Frankie Smile Show dev log

Station 37, and more stuff

2011-07-27T15:24:00.006-04:00

Finished up a game I made with The Monster King a few months back, with music by Chef Boyardee. Its available there: http://www.frankiesmileshow.com/station37

Trailer:

The game was featured on the indie games blog and more recently Tigsource. Thanks guys!

Now working on a short game project for the something awful game making thing, and also working on Super Banana Nababa again. Lots of things going on! Also I should have a new video coming up soon, there's some album art ive made some time ago but never put up the time lapse of it.

(Also in other news last month I quit my day job to go full time freelance/game makin I GUESS THATS ALSO BLOG WORTHY)

Stuff I did!

2011-05-26T00:18:00.005-04:00

Hey! Didnt post anything in a zillion years again.

Heres things that have happened since that:

Made some art for a videoclip:

like this for example:

Might add some more of what I made for it there when I got more time

Splash screen ish thing for an indie developper, infiniteDev:

Cover for a game OST soundtrack, Ranger Wars:

Also, THOR on the DS came out some time ago, did a bunch of character animations for it:

And I did pretty much all of the art in this game:

Finally, I made all of the art for this avatar maker app here.

Right now I am currently working on a bunch of small projects. Ive been to the Toronto Game Jam a while ago with The Monster King and weve made a pretty cool game over there, were polishing it up right now, should be out soonish. It involves firefighting!

GEIF Cover art and other things

2011-02-19T14:48:00.002-05:00

Cover art for Phlogiston's GEIF album:

Video of that cover being drawn:

Also, heres a "making-of" video about a project ive been helping out on for a while now, a game for the progressive metal band Last Chance To Reason. I'm making visual assets for it mostly.

Should have more about this around march.
More new things coming soon.

Global game jam!

2011-01-31T21:05:00.005-05:00

Participated in the Global Game Jam this weekend. It was quite an experience. The game we were working on was RoVo

(the splash image was made by Josse Laurendeau Piron, he did a lot of amazing illustrations for the game)

The idea was pretty cool: An RTS where you control a bunch of Robots and try to survive in a post apocalyptic wasteland. You upgrade them by modifying a large factory that produces them. As new robots start coming out of the factory, the past generations of your robot slowly go insane as they realize theyre obsolete, and turn on you, repopulating the battlefield with ever-stronger robots to make your life difficult. A good way to play is to engineer weaknesses in your robots so you can easily dispose of them when they turn on you.

Buuut yeah... in the end we just had a generic RTS engine working. The game was all 3d with lots of cool stuff working, some neat pathfinding... but the final game had no combat, no robot upgrading, so not much from the actual concept. What we did end up with was however very impressive, everyone did an amazing job, the game was just too much for the time we had.

Im pretty happy with the things I made for it though. Here are some of them:

Heres the game's page at the global game jam website

The game's credits:
Tristan Boudreault (Redaction, Sound Edit) Josse L.Piron (3D Texturing, Graphic Art/Illustration) David Boutin (Lead Programming) Shan Meunier Bernard (Programming) Lawrence Collier (3D Modelling, Level Design/Sound) Guillaume Pinat (Programming) Francis Coulombe (Pixel Art/Animation) Christian Roy (Tech Lead, Lead Programming)

Some stuff that happened

2010-12-24T09:29:00.006-05:00

I am horrible at updating this blog I am the champion of not updating things.

To make it up, heres some stuff I've done since!

I am currently working on an entry to the ACTION 52 OWNS activity on Tigsource, a game makin thingy organized by Arthur "Mr. Podunkian" Lee, where 52 developpers remake the 52 awful games from the notoriously awful Action 52 videogame cartidge.
This 1991 NES game cart was a pack of 52 awful games, half of them almost unplayable, some of them LITERALLY unplayable, all of them riddled with bugs and design problems and glitches. The cart was sold at the outrageous price of 200$. The activity is for individual developpers or small teams to each make a new action 52 game, inspired from games of the original NES cartidge. Some games are still available for developpers on the sign up page. You will need a TIGsource account to sign up, as the process uses your TIGsource member ID.

The game I got was game 27: NON HUMAN. Here is a video of the original:

My own game inspired from it is almost done. I will try to finish it over the holidays, but that wont be easy, cant make promises....

My take on it is a robot warrior going on an action-packed shootin' adventure against horrible mutants and zombies and giant eyes and mouths. The robot, like in the original, can only shoot forward. And like the original, the game is a continuous horizontal path, with no rooms or levels. Here is a video of someone playing through an early build (as well as two other games from the same activity)

You can find a more recent (though still old) build in the TIGsource topic about the activity. I wont post it here until its really done though, I don't want the build to start spreading around before its all wrapped up.

