During the pandemic I played through a lot of games sitting in my backlog. Inspired, I started doing some mini fan art projects related to games that I played during that time.
I finally got around to playing through Metroid Prime to completion. Previously it had been a game that I had played at friends houses in short bursts, or had rented from a video store unable to hold onto it long enough to complete without fear of late fees.
Having grown up gravitating more towards the action-y FPS games of the time - like Halo, 007 Nightfire, or Time Splitters - Metroid Prime’s more methodical game design that emphasized exploration and learning the map never quite jived with my desire for quick hits of serotonin that I’d get from playing my brother and our friends in splitscreen matches of CTF on Blood Gulch.
Now coming back to the game as an adult I’m able to appreciate the slower pace of this game. The mood, and the atmosphere of the game are so well done! As a UI Designer, it’s obvious that this game is what most Sci-Fi games have been trying to replicate in their own way since it came out in 2002. The curved projected HUD and menus still look cool as hell almost 20 years later. The game as a whole, besides the controls which had a bit of learning curve, is still remarkable today. I’m eager to check out the sequels.
I wanted to see how far I could get making an illustration entirely in Illustrator. I was experimenting heavily with different vector patterns and textures. In the past I have tended to use Illustrator to block out base vector shapes before importing them into Photoshop to bring to final. This pipeline is simply because PS is the program I’m more comfortable with having come from an Illustration background. So here’s the result of my experiments!
After finishing the base B&W illustration of Samus, and all of that time trying to push myself to only use Illustrator…I brought it into Photoshop to quickly test out different color palettes.