Update Dump of Ultimate Guilt!

Sooooo... I know I said I was going to be posting more, and that I was going to have more free time. One of those things turned out to be true! But I swear, I haven't been not posting because I haven't been doing stuff! I just haven't done anything finished enough to show off. Sad, but true.

So what have I been up to? Well, Mario Maker got me in the mood to hit game development again, and with a vengeance. I actually put together a little Castlevania style platformer that was shaping up nicely, but honestly that will take a very long time before it is actually done. A finished stage as a demo isn't out of the question, but even that would be a little ways off. I'll dump some of the graphics and screenshots up here in the future, but that is a story for another time. Here's a mock up of th first boss fight, just for fun!

I also did a crap load of work on Nova Phase, the 5th issue of which will probably be done this week. That means it will come out like... in February probably, but whatever. It will be good to be close to completing the series' run, and some of the art in this issue is pretty awesome. Maybe I'll post some spoilers. Maybe.

I've also been trying to take steps towards finishing some other little projects that have been sitting around. It is my genuine intention to do one more chapter of Janken before doing an Amazon e-book or something of the whole thing. The cover is done, and the "last" chapter is thumbnailed, with a few pages even penciled, but that's it on that. Here's a look at the updated cover and logo.

A lot of my down time has been spent basically practicing my digital work, including lots of inking and sketching. Some of these turned out pretty cool, so I'm posting them here for fun!

This one was a concept design for a comic my old collaborator on Heckbringers was thinking of doing called Dragonomics. Not much to say about that yet, but could be seeing more of this little rascal in the future. He's up to some other stuff, which I will post about a little later this week.

Anyone who follows my blog knows I come back to this guy every now and then. I'm working on a small project involving him that is going really well so far, but I want to have a bit more of it done before I post it here.

Another one that comes and goes pretty frequently! I don't remember why we stopped working on this game, but I love the designs from it and I'm trying to find some place to use them here. Ideally something that wasn't a full blown comic, but I guess we'll see.

I've got some other stuff brewing, but this is the major stuff. I'm also finally biting the bullet and sitting down to remake and ultimately finish the original Bird Force in a more reliable program. There were was supposed to be a pretty involved story, and a handful of characters that never made it into the version I posted here because I was terrified Construct would collapse and I'd lose what I actually had done. I'm working in Multimedia Fusion to program a definitive version of the game with all the features I initially imagined. It's going well considering its literally been one afternoon of work. Hopefully more on that in the near future!

Okay! That's it! I'll probably be posting another small comic later this week!

Some Bird Force Bits!

Been a while since I posted anything, and don't really have anything to show, but I have some Bird Force related stuff from a bit ago that I took a little time to finish up this weekend, and felt like showing off a bit. First off, some planes!

This is for the four main characters, although the plan is that there will be a ton more of wingmen to find and recruit, each with their own ship and weapons. I don't think I've shown these in sprite form before, so I hope this is cool! Next, some bosses!

Just three for now, based on a fly, ant, and bee (or maybe wasp) respectively. The enemies would be bug inspired planes, but the bosses would be full blown mecha monsters. Had a hard time nailing the look for the enemy mechanical designs, but I'm happy with how these turned out.

Sadly, that's about it. I'm hitting a brick wall on backgrounds, but I think I might just be tired... I'm changing my development tools around a bit, as Construct turned out to be a little too temperamental during the development of the original Bird Force last summer. I'm gonna try Multimedia Fusion this time around, so hopefully that will be a little more consistent.

And yes, development was definitely inspired by the Star Fox announcement. So cool!

Bayonetta 2 Pixel Art and Twitter Glory

So Bayonetta 2 is getting pretty near release in North America, and I'm pretty excited about it. I've loved Platinum Games since back when they were Clover Studios, and more games from them is always a good thing. I absolutely adore the Wonderful 101, but I sadly missed out on Bayonetta, as I didn't have an Xbox 360 or PS3 when it came out, and never found the time to pick it up subsequently. The Wii U rerelease packaged with Bayonetta 2 will be my first time playing the original, and I'm looking forward to it.