Almost half of the 52 games are finished as of this blog post, check them out!

In other news, I also made a few covers for indie game soundtracks!

Here is one, for Lazrool's Warlock Bentspine

I recorded the drawing process here:

You can get the fantastic, free game this soundtrack is for on The Poppenkast Forums.
You can get the also free soundtrack itself at the IImusic website.

Thats a cover for the original soundtrack of Super Crate Box, a game by Vlambeer.
Heres a recording of me making the right half of the picture:

You can get the fantastic, free game the soundtrack is for at the Super Crate Box Website.
You can get the also free soundtrack itself at the IImusic website.

Anomaly album cover

2010-04-17T14:28:00.003-04:00

Oi, made this album cover for Norrin Radd's "Anomaly" a few months ago. The album is out now, so I can finally put this up! Also heres a video of the thing being drawn here:

You can download or purchase the album here: IImusic's Anomaly catalog page

Webjam 2010, and new website URL

2010-03-28T19:37:00.003-04:00

Just got back from a 24 hour web design competition, the webjam. The competition theme was "2012, a survival kit".
This is the site we made:

And heres the team that did this with me!

Matthieu Gadrat and Philippe Trudel Guerbilsky made a wonderful job with the programming, Pierre-Olivier Nantel worked on video and motion design, and I worked on the prints you see in the videos, helped out a little on the filming and made some illustration. Phil and me both worked on the text content. We were coached by Sophie Blondeau, who had some sort of overseer job of checking on us for 10 minutes at every hour and support us. (But she mostly watched episodes of How I met your mother along with the other teams' coaches...)

We won third place! It was fun but there were two horrible 8 hour bus rides and very little sleep. And I have an internship starting tomorrow, too!

You can see all of the entrants here.

Also! I finally got me a domain name and updated my site a little. Ill do some more of that later. I'm thinking I should spruce up the background animation. Like make some alternate background themes that would be picked at random, that would be fun. The new URL is http://www.frankiesmileshow.com

New picture

2010-03-20T19:03:00.003-04:00

Finished this giant digital illustration for a contest.

My college has this contest to decide the front page of the next student notebook, thats my entry. Had a lot of fun working on it! You can see a higher resolution version of it here.

View the drawing process in high speed here:

College semester finished!

2009-12-23T18:38:00.003-05:00

I was horribly busy recently, but its all over now!
Heres some of the things that hogged all of my time these past few weeks:

First, a 1-minute pixel art video:

This video took about 5 days of work. Its silly but fun, I like the result a lot.

Also, in our flash course we had to make two flash microgames. The games were to be handled by an external shell that would randomly play em. Because the external shell handles them, there arn't any play controls on the games themselves so just hit refresh when you want to try again.

first game is called DISASTER. Spin around the screen with your mouse to avoid the projectiles, and click to shoot the monsters eyes. you can play it here:
http://www.frankiesmileshow.leafo.net/Stuff/datthang/Disaster/jeu.swf

In the second game, you have to fill a watering pail with water, and then water some walking plants in the bottom of the screen. You can play it here: http://www.frankiesmileshow.leafo.net/Stuff/datthang/Botanix/jeu.swf

You can try out the final project with all of the student's games including my own here: http://tim.college-em.qc.ca/~microjeux/ though its all in french, and some of the games can be a little confusing even when you understand the language....And quite frankly a lot of the games are a little poorly made! Its understandable though, there was a lot of work to do this semester and not everyone was particularly interested to invest a lot of time in this one project.

Lastly I spent quite a bit of time working on a php website. The assignment was to make a website where you can register and then upload pictures. You can check the website there: http://tim.college-em.qc.ca/~coulomf7/index.php
Though it might go offline soon, its just temporarily hosted on my college's server for the purpose of the assignment. I couldn't really finish it on time but it had pretty much all required features.

New vidya, and some other stuff

2009-11-23T09:51:00.014-05:00

Here is a lil cover for Phlogiston Game Music vol. 1

I posted this before but heres the new part,the drawing process video!
I thought I had lost the footage at one point so I didn't record the last half of the work, but most of it is there really, all that's missing is some tweaking on the character and the smoke from the missiles.

And I remind you of where you can get the album, here.

