Eve shenanigans that we had planned. Because we are. April 9th is the official new New Year for the entire Earth. Get on board or be left on the dock.
APRIL
09th – Nashville, TN – Exit/In (NYE Spectacular… in April)
EUROPEAN TOUR
Speaking of docks…. we’re boarding a boat in mid-April to sail over to Europe for our tour (not really about the boat… we’ll probably fly on an airplane. I just needed a segue to this paragraph), and Makeup And Vanity Set is terrified of boats (not really sure why I’m still on about the boat thing, but I started down this path and it’s a little hard to change directions now, so I’m just gonna go with it for a bit), so buy a bunch of tickets and tell everyone you’ve ever known about us and the Euro shows to make it worthwhile to Makeup And Vanity Set to face his fears about long-range boat travel (even if the potential boats and his fears of them were simply fabricated by me as a paragraphical segue and to express our desire for you to help spread the word over there about our band and these shows.).
APRIL
17th – Berlin – FRANNZ Club
18th – Amsterdam – Melkweg
19th – Paris – Les Étoiles
21st – London – Shepherd’s Bush
22nd – Great Yarmouth – Sci-Fi Weekender
23rd – Swansea – Sin City
24th – Oxford – O2 Academy
26th – Wolverhampton – KK’s Steel Mill
27th – Glasgow – Stereo
28th – Bradford – Nightrain
That’s all for now. We’ll see some of you in a couple months,
if you ever see or hear me say “okay…now you pissed me off” i hope you know im specifically referring to a deviantart edit my friends and i found years ago of woody from toy story but as vampire
kianamaiart
prguitarman
dailybridgerton
2087
turnnoffyourmind
