The Curse of the Bonded Realities Cover Art (Part 2)

The update has passed peer review.

Now comes the agonising wait for the update to be reflected on the marketplace. Games have changed their boxarts before, so it shouldn't take too long hopefully.

Now, let's talk about this awesome new boxart.

I looked around for boxarts of other RPGs, hoping for some inspiration, but it took a while for any sort of image to eventuate in my head. I would have the player and Liam, back to back, using their respective attacks (sword and punch). This would evoke an image of being surrounded by enemies, which would be helped by putting lots of images of enemies in the background. I had to remove the enemies because it looked a mess at small sizes.

Now, remember in the last post I said that smooth gradients and shadows were a necessity in good boxarts? I haven't done that sort of stuff in GIMP before. I tried my best, but it took forever to do. I added shadows to the player and Liam, but they still looked plastic.

I later wanted to add Josh, facing the player, breathing fire straight at you. This would fill the "sword and dragon" necessity for an RPG boxart. I started on drawing Josh. Then something brilliant happened.

I received an offer from Dean Dodrill. Yes the Dean Dodrill, winner of Dream Build Play 09. When I was crying out for help before the game's release on the XNA boxart thread (see previous post), Dean wanted to draw something up for me, but was so busy converting Dust to XNA 4.0 that he couldn't. Argh.

But, he had gotten so bored with conversion that he wanted to do some art just to stop him from going crazy.

He wanted me to send him a draft. So I sent him my aforementioned new attempt. He said my work reminded him of Akira Toriyama (creator of Dragon Ball. I had to Google his name when he said that, sorry Dean!) and that he liked the poses involved, so he would keep them.

I won't post my unfinished draft because it looks like fried arse, but here's a bit of trivia. Dean wanted to recreate my draft in just under 20 minutes. It took him a little over an hour. It took me 3 hours to do the draft and I didn't even start the shading on Josh.

I received the first iteration of his finished piece. A little bit of feedback, and it was ready to make a boxart out of. I added a border, cut out some areas here and there, and behold:



Curse broken. Thanks Dean!