Ive done some more work on Recession, but its slowing down because of college stuff. But said college stuff is pretty cool: I have to make two games in AS3 and a deviantArt-like website with some PHP. The two AS3 games are for a collaborative project where all students make two small 10-second games, that are then all put together in some sort of warioware-like supergame where the player plows through an endless series of microgames to raise his overall score. One of my two games is a 10-second bullet hell where you fight a procedurally generated monster. In the second game, you have to water some weird walking plant monsters with a watering pail using your mouse.
The PHP website's concept is basically a deviantArt site that is specialized in sketching, doodles and pencils. I made the visual concept for it, a very dirty, sketchy-looking interface:

There is a toolbar on top that is missing in this screenshot. The idea right now is to have the sketchy background change entirely depending on the site section you are in.

Also I'm working on an AS3 game with Bisse, who recently came back from his mysterious radio silence. Welcome back, Bisse! It'll visually look a lot like some bastard child of Gyruss and Abadox, two awesome NES games that I played to death as a kid...

Most of the work on my personal game project "Recession" lately has been about the intro sequence. It will resemble the intro sequence of Day of the Tentacle in how it is made:

That is, a series of partly-animated slides. On most frames, the only animated part is some lip syncing, and in some others its a more elaborate movement. I guess I didn't really need an example to illustrate this but heh, I love that game...

I wont animate them yet, I'll start by outlining the base images, and then get to work on finishing the game gameplay-wise. I'll do the big animation work much later on, it will probably be the last thing I do on the project actually. So if I end up losing interest ill still have a usable, non-animated sequence as a bit of narrative. The intro sequence is all sketched and two of the base slides are done right now. Ill show some of them later, for now ill get to work on one of those AS3 games I need to get done.

Another album with cover by moi!

2009-10-29T07:24:00.002-04:00

The J. Arthur Keenes Band released a new album, called Pamplemousse.

I made the cover art. Its looking juicy.
Get the album here:
http://www.iimusic.net/catalog/2009/10/the-j-arthur-keenes-band-pamplemousse

See the drawing process in this youtube vidyah here:

I still have like two other album covers on the way, one is almost done too.

Also I made a few more things for the Tigsource Assemblée competition:

New album by Phlogiston out

2009-10-26T20:22:00.004-04:00

Phlogiston put out a game music compilation album, its great! I made the cover. You can get the album here:
http://www.iimusic.net/plus/2009/10/game-music-1

I am working on three other album covers right now, I'll post em here as soon as theyre done. I recorded the drawing process for some of them.

Also I've been doing some things for the TIGsource Assemblée competition. Heres a lil blast

New portfolio is out

2009-10-21T12:27:00.003-04:00

I have almost finished my portfolio site. Its a college project, basically we got to show off so we can get a good internship somewhere. Its not entirely done: I have some things to add on the animated background still, and also I want to translate the whole thing in french, as most companies around here are mostly francophone. I put it up to replace my old site hub here: http://www.frankiesmileshow.leafo.net/
Also I think the site might have issues with chrome! There's an odd white rectangle that appears on the lower left. It disappears as soon as the window is resized. Ive no clue where that comes from. Also the gallery seems to load very slowly in chrome too.

Ill also put a resume there later this week.

Finally picked up Recession again!

2009-10-18T23:03:00.002-04:00

I haven't worked on Recession in months. But last week I picked it back up again and boy did I work! I placed all of the bosses in the game(except one that isn't finished yet, cant go in much detail about it, endgame stuff) , finished equipment and treasures, made a saving and loading script, fixed the map display, replaced the pause menu with a more useful one (where you can check your collected items, equip weapon parts...) and took care of many, many little bugs there and there.

There is still a lot left to take care of, but I took care of lots of annoying elements. This game is getting done! Finally!

Cowboys and crabs are two very cool concepts

2009-09-15T20:08:00.004-04:00

Ive been spending some time sprucing up old projects! One of them is Crab Cowboy, that game I originally made for a Poppenkast compo. Making it longer, look better and play better. Heres a few screenshots of what I got right now after about two days of polishing:

Planned are 5 levels, 7 enemies and 5 bosses. So far I got all levels made, but only 3 of them are populated with baddies and only one is really finished, the village. I could finish dat thang within a week if I wasn't so horribly lazy. Need to refresh your memory about the original Crab Cowboy game made for the competition? Scroll down to the games section and pick it up. It was neat enough.

Other than that, very little is new, I got some college work, might be working on the visuals of a pretty neat XNL game with the XXIst Century Digital Boy software guys soon too. Also I've been compiling a lot of my past work to build a portfolio of sorts ill make in Flash. Probably something really lively full of animation and wacky shit, to sell my mad animating skills!

