News

The Squirrel Game

Jordan Duchnycz — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 14:08:14 +0000

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

Jordan Duchnycz — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 15:42:21 +0000

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

Jordan Duchnycz — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 08:09:59 +0000

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

Jordan Duchnycz — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 06:56:55 +0000

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.

Jordan Duchnycz — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 00:39:52 +0000

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.

Super Jeremy Bongstarr

Jordan Duchnycz — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 21:01:13 +0000

I've been doing some work on the cutscenes for Super Jeremy Bongstarr, thought it'd be cool to write out how the new game will look different than the last. First, here's a screenshot from the original Jeremy Bongstarr.

Now, through the magic of photoshop, i've been practicing my digital painting skills over the last little while, and have made the new cutscene look like this.

I'm really starting to like how it's all turning out! And I can't wait to show more work, down the road.

Exile on the Backburner/Site retouching

Jordan Duchnycz — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 23:33:56 +0000

I've been meaning to write this for a while now, but as i relax this friday night with this Rum and Coke I figure its a good a time as ever to fill out a blog post. Now, the reason for the delays with Exile is primarily because of School. It's my final year of College (I still feel like I just got out of high school .__. I guess it's because my course is only 2 years long), and they're really pouring it on. I'm learning lots about After Effects though, gonna be learning Actionscript soon too :D

Another thing that's taking up my time is all of the Flash games that I'm working on. You guys already know about Mother Judgement, which i wrote up a blog about just recently. I also did another "Learn2Flash" with a Patchman Miniboss for the same game, If you haven't seen it..here it is.

The other two games i'm working on are "The Squirrel Game" and "Super Jeremy Bongstarr". I'll for sure write up a history of squirrel game at one point, It has a fun story, but might be a little lackluster in the end just due to a long history of coders dropping out due to laziness, random disappearance, etc etc. This game is being coded by NegativeONE though, the guy who coded Newgrounds Rumble, which is pretty impressive.

As for SJB, that's a game to be reckoned with :D We have some pretttty big plans for it, and it's just the remake! Wait till you see Jeremy Bongstarr 2! Unfortunately though, at this time I don't want to write up too much about it, hopefully in the next few weeks i'll be able to pull the curtain on this fun little platformer.

As you may or may not have noticed, the website has a slightly new look! Gone is the sidebar on the left, giving more room for the main blogs, bigger pictures, etc. I also changed the banner. This was a big change because before it signified that the website was about Exile and its production. Now that it's on hold, i've been having to write about my other projects. It seems stupid that i didn't do this in the first place, so LifeinExile is now the home of all of my projects in one :)

I was tempted to turn it into a website-website, where its just a showcase of my work like a porfolio, but i've really started to enjoy writing up all of these blogs.. Therefore, I'mma keep em!

Mother Judgement Announcement

Jordan Duchnycz — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 04:14:38 +0000

K well i actually "announced" the game like 2 days ago on Newgrounds, however i'm writing here so that i can write even more about it.

Mother Judgement is my next game that I'm working on, though Squirrel Game might hit sooner actually..I'll talk about this one. Basically it's a funky platform shooter where you play as a nun with guns, as she explores a church to find the secret about the zombie invasion. Already you love it :P

I feel that game developement needs to be fun, like as fun as possible and if the developers have fun making it, the players will always have fun playing it. Were having fun making this game, so we think you'll have fun too! I mean...i drew this yesterday...

And it doesn't often get more awesome than that! Special thanks to mah pal Araelyn for the idea, (Holy shit guys, as i was writing this, she told me his name was "Jewfro Eagleman"... I love it!), so my version was going to be a hang-gliding zombie, but that wasn't as "realistic" with it being indoors for most of the game..

Xeptic is coding it, he recently got daily 2nd on Newgrounds for his new game "Recordshop Tycoon", it was pretty sweet, It's like lemonade stand but DELUX. Try it out!

So here's a main menu i whipped up. The game didn't actually have any sort of God of War theme to it before the menu, but after it, i think things are going in a SLIGHT direction that way. And I only did the menu like 3 days ago.

The music is being done by Ockeroid, who is a rather cool cat. Worked with him on the 24 Hour Collab, which i still have to write a blog about..it's on NG frontpage now though if you haven't seen it.