It's been a long time since I did a real good demake, partly because nothing has caught my fancy and partly because I've been busy with other things which have occupied most of my time, but I enjoyed doing this kind of thing and thought it might be fun to do again. The goal was to picture a scene from Bayo 2, as if it were a classic 2D action game, ala Castlevania or Ninja Gaiden.

I'm probably most pleased with the sky, as capturing the sort of ethereal radiance was very tough, but I also am pretty proud of how much of Bayonetta's features I was able to squeeze into that sprite. People tend to 'oooo' and 'aaaaa' over really big sprites, but honestly those are much easier to make good, as they start to just become small drawings after a while. It's REALLY challenge to turn a hundred or so pixels into something that looks like anything, let alone a specific character, so I think I accomplished something good here.

I was also granted the supreme honor of having Bayonetta's real life daddy, madman Hideki Kamiya retweet the image with rare enthusiasm. Probably the first post I've eve made on Twitter that ANYBODY has ever looked at. Yay!

In other news, I'll be wrapping up the fourth issue of Nova Phase this week, which means it should be on (digital) store shelves in the near future, with the print compilation of 3 and 4 available on Amazon soon after. I hope. I'll make an announcement. In the mean time, issue 3 is available on Comixology now, so if you haven't already, check it out!

https://www.comixology.com/Nova-Phase-3/digital-comic/104319

Also working on the next chapter of Ja-Ja-Ja-Janken!, which is coming along nicely. With Saturday morning cartoons becoming officially extinct like, next month, I feel like my work on Saturday Morning Anime is more dire than ever.

Lots of work on AtomMan

Was seized by the desire to work on AtomMan, a project I've been working on and off on for a very long time. It was actually the first ever game I ever made, waaaay back in like 1999, when I was just a 6th grader! It originally started as a MegaMan fan game, but after a little while, I guess I wanted to make up my own bad guys and such, and it turned into a VERY thinly veiled ripoff, parody, homage, or whatever you want to call it. The sprites were even just crappy recolored versions of MegaMan characters, with pretty minor tweaks. There was a great deal of humor in the game, and some pretty terrible and basic gameplay, but I felt pretty accomplished.

Now, years later, I couldn't really resist the urge to look at these characters again, and I started to think that maybe there was some potential here. Sure, it started as a pretty basic ripoff, but some of the designs had genuinely cool elements, and I thought I could re-imagine it into something much more original, while still obviously honoring the games that inspired it.

So yeah, the inspiration is probably SUPER OBVIOUS, but I think this turned out really well. I don't want to talk to much about the story just yet, but these guys are the main bad guys.

Now, because I can't focus on anything, this is both a comic and a game, so here's some of the animations and such I've whipped up!

 Look at him go! These are just his basic animations, but there are going to be tons of other weapons and maybe even forms to take on. To get started, though, I think these are coming along nicely.

I also mocked up a little screenshot today, which I think turned out well. This is the first time since being a kid that I've gotten this far on this project, so it's pretty exciting.

 Not  finished anything yet, but just trying to establish the look of the game. Obviously very MegaMan inspired, not going to debate or deny that, but I want to push this game into some pretty out there territory. I want to try to bring all the things I loved about the Legends and Battle Network games into the basic gameplay of a 2D classic MegaMan game, but there's elements of other games from this era that I really loved back then, including Shenmue, Brave Fencer Musashi, Legend of Zelda and Mystical Ninja.

OKAY! So that's what I got so far. Feeling pretty good about it so far, but definitely a work in progress.

Pixel Art for Fun and Profit

I don't know how forward I've been about this in the past, but damn would I love to just do pixel art professionally. I've dabbled in doing freelance stuff, like Boon Hill, and arguably Nova Phase is pixel art, though I don't really make ANY money off of that, so it's more like an expensive hobby than a job. I have still never seen any of my work, including freelance stuff, used in a finished game, except Bird Force, which I made myself and still really isn't done. I see tons of games come out that still utilize pixel art, so obviously somebody somewhere is doing this stuff for a living. That's what I want, but man,  doing something for a living is really hard when nobody will give you any money for it.