Vector illustration.

2009-09-10T14:32:00.001-04:00

New pic! Another issue cover for my College's student newspaper, Le MotDit. This time its in vector art.

How will spiderman get out of this one!? Let's find out...

Kabloom

2009-09-03T18:31:00.001-04:00

It goes krackrboom!! Blammo!
Thats an old sprite of mine that I found in an old folder. I added a bunch of frames there and there to wrap it up and here it is:

Its all blooey! Might recycle it in a game sometime...

Vidyah's up check de vidyah

2009-08-30T00:01:00.003-04:00

Vi-dee-ooo! Finally got around putting this together.
Its got a kickass background song by "Sloche"(an obscure 70's Quebecer band) called "J'Un Oeil".

Got a new computer today, took me a while to configure the whole thing up until I could transfer the raw movie files from my old machine, edit them together as one video, render the thing, connect to the web and upload it. Heh.
Got a new compy to get rid of the overheating problems I had. I'm thinking they were due to my AMD processor getting old.

On the flipside it means ill prolly record more now that I got a better machine that doesn't show signs of internal hemorrhage as soon as I do more than 2 things at once on it. And now that I got something stronger I might just end up doing some 3d modelling, that would be rad.

Sweet vectors

2009-08-28T16:54:00.004-04:00

I tried Illustrator's CS4 version (amongst other things) for the first time yesterday at college, and I just had to draw something.
So here's Pepito! The protagonist of Recessions' final version:

Here's his actual sprite for comparison:

Still working on the final battle. Its shaping up pretty well. Its looking raddd.
I hope ill finish it soon so I can work on less spoilery stuff that I can talk about in more detail.

Art got done

2009-08-26T23:25:00.003-04:00

Did some more art! I added some colors to the characters in the cover image I posted on my last entry:

I began to put together the video recording of the process, Maybe I'll upload it tomorrow.

I also made a series of images for the same issue, in a sort of recruitment article. Each vignette represents a particular position in the journal's team. You can try to guess what each of them refer to. Id list them but I don't know what some of them are called in English and don't particularly feel like checking them out for now.

I did not record the drawing process on that one because of the overheating problems I mentioned in my last post, it was just too much hassle to take breaks to let it cool off at every 5 minutes.

Work on recession and college stuff

2009-08-24T00:59:00.004-04:00

College has started again, which might slow down work on recession a little! But my schedule leaves me a lot of free time. I spent a lot of time this weekend on College newspaper-related work, like the cover image that I finished today:

It was fun enough to work on. I recorded the job with camstudio, I'll probably put it together as a video on youtube later this week. For now I got more stuff to finish for the paper. Working on this big picture up there made me realize how awkward I still am with a tablet. I couldn't keep a steady hand and it took a ridiculous amount of time to get clean lines and curves. The result is really messy, but you probably can't notice much with that shrunk down version (the real one is 5 times that size at full resolution)
Also my computer's overheating problems really showed when I was working on this. The combination of recording with CamStudio and drawing with the tablet (with pressure sensitivity etc) made my core temperature skyrocket. It reached 86 degrees at one point, and my core's maximum temperature is supposed to be 70. I took frequent breaks to let it cool off. I probably won't record tablet drawings again for some time, it's too much hassle to stop every 5 minutes.

Aside from that, I did some more work on Recession, the details of which I still cant really talk about in great detail, its all final battle and endgame stuff. I must have spent about 6 days so far on that. Especially for the visual side, its a very long job, and its still far from over. A lot of animation to deal with and very large sprites to produce. It is sort of frustrating to know most players might never get to see all of that work if the game ends up being too hard. It is also frustrating to know that I can't really showcase that kind of spoiler art, even though its the most impressive looking work of the whole project, by a wide margin! There is some of it I can show though, like this minor enemy that appears during the boss fight. Its shown here at 4X:

After that's done, I'll work on getting a fully playable but visually unpolished version as soon as possible so technical problems can be found early. The to-do list for the "fully playable" milestone:
-Finish the obscure endgame stuff (what im on right now)
-Place the new boss battles in the maze (for a big part of summer I scripted fun boss fights, tested them, but I never put them in their context)
-Build the saving system (didn't even start to work on this, not even sure how saving will work exactly yet)
-Rebuild an area of the maze that doesn't work (the factory. Not that youd know what I'm talking about, but its the factory.)
-Rebuild or populate some rooms that are boring
-Make up some system to deal with dialogues, and then place the main ones in the game. (the other secondary dialogues will be for later)
-Put up some temporary interfaces for the pause menu, game options, etc.
-Build the shop interface, just a functional one for now
-Finish the basic map display
-Probably forgot something on that list.

