
Concepting the GUARD

Hey, everybody! I hope you like giant mecha and armored vehicles because I do, and I’m going to talk behind-the-scenes about them today!
Being the dignified gentleman that I am, I resisted my base urge to jump for joy when I found out I was going to get to update the G.U.A.R.D. models for our relaunch of the game Monsterpocalypse, but these guys are my jam, so I was thrilled to work on them.
DEFENDER-X
We established early on that we didn’t want to reinvent the wheel with the new Monsterpocalypse line. The base designs are solid but were designed for a pre-painted collectibles game rather than a hobby miniatures game. Thus, we wanted a little more detail, a bit of proportion adjustment here and there, and other minor tweaks. My first sketch for Defender-X was pretty much what we decided to do, so there weren’t many revisions. The biggest changes were modified hips for a bit more motion, a revised head to emphasize the face, and some more small details to emphasize his massive scale.
With the sketch approved, I got to orthographic projections and we called it done:
G-TANK
As with Defender-X, we didn’t want to start from scratch with the stalwart G-Tank. My first inclination was to adjust the suspension based on some Cold War-era tanks. This first version went over pretty well but wasn’t quite massive enough to look like it could stand up to the firepower being thrown around in a Monsterpocalypse battle…
The revision below brought back the big rounded fender armor that made the original tank so iconic, and this was pretty much where we wanted it to be.
A little bit of orthographic projection later, and we had our final tank!
REPAIR VEHICLE
The G.U.A.R.D. repair vehicle received a few more changes than the other units, although they are fairly subtle. I wanted to remove the wheel guards to show off the tires as well as update the crane to look like modern military recovery vehicles.
Those updates were approved, so it was off to the races!
That’s all the secrets we can reveal for now! I’m very excited with how these models turned out, and I hope you all enjoy them as much as I do when you start destroying the cityscapes around you this fall when Monsterpocalypse returns in a BIG way!