It’s art time!

Last week, I promised to steal Oxeye’s level art creation process. I can’t believe it, but the lab technicians actually discovered my intentions! They hired a team to counter–hack. Turns out they’re pretty cool people, so we joined forces and formed the Cobalt Investigation Agency! Comrades, get out your inner Leonardo. We’re going to the gallery.

…Just pretend that was cool, okay?! What do you think I am, a wandering wizard of words or something?

First, here’s my favorite piece of fan art as warm–up!

The Creation of Mona Levela

We have tons of cool community maps, many of which can be found in the Cobalt Vault, but our favorite game of guns has its share of official maps as well. Fact: They look pretty good! But how are they made? I’ve managed to dig up a few pictures from the process.

Here’s a level that our beard overlord jeb designed:

It seems to be some sort of building!

It has quite a few doors!

You can go inside! Technology!

While these locales may be prettier than the scraps of mapping I’ve attempted myself, they’re nowhere near the quality level of finished maps. What happens next?

Kinten, the great art magician, steals the map and beautifies it. With his pen and Photoshop, he takes a close look at the map and crafts custom tiles specifically tailored to it. See those doors? I don’t, because they just got changed.

Straight out of the forge.

There’s a lot more where it comes from! Click this for more! And this! Another! Even more! Interesting, I say! …Oh, there’s one more.

Throw these in the mix and touch it up a bit, and you get…

Marvelous choice of colors!

Is this even the same level?! ‘Cause it’s on a whole different level of quality! Get it? Level? Never mind.

It looks just like the Agency headquarters! …If we had any, that is.

This map isn’t in the game just yet, but if you manage to break free of the state of trance induced by its coolness, you’ll probably notice the level name—and prefix. It’s a Puzzle map! There are currently none in the game, but I checked up on the Challenge submode, and surprisingly, it’s a game mode featuring puzzles! The details aren’t completely decrypted yet, but it’ll feature a different way of racking up points than we’re used to.

In Other Nets

Our frenemies at Oxeye Labs like to keep logs of everything they do there, which is quite fortunate for us, but thewreck’s log was quite short this week. He’s been doing a bit of field work at Fatshark, and there are very good news:

Networking! Progress!

Nothing is certain yet, but it seems like the shark will be getting online multiplayer, and if the shark gets networking, the PC & Mac versions of the game will too. Hopefully, we’ll all be able to roll around together someday!

A Cup of Community

I mentioned the glorious map sharing site known as Cobalt Vault earlier, which is a great way to fill up that User Maps list in–game, but it can be hard to keep track of all the new maps and works in progress. Fear not—Janeator is here to save the day with a new Twitter account! Follow @CobaltMapmaking for the mintiest of minty maps!

For more community news, the Cobalt Forum Content Team has just gotten a new member! FabiotheTurtle has written his first post, featuring the brilliant Multikill mod which has just been updated to work with the newest edition of Cobalt. It’s one of my favorite mods, so go check it out!

Two weeks ago, we took a look at a cool map. That was fun; let’s do it again! However, I won’t be the one doing the talking here. One of the members of the Cobalt Investigation Agency may or may not have threatened to publish those pictures of me dancing to Caramelldansen which he may or may not have snatched, and to avoid the absolute annihilation of the human race, I’m going to let him write a few words each week. My dear friends, I bring you the self–proclaimed Duke of Cobalt, and the map he’ll enlighten us about is…

“Overall a very fancy ‘n very compact map. A bit fruity with all the shadowy surfaces. Random loot is lel, makes map control hard. Good thing I’m the duke of map control.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself. It feels like there’s a tad bit too much Phaser action going on, but overall it’s a very cool map with interesting gameplay!

That’s all for today, folks! Come back next Friday for more metallic babble!