At this point the game should be fully playable from beginning to end, so ill put it out for testing to friends and on The Poppenkast and to others who'd like to help out.
Then I'll do a very long job of polishing the hell out of the visuals, mostly by adding unique scenery elements to certain rooms. Then I'll draw and implement the basic story of the game which is just told through a few storyboards at the beginning and end. Then I'll finally replace the temporary interfaces (like the pause menu) with the final prettier ones, and that should be it.

Absolutely no clue as to when that will all be done, though. Hopefully soon?

Art! Arty Shmart!

2009-08-15T18:08:00.008-04:00

ART SHMART
I decided I really should update this log more often with whatever I do everyday. Every time I think about doing that I promptly forget about it a day or two later.
Well here is one thing I finished today, an album cover for C-Jeff from iimusic.net
C-Jeff asked me to make something neat from this photo . I started out with just doing a color reduction, not really thinking about spending hours on making a whole pixel art piece from it but just make it look good, as I was already pretty busy with my own projects, but then as I cleaned up the result it went on and on, aanddd....

I ended up practically redrawing the whole image and spending more than a day on it, yayy. The longest part was probably to make out what the electrical pylon structure was supposed to be like. On the photo, its just a mess of black lines and the actual perspective is very hard to discern. Its not too hard for the lower levels of the iron bars, but as you get higher it turns into an absolute mess of black. I sort of half-ignored the model for the topmost part of the structure as a result. There are many bars missing and probably a few that are "connected" wrong but the result is fine looking. I'm not sure yet whether ill upload this on pixel joint yet.It does end up as pretty much a trace as far as the pose and big metal structure goes, but on the other hand there's much more work to this one than just tracing the model image.

On other news, RECESSION (the game):
Maybe some regular updates on how my big current project Recession is doing would be interesting. Except right now, the details of what I am working on is a lot of end-game spoiler stuff, so I guess its a terrible time to start doing this! Meanwhile I'll yap about what the game is currently like and what the game is shaping up to be and what is left to work on etc.

The game, as I explained a few times before in other entries, is closely tied to the theme of money. Originally it was a short and simple game made in a couple of hours for a poppenkast competition with money as a theme. It was a simple non-linear platformer with money and enemies spread about. In the game, almost any action except walking costs you money: Shooting, jumping, getting hit, using bombs, double-jumping. If your money gets below 0, you die. Note that in the newer version, instead of dying right away, you have a limited time to refund your debt (with interest) before dying. The game being much bigger required a much more forgiving way of dealing with debt!

The two main numbers to keep track of in the game is your current money (which serves as ammo, life and stamina all at once), and your money's exchange value, called RATE.

The RATE starts at 1.50, and that number multiplies any amount of money you gain. So the higher your rate, the more money you get. But the rate also DIVIDES any money you lose, so the lower your rate, the more you lose. The rate value goes down as you play the game, so as time passes, you get less money from treasures and everything becomes more expensive. The goal of that first game was to figure out where the best treasures are, and then figure out the shortest path possible to them, and then try to get to that big jackpot with a RATE that is still very high, while trying to keep jumping and shooting to a minimum. That early version of the game is available to download here, just scroll down to the games list below the blog entries.

The game was neat and I decided to make a bigger one with the same system. The bigger game was pretty much built over the smaller one, expanding on the maze and adding more paths and areas. I have been working on this new version since the beginning of summer now, and I think it could be done for September. A lot of the game is finished, but there is still significant things left to work out. Some things like saving and loading the game aren't made yet (it wasn't needed in the original game as it was beatable in just minutes), as well as many interfaces, dialogues still use placeholder message boxes, the game's mini map isn't made either. There is also some work left on finishing some of the paths of the maze. All of the boss battles except the final one are finished (and there are a lot of them too).

The biggest chunk of work left is going to be on the polishing of the game's visuals in general. Most of the game's rooms are almost featureless as far as visuals go. They don't look ugly and have tiles and all, but very few rooms stand out as nice-looking, or as having unique features. This is not a big problem for games in general I think, but I sort of want to go all out as far as art goes and add character to the maze's visuals, for instance by adding background elements that are unique to a room, like say a big statue or animated machinery or computers or a giant sleeping monster. This visual polish is probably the most time consuming task left on the project. I will also have to draw images for the game's introduction and ending.

