Lit Trailer. Do want!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_DxR7qaLrE

Oh, this game can't come soon enough. I made a desktop image for it:



Similarly related, I managed to find a new copy of Sigma Star Saga, including the box and instructions.
It's a good thing my work on that Flash cartoon halted, because it looks like I made a few errors on Reckers Krill armor.

Had to post this one

God I'm so glad they didn't go for that ending. It would have messed me up so bad as a kid. (Like that cartoon about the guy trapped in the egg being crushed by a bigger guy in an even larger egg.)

Comic's upgrade

Every Few months, it seems I get a little less pleased with the Quality of Magic 8 Ball girl. Overall it ends up being a good thing. What else is going to motivate me to draw better.

However, a the recent spike in quality has been a bit of a doozy. After drawing all the animated Cells for the Magic 8 Ball Girl game and the Sigma Star Saga cartoon, I now can't even draw Magic 8 Ball Girl without using framing:



I had been able to get by with only visualizing the frames for a good while, but that is no longer enough. The drawings are getting much better, true. But it's also taking me forever to do so, and It's a little discouraging.

Zelda Song

Not sure what I'm going to do with this one, but:

It was 1998, my skirt was short my hat was long
Caught somewhere between the now and then
There were 7 Sages and time travelin' through the ages
It was Wintertime I spent with the Big N
Ahh Ahh Ahh
Ahh Ahh Ahh

Slashing Bongo Bongo
Smoking King Dodongo
Plus the simple tricks like webs and fish and crates
We didn't have game F-A-Qs
But if I ever had to choose
I'd rather solve those puzzles with my mates

[Chorus:]
And we were finding different hearts
We were sequence breaking parts
Making up some crazy shit for the Scarecrow's song
Trapping Fairies in a bottle, playing strait 'till tomorrow
Singing Sweet home Ocarina all winter long
Singing Sweet home Ocarina all winter long

Forgot to change the last 2 lines

Phantom Legs

I haven't done a big animated project since BBB2, I hadn't realized how drastically my style has changed since then. I hope I get this project finished soon so I can really see differences.

Best thing Peta's ever done.

Had to share this one. Peta's made a flash game against cooking turkeys using an Evil Cooking Mama.
It's maniacally brilliant, just thinking up the idea of an evil Cooking mama. They even have a wallpaper for her.


Then they had to go and throw the tofu-turkey in there. I get what their TRYING to do, but out of all the Vegetarian meals to serve as an alternative to Turkey, I giant mass of Tofu does not sound appealing. Tofu is best in smaller varied portions like in rice bowls and as breaded fake chicken wings.

Boarding the ship

Here's more of the animation I'm working on.
I want to get it done before christmas, but this was all I had time to animate this week.
Case in point: I'm going to go into overdrive for it.

Here are the references I used to draw those backgrounds.
And here's one last picture.

As long as I put my standards as low as possible, I should be able to get things done fast enough. I know it would probably be better to take my time, but I might not ever finish it if I don't accept my pace.

Sigma Star Shockwave

I got a lot sketch ideas from playing this game, and I'm going to go ahead with a flash cartoon.
Oddly enough, none of those jokes revolve around the skimpyness of the Parasite Bikinis.
Running animations have been so much easier for me since I studied those Shantae Sprites. I didn't have a need to animate the legs, but I it probably wouldn't have taken me another hour to do.

M8BG Game level sketch

I'm not sure if I'm going to start working on this game right away, but I've already got a few ideas for this new game outlined so far, including story, characters, overall structure and such.

What we have here a detailed look at how the intro sequence will play. There's a man trapped in his gigantic basement, and it's up to Magic 8 Ball girl to dive down there and carry him out. She can either hoist him on her shoulder (weighing her down and making the Platforming difficult), or she can put the man in the bucket, leave him over on the other side of the level, open the box to find the rope, and then use the rope on the convienient pully to lower it to the man in the bucket and lift him up.

There are also other tricks like pulling the level to make a bridge, and going through a door instead of making a tricky jump. I also figured I'd add a clock, just for kicks.

New Character: Quat'

I had a sketch of her original concept, but it got deleted, so here's a photo of the FBI agent from heroes who looks kind of like her:

Game Progress continues

Progress on the game goes well. I think I have a working item inventory figured out. It got a little overwhelming when I realized how many variables and conditional statements I'd have to use to get it all working.

It shouldn't be long before I start working on an actual game based on this thing, but I'm getting tired just thinking about it. I'm not even sure what Variables I'm supposed to store to make save files yet. And testing something like this is going to be a real headache.

This counts as two posts

Making a game. I'll have more details later, but for now, here's a look at the sprites


This walking segment here (click to play) takes a lot of notes from the animation to the game Shantae. Nothing is traced over or directly ripped, mind you, but considering how well I usually do on walking cycles I learned a great deal.
And I do know the benefits of taking reference from real life, But in this case those references were not helping.

Shantae also caught my attention because she has a similar playful attitude to Magic 8 Ball Girl. However, when it comes to responsibility and Conscience, Magic 8 Ball Girl probably has more and common with Sam and Max.

Retrospective

Legend of Luik

It's time for a retrospective. When I started that Cartoon in '05, I thought it would be a simple animating out of Mookie's My Angel with limited use of artistic license. By the end of it's production it was entirely different cartoon and one with a story that I was pretty proud of. Even still I had some issues with Legend of Luik's plot upon its completion, and it has only been recently that I realize why.

The Main scene I had problems with was the one during the Bridge (2:55 to 3:25) Here the girl Katharina is supposed to make Luik realize what a monster he has become on his journey, but nothing she could do felt natural to the story. He practically realized it on his own while the rest of the time was padded with shots of the people he killed (just in case you forgot- dur hur hur).

