Making my TftL Game Blurb Picture 'On Cloud nine & Golden Sunshine'

So for one of my Tales from the Loop episodes, On Cloud Nine and Golden Sunshine, I had this image in my head. A small Magnetrine ship abandoned in a dried out marsh. Vandalised, missing parts, covered in graffiti, and deserted. A play area for adventurous Kids, a possible machine that could be tinkered with, and a possible means to get onboard a larger Magnetrine vessel floating over the industrial section of Derby. Now I am no Simon Stålenhag but I do have a modicum of artistic flare. So I went about and photobashed an image together, an orange Magnetrine ship, sitting in a green, misty field, it’s Magnetrine discs crushed and buried. Called, of course, Golden Sunshine. I used an actual photo of the field I was envisioning, from next to the location near where I used to live as a child myself. The vessel I cobbled together from a few photos of similar tractors and I swapped out the wheels for an engine to act as an undercarriage of sorts.

I also used it for my advertising for my game so I designed the title as well. I went for a “Top Gun” theme for the first part of the title, ‘Cloud Nine’, swapping Top Gun for Cloud Nine. The second part of the title I went with the Indiana Jones theme for the ‘and Golden Sunshine’.

I was rather pleased with the results, though when I used the picture in my game, most of the players just thought it was an old tractor stuck in a field. Damn, not want I wanted at all! So I went back to the drawing board. I tweaked the image to make it look like the Magnetrine vessel, Golden Sunshine was flying. Fixed and repaired by the Kids, it would hover over the hole it made in the field when it had crashed. I made the turbo in the engine undercarriage spin, added new Magnetrine discs, and added lightning sparks coming off the engine. I added a miss-coloured panel, black smoke coming out the top exhaust pipes, and populated it with eighties kids trying to fly the vessel. I particularly like the girl balancing on the ‘prow’ of the vessel on her BMX bike!

Now it is a dramatic image, an impossibly large Magnetrine ship flying over a Derby field with a range of eighties children flying the vessel away.