Found an old game! Y'guys can play it!

2009-08-12T18:00:00.006-04:00

I found an oooold game I made a long time ago, Sluggy's adventure (the first one)
I finished that about 5 years ago back in early 2004. It's the very first game I ever made, it introduced me to pixel art. The art really sucks, but heh it always does at first right?
I made the visuals and the game, and Erave made most of the music (I composed the main theme and he did everything else I think)

Some of the art was taken from other sources though. Like that terrible cloud background was part of a texture pack I think, and also there is an explosion effect that I took from the web. Some sound effects I got from sfx websites, and most I made by recording my voice and speeding up the result 3X.

Download Sluggy's Adventure 1

Also its FULL of bugs and problems. like, the backgrounds scroll based on your directional movement rather than from the movement of the view which looks really awkward. Collisions are based strictly on your vertical speed, so if you bump an enemy's noggin while going upwards it will count as getting killed. Etc.
And some levels reaally suck
And its frustratingly difficult because I had made it on a slower machine back then, so a consistent lag throughout the game made it easier for me when I tested it. As a result there's some very tight timing-based obstacles in there, and some levels are just ridiculous. The bosses on the other hand are really easy, I made them sort of as an afterthought, thinking hey my game has no bosses thats terrible *makes something worse than having no bosses at all*
Except the final boss is a tad better, he has a two-action pattern instead of repeating the same single attack over and over.

But hey it was my first project ever (not counting my early rpgmaker years, but I never finished anything with that anyways), and it wasn't easy to find! I didn't have the game anymore because it was on an old broken up machine, and most of the sites that hosted a copy of the game are either down or the link didn't work anymore. Most of these sites linked to the original download page at www.gamingw.net but this one is down as well since the site was redesigned. But luckily, a mysterious benefactor (that I will simply refer to as "Lucifer") still had a copy on his computer, which he gave me in exchange for my immortal soul and an exclusive sneak-peek preview of my upcoming game Recession.

Speaking of which, Recession is coming really soon! Just as the real Recession is dying down, too. I've been working on it NON-STOP for a big part of summer. Its gonna be an epic game, I'm putting a lot of effort in the visuals especially. I am thinking it might be finished by the end of the summer, depending on how many problems I encounter and, to a greater degree, my attention span. I have been working on this for something like 5 months now!

One last thing, I had made another game right after Sluggy's Adventure, a sequel interestingly named Sluggy's Adventure 2. I never finished it because I lost the source code while working on it, but it still had 20-something levels. I was trying to be fancier with my pixel art there, and it did look a little better already, though it is still very ugly by my standards today. I will put that game up in a next post.

Western compo entry 1

2009-06-29T15:29:00.002-04:00

Hey woudya lookatdat its a game for a poppenkast competition!

It doesn't have any audio however, but the game is swell nonetheless. Get it there:
DOWNLOAD CRABCOWBOY

Its a platformer! Play dis shit!
Controls:
A jumps
S shoots
D reloads
left and right move
up and down move the pincers position from up and down

When the pincers are low you can aim better with the gun, when the pincers are high you can move faster and jump further.
Your crab nature keeps you from being able to turn around and shoot back... you can only aim forward...towards the setting sun...
Get to the end of the level and shoot down that boss guy! Try to finish with 10000 points for a bonus game mode!
I asked Untitled to whip up some music to make the game less boring audio wise but I didn't hear back from him since, maybe he's busy.

The game was made in around 2:30, for a 2 hour competition. I went over the limit a little....ah well, it was fun to work on.
I worked a bit more on the game since, but I'll only upload the updated version once the voting on the competition is done, which should start around july 1st.

I made another entry for the same competition teaming up with Bisse (I drew he programmed), I will put it up on the blog tomorrow.

wow a new blog post

2009-05-13T20:19:00.008-04:00

Hey its been a while since I wrote there

Ive been working on lots of stuff but I've been especially busy with college.

The biggest thing I'm working on right now is a game I initially made as a poppenkast 4-hour competition entry, called Recession. The competition's theme was money. You can get the competition version of my entry here : DOWNLOAD RECESSION v.0.21
The looping track heard througout the game is by Chef Boyardee.
The game is pretty simple: You control a little guy who runs around and collects cash. Any action in the game costs money except walking: jumping, shooting, getting hit all cost cash. SO cash is a both your ammo, your life and your stamina. There is an exchange rate that is applied to all revenues and expenses, and the exchange rate drops as time passes, so in other words, the longer you play, the more expensive everything becomes, and treasures are worth less.

