Jersey Shore: Super Mario

Happy New Year Rust Belters! If you've been following me on Instagram, you might've noticed that I ended 2014 with a flurry of posts. However, if you're only following me here, you'd think that I'm a lazy so and so because its been sparse at best. So, 2015 is all about keeping a schedule. You'll see something from me every single Friday.

You're worth it. Also, you look nice today. 

Your Pal, 

Randy Crider

Ben Emerges From The Shadows...with stuff.

Boy have I been neglectful.  Not because I wanted to be, but because nothing is finished.  So rather than give off the impression that I'm some lazy lump that rides on the coat tails of his fellow monsters, I thought I would share some Work In Progress stuff.  So let's get up to speed.

Post by Need Your Disease.

First up, I had grand plans for Halloween.  Namely, a quicky animated short to post on the site.  Turns out, animation takes longer than you would think (even limited animation).  So I missed my deadline.  

Luckily, it took the pressure off of me and I can toy with it more.  Even remaster the whole thing in 3D.  Apply your 3D glasses....now.

Next up: My superhero game!  Since I last showed it, I was in the process of revamping my animations and adding art.  Well, I have a couple new things to show you.  First, I was running into a problem where my stopping animations (character resets and cape falls to the side) was playing twice.  It was really bumming me out.  So after some coding wizardry and a healthy dose of luck, that has been corrected.  Now the animation plays beautifully.

Post by Need Your Disease.

The other addition...well, more of a test...is these speed trails I've developed for the game.  I wanted some kind of trails behind him when he flew and threw this together. 

Post by Need Your Disease.

And finally, I'll be on the C2 Podcast talking about my game and using Construct 2 this Friday.  More to come soon.

Ben: A Redesign!

Time for a project update!  I've been really busy lately with a redesign of the game.  After looking at some of the things that I liked and didn't like, I came to the conclusion that it would really benefit from a restart.  What would I do different if I started over?  The characters would be built with Cut-Out/Skeletal animation (mostly), the art would still be retro, but at twice the size, the levels would be built with repeatable tiles, and the controls would be streamlined.

Well, I can show the first couple of changes.

After getting some flack on the internet for the original design basically being Superman, I decided a redesign was in order.  I took a bunch of unflattering reference photos of myself and got as far from the last design as I could (except for the cape).  Another problem with the original design was the short legs.  It looked tolerable standing up, but tipping him on his side while flying was a little ridiculous.  Those tiny legs just didn't hold up. 

With the new design in place, I built the character up in pieces from both the front and side angles (additional angles coming).  Then, I started rigging the bodies with a skeleton so that they could be animated.

Skeletal Animation rigged in Toon Boom Animate Pro

With the rigging in place, I animated a simple "idle" loop and attached a cape animation.  I did the two separate to break up the cycle.

Idle Animation next to Original Design (Left)

Next, I started rebuilding the backgrounds.  I reworked my first "shop" in a more simplified design to keep my file size down.  The new version is bigger and only 12kb.

There is still plenty more to do, but I thought I would show some of the new changes.  You can see much more at my personal blog: www.NeedYourDisease.com

-Ben

Original art and after derezzing in Photoshop

Ben: Character Updates

I've had so much fun doing the birthday caricatures of my friends that I thought I would try the same on myself. To up the challenge, not that my "unconventional" head shape isn't enough, I decided to 

do a model-sheet style turn around.  Boy, was that not fun.

At the same time, I've been doing a redesign on my superhero character.  I'd gotten enough comments about it resembling other superheroes and the character art being too small, that I decided that a redesign was in order.  I always knew that I wanted some kind of medieval connection to the character so I started pushing in that direction.
After I had the new design locked down.  I started to play with character color variations.  I stayed pretty close to the original Blue and Orange, but muted it and added some armor.









Next up was building the character in Toon Boom Animate Pro.  From there, I was able to play with the line weight until I found one that would look good once shrunk down.  I've always wanted that retro- arcade look, even though the character is probably way bigger in resolution than any of those other games were.

The other benefit to working in Animate Pro, is that I can use bones and symbols to simulate animation without having to redraw everything.  Hopefully, it will cut down on a lot of the time I'll spend creating the animations.  Below is a quick test (definitely not final animation).

That's all for now.  If you'd like to see more updates as I they happen, visit my blog at www.NeedYourDisease.com or follow me on twitter at NeedYourDisease

-Ben Hale

Ben Ushers In The Winds Of Change

Inspired by Jim's post last week detailing his process, I thought I would show that (despite my missing last week) I've been kind of busy.  As I've posted in the past, I have a little superhero/video game project that I work on in my spare time.  Its fun because it lets me stretch my muscles and work on animation, digital painting, and a brand of problem solving that I don't normally get to do. 

Well, I've had a rush of motivation as of late and started roughing out the character animations for the player's character.  I've done some in the past, but nothing too intensive.  A run cycle that's a few years old now, a jump animation, idle animation, and some flying.  Nothing too terrible, but the difficult work was coming shortly.

Rough Lift Animation (objects from the ground)

It was while I was working on new flight poses, that the lingering doubts about my character's design began to swell up.  I originally drew him 3 years ago.  I've evolved quite a bit from the artist I was and the older style wasn't working as well for me.  First of all, while his stocky build was working for strength, it didn't play as well when he was flying.  Particularly when he was tipped on his side with his stubby legs looking ridiculous.  All of that was annoying, but the worst of it was that I would immediately get comparisons to Superman.  It didn't used to bother me, but not it does... a lot.

My first instinct was to add gauntlets and a hair color change.  I figured that way I could keep my existing animation and just add these extra assets on top of it.  

Test Thumbnail Gestures with Arm Gauntlets

I did some variations, shrunk the character to give him that old school "sprited" look, and then placed the variations throughout the level to see how they worked.

