Xaklor's Art Pile

[Xaklor]

This one’s going to require a substantial amount of explanation, so bear with me please:

Borg Mamel

A couple weeks ago towards the end of the steam winter sale I picked up Crypt of the Necrodancer because it was cheap and I was curious if I’d be into it. I finally got around to trying it recently and to total shock and surprise, one of the built-in skins you can choose from is Shiren the Wanderer of all people. I had no idea there was someone out there who actually liked the game enough to put a reference that overt into their own game. This nostalgia baited me into revisiting the game to play it a bit since I still have the DS cartridge with my save data on it. My understanding is that Shiren was sort of like the Demon Souls of roguelikes: no one played it and it was initially panned when it came out, but gained a sliver of retroactive praise after more popular games brought mainstream attention to the genre. The fact that Demon Souls got a remake recently muddies the picture but it’s the best analogy I have.

Borg Mamel is the final unlockable ally character in Shiren the Wanderer. It is a robotic version of the weakest enemy in the game, but with rocket thrusters on its back and can level up to a frankly insane degree by giving it a bafflingly difficult to complete checklist of items. To unlock Borg Mamel, you have to clear the dreaded Final Puzzle: a 99 floor dungeon containing nearly every horrible monster in the game where literally every item you encounter is unidentified and can only be understood by trial and error, deductive reasoning, and shop prices if you’re lucky enough to find one. And some of these items range from “instantly creates a monster house and dump you in the middle of it” to “if you throw this at an enemy it’ll permanently remove all copies of it and every variant of it for the rest of the dungeon”. I have beaten the Final Puzzle 3 times, and for 2 of them I had to use a rescue password generator to revive me once.

To give you an idea of how completely unknown Shiren apparently is in general, I had the hardest time finding any reference images for either Borg Mamel or even regular Mamels. I couldn’t even find a sprite sheet for Borg Mamel ffs! I could not find any other image of Borg Mamel across the entirety of the internet besides a standing forward-facing sprite, which means that this image I have just created is the only Borg Mamel fanart on the internet. I guess that’s an achievement of sorts.

For comparison, this is what a regular Mamel looks like:

[DeeBomb]

It looks so cute and robot-like! ️

[XBookwyrmX]

Crazy! I had a former friend and schoolmate, the eldest son of my counselor’s boss who introduced me to my small high school’s existence, and he absolutely loved that game. He was a crazy tech nerd and a prodigy in a couple different areas… I used to watch him play it. I wonder if he ever made it that far… he had a selective attention span. Cool to see any form of that enemy referenced again! Good memories. <3

[Xaklor]

if he knew to grab a price ID chart off a wiki and had the drive to keep going out of spite for a game that wants you dead under any and all circumstances, then maybe. otherwise he’d probably never beat the Final Puzzle, it’s monstrously fucked up in difficulty as several late-game enemies can attack you through walls from rooms you aren’t even in yet, and there’s this one particularly evil monster that can drop your attack and defense to 0, prevent you from using items, disable your defensive powers on your armband and shield, put you to sleep so you sit there doing nothing for several turns in a row, and permanently drop your level by 3. doesn’t matter what you have equipped, if you let that thing cast once or twice you’re basically fucked if not instantly dead.

[XBookwyrmX]

You might be surprised he did nonsense games like that for fun and would 100% them. He was arrogant, but extremely talented. (I digress though; I’m finished derailing now)

Love the art!

[Rabcord]

the dreaded Final Puzzle: a 99 floor dungeon containing nearly every horrible monster in the game where literally every item you encounter is unidentified and can only be understood by trial and error, deductive reasoning, and shop prices if you’re lucky enough to find one. And some of these items range from “instantly creates a monster house and dump you in the middle of it” to “if you throw this at an enemy it’ll permanently remove all copies of it and every variant of it for the rest of the dungeon”.

it’s monstrously fucked up in difficulty as several late-game enemies can attack you through walls from rooms you aren’t even in yet, and there’s this one particularly evil monster that can drop your attack and defense to 0, prevent you from using items, disable your defensive powers on your armband and shield, put you to sleep so you sit there doing nothing for several turns in a row, and permanently drop your level by 3. doesn’t matter what you have equipped, if you let that thing cast once or twice you’re basically fucked if not instantly dead.

that sounds like pure suffering.
*laughs at the thought of all the horrible and entertaining things that can happen*

was this dungeon made by a sadist? cause it seems like it.

