Drawn completely from scratch and inspired by awesome Starcraft universe and its characters. In time for release of Starcraft II.

Again, you can download Starcraft Fan Art in bigger resolution without our sign from here:
http://retrostylegames.com/blog/artwork/starcraft-kerrigan-fanart-bigger.jpg

Don’t forget to join our Facebook group or just press Like button.
Thank you

Both digital illustrations were created by artist from our team. Dastan’s picture is based on Prince of Persia poster, but it’s not primitive copy, it actually was drawn from scratch and has some unique details and elements.

You can download both Prince of Persia fan-art illustrations in bigger resolution from here:
http://retrostylegames.com/blog/artwork/prince-of-persia-Dastan-fanart-bigger.jpg

http://retrostylegames.com/blog/artwork/prince-of-persia-Tamina-fanart-bigger.jpg

Write your comments or join our page on FaceBook if you like our artwork

More information about Mars Miner game:
http://retrostylegames.com/index.php?action=prod_miner

Download Mars Miner 1.2 for PC:
http://www.retrostylegames.com/mars_miner/MarsMinerSetup.exe

History of Mars Miner updates:
1.2.0:
- Zip.dll startup error should be fixed now – download New version if you had that error
- Game Protection mechanism was changed – all license owners should contact us to get new keys
- Difficulty balance changes and other small fixes

1.1.0:
- New sound tracks by Mad-Tek and Takomo
- Difficulty balance changes, it should be easier and more fun to play now
- Other small fixes

1.0.8
- Reworked sound engine
- Additional music themes
- Story mode Awards and small balance changes
- Survival is more dynamical now
- Smaller game size, but more content

1.0.6:
- Random hanging in full-screen mode. Score computation’s are faster now in Survival mode

More information about game on it’s own page: http://retrostylegames.com/index.php?action=pocket-elves
Positive customer reviews are pouring in.

And here is bonus Pocket Elves video of farting Santa and vomiting elves:

Have fun!

Our friends from FDMPro.com asked to write a couple of words about their football simulator.

Idea

It’s online game, where you can reveal your managers skills in football business. You choose the countries and hire the footballers, trainer, medical staff for your team.

http://fdmpro.com

 Thereafter, be ready to build your own stadium, make money from tickets, TV broadcasting and sponsorships. Gamer goes deeper into this virtual world minute by minute: it’s even possible to own factories, that produce sport equipments or like football boots or pay more attention to the commercial and financial aspects (such as buying shares and equities of the other football clubs).

 We know what people like in football and it is not just seeing team beat another. It is about the spirit of the game with all the attributes, which exist in the football world. In our game all your teams can have even football fans, who follow them everywhere.

 Sense

People are crazy about 3 things in the life most of all:

Authority. All people want to prove that they are the best , because it brings the respect and recognition of achievements. We have a rating system in our game and everyone can see who is the richest, smartest, most successful and the best manager. Everyone wants to take that place. Gamers try to get this status through invention of different game strategies, that will allow them to get to the top.

 Team spirit. If you look at football stadium, it is not difficult to notice that people are not just observing a match. They are covered with bright drawings, shouting the name of favorite team. We believe that the reason is only team spirit – even when men hunted for mammoth thousands years ago, they did it together. In this game it’s possible to create your own football leagues to play with you friends and share emotions and knowledge. It will be a time together.

 Dreams. Everyone have dreams in their life, and, probably it’s the most beautiful thing which we might have : just in a moment you can imagine that your dream comes true. However, it can’t happen faster than you think about it – in reality it obviously would need much more time. Our game is a small dream for many people – they would like to own real football teams and feel all this power and taste of victories, they would like to be proud of something that they have created themselves. We give them teams, we give them a world where they can feel all of these.  

Originality

I believe you saw many football games in Internet, but no one from them can propose something more than just to observe how footballers from your team play with footballers from the other team and that’s it. But we try to focus on many more details and aspects of real life. It is different from usual football managers like Fantasy League :

• We don’t have duplicate players in our game. Everyone wants to have Beckham in his team, and other games give this possibility, although we are confident that it destroys the pleasure of game process. It becomes much more exciting and interesting when you try to get this single Beckham to your team. And it’s possible, because if the team of gamer loses many matches then players can leave it.
• We all know that happiness of the game is not in the victory but in the way, which you have to pass through to win. All other online football manager games have very restricted time when people can enjoy playing matches, and when a football season ends gamers have to wait until the start of the next season.
• In our game you will be always be happy even between official championships which occur every month, because you can play up to 30 unofficial matches with different people every day. Apart from that, you can create your own private leagues and invite your friends to play in it. You’ll not have time to be bored here.
• As mentioned, gamers always try to improve the skills of footballers to make their team stronger and win as many matches as possible. Surprise and uncertainty is not how fantasy Football works, where you just get the team and observe how it performs in real life – nothing depends on your efforts. Things are different in our game: you can train your footballers and even buy new football boots to increase their strength and improve their skills. You can feel how each one of your steps brings results.

•  Other football games does not have variety of economical models. Usually they are just focused on played matches and nothing else that can make you feel like a manager. In our game, people build stadiums, issue equities, produce sport equipments, support football fans, create own private leagues and much much more. It makes you think about business side of football also. economy side of the football business. It’s just like in real life football, isn’t it?  

Here are first tests (GIF animation):

The hardest part was to slice and prepare stadium model for rendering into layers. Also, we need to find some way to automate rendering process using scripts.

It was really nice, filled with great experience two days in our native Kiev town. We had a chance to meet a lot of interesting teams from all over the world and masters of their own business, which were our mentors for that period.
Here is video presentation of FDream online football manager I have done for Seedcamp. We had really tight deadline, but I like final result:

BTW, we have won it (in Ukraine it was a selection part) and our team should show polished FDream project again in September in London.

Some miscellaneous icons I have done for FDMPro:

Forum badges:

At last I have some free time to prepare and upload my animation online.
It’s CG music video for song “He is Hacker” of Ukrainian music band “Bottle Green”. Leader of the band is the friend of mine so I created this animation almost for free in my spare time.

You can download Medium-resolution DivX video here:

http://retrostylegames.com/temp/clip/Hacker_clip_fin_en.avi

Almost everything was done by me during last year and rendered in December. Final cut with some post-fx was done in January of 2008 with help of my friend Vadim.

Update: my video was mentioned at 3DTotal.com which is really popular 3D resource.

Some additional details and Low-resolution YouTube variant of the video are under cut…

The story of the video is based on the comics by band’s drummer and connected with song’s lyrics. Main hero is hacker which has exchanged his real life with computer world. And now he is starting to see various kinds of illusions.

We have discussed first stages of creation process with band’s leader more than 1.5 year ago and first models and animations were created then. After that I had a break and back to the video only in a half year.
That’s why and also because it was really hard to do everything from concepts, modeling and rigging to animation, rendering and direction by myself – video can look a bit outdated in some places.

But the main thing I have set oneself as an object – was bringing everything I have done to the final, understandable and complete look.
It was really great experience for me.

A week ago I have suddenly noticed a new tutorial on his site.

It’s – Animation workshop #1: roboBall

Tutorial consist of four parts: Animation, Shading, Rendering and Compositing. But the most interesting is the first part. I was stunned when I saw his straight workflow and his animating speed! Especially compared to pose-to-pose technique I am trying to use in my animations.
It was really great experience watching how Tyson is animating his robo. If you have missed this guy – hurry up to his site.