Some Bird Force Nonsense!

Bird Force, my awesome game idea that I can never seem to finish, has been an enduring shadow over my thoughts for almost two years now. Although I may not have the time just now to focus on bringing this vision to life, I thought I'd at least share a little art and keep the dream alive!

I'm also just trying to draw as much as possible these days, for both practice and personal satisfaction. For how much I love Bird Force, I've produced surprisingly little art related to it, and my recent Star Buster art has been coming along so well I thought I'd branch out a little. The composition is a little more ambitious than the previous digital stuff I've been doing, and I'm honestly not great at drawing birds, so this was a fun project. I literally hated the way it looked until the minute it was finished, so I guess it can be cool to see how something can come together.

Uh... that's it I guess? More Star Buster next week!

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!

BIRD FORCE STICKERS!

I know at this point it seems like forever that I have been promising these, but I finally sat myself down to get these little guys done! I wanted these to be as fun a a bunch of stickers possibly could be, so I hope they turned out good! Without further ado, here is the first set of BIRD FORCE STICKERS!

Collect'em all! #teambirds

Here we have the starting roster of pilots, complete with their own unique signature ships. Everybody here has already been featured in the past, but this is the first time that they've been  rendered in anything other than pixel art, which was an interesting challenge, as I never even drew concept art of these guys. In the future, there'll be some new characters debuting, including enemies! I think they will be pretty awesome.

Now then, instructions. Just print this image on to sticker paper, available at Staples or whatever office related store you frequent. I'd buy it online, because it's probably cheaper, but whatever. I imagine these would look best a little smaller, so try printing them 4 up! I don't know. Experiment, and let me know what works for you.

Enjoy!

A Shirt I Want To Make So Bad I Share With You

There was something wonderfully naive about growing up in the 90's. I'm not sure if there was ever a generation that held surfers and ninjas in such high esteem, or that there ever will be in the foreseeable future. Put this on a shirt and proudly show that you too have been irreparably damaged by 90's pop culture.

If you don't feel like fiddling with color printing, you can use this hastily decolorized version, which I almost think turned out better for it's wild jankiness.

Awesome. In other news, I'm almost done sticker stuff. I have three sets of four stickers in the works. Although I mainly wanna focus on original characters and stuff, I couldn't resist drawing Robot Masters and Ninja Turtles, so look forward to those as well.

Also contemplating the game situation here at Doki Doki. I don't have the time or a reliable enough piece of software to develop a whole game, but I think I might be able to manage doing single "episode" style stages every now and then. Would you play a vertical shmup one stage at a time? I guess we'll see.

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!