I got a dumb gimmick for this year as its been a while since Mechaween. So this year, prepare for the ‘best’ advent calander you’ll get: FISHMAS. 25 fish, released to you on the 25th of December (australian time). We will be using a very wide definition of ‘fish’ so there may be a few oddities that are technically outside of the modern definition, and there absolutely will be sharks and rays
(i do not have an advent calander picture its 11:45 PM on the first i gotta get this out quick)
The Oarfish! Yes, I am aware oarfish don’t swim like that but, there isn’t an appropriate swimming animation for ‘vertical’ and it looks really nice actually swimming like that. A perfect creature for either abyssal depths or flying through the sky delivering messages from the Dragon Palace
(someone please add in the oriental rural tiles to Worm’s undersea tileset, I would be very appreciative. just need a reskin to make 'em more coral built)
Anywho if you want to join in on the nonsense, come and chill. Or if you’ve got ideas for fish I may not have thought of, also welcome
Its a Viperfish, because you’d better believe we’re going to have fun with illumination maps on this. Only got stuff for two abyssal fish, but, they’re going to be proper glowy in the depths
Now, the slight problem is your average viperfish, despite their appearance, is, even at the biggest, like, 30 cms which. Little small for creatures in NWN, so there may be an up-scaled Bigger Viperfish coming along with him, because this is dclearly what everyone asked for
Most of my fish for this thing are living ones. Ones you may know about. Ones you may not. but. I’m me. I filled an entire ice age CCC with all sorts of obscure critters. I hope someone makes a sauropod animation set so I can get more sauropods in the game. I live and breathe dinosaurs and other extinct creatures.
So you’d be correct there’s going to be an extinct fish and not only is there, its the greatest, most memed of all extinct fish. The one. The only.
The electric eel isn’t an eel, its actually a knifefish. Its also probably one of the more useful of these fish I’m whipping up given they’re something reasonably well known and, I think actually have some D&D stats? It and the Viperfish share that as I don’t believe the oarfish ever got any and, well, sacabambaspis, as much as we love him today, wasn’t exactly ‘stated creature’ territory back in the day, even with Dragon magazine having a whole host of various prehistoric critters
hey remember those. ixits I whipped up a few CCCs ago? This is the base model I made 'em from, an eagle ray. If you have the ixit you know exactly what to expect, which is also why I gotta poke at it a bit to fix some slight annoyances with the weighting.
Winner of a random “I lived” vote on Tumblr, beating out a character from Buffy, one of the fish with a song named for it, its the coelacanth. Despite the pop culture thing being ‘oh its a living fossil’, our modern coelacanth are quite different to their historic ancestors and are adapted to one very particular lifestyle of living deep water, unlike their ancestors
also uh, anyone got a version of Worm’s undersea with edge tiles because the sacabambaspis is about to swim off into the void
In the background I’m working on some nonsense so we can get another two more abyssal critters to play with the viperfish (if anyone like, uses these on a PW or something lemme know I am very interested to see what nonsense you can create)
Given it was the Game Awards today, Twitch Chat is something on the mind. So naturally, let’s have a Twitch Chat fish
A fricking 4 meter long one. Ths Sturgeon.
what does the sturgeon have to do with Twitch Chat, you ask? There’s an emote on some channels called joel which is just a sturgeon rotating. So, you can now have Joel in your NWN modules (or at least when this releases). Maybe even evil joel as well!
Going to have some more interesting mischief coming tomorrow, given the weekend. Just gotta dredge up a decent seaweed area…
One of the absolute strangest family of fish are the seahorses. Seriously, they’re ridiuclous. They function like climbers, like monkeys, in a gravity-less enviroment and also just, y’know, just so happen to be some of the most successful predators on the planet with a 90% hunting rate. Absurd creatures, seriously.
But among the seahorses, the most interesting, most beautiful of their number are the sea dragons. So prepare for some sea dragons to show up
I’ve gone against myself on this one and left it at the default size, which is about on-par with the pseudodragon and way, way larger than they are IRL. But, this’ll make it a bit more useable. And don’t worry, the more famillier leafy one will also be shoowing up alongside this one. In a bit of strangeness I’m actually using the Eyeball/Beholder animations to get this one working, as it works surprisingly well for seahorse type critters
This time I couldn’t find a good base model so I’ve used the work of Zerosvalmont, of 7SeasDesigns, to bring you… The Gulper Eel. Another famous abyssal dweller, they’re also known for the mysterious pink light at the end of their tail. IRL ones can do all sorts of interesting things with inflating themself to look bigger but, not so much this one. It is, however, another appropriate abyssal threat alongside the viperfish. One more abyssal critter will come with these two, in time, but its probably time to head back towards the surface for a few other fish. Possibly some we haven’t seen in a long time…
The whorl-toothed ‘shark’ itself, Helicoprion, in ‘boy there sure is a paleoart meme of making this thing brown, huh?’. Helicoprion is not a shark and lacks a lot of shark things, such as the rear fins. It is instead a Eugeneodontid, a relative of the modern chimaeras. Back in the Carboniferous and Permian they were a group of strange shark-like predators. That buzzsaw in its mouth is all we had for Helicoprion for the longest time, and it seems that strange structure allowed them to scoop various mollusks, far more common than today’s nautilus, straight out of their shell
also like. This is a conservative size but like, these things were -big-. I could have gone worse and done Parahelicoprion, its larger relative, which is one of the biggest chondrichthyes (sharks, rays, chimaeras and their ancient relatives) out there and has a more vicious saw for general prey. Both however are dwarfed by sir not appearing in this pack, O. megalodon, of course, but they still got dang big
I’m probably going to come back to the textures on this one as the striping isn’t doing it for me, and I am feeling dusky colours may be a bit more appropriate. Though, it probably was countershaded
The manta ray! uh if you’re in the discord you know I’ve been working on this one for months, but its finally getting released! The largest of the modern rays, this friendly ocean dweller none the less has all sorts of superstitions about it.
Also like, shows up in the monster manual way too many times for something that can really only bump into you to hurt you
A flouder or halibut? I may have a suitable model for that, in fact. Animations though are the problem, but halibut can grow stupid big and would be a good stealth encounter… May have to fish up the dolphin animations from that one CCC. Either that or the badger animations
As previous I do hope folks do use these for things so here’s a fish that’s downright usuable as a threat. The lionfish. These scorpionfish are a bit of a notorious threat in places, due to being invasive, venomous, and annoying predators. Big enough fish can take 'em (like sharks) but they tended not to due to them being weird fish. At least until some folks started just feeding sharks them and the sharks going ‘oh, that’s spicy food’ and going for 'em themselves
I was trying to find a stupid thing to say for this one, but work chrissie parties wiill take it out of you. Its another eel and another of the ‘probably useful’ given cave morays are a random 1E creature
We got ourselves a biggun today, as unfortunately my initial plan didn’t work out. Anyone know any animations that kind of, stick close to the ground most of the time? I need some for some bottom crawlers…
But, that’s something that can wait because today’s fish is none other than the sailfish!
Charismatic predators, sailfish are known for being among the fastest fish in the ocean. While.their alleged top speed probably isn’t right, they’re still dang quick
