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.

Memorial Day weekend is here! Yay, for us at the studio it means a good long 3 day weekend. Back in Bangalore (India), my friends who work for multi-national corporations (MNC) get Memorial Day off. Though it does make business sense to have a day off for these MNC’s, it doesn’t make sense to anyone else there as no one’s observing the real reason behind Memorial Day.

If one goes back to the roots of this day, it was first observed by formerly enslaved black people in South Carolina, honoring the Union soldiers who had fought for the preservation of the Union. That’s definitely a reason for humanity to celebrate and it doesn’t matter in which part of the world it’s observed. I wonder how many other cities outside the USA have a day off work?

Want to know more about Memorial Day? (wikipedia)

These are some of the earlier concepts I made back in 2007. It’s about a team of nerdy footballers and their friends.

Roughed out something quick before jumping into my next assignment. I find it very relaxing to take a break and doodle. Nope, I don’t smoke.

Just playing around with border sizes and a new format of presenting illustrations.

Just before hitting the bed every night, I religiously log on to Newgrounds.com one last time to see all the funny art/games that made it to the homepage. Tonight is KEVIN BACON’s DAY! I had to crank out a piece of art before the night was done, so after grabbing a coffee and some Wacom pens this was the first piece I came up with.
Yup, it sucked. It didn’t matter that the illustration came out looking nothing like Kevin Bacon, but I had used a bad reference image. So with a lil bit of brainstorming and combing though Google Images, I finally found a better reference and decided to theme it Futurama’s “Head in a Jar.” So here is the process from which his final head evolved.

(more…)

“Do. I. Look. Like. One. Of. ‘Em?!” – Louis
This is a continuation of the small Left 4 Dead project I’ve been working on and off on for Newgrounds.

Caricatures of Ashwin and Yash from Avenue’s Hospitality.

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