It was then that I started to ask myself what I would do different if I could start over.  I'm a better artist now and I'm much more familiar with the software.  What were some of the older ideas that I had dis-guarded?  Well, one of them was my idea to have the characters light and shadow be effected in real time by the direction they were facing.  I would make normal maps (mainly used for CG graphics) and use them to give the effect of the shadow falling either on the front or back of the character depending on which direction they were facing.

Below Left: Doctored artwork (normal map) used to direct shadows
Below Right: Original art no longer containing shadows or highlights.

Now I can direct the light in a level and have it affect the characters.  I've never seen that in a game and am excited about it.  If you are sitting at a computer, you can actually test the effect not.  The yellow box represents the light and will follow your mouse.  Go here to try the effect out.

So I've committed to redesigning my player art slightly.  I plan on tweaking the costume, changing the colors, and adjusting the proportions.  I don't have to redo everything as the cape animations can be reused.  Below is a potential redesign idea.

Potential Redesign

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that everything works out in the end and am excited about this new direction.  I'll post more when I have it.

-Ben

www.NeedYourDisease.com

@NeedYourDisease

Original Sketch for Cover Art

First pass at Gauntlet design.  Might lose ridges.  Pretty sure they won't show up when the art is shrunk anyways.

Ben: Sketch Roundup

Oh how time flies...well, not really.  Life has been extremely busy.  So I haven't been able to complete anything, but I have tons of sketches and false starts to show.  First up, I recently purchased Manga Studio 5 and am kind of in love with it.  The above Ninja Turtle is my attempt at learning the program.  I still have a ways to go, but I like the path I'm on.

Next few pictures are some gesture sketches I did of my superhero character.  Fast and loose and usually on my lunch break.  

And finally, I was finally able to figure out some standard "tiles" to use for buildings in my game project.  Tiles are images that can be looped seamlessly to create different assets.  The next drawing is drawn on a grid of 3 x 3. Every piece of the grid, except for the corners, can be repeated infinitely to create the buildings...  

Here is an example-

And finally: remember that guy in the green shirt that was walking around?  Well now I can drop him high enough to break his legs.  Fun right.  Below is a picture of the civilian in his "injured" state.

That's all for now.  If you'd like to see more of my ramblings and progress on the game, go to my personal blog:  www.NeedYourDisease.com

-Ben

Doodle

Yeah, I have no idea where this one came from either.

 Photoshop 30 min sketch

Ariel knows all the cheat codes

Ben's Week In Review

Tuesday has come back around and I am without any real finished product to show.  I spent most of my time working on smaller projects and some video work.  But because of my crushing fear of being the first Monster to miss his day of the week, I've decided to make my post about a bunch of little things from the past week.

First off, last Friday I participated in the live drawing event for the Crunch: Sugary Art gallery opening.  Above, you will see a very deranged Sunny the Cuckoo Bird which I painted as a part of the mural.  I actually didn't know what his name was when I was drawing him.  A little research and I have now educated us both.  Your welcome.

I also continued my long standing dream of getting a working prototype of my game up and running.  With the help of the Scirra forums, I was able to get my helpless Non-Player Characters (NPC's) to fall (potentially) to their deaths.  Pretty thrilling.  Next up, figuring out how to get them to lay down when they're hurt.

"Help!"

The last couple of days were spent working on a video project in After Effects.  While the whole thing was pretty standard editing slide shows, it did remind me of a time when I used to spend quite a lot of time in the program.

After Effects-Picture Wall 11-6-09 from Ben Hale on Vimeo.

And finally, my fellow Monsters and I have decided that this month's challenge will be a tribute to giant robots and monsters.  At the moment, I'm leaning towards Gamera v. Voltron (Card Subject to Change)

Early sketch for potential Gamera vs Voltron piece.

Remember that you can see more updates and personal tomfoolery at my personal blog: NeedYourDisease

Ben Makes 'Em Walk

It actually wasn't the most productive of weeks, but last week...well that's a different story.  Continuing off of my post from last Tuesday, I'm working on a game.  Most notably, it takes place in a city.  A city with pedestrians that go about there daily lives and stroll up and down the street until there's danger.  They flee from danger, they get hurt, and they need rescuing.

The multiple "States" that each civilian will go through.

The city wouldn't be very interesting if every single person that lived there looked the same.  So I started thinking about variations I could make to give the crowds more life.

Some quick sketches. Trying to get some different features to help each civilian stand out.

Knowing that each of these tiny, helpless civilians will possibly be placed in one of these states and that each one of those states needs to be animated puts such a strain on my mind that it makes the whole thing feel like its not worth it.  Luckily, there are corners that can be cut and things that can be streamlined.  Rather than animate each character doing each movement, I've decided to animate one male character and one female character in Adobe Flash and edit those to add variety.  Change a few facial features, hair styles, swap the color pallet and you've built a some semblance of a real town.

The character's individual parts before assembly.

I build a base character by breaking up his individual body parts and constructing them in Flash.  The parts will be animated via a skeleton.  That way, I can redraw the specific parts and have all of my animations pre-arranged for me.

Character pieces are assembled and attached to a virtual armature.

The character is animated and its frames are exported from the program.  Those frames are shrunken and their pallets limited to fit with the aesthetic of the game.  Plus, as any good artist will tell you, every piece of art looks better shrunk.  It hides all of your mistakes.

He is very determined.

I'm currently working on all of the other animations.  In time, I'm hoping to have a (virtually) living and (virtually) breathing city for players to run and fly around in.  He's citizen one.  Soon he'll be one of many.  For more updates, feel free to visit my personal blog: www.NeedYourDisease.com

-Ben

@NeedYourDisease