The Devils Garage

Well, a big thanks to Kickstarter.com for featuring our game there.

Another shout-out for Indie Jones @Blodic.us, sweeet!

Good news, everyone. Our game “Indie Jones” made it to the Newgrounds homepage! Super BIG THANKS to Tom Fulp!!

To learn more about Indie Jones, go here.

Finally got to meet Tom Fulp and Dan Paladin from The Behemoth and got me a sweet autographed Barbarian Figurine (character from Castle Crashers)!
Here are two pictures:

(l-r Sean @ Bacon and Games, Tom Fulp @ Newgrounds.com and myself | myself and Dan Paladin @synj industries)

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.

Being a game designer has helped me understand how to write a quick game schematic. Over time I’ve created a game schematic template which is super helpful for creating a pitch.

You can download the template here: (PDF)|(Word) Temporarily unavailable.

Feel free to modify and contribute.

I decided to work on some art to help move the cog wheels of Clock Day.

Clock Day is celebrated every 15th of August (since 2001) on newgrounds.com. It started when a user named StrawberryClock turned in his flash submission which contained merely the letter “B.” This submission, as much as it was blammed, withstood the blams of time and has churned out an Internet subculture. From these bytes of silliness grew the phenomenon of the creative Clock Crew.

According to history books, before StrawberryClock submitted “B,” he turned in “A” which was blammed to the brink of oblivion. Thus, my project is based on that submission by StrawberyClock.

It’s a short animation that personifies the letter “A” and A’s bleak, short-lived future it faced by the forces that bind Newgrounds.

Below are some of the pre-production works that went into this project. Enjoy!

First, I started off by penciling some basic shapes to get a good feel for the character and simplify his figure.

Upon nailing down the final design, I decided to go straight ahead and not do the turnarounds, something I essentially do on all projects.

After thumbnailing the concept storyboard, I dove right into a tight animatic with Jedadiah’s Pardon? (Theme) from the Audio Portal. Songs that didn’t make it into the list or were dropped last minute are the following; a salute to these talented audio slaves:

CJ’s: Ghosts of the Past
DanPaladin’s: PEAR
Zeke30695’s: Lilium (Music Box)
Jedadiah’s: Reprise and Finale

The Clock Crew in the mean time have finalized on this year’s preloader, which I’ve modified to fit my animation.

Getting to the end of this post, I had fun working on this project. The total time it took me from script to screen was approximately 12 hours, broken over a few nights. Getting technical, this animation was made in Flash CS3 (bloody thing crashed a lot of times), the background texture is from CGTextures.com which is a collective maintained by Marcel Vijfwinkel, also used Photoshop for editing and optimizing the final image. Audacity was the weapon of choice for sound editing.

I’m submitting the finished animation this Saturday to Newgrounds and by next week, it will go up on thedevilsgarage.com too. So for now, I shall leave you with two stills from the animation.

Shout-out to Sean “Chains” Mckenzie who helped me out with that strange language called ActionScript.

Update: Death of “A” has been featured on the Newgrounds homepage! It got 15,000 hits in the first 24 hours; most excellent!

Sawed-off head for the Newgrounds banner.

Here’s the third installment of race cars from Alien Hominid.