Arcadia wallpaper
This animated double-height wallpaper is loosely based on Skies of Arcadia, an RPG released for the Dreamcast in 2000. It was created using 3D models with toon shading and a noisy freestyle outline for a hand-drawn feel. It has an "awake" and an "asleep" version.
Blood and Sea-Races
This is a prototype of a TTRPG (tabletop role-playing game) created for a university module. It features pairs of players working together in ships, racing against other ships using creative thinking and statistical advantages.
Brown Slime
This is artwork of a slime character with a dark backstory about being permanently wounded by humans, yet still expressing an interest in studying them, created for a university module.
Brychni, Knight of the Night Sky
This is a rigged and animated female knight model designed and created from the ground up, themed around the sun, moon and stars. The initial design was heavily altered by the time of the final animation.
Cactu in Box in Space
This is a simple model of a shiny bulbous cactus looking cute hiding out in its box, with emissive sparkles. It has an HDRI background so that it's in low space orbit around the Earth.
Cactus Plushie
This is a model of a cactus plushie slumped on a sofa, made to look fabricy and stitched, yet with the magic orbs still floating and glowing. The pillowy shape was created with proportional editing. The original was made in 2020, and an updated version was created two years later.
CactusMagelord profile pictures
This is a collection of my profile pictures over the years, used across various platforms. The basic cactus-and-orbs design stays the same, but it evolved and changed over time, including getting new animations and new variants like seasonal changes or bonus additions.
Cardboard Box Animation
This is a short animation of a sentient cardboard box in a dimly-lit cardboard cavern, innocently hopping along from shadow to shadow until it hops beneath the camera and we lose sight of it.
Chest of Marbles
This is a 3D model made off of a real-life mini chest full of marbles, using photos as reference and as texturing for the chest. The marbles were manually approximated, and warm/cool lighting was added to give the chest a sense of wonder.
Disco Ramen Moyai
This is a model of a moyai or moai statue eating ramen while covered in a set of dancing disco lights. The lights perfectly loop because they're simply area lights in 3D space being rotated about a pivot, returning to their original positions.
E4 Rolling Pin Ident
This is a 30-second animation created as a college assignment, where we were tasked with creating an ident as if we were working for the television channel E4. This ident is quite story-heavy, telling the tale of a rolling pin regretting rolling a piece of dough, but being forgiven by a gavel in a cosmic judgement environment.
Echelon
This short proof-of-concept game, created in the old Blender 2.79 game engine, was my first major Blender and game project alike, as a college assignment. It features a cube moving across a grid to collect casino chips, with turn-based moving platforms and lasers, across 4 levels. A poster was also created, hypothetically to advertise the game.
Falling Leaf
This is the first game of the Freezing World Pentalogy, a series of five rapid prototypes created for a university module, and was developed within about a day using Unity visual scripting. It features basic unlosable arcade gameplay of moving a leaf as it falls between branches to collect seeds, with a high score table after 3 short levels.
Fehér Lufi
This is the third game of the Freezing World Pentalogy, a series of five rapid prototypes created for a university module, and was developed within three or four days of work using Unity visual scripting. It's a top-down multi-phase horror boss fight, playing as a spirit fighting off the titular white balloon.
First Fable's train game cutscenes
As part of a university module to create a game with environmental storytelling, I made an opening and ending cutscene for a game set on a train where you play as a wounded bird. At first the world seems cartoony but real, and then it's revealed the bird is a plastic toy in a toy train set.
Freezing World Pentalogy
Coming soon.
Frostcore Technica
Coming soon.
hoverboard game
This is a time-trial racing game created in UPBGE (a version of Blender that ports its removed game engine to newer versions) for a college assignment. It features one decorated track, a sense of solitude, a number of checkpoints and interesting controls where leaning forward or back on your hoverboard affects acceleration and steering inversely to each other.
JSR Cactus
This piece of artwork recreates my CactusMagelord avatar in an urban style inspired by Jet Set Radio, but with a skateboard instead of roller skates. It features heavy use of dithering for shading and effects, and has an angular sharp appearance.
Judgement of the Starry Seas
This is a four-page comic created for a college assignment, continuing the story of my E4 Rolling Pin Ident but now combined with a retelling of the real E4 pirate ident that inspired the narrative ident in the first place. It uses limited colour for emphasis in the twisting storyline.
Lost in Potato contributions
These are my contributions to the Lost in Potato set of Discord emotes, specifically animated versions of existing emotes and a variety of onesie designs for it to wear based on a given template.
Mechanic visual narrative
This is an 18-panel visual narrative, not dissimilar to a comic, depicting the story of Terraria's Mechanic in a pixelated simple art style, but with attempts to shade and colour-balance each panel. It was created for a university module.
Pepsi emojis
This is a collection of ~600 Pepsi-themed emojis, originally created for a Discord server. They use simplistic shapes and a desaturated colour palette making the main colour fit with Discord's "blurple".
Pixel cactus emotes
This is a small collection of pixelated versions of my cactus icon for use as Discord emotes, with various expressions, hats, or other tweaks.
Race of AGES diorama
This is a small diorama meant as a recreation of the floating island for the track "Race of AGES" in the menus of Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed. The materials were created procedurally within Blender, using elements like procedural bricks and noise.
Racing comic
This is a short two-page comic created for a university module. Similar to Judgement of the Starry Seas, it uses black-and-white with limited colour, but this time the entire comic is rendered in a 3D scene with halftone shading.
rat and cheese and oh no there's a flood
This is the fourth game of the Freezing World Pentalogy, a series of five rapid prototypes created for a university module, and was developed within three or four days of work using Unity visual scripting. It features two-player asymmetrical co-op tank-controlled platforming, ascending up a 3D level to avoid dangerous rising water.
Robot models
This is a series of 3 robotic models created for a university module. Concepts for a space-surfing rocket barrel, a mecha feline deity and a pizza cutter motorcycle were iteratively sketched then iteratively modelled for the final result.
Rotating potted emotes
This set of 3 spinning models features a cactus, a calico cat, and Kirby sat in flowerpots, for use as Discord emotes. Texturing was done manually with painted sections and procedurally with noise alike.
Santa Froggo
This is a little animation of a frog bouncing around on a snowy floating island, in the style of the Arcadia wallpaper that the terrain assets are adapted from. The frog's keyframes are interpolated bouncily for a spring-like effect.
Smiley Toilet and Bee
This mini-animation, based on the profile pictures of the people in a Discord call, features a cute bee brandishing a butter knife while hovering above a smiling toilet. The toilet water was animated with just two shape keys of randomly moved vertices.
Stardust emotes
This is a set of white pixelated animated emotes meant for Discord use, primarily featuring a star character's various emotions but also recreating a few popular emotes in the same style. These are fit for white-background use thanks to their outlines.
Worldsaver
This is the second game of the Freezing World Pentalogy, a series of five rapid prototypes created for a university module, and was developed within two or three days of work using Unity visual scripting. It's a top-down 2D dungeon-crawler through a Windows 98-inspired level, playing as a mouse cursor that must avoid mines and collect Lock Keys while wrestling with upload/download mechanics.
Any credits or acknowledgements for content on this page are located in the individual pages for each creation instead.
Site font: Atkinson Hyperlegible
Apart from the above, all content was created by me, CactusMagelord, unless otherwise stated.
"Hope you enjoyed the variety of different projects in this list. When initially putting them together, I was surprised some of them still existed. Oh, and hope you enjoyed the flavour text for each creation too, it's fun to write."