This is a commission for  tuckerpreston and  latikyle from anthrocon 2016.

Overwatch fanboys Tucker and Wexley fight in the streets of Honamura where they will die many times in the pursuit of victory. Such is the harsh, yet enviable reality for player characters that are killed often but can re-spawn. What can we say about this image? Tucker had some great design references off the bat that we were thankful to have, but Wexley did not. This guy's sona needed some work: his facial proportions had to be re-considered. We gave Wexley the hint of an asian visage to match the ethnicity of the human he is a fursona of. We're not sure if it comes off. We think it does, but not too strongly and that's what we wanted. He was sure to act EXTRA goofy in front of us in order to get across how his character should be portrayed. We took him as a guy who wanted his character to be free-spirited even in the face of a bullet storm. He's got a wide open grin for that reason. Wexley, in contrast, needed to be a bit more, "in the fight" but we didn't want to make him too serious about it because they're in a game. The Skylanders fan art we did informed some of our compositional choices here. He also wanted his love for chocolate chip cookies to be referenced in this image. We recalled one of Dan LuVisi's paintings, featuring one of his characters (Gabriel) spilling an ammo pouch of skittles on the floor during a gun fight, and did something similar.

This painting reminds me of the term gameification. It was a movement that suggested that companies should deploy game-like features into their company culture. Its sort of like, all of a sudden you get points for doing your job well and you can turn them in for some reward. That's a lame example of it though. Gameification tries to get into the heads of a companies employees in order to make them work hard and be more efficient. It is meant to be fun. We like the idea of it actually, so long as everyone else did. We had no such rituals going on at DreamSail Games. I didn't adopt any practices because I found it superfluous. The only thing we did do is employee of the month. It went over very well with everyone except one australian team member who wasn't aware of the concept at all. This person found an employee of the month award to be disgusting. Man. That guy is going to make us miss DreamSail actually, he was a good dev. Now we're here staring down a furry future for god knows how long. In my opinion, humans need fun. Gameification is a way to provide it... eh this is a boring conversation.

I think I can talk about what the existence of Overwatch did for us. It made us feel too cool. We had the ability to screw around because of this game, again. Not just with Sanders. I don't want to talk much about this but the reality is that Sanders is living with a mind controller that gets confused over video games. Ill say it loud and clear that I have that issue. Am I going to stop playing them? No. I think I've been through my lessons. At this point, I see Overwatch as an interesting thing to analyze in terms of successful characters and how they are made. It followed a conversation we had at Insomniac in 2014 about how characters always perform true to who they are. If they don't they're false and that part of them is thrown into the bin. This is because humans have a natural way of being. Can they change themselves? I know that they can. Its just something I know. They change through the process of learning, and the process of learning may require someone to understand that they were wrong first. Its kind of like something we over-heard but I have to agree with it because its what I know as a mind controller. Just to be clear here, Sanders isn't a mind controller, I am - and i'm using his fingers to type out this description.

We used portions of Tracer's game-rez model (her jacket, time-splitter device, and shoes) to make this image. It was to save time. The rest of it is ours.

See the 3D models here: https://sketchfab.com/models/1fefb8.....9eacd5fb49dbaa