That game was made in around 5 hours, I made it in early April. It was cool enough but I felt that a lot of things could improve on it, that I could play with that money concept way further. After the game was ready for the competition I decided to keep working on it, and now we are more than one month later and the game has grown - a lot. I am hoping I will finish the real, final version of the game this month, as college work stops hogging all of my time. Now there's exciting boss battles, much more exploration, more atmosphere, more music, more secrets, weapons, cooler visuals, its all there! Its a lot of fun to work on, too.

In other news

Today I made my first big photo manipulation work. I'm sure that people experienced in photo manips wont find this any impressive but I'm pretty happy with it (click to see in full size, its pretty big):

This is for a college work, where we received a fictional contract to build a website for the upcoming movie of The Hobbit. Its a team effort, and I am the team's art director-ish guy. This is the source image I used. I used it without permission, whoops...
First I took out the guy with a brush, and replaced him with a wood texture in the opening to act as a closed door, added hinges, a door knob-ish thing in the middle and rivets, used a lattice texture found on the web for the windows, added a shadow cast on the door (which instantly added a LOT of realism, its insane the impact this one shadow had on the whole thing), then I added a dark atmosphere using an edited clouds render with a color burn blending mode, added plant silhouettes on the foreground, added flowers and vines, edited the shadow on the door to include shadows of the hanging vine, added a logo of the film I found with google images and edited to fit the colors of my image, and done! It took around 4 hours in all. I think I'm growing to like photo manipulation a lot, so I'll do more in the future. I'll try using strictly photos of my own or open-license free images too for stuff I want to put in my portfolio, just grabbing whatever I find on google images feels a little cheap to me. It didn't matter for that particular college work though.

I did a bunch of other things for college, like a website for Stéphane Turgeon, a francophone rock band.

I worked on this with two other students. I took care of the visuals and the CSS, and the others mostly worked on the MEDIA section (it is empty in this version however).

and also a 3d modeling work of an art studio of sorts, turned into a Quicktime VR that is then connected to all of the other students' 3d rooms. You can access my own 3d room here. From it you can also travel around the network and see the other students' works. I wish I had more time to finish my own, it feels a little empty and some of the textures are wonky. I will eventually get a better, faster computer so I can practice 3d modeling at home, my current machine is too slow for it. I'm beginning to like working in 3d some more but its frustrating to only be able to do it at college, and it slows my learning curve by a lot I'm sure.
We had another, similar project for a video course where the same concept had to be used with photos rather than 3d renders: we had to take many panoramic photos of a place of our choice, then modify the photos somehow and turn them into a Quicktime VR. Mine can be seen here. I took photos of our student newspaper redaction room, and added monsters sitting there. It was fun but took a little too long! I also included a friend Marc-André Trépannier in one of the photos, playing a ukulele. I drew a freaky little monster riding him.
We also had to include short videos in our rooms that would start when the visitor clicks a certain object (mine is a little drawing on one of the room's billboards). Making these videos automatically load a new Quicktime VR file by adding something called an HREFtrack on the video was a real pain in the ass, it usually just didn't work for dozens of stupid, obscure technical reasons.

In another course called "Présentation multimedia" that focuses on nonstandard communications between users and computers (like with heat sensors on input and lasers or motors for output instead of the usual keyboard and screen), we are working on a game!

(that's a mockup though, not a screenshot of the actual thing)
Its a side scrolling shooter where one player uses the arrow keys to move a little ship through a dangerous tunnel, and the other player uses a microphone to influence the level's generation. It's lots of fun to work on, we should finish it soon enough (maybe tomorrow actually).

One final project I'm working on for college is a video clip for a Canadian artist who's name eludes me right now. We recorded him singing his song over a green screen from multiple angles, and next week we will put the clips together and throw in a little animation and have some fun with it. I might put it on youtube when its done who knows.

That's it for now yo, cheers.

Aaannnd more stuff again

2009-03-11T07:46:00.003-04:00

More stuff since last time!

I participated in a weekly pixel joint challenge again, it had been a while since I did that. I didnt win or anything but I like how my image turned out nonetheless.
Its basically a little troupe of clown fishes (none of which are actually clown fishes heh... how...ironic...)

I also drew a very colorful image for a contest at my college, to decide what would next years' agenda cover look like. This is what I came up with:
Its basically some ridiculous cartoony character taking a lil stroll in fucked-up-land. All of these flowers sure took a while to draw, but in the end the details in them make a pretty cool effect I think. The image being very cartoon-like and colorful, I'm not sure it will be picked at all, they are probably looking for something more boring. Heh, ah well, it was fun to draw anyways....