The issue from the story is actually rooted to a scene (which also takes place during the bridge) in My Angel's story, but the blame is still mine, as this was the very first scene I gutted during my first rewrite. To show the moral high-ground that the hero possessed, Mookie had one of the villains Seduce the hero as a last resort and he resists her because he's fighting for more than lust. As Necessary as this scene was it seemed like a highly out of place move for the villainess to make (easily misinterpreted as a sign of the artist's deprived needs). In an attempt to fix this problem, I changed the Seducing woman to an innocent daughter of the villain. I took it too the opposite extreme by making her much more sympathetic as I developed the plot. The Girl and Luik end up switching roles as villain and hero over the course of the movie. Both of our movies ended up making the same mistake.

In both of these cartoons the character who should have been focused on to fix this issue was the Captured girl. In My Angel the girl is unconscious for the entire show, and in Legend of Luik she does nothing but forgive and enable the murderous side of the hero. I did flesh out a lot of this girls character in her story preceding the events of legend of Luik, but if I had developed a Passive heroine from her character and not made her accept the destruction of her village and death of her loved one, then I could have had some much better motivation in these characters and the plot would have been a little more solid..

In the end, I learned that Mario really messed up my view of the Hero rescues princess story structure, what with the entire focus on mario and making toadstool just wait there as a goal and not a character. I also learned that just building onto your characters more and more is a blind way to develop a story, and I should always continue researching on things I can apply to my writing.

More Cave story art kinda

I was had some writing thing planned for today, but that can wait for next weekend.

Quote the raven... not a raven

Here's a bunch of quote sketches. Sprites are so easy to misinterpret.
I'll have a big post for tomorrow.

Just dropping this off here.

This isn't saturdays sketch.

Exsquirrellsion

Someone at my School said a squirrel knocked out a transformer and got killed while causing a blackout.

So I drew it.

Zero as a Meme

I've drawn some questionable stuff for this Blog in the past... But I think I've really scared myself this time.



This is from a rather odd meme that uses the facial expression of this girl from some recent doujin and pastes it over various pictures. My favorite one is this:

Here's megaman

This has been the longest weekend I've ever had. It gave me plenty of time recover from that awful flu, but it still felt like I went through 5 days instead of 3...

It is still sunday right? I didn't forget to update Magic 8 Ball Girl, did I?

Really sick today

Man I don't know what Happened, but Today and yesterday I have gotten sicker than I've ever been in a long time. I think I actually got delusional the other night.

Here's hoping I recover by tomorrow.

Teenage Ada

And so we say Farewell to Teen ada for now. Here's a collage of all the sketches of her from this flashback sequence, as well as some concept sketches from when this story was first conceived back in february.

I've gotten so used to drawing Teen Ada, it may make going back to the old look a little difficult.

Dos Games and BBB

This blogs gotten boring, and since I no longer have M8BG hanging over my head Everyday, I guess I should bring this up to two updates a week.

So Look out for updates every saturday and Sunday.

Anyway, I've been playing a ton of old games lately. I've got the ScummVG engine running point and click games on my wii, I just Beat Athena on an NES emulator (A game I used to play when I was only 3), and I even have a mock dos system running on my Mac to play some of those old programs back when PC gaming was a little more affordable.

Their Even more affordable now though. A lot of these old games are available on the Web as Freeware. And the ones that aren't freewares are available for free too, but that's where the Ethics begin to blur :)

Here's my celebration of Defeating Athena:


And here's a concept for the custom character Icon I was trying to make for Castle of the Winds, before I realized how broken that system was (that's windows 3 for you):


Brians looking as tough as ever, which brings us to our next bit of info, Bridgette Brian and the Bunny is back in motion, Here's what I have so far

Legacy of Squares

So I started Drawing the Soul Reaver Bosses in a megaman esc grid... then I ran out of bosses

Then I ran out of Bosses... I could have put Kain in there, but that would be like putting Wile in there.

These guy's portraits are also modeled slightly after the Megaman Two villains they take the box of. The most obvious one is Melchiah as Airman.

Another late update.

I keep forgetting these updates. It's your fault you know. That's right you, Gregory feltrick!

Here's a something

I drew this a while ago, but every week I try to write the post for it, it drags on and we just skip it. so here it is.

I can't help but feel I've forgotten something...

Oh... woops. Magic 8 Ball Girls 1 year anniversary was 9 days ago

CHAKAN!!!!

I faced facts. Chakan the forever man is just not coming out on the virtual console. So got it through the web already.

Chakan in some ways represents a lot of what the sega genesis was for me. Overly Dark hardcore yet campy settings with the most unnatural sound effects you ever heard and frustrating but barely manageable platforming... exactly what I needed back then.

Dart

I did this drawing soley to write a review for a budding little comic called franken fran. The picture here was drawn as is, and I made plenty of sloppy mistakes aligning the face and such at that angle, but it added to the sort of flavor the comic has so I left it that way.

Oh, but I was going to talk about dart:

I'll be bringing Dart back into the comic Wednesday (correction: friday) and obviously the guy who was made up of two squares and four sticks needed a big revamp. Now that above picture is terrible, and I won't be using anything below the neck there he shouldn't even have a sword, what the hell did I draw that for?

I like the hair though.

Alice 6 Months Later

So Here a look at how Alice has changed over the past 6 months since she was introduced into Magic 8 Ball Girl. I gave her a big remodeling this week since she's providing some important recaps for this story.






Book 2



The Hair and bangs have been changed for Book 2. She now resembles a middleset Brian Green

The actual idea though is to make her hair resemble Tiny Fortune teller's hood.