Unhealthy obsession turned semi-productive exercise.
If you have a long enough conversation with me, I’ll eventually bring up Destiny, a first person shooter video game with MMO player engagement mechanics, released in 2014.
I lost years of my life to this game. From the PVE raid grind to the PVP gauntlet, I was hooked. What really stuck with me was the philosophy in the lore, the team at Bungie (and their contractors) did an incredible job of weaving multiple perspectives on ontology into fragmented glimpses of a greater whole. I’m a really big fan to this day.
CLEARING THE LIGHTHOUSE
Each week, a window of opportunity opened to players - if they went “flawless” - to journey to an exclusive area in-game, The Lighthouse. Home to the Cult of Osiris, The Lighthouse held exclusive loot for the best-of-the-best and neat little bits of environmental storytelling.
For my regular PVP team and I, we had an incalculable amount of fun adapting strategies, talking each other off the tilt cliff, and ultimately winning 9 games in a row to go flawless.
This illustration was of my player character - a hunter - decked out in Cult of Osiris regalia, exploring The Lighthouse for his first time.
I… spent a lot of time playing PVP. So much time that I was in the top 10% globally for a bit. It was gross.
Typical thing here: paint something cool, separate layers, set up parallax. Photoshop to AfterEffects, straightforward process.
It was - no exaggeration - a joy to take these rough paintings from a younger version of myself and update them for my current skillset. Cleaning up rough color thumbnails in this piece’s case, and separating the different z- elements and painting occluded sections was a really lovely trip down memory lane. If you’re an artist, try updating one of your old pieces some time, it’s really fun to process how much you’ve grown!
ERIS MORN
When Eris appeared in game, she brought warnings of an ancient evil awakened on Luna. Ghost-less and sporting a Hive Acolyte set of eyes instead of the biological norm for humans, I invented a story for her.
In the years since her fire team were dispatched to attempt to defeat Crota, Son of Oryx, Eris had survived in the labyrinthine tunnels and inverted cathedrals carved into our moon’s depths. I imagined she would have found the wish-dragon bone there, and fashioned simple weapons from the husks of her kills to ensure her survival, which is where the spear comes from.
Look, I was hyped about The Dark Below releasing, okay? Eris is a pivotal figure in the destiny universe, read about her here if you want.
Photoshop to AfterEffects pipeline. Standard tools, standard workflow.