Last in the round-up is some college work for my "Arts numériques 2d-3d" course, where we had to mix 3 different media in a 15-40 seconds animation that showcased lip sync. Here is the video:
It was fun to do and I learned quite a bit about XSI (the program we use in the course) in the process. My brother did the voice acting sunday, I made the lip sync animations monday within a couple of hours, and I finished the film with the audio effects earlier today, just in time to do the final render and deliver it on a dvd in class.
The 3d scenery and character animation were made last saturday and the filming was done first, about a week ago, with some help from our student TV crew.
Originally it was going to be a bit longer and have more of an ending but I didn't have time to film the missing parts and had to do last minute changes. Too bad!

In other news I also had some freelance work for Electronic Arts Mobile, but I'm not allowed to go into any details.

We have resumed work on Super Banana Nababa recently, that's rad. Were doing more planning now instead of pretty much making it all up as we go. I aught to make more games, I didn't do anything in a while. I will probably participate in this week's poppenkast activity, 4 hours to make a money-themed game. That should de-rust mah game-makin' arm.... Ill do somethin' rad...

More Schtuff

2009-02-06T06:15:00.003-05:00

Long time no see. Again.
College taking up some space now, with big projects in every other course, but I still have time to work on some of my own stuff on weekends. Here's the latest new shit:

In that video I first draw the thing and then animate it, its the first time I recorded my animation process....
Thats a flying hippocampus-shrimp-dragonfly monster, fully animated. Its for a new game project of mine where I'll try using all of the unused ressources I made for past projects. Basically its an exploration-oriented platformer, like metroid or castlevania, with a visual style that seems to be somewhere between the NES and SNES, though without really following the restrictions of neither.

Heres a video of an explosion, its for the same project:

Basically, the games' story is that two aliens crash on a strange unknown planet and have to find a way to either repair their ship or find some replacement. The game's main idea is to give it many endings that change how long you spend on the planet, and that the longer you spend on the planet, the stranger and creepier the game gets. For instance, if you finish the game with its earliest ending, the story will have just been about two aliens crashing on a planet and then leaving. Nothing strange, nothing weird, they just come and go. But if you stay just a bit longer, as you gain access to deeper parts of the maze, enemies get more freaky, the game gets a eerier atmosphere and the story unfolds slowly into something pretty ghoulish.

The game also has a few gimmicks I'm working on building up into decent gameplay mechanics: the games' maze is split into many areas with their own visual characteristics and atmospheres, and each of these areas are in a power circuit, and placing power cells in an area powers it up, which significantly changes it around, like doors open, machines turn on, lights turn on, some monsters disappear or change their behavior, some new monsters pop up. So it gives areas two very different perspectives: Areas that are powered down are dangerous and creepy: Your vision range is more limited in them, weapon recharge and healing stations do not work and enemies use the dark to their advantage, staying out of your vision range and suddenly swooping in. Powered-up areas are more combat-oriented: weapon recharge stations work, enemies are all visible and attack on sight.

I'm doing a lot of work on that project, and more importantly I wrote a design document for it instead of just making up shit as I go along. I always stayed away from that approach before, thinking it wasn't really useful to spend hours and hours on a design doc if the project is a lone wolf project anyways. I thought design docs were only useful to make sure all team members always have a clear idea of what the project is as a whole and can just refer to it when they have questions instead of asking the game's designer. But now that I made one, I see even a lone wolf will benefit a lot from that kind of planning.

First, it sets the project in stone psychologically: its written down, its all done, it separates the design and the integration processes clearly, so you don't end up adding new features or changing ideas while you are actually making the thing, and it makes sure that before you even begin programming anything, you already have a clear idea of what you will need later, you know exactly all of the features you will need to implement on the player characters' object for instance.
It also makes a schedule, and you no longer have these "okaaay... whats next now, where the hell was I?" moments, even after a long break from working on the project.

Does it mean I'll ever finish this game? Id like to think YES but heh you know what its like amirite! Well I've been on this one for months now and I still have interest in it, that's probably a good sign. I asked two great chiptune artists for help on the game's music, Untitled and Phlogiston.

And now for something completely different, here's a picture I drew for my colleges' student newspaper, the front cover:

I might or might not make another update soon, with like more game art or sketches or who knows maybe DUCKS

wowie sbeen a while

2009