So here's a thing.

It occurred to me that I don't paint enough. I'm trying this thing someone suggested to me, which is finding a photo on Google Image Search, and then painting from it (also from life). I'm seeing how long I can stick to this, but I want to try to do this for the rest of April at the VERY least.

Tonight's result (click for full size, though it's small anyway):



The Kodkod is the smallest cat in the Americas, apparently. It's very cute. It had a (VERY CUTE) segment on Planet Earth where it ate moths. Watch and groan at David Attenborough's puns!



I think tomorrow's subject will be a tree... I'm not great at painting masses of leaves!

Global Game Jam

Oh man, we finished the GGJ this Sunday, and it was awesome. Well, it was tiring, but it was awesome.

This is our game, it is also awesome.

Please note that it's meant to be a two player game, but if you really wanna control both birds, you can. It's just super hard. Open it in Flash Player if you can, not a browser, because it'll look strange if you do. It'll run fine, just look strange.

I think we forgot to include the controls in the documentation because we wrote it in like the last MINUTE before the deadline, so the blue jay (I made that blue jay!) controls with WASD and the cardinal with the arrow keys.

Our actual idea was to have the tether break if any of those obstacles (the apples, the biplane, etc.) hit it, and when it broke it would cause a game over, so that the two players are competing for points but they're also collaborating to keep the game going. The code didn't work out in time though, saaad. The obstacles will take off points though, so avoid them anyway!

Trunkbirds eat space barnacles

I love vectors, secretly. When they want to be nice to me, anyway.

This is a weird recurring character of mine that I just call "trunkbird". He just kind of appeared in my head one day, along with his not-really-friend who is a penguin that wears a beret to cover up a bald spot on his head. I used them both in the first sound-synced animation project in school, and now trunkbird appears occasionally on doodles and on my business card, doing a little run cycle.

This is a short little in-progress clip of my senior project. Modeling and rigging was done by a friend (http://www.ekester.com).

Still working on it! Tirelessly!

Terrifying Senior Project Time!

Oh, it's that wonderful time of year, yes indeed.

I got the idea for this animation from this sort of half-awake, half-asleep dream I had involving a penguin wearing a really, really bad peacock costume. I wondered why a penguin would ever need to do that, and ... things went from there.

The storyboards look like this. (Click for full size)



In case anybody was curious, the notes I scribbled in the margins are for the modeler and rigger I'm collaborating with HEY EVAN YOU'RE AWESOME. (I have since added that one more scene.)

The penguin is here in greater detail.



He was actually a much more sympathetic character in the first draft of the story, but it was a lot harder to get to some kind of resolution. After unsuccessfully bouncing ideas off other people for MOOONTHS, it actually became much easier to put a story together if the penguin was more of a flakey sort of guy.

And of course, the poor peahen.



That last color shot is just an idea for now and probably will not be her final colors.

Yaaaay!

So my school has this game development club, and we're currently coming up with ideas for enemies and characters. There's supposed to be these hordes of easily-defeated small goblins that the main character can just wade through, so these are a couple of fast sketches of what they might look like, cobbled together from my own thoughts and some ideas from other club members.

I'm going to hell for drawing that poor cat. Click the thumbnail to see the full version, as usual.

http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v481/Zaphy/doodles/?action=view¤t=j43_project2.flv

I've never animated in Flash before. It was an... interesting experience.

INTERESTING

This is based off of Shel Silverstein's poem "Bear in There". I don't think it's complete yet, it needs sound and also less of the floaty text.

(I fail at embedding videos.)