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.

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.

Here are some of the prop designs used in Rock Mash. I decided to keep them very simple and stylized because they hardly get any screen time before they are all mashed to smithereens.

Feast your eyes on some concept development for Rock Mash, an upcoming interactive experiment where a tiny rock is let loose on the streets of a big city. Here’s one of the earlier splash screens.

Welcome to The Devil’s Garage, the smelting pot for concepts, designs and animations by Ajay Karat.

As much as I really didn’t like Wordpress, I never thought I could pull off this whole website in under two week without the help of the Interbutt, WP, everyone’s philanthropic contributions, plugins and themes.

Most recent updates: Other than the fact that a good portion of the site has been revamped, do check in for new content over the next few weeks. I also understand that a lot of the earlier posts have broken links and I’m working on correcting all that.

Here are some initial concepts I was leaning towards when redesigning this site.

The biggest challenge while working on the layouts was to create an intuitive navigation that was easy to understand and always had scope for expansion.

It was this layout design (below) that I felt best suited the new design. I dropped the Print and Illustration links and combined the content under a Design category.

Made these assets for a top-down shooter game. Rigged the assets such that one can create more jets from random combinations of jet parts.

Also read this post for more designs related to these characters.
Visit Bacon and Games!

Pvt. Bedlam is a game concept inspired by the movie Jacob’s Ladder. Bedlam’s crew was picked by the Army to try out new experimental performance drugs to make universal soldiers, but things go bad with the first batch of testing and the Private is one of the mad survivors who is hayballin’ his way outta there. Alice’s Restaurant Massacre would probably be the most fitting track for this game.

These are three comics I made for close friends sometime late last year.
The humor is very colloquial. The character development posts can be read here and here.

The power of the decoder

The trip to Gokarna

Ashwin’s Birthday

Lost in space (since 1994 because his car’s ignition blew up on his way back from work thus causing a nano-space-time vortex which threw him out there), home-sick Fred is now battling his way back to the present.