But still, I just love doing the stuff. I guess that's why its kind of weird that I've never tried bringing my work into the physical, real world, like that cyber demon from that one episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. You know the one. I've seen people do these little bead jobbies, and always thought it would be cool, but I don't generally think of myself as a craftsy person, so I never got into it. It's weird, but I just never did it. Until today, of course, when my fiance thought it would be cool to make a pixel art cake topper for our wedding. Good on her, because I think I might do a ton of this.

This was my first attempt at bringing a pixel work into the real world, like said Buffy episode. Moloch the Corrupter was the name of the demon, just looked that up. The sprite I used hasn't been shown off before, and is for a new project that is super early in development, a dice battling game called HyperDyce. It is in fact as ridiculous as it sounds, possibly more so, but more on that later. This is the player character, a scumbag dice battler called Jackalope Winfight, as he appears on the overworld between battles. But I've already said too much.

There's something remarkably satisfying about physical things. Pretty much all of my work is confined to the digital world, so being able to hold something I've created in my hands is kind of amazing. Although Nova Phase was intended to be a digital comic from the get go, getting my hands on the printed volume just felt really cool, and was actually the first time I felt genuinely excited about the whole experience. This is the first time I've been able to have this experience with my smaller scale pixel art, and I really like it.

I need way more of these little boards, and an assload more beads probably, but I think I'm gonna be doing alot more of these, maybe even selling them! I love the idea of making and selling stuff, maybe because of some weird, RPG, Animal Crossing brain problem, but whatever.

Bird Force Update!

Some time ago, I posted some mock-ups of a game I was half-jokingly planning about birds flying jets.  I had a fever of activity, possibly due to temporary madness induced by too much work on Nova Phase, which subsided once I was working full time. Now, however, I'm back to working on Nova Phase, and I guess the madness must have seized me again, because I started working on Bird Force again, only this time much more earnestly. I actually started trying to program the damn thing.

Using a somewhat stable free version of and HTML5 game development tool called Construct 2, I've started working pretty seriously. Things have not been going entirely smoothly, but I figured it would be fun to post my progress here. Eventually, I'd like to post a playable version here (if that is actually possible, that is), so for now, here are some shots of in development stuff!

Here's the first shot. It's a pretty simple game. You click to fly up, release to drift down. Moving rings come down towards the player, and you just need to fly through them to get points! As you can see, there is pretty minimal stuff going on here, but the basics of the game are in place. Woo, look at that score!

 Okay, no we're talking! We've got obstacles to avoid, a much more attractive score display, and slick, parallax scrolling to  fake depth on the clouds. There's also a neat little afterburner effect! Score has improved as well, thanks to a combo system that rewards players for flying through rings consecutively.

Accidentally left the game running, and got a pretty good score! Of course, the bombs weren't actually programmed to do anything other than look cool at this point, so the game was basically impossible to lose. Notice the sparkly effect around the ring! Yummy!

Finally programmed in a way to lose! Added some appropriate dialogue, as well as a cool game over screen! Now there is actually a game happening! And its actually pretty hard, as a matter of fact.

Unfortunately, after this the project literally fell apart due to some weird instability in the way the program paths files or something, and for  few days I couldn't even access my work. Very annoying. After a lot of reading on the Construct forums, I was able to figure out how to access my back up work and actually get some of my work back.

To celebrate, a title screen! Though I did a bit more tweaking on the combo system to today, this is about as far as I've come. I'd like to add a few more elements to this beta version, including at least 5 minutes of dialogue and of course maybe some music. Reading all about Famitracker and such, hopefully gonna be able to actually do something with that.

Anyway, that's it so far! Hopefully I can have something playable up here soon! I have no idea how that works, though.

Honesty important, right?

In other news, issue 4 of Nova Phase is going really well! Slowly making progress!

Badass cover design for Nova Phase 3!

Very happy with the end result. Tried to go all out on this one.

Amazing might be an overstatement...

This should kinda make sense to anybody that saw the movie. This was all I could think about during the big action scene at the end.

I thought it was okay. Not really very much different from the Raimi movies, I don't think. I do feel like they severely downplayed Peter's nerdiness, though.

Okay, that's it. Maybe something tomorrow.