[Xaklor]

laughs at the thought of all the horrible and entertaining things that can happen

I have an example of some straight-up BS if it’d help your imagination:

on my most recent successful run of the Final Puzzle, about halfway through the dungeon I entered a new floor and started the floor in the middle of a monster house. so, literally nothing could be done about that. but it wasn’t just any monster house, it was an undead-themed monster house so it had those skeleton caster monsters I mentioned above. I started applying my buffs so I could survive the melee and on the first turn I was immediately sniped from across the room by one of these skull wraiths with a magic spell that afflicted the “riceballed” status that minimizes attack and defense, and disables items and equipped effects. spell bolts (both yours and enemies) can’t miss, and nothing can cure or prevent this status effect which means that so far we’re still at “literally nothing could have stopped this turn of events” territory. by staggering coincidence, another undead enemy in this game is the reaper family which move and attack at double speed. once again, there’s nothing I can do to stop them from catching up to me because I can’t use items and they can run faster than I can. so the reapers stormed right up to me and slit me open since I had minimized defense and couldn’t fight back. so all in all, there was nothing I could have done to defend from that turn of events. so I didn’t feel bad about using the rescue password generator because if they’re going to cheat so will I. fortunately it was mostly smooth sailing after that, but only because I had items that could revive me from the other 2 times I got dabbed on by the game so it was all “by the rules”.

[Xaklor]

guys I’m famous

[Xaklor]

don’t mind me I’m just blatantly indulging in drawing characters I’ve told you fuck all about:

Mistral, yet again

took another stab for a few reasons, first being that I’m just better now in general, second is that I’ve gotten the hang of using reference images so I could make things fluffier, and third is that I’ve added lightning to her arsenal in addition to wind so I could add a new accent color. I originally wanted to draw her standing on her gf’s shoulders but a) given that I don’t draw necks that’d be kind of difficult, b) that’d make a really tall image, and c) I haven’t quite worked out what she looks like other than “muscles”, which don’t even show up when in my art style.

super brief bio on Mistral: she’s what you get when someone simultaneously has the power to level an entire city with a thunderstorm (or at least one of our cities anyway, cities on her planet are built to handle that kind of thing much better) and the worst case of imposter syndrome you’ve ever seen.

[DeeBomb]

Drawings like this remind me how I love your art style so much

[Seelpit]

Omigosh I love those fluffy lightning-style accessories on her sleeves!!
120% cool 8’3

[Xaklor]

inspired by this armor set from MH4U:

[Seelpit]

now copy the chest part, xak.

[Xaklor]

believe it or not, I was using the male armor set as my reference. the boots, waist area, and arm fluff are all ripped from the male armor set and not the female one. as cute and snuggleable as the girl in this drawing is, in-game the female furious rajang armor set feels lacking. it has virtually no fluff other than the pigtails, and I was looking for fluff inspiration.

[Nameness]

now copy the chest part, xak.

I would like to add that she literally has no nipples, like is that secretly part of the armor in order to trick an enemy into thinking her vitals are unprotected?

[Xaklor]

I forgot I have more than 2D artwork these days. I made a truck for a class project! Here’s what it looks like in unreal engine:

and here are the reference images I used to create it:

not sure why it looks darker than the original, the colors were literally picked from the original images. whatever

[Seelpit]

ah , yes.

The Anime Girl Reaper.

[Xaklor]

[Seelpit]

[Xaklor]

wow it’s yet another character absolutely none of you will recognize and I have to explain again:

Future Robot

long time ago I played this silly little game called Hello Penguin. basically if you type in “hello penguin” you win, and if you type in “goodbye penguin”, bad things happen to you. there was also a sequel called Hello Penguin 2: an epic saga of 4 heroes vs the out-of-control penguin for the sake of reality, unreality, and everything in between. but catastrophically, all save files come with a save immediately before the final boss fight of the game, and there doesn’t seem to be a “delete save” option in the menu. you fight the Fallen Angel Penguin, Galaxy Penguin, and Penguin Reborn in a climactic final boss fight in typical turn-based RPG combat. your party consists of Pumpkin Knight, Clark, Cagefuck, and this character, Future Robot. despite being a free, fun little baby indie game, I actually quite liked the character design of this Future Robot character and thought I might like to draw it some time. never did though.

skip forward in time to a month or two ago and something made me remember Hello Penguin 1 and 2, and I went to go check it out again since I had deleted the downloads some time ago. to my astonishment, there was a whole new Hello Penguin game: Hello Penguin 2 HD! and honestly, HP2 HD is pretty great. like, the original was a bit of a shitty spoof that was ironically enjoyable, but the remake is actually quite polished and fun to play. it’s still not very long since they didn’t get that save state bug fixed, but it’s worth a look at nonetheless. it’s also got me wondering some things on game design/storytelling levels to see if they might be worth expanding on, though I haven’t gotten anything worth bringing up yet. seeing the game once again also reignited my desire to draw Future Robot, and this time I actually followed through.

itch page for Hello Penguin 2 HD: https://noxid.itch.io/2hd