Becky Volcano High vs Stacy APW

I honestly didn't watch the PS5 livestream last week, I just got wind of some of what they showcased both from memes on Tumblr and by what the people I follow here were talking about, primarily the new Ratchet & Clank; it was in the former I saw one of what looked like anime crying dolphin getting choked by Demon's Souls in the TLOU2 strangling meme (which, BTW, has some hilarious variants, especially the New Vegas ones) and a screencap referring to something called 'Goodbye Volcano High'. I was honestly scared to look it up on Google/Duck Duck Go, so I moved on only to have my mom reference it while listening to video of Tim Pool and his friends discuss the PS5 livestream; finally, I got around to watching both that trailer and a few parody videos making fun of it and was both flabbergasted and quite honestly disturbed. The character designs were so weird and it took me a bit to realize that they were supposed to be dinosaurs and I took that revelation with a fair bit of horror.

Yeah, I honestly do believe the game's art style and the majority of its character designs are absolutely abysmal and on top of that, it looks to be yet another whiny high school teen angst thing, like there hasn't already been fifty thousand of those cropping up over the years. Also, what the hell is it with works featuring anthropomorphic animals lately and mundane contemporary settings? Between Zootopia, NitW, Beastars, and now this; jeez, at least Beastars is supposed to have weird shit about trafficking and lion Yakuzas (I barely know anything about Brave New Animal, other than it looks vaguely cyberpunk and stars a wolf dude). Bleh, just makes me want to play more Later Alligator and Tooth & Tail, least the former had fun with the idea of an all-alligator version of New York City, the goofy tone and art style helping a lot with that.

So yeah, let's just say I was less than impressed with what GVH is shaping up to being, hence why I started negatively comparing to the world that I'm conceptualizing. Not to toot my own horn but I firmly believe that I have far more interesting ideas with my weird little alternate world/timeline thing than whoever came up with the ideas for Volcano High. Certainly I have a more appealing art style, one that doesn't make you want to gouge your own eyes out like you're on the Event Horizon ("Where we're going, we won't need eyes to see.") and certainly better-looking and more interesting characters. It honestly feels good that I have better ideas than an entire team of writers, coders, and artists with thousands, maybe millions of dollars at their disposal and the support of a massively-successful console manufacturer/publisher.

That doesn't mean there are at least a few positives: some of the character designs (the orange dinogirl who looks vaguely like a Styracosaurus, the ambiguously-boyish pink raptor drummer, and some of the background characters at that school) are actually not too bad and I would have liked to see them in a more visually-appealing style. Even the MC's design (whose name is Fang, how unoriginal for a dino protag) would be good if you slightly tweaked it, like making her an Archaeopteryx hybrid in order to justify the wings; wouldn't you know it, in the process of making this piece, I did stumble across some fanart of her and wouldn't you know it, all of it makes her look way better than in the trailer. Even some that makes her, ah, quite appealing and even cute, like SSSonic's depiction of both her and that new Lombax girl. The idea of the female lead singer of a dinosaur goth rock band is actually an interesting idea for a video game protagonist, you could do something with that concept in a completely different game; something like a point-and-click, an RPG in the vein of either MOTHER/Earthbound or Persona, a Streets of Rage/River City Girls-style brawler, a rhythm game in the vein of Un Jammer Lammy, or a spectacle fighter similar to Lollipop Chainsaw/No More Heroes.

The animation is decent though you can really tell they only had a limited budget for that trailer because as soon as the MC's band starts playing in that wide shot, it instantly cuts to the burning year book. I also really like the drummer's tail swishing behind her/him/they/it in the establishing shot of that band before they start playing, I thought that was a nice touch given what the characters are supposed to be. And that's kind about it in terms of positives because most of those are in spite of the terrible art style; at the end of the day, the game looks like shit.

This started out as a pencil sketch I did for about 24 hours before doing it digitally, first converting it to lineart and cleaning it up on GIMP and then adding the colors in Krita (since I really have no idea how to work with colors and layers on the former yet); the whole process took me about three or four days and I'm mostly happy with the results. I'm kind of burnt out, I feel like starting on some sketches, maybe even painting, I guess we'll see where that goes. Also the text was added in MSPaint and the font size was as big as I could make it on there, the damn image is just that big.