The Devils Garage

Last August a few of us Newgrounds followers had caught up with Nathan, an indie film maker for a documentary film on Newgrounds and the Interbutt. It was an interesting interview in which Nathan had asked us what got us into animation and the earliest memories of Newgrounds and where we thought this medium would be taking us.

Recently Nate mailed saying that he’s uploading his documentary to Kickstart.com, asking netizens of the Interbutt to help fund his movie. We spoke about other ways of getting this message out there so that more people could support this project. My friend and myself have been working on a concept to make this message go a bit more viral. We’re also on a tight deadline to get this completed before the Kickstarter deadline is over. (Project funding closes on Sep 01, 11:59pm EDT)

The concept is quite simple: one plays as Nate, The Indie(ana) Jones who is being chased by this big boulder of time to get all the funding he needs for his project. He needs to collect every little gem he comes across and avoid pitfalls and dodge objects that come across his way.

After we worked out a list of art and animation assets to be made, I roughed out some concept art for the game play and dived right into the art style that I wanted the game to look like. First targeting the character designs, turnarounds and run cycle.

Now Nate doesn’t look anything like the character and I felt that I really needed to tweak the art style or do a completely different approach to make the character look more like the reference. Deciding to go 8-bit style, I was able to get Indie to look exactly like Nate…
For the technically curious, Pixel Tools, v2.0 pixel plugin by the neuroscientist Patrick Mineault, is a boon to Flash artists/animators everywhere. I was able to work around the bug the tool had that kept crashing Flash.

This game style is a bit new to me as I haven’t worked much on this patience-draining-yet-worth-every-second art approach.

Will keep you posted on further updates.

This is a small animation that I created for the instructions page for the game mentioned in the earlier post. I’ve included the Flash source file so that anyone can use it for their non-commercial/personal projects. Feel free to download the FLA file and possibly create your own animation with these assets!

The audio track is by REECEY-BOY

I’ve received quite a few requests to create a tutorial on how to rig characters for animation and games. That article will soon be covered.

Cheers!

I’ve been working on a submission with a fellow programmer for Newgrounds’ Robot Day. The game is a fan-based take on Castle Crashers and I completed most of the Red Knight assets for programming.

The character went through a bit more evolution and I fine tuned the colors so it’s easy to animate. I decided not to use strokes or lines so as to keep the animation easy and that way the turnaround time for the assets would be quicker.