04 August, 2008

PAX 2008: Prep

The Penny Arcade Expo is coming, and I'm getting ready. Mostly I've been using GIMP to work on art projects.

Last year I made what I hoped would be a conversation piece, a shirt with lots of gaming stuff to talk about on it.



It failed. A couple people I was talking to already would ask about it. But there was way too much interesting stuff at PAX for anyone to be bored enough to start checking out t-shirts. Plus there was no focal point. If I want to meet people via a shirt, the design must focus on exactly one element of quintessential awesome that will make the kind of people I want to talk to run up for high fives.

I'm actually not sure if I want to make a t-shirt at all this year. I mean, it would be fun, but would it really serve a purpose? After all, this year it's all about the buttons.

- PA (Penny Arcade) forum icon (Jason from Blaster Master)
- Van Gogh (cause I kinda look like him with my hair short)
- as a mandelbrot fractal
- PA Adventures character

These are the options I'm currently considering. I've generated (or stolen and reformatted in the case of the game art) more images, but many were for t-shirts I will probably never make. One idea was to do a shirt for Bully, one of my favorite games I've played since PAX 07. I don't remember exactly when I thought of this shirt, but I think it may have been as the words were coming out of Russell's mouth. It was just perfect.





Classic.


And I also noticed that the picture with me and Van Gogh looked a little bit like the loading screen from a fighting game, so I decided to take that a step further.



Here's a closer view (and you can click through for a super detailed view) of the main event.


I'm working on shirts (even if I'll probably never make them). I'm working on buttons. I'm active on the forums. And I've even been modifying a song by PAX favorite Jonathan Coulton for play on my virtual guitar (Jam Sessions on the DS). PAX is dominating my gaming life. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

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