
Blue planet accosted by an enormous hurricane! of death!
Nice! I suggest for the planets that you make a few moons as well for some of them. I’d like to see a mechanized/city planet or moon!
Phil - here you go 

It didn’t turn out quite like I was hoping, but I think it still basically works. I was having a hard time expressing an entire city block with a single pixel, I’m not sure there’s a good way to do it…
EDIT - This is Tuesday’s “mini ship,” I have to work on paid stuff tomorrow! Mini-ships will be back on Wednesday night!
Well, what can i say that hasn’t been said yet? These are just awesome! I keep coming back to this thread and each time I do I am surprised, delighted, and know why cgtalk is the place to be. With talent and fun all mixed together how can you lose?
These are simply great. You have inspired me to try my hand and super duper plasma pooper low-poly modeling (that means really low like you have been doing…)
Keep up the good work! These are fantastic!! =)
-Bair
Woot! Nice job with the city planet:)
I’ll have to give this very low-poly stuff a try at some point, that way I can actually finish something and work my way from up there!
men maybe i shoold try to… its look complicated…is it hard…??ho well il find out!..
i really sincerely hope you don’t mind me posting one i did here. if it bugs you tell me and i will pull it out. no worries.
first let me say its pretty tough working with such a small texture page and such a low poly limit. the fact that you do it so well is a testament to your skill and abilities. so here it is. my tech tank… shrugs

doesn’t bug me in the least! I would try working with the “pencil” tool in photoshop next time, it should help you get a cleaner, crisper final map! Also, on low poly forms, for some reason things like more “round” if they are not axis-aligned; e.g. if your tank barrel was a diamond-shape along the cross-section, rather than a square. Keep at it!
If you didn’t notice, Daily Mini Ships has kind of ground to a halt, so I think it is time to be done with them. This has been really fun to work on, and I am happy that this little project was able to inspire some of you too! The last few things I wanted to do was a couple of mockup screenshots for games these ships might be in. I think the Sony PSP is VERY well-suited to classic side-scrolling shooters because of its 16:9 screen ratio. So here is a 480x272 OpenGL + particles render of some of my models:
In all likelihood it would actually look better than that on PSP, as these models were made with the DS in mind. I will post a DS mockup soon! Thanks for all the encouragement and posts throughout this project, it made it really fun.
Looks great - that planet looks a bit iffy in my opinion though. I think it would be a lot higher poly, or perhaps an image plane. When i first saw it, i thought it was really low poly, but i assumed it would be seen far away in the background.
Now hows about making another pic, but in an ikaruga style vertical shooter? You can try and cram hundreds of ships on the screen!
Franklyn - Later rather than sooner I’m afraid
I have some plans for a multi-directional shooter on my homebrewed game engine, but it will be a few years yet!
Arman - I have to finish up my obligations to Halogen, then I will be slowing down my side work a little for a while, so I can have a life and all that
I’m not sure what sort of real project I will tackle next, but in a couple months I think something with dinosaurs would be really fun…
Andy - yeah, I actually have some ideas for how to do some better low poly planets using billboarded sprites (Mario 64 used these for all the bomb-omb style characters to great effect), but Wings doesn’t do billboarding so I opted for a plain old sphere. If I had some actual hardware to mess with there are 3 or 4 different approaches I would really like to play with to get a true planetary kind of effect - a translucent cloud layer, a little atmospheric corona, etc…When I originally designed them, I was thinking they might be part of like a Starfox style menu screen, or part of the game world but once you got so close they started to look bad it would just assume you were landing on that planet, etc.
Maybe for the DS screens I will use the 2 screens together to create one tall window for some hot vertical action…
EDIT - Just finished the 2nd of the 3 final images, this is just a simple collection of all the models and textures, it is a big pic though so I’m just putting the thumb up here, click to see the full image!
Well Atomic, its been fun watching these things progress and I really look forward to the next project you begin. Thanks for the inspiration as well as the tutorials and help. By tutorials I mean the explanations of things for me. =)
Best of luck with the real world and I look forward to the next thread!
-bair
Great work Adam, the PSP mockup really makes me want to buy one, unluckily Sony decided to let us Europeans wait until September 
Looking forward to your next project!

And here is the full 256x384 image that would be split across those two screens:

Those are the final Daily Mini Ships images
Thanks again!