Hmm...what else..

Right, well yesterday I actually whipped up a new "Learn2Flash" video, I still have 2 hours of video to edit through though, this one might be quite a bit longer than the last, which i suppose is good but I like keeping them under... i guess 10 minutes, don't want it to get too lengthy or drag on. I'll update this blog again in a few days when i upload it, and will possibly write about the samurai collab as well.

School is buuuuuusy!

Jordan Duchnycz — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 23:14:30 +0000

Exile is taking to the backseat for a bit due to lots of projects i'm working on now, mostly revolving around school, after effects, and all that jazz. For those who don't know, I'm just starting my 2nd and final year of college, where i'm taking Digital Multimedia Technology. Specializing in special effects, graphic design, motion graphics, 3D and Web design. Fun stuff!

There are a few other things that i've been managing to do lately too, so i'll try and sum those up right about now.

Last sunday, my friend RedHarvest held an online collab event where 10-ish artists came together for a day and all worked on their own 13 second animation, to be strung together in a collab which the theme was Samurai. I'll post a link to it as soon as its up on Twitter and Facebook, so follow those if you already aren't and want to see those updates ;)

Speaking of Twitter, my website twitter isn't updating.. It keeps showing the same tweets from like a month ago.. If you know how to fix that let me know!

The next project i'm working on (and getting close to finishing) is the long overdue "Squirrel Game" the game that puts you on a roof, as a squirrel, running away from a dragon while it shoots fireballs at you and you gotta avoid stuff. It's kind of like robot unicorn attack without all of the colours, and a bit of canabalt as well. NegativeONE is coding it, and all of the art is done for that so it should be done sometime in early october.

Also happening in octover, the Newgrounds Toronto meet! NegativeONE is also hosting that meet up, so i blackmailed him into coding the squirrel game so that I could fly out there for the weekend. If you're in the toronto or north america area, come on by! It's in early october, you can read about it here!

Yet another game i'm working on, working title "nun-game", is a game about a nun who shoots up Zombies in a church, but then she starts exploring..and finds some craaaaazy shit (pardon my obscene....nevermind, shit's not that bad). Xeptic is coding that and he's doing one hell of a job, lots of the stuff he's coding is really new to him, so he gets mad props for figuring out how to code all these things in a short amount of time at that.

Of course, Super Jeremy Bongstarr is also getting massive updates, and is coming along quite well. Monkokio is working on it when he can, and because he's a busy lad it is taking a bit longer to do. It's all good though, since i'm done the art i just have to play the waiting game, mixed with the "bug monkokio about it 24/7" game. Hopefully i'll have new screenshots of that game soon, we have sexy plans for it in the future!

Anyways, that's about it for now, but i should be updating this again a lot in the next month or so!

Later dayz

End of summer recap

Jordan Duchnycz — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 16:28:36 +0000

So year 2 of college is officially back on and I'm typing this up during class 'cause were not doing anything! I feel like in the last month or so of summer I really lost interest in flash for a while, so i'll get into that a bit, and how I won back my motivation in the last 4 days. (woo!)

Right, so after the NG game jam I took a few days off from work because it was 48 hours of nonstop drawing, that was a bad idea unfortunately, 'cuz I kept up with that same laziness hardcore. Not long before that I found a copy of Legend of Dragoon in its original packaging, so I played through that, then Jak 2 and 3, then Sonic 2, 3, and S&K. The laziness continued for quite a while with me doing about 1 hour ish of work in flash a day.

For those who are wondering, now i'm going through GTA4.

Last week I felt a random urge to watch Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood as i worked, hoping it would inspire me to keep working. It did, and within 3 days I watched the 10 dubbed episodes of Brotherhood, 10 of dubbed D.Gray Man, all 37 episodes of Death Note and the full series Gurren Lagann. It's weird because I hadn't watched an Anime in like 2 years, but all of a sudden I covered my favorite 3 shows in like 3 or 4 days. It was a good time. Needless to say, the brilliant animation, action, and storylines really got me pumped to work on Exile again, and I finished another 2 scenes while I watched the shows on my 2nd monitor. Huzzah!

Exile 1 is almost done, and the first scene of the second is roughed out. With all of the free time that I get from school, I'll probably finish the 2nd in the next few months.