The Squirrel Game

Last week my new game "The Squirrel Game" came out, It was a really good moment for me getting to finally submit it after almost a year and a half of production. No, the game itself doesn't LOOK like it took a year and a half, but oh~ There's a story there... a small story really.

You can play it here.

So it started back when I was working on Kid Launcher, the coder of that thought we should brainstorm some other ideas for games. One of the ideas i came up with was about a squirrel who jumped across rooftops being chased by a dragon. The programmer at the time liked this idea, so i went ahead and started doing art for it. Then he ended up dropping out, and i slowly brought the art to different programmers. I think i went through 2 or 3 who started the project, then had to drop out because of personal issues or busy with other work. By the time i talked to Aaron (NegativeONE) about it, the art was just about done. Then he took it and worked on it for about 3 months on and off, and eventually it looks like it does now.

Also, my friend Andrew Yablo did the music. I figured he'd want a plug. Go check out his stuff.

I'm also pretty excited because Newgrounds ended up sponsoring it! Check this out

Guy with a Tie

I'm slowing down lately with my world of animations and cartoons. I think it's mostly because I'm super busy with college, which is allowing me to make new, 3D-esque animations in after effects! There's actually something else that I'm working on that's really BIG, unrelated to anything connected to animation. I will talk about that when the time is right.

Having said that, it's now time to debut my latest toon, Guy with a Tie!

This toon was actually part of an assignment where we had to make 2 3D rooms in after effects using textured images like with photoshop. Then we had to Light the scenes, and have the camera move from one room to the other. For my assignment, i took it a bit further and animated characters into the scene, giving it a bit of a story. It's not the most advanced story or anything, in fact, it's really quite random. It was alot of fun to work on though, was a bitch to render, and I'm happy with the end result!

Frozen Fate, Game Jam 2

So over the last 3 days i participated in the second Newgrounds Online Game Jam. This time around, the theme was "Earth freezing over" or something like that. I was paired up in a team with WallRoss, Father-Of-Death and ZaDrugLord, all users on NG.

The initial premise that they had when I started talking to them was about a giant death-star thing blocking the suns rays from hitting earth, freezing the planet. From there, we warped it into this game about a mexican janitor who was sleeping on the job, and then was the only one who could save the planet from an iminent ice age.

You can play the final version here

Every aspect of making this game came together really smoothly. Everyone got along really well and the scope of the game didn't get out of control. In the end though, 2 of the traps had to be cut. We had these doors that you had to shoot and blow up to keep going, as well as bombs that dropped from above, and then blinked 3 times and blew up. Those were cool...i wish they coulda made it in.

I'm not sure what else to write about the game, it was a fun 3 days and everyone really pulled through with some really quality work. Not only that, but the game itself feels like a powerful game to us too, because of what happens at the end ;)

Working on Frozen Fate was a really fun experience though, if you liked the game, head on over to newgrounds and write a review! We love hearing from everyone about it.

Play - Making of

Hey guys, here's the blog of the studio project "Play" i did. You can check the end result out below.

Blog 1.

Last night i spent a few hours trying to come up with some quality concept art. I had done a few sketches previously which ended up changing the storyline a bit.

Previously, the storyline was about a rock gollum who finds a bird, kills it, and is upset but it returns to life when a forest ..creature..thing, brings it back to life. Now, I gave the gollum a pick-axe, and there is many of them all enslaved. One will find a hole in the cave they’re mining and crawl through, and when reaching the surface, the rocks break off and he becomes the creature i have drawn here.

I think he was a species that was kidnapped and enslaved to mine for jems or something by either people or a more dominant species, but upon escaping, he turns back into this creature. He may jump on top of the mountain and crack a hole in it, revealing the light to the rest of his race too.. Not sure, but the script is becoming more concrete.

That’s all for now, I think i’m almost ready to start an animatic.

Blog 2

I have been immensely busy in the last few weeks, even forgot to update this blog! So here’s a recap.

Since my last blog, I’ve animated the first 2 scenes of the movie in After Effects. I first had to experiment quite a bit, but it turned out Flash animations (sfw’s) would compile very easily in After Effects. My first scene was sort of a test to see how it all fit together, the results actually came together quite well, here’s a screenshot of what to expect.

as i wrote before, all of the backgrounds have been made in Photoshop. I’ve really been experimenting a lot with different brushes to make the trees and scenery more vivid and sharp. I think by the end of this though, my digital painting skills will definitely be increased.

In the last few days I’ve also started learning the program Reason, made by the company PropellerHead. Reason is a powerful music writing software with a steep learning curve. My friend Ian, who has written music for me in the past has been using Reason for several years now, so I actually learned quite a bit from him to help understand the program. On the side i’ve been watching youtube videos and reading up on Music theory to properly make music for this assignment. Although the learning curve is big, i’m actually having a lot of fun with it so far. Though it will probably take a LOT of hard hours just to get the music right for this video.

Blog 3.

I’ve updated this thing SO little i’m probably going to fail the studio project just because of that, it’ll be the most amazing video in the end, but it’ll fail because of this blog haha. In the last little while, I’ve really started trying to push After Effects and build a 3D environment for the characters to take interact in. Which is what today’s blog is about. The scene is turning out really cool and i figured it was time to share some more work.

In the pictures you’re looking at, this is a short scene in which the creature-guy chases the bird through some trees, he flips around and jumps from tree to tree. The camera follow him through his path and eventually up, overtop of the trees, revealing a big cliff and the character will fall off of the cliff. (Don’t worry, he’ll be fine).

Organizing this scene was really difficult at first, i had never done anything like it before, as typically everything i animate is in Flash, and left there. As i got further along, it did get easier, and the end result is really looking good, although there’s still a bit more to do.

On the music front, i haven’t really gotten much time to learn to write music in the last little while, I’m not sure if i’ll be able to write music for the video in the end.

Blog 4.

So I had two big inspirations for this video. One of them was Bitey of Brackenwood, a flash series by Adam Phillips. His creative work features a forest dude named Bitey running gracefully around long open fields and swinging from tree’s in elaborate forests (and then being a dick to all of the forest creatures haha). My next inspiration was just the need to digitally paint something more natural. Most of my work lately has all been industrial-esque, with buildings and very little wildlife. So this project was kind of an outlet in that respect.

My original idea’s revolved around this Rock Golem who finds a friendly bird and they start playing, and he kills it. Then a forest nymph thing would come out of the ground and revive the bird. I didn’t quite take to this idea in the beginning, and soon changed the Rock Golem into an enslaved miner, who tunneled out of captivity and upon hitting sunlight, it would blast the Rock’s off his body; turning him into the creature that he is now.

After coming up with the main character design, i actually reverted back to the original story. Only I actually planned up to where the bird gets hurt, I started making it without being fully prepared. As I went along with making it, I came up with the rest, which ended up being relatively similar to the original story.

The programs I used were Flash, Photoshop, and After Effects. I learned quite a lot about After Effects while making this, and I’m for sure going to be doing a lot more work in After Effects in the future.

Blog 5.

Some difficulties that I had during production on Play was poor planning of the music. When i started, i thought that I would have a surplus of time to learn Reason and learn to write some basic music for the video. As i went along though, i found it harder and harder to find time to learn the art of music creation. With only a month left, i decided that I would be best off if I outsourced the music and focused on making the video good. In the end, I ended up grabbing some music recommended by a friend and using that, and it turned out alright.

I also experienced quite a bit of After Effects related issues that i had to work around. Things like Particular not working in 3D space, and random objects disappearing and reappearing every so often. In the end though, most of the design problems were resolved and the video turned out okay. My one big gripe would have to be the particles though, i really wanted to have lots of glowing floaties in the forest, and i couldn’t make it look good or consistent.

Halloween, Firefox, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

This is going to be a brief roundup of a ton of things that have happened lately, i need to stop neglecting this blog...this sweet....sweet blog...

Halloween happened, and the night before Halloween I was talking with YungJazz about a short Halloween flash, in 5 hours on the Halloween sunday, I whipped up Epic Crossover: Hoeloween. It's a fun little mashup between the Exile series and YungJazz's Necropolis series. Also, music by Rig. Enjoy!

I'm quite annoyed with Firefox lately, they updated their browser again and released a Beta. There's SO MANY small annoyances now... Such as: Boxes around flash windows, video's not playing full size on certain sites, unable to scroll while the mouse is overtop of a flash window, typing a website name into the URL bar now googles it, rather than taking you straight to that site... the list goes on, but I just wanted to get that out there. If you're a firefox user, the new FF is really nice, they've built a feedback option into it, so go spam them with anger about the small inconveniences it can cause you... Or switch to Chrome.

I got a new Facebook account! Kinda...Before i had an "Exile" Facebook fan page, and a "Patchman" facebook fan page, and i wasn't really sure where to post everything else...like news on Mother Judgement or random flashes like "Tales of the Jesusaurus Rex". Needless to say, i've scrapped my Exile and Patchman pages in favor of a Jordan Duchnycz one. Now go like me! :P

Not really important, but I finally added a background to my twitter page...only took me half a year..

Huzzah for networking.

I'm working on a really cool video project for school where I mix after effects, photoshop and flash into one big amazing movie. It's REALLY looking tight, and should be done in the next few weeks. Here's a screenshot for now, hopefully i'll do a full post on it soon.

FFF, my image uploader isn't working...pretend there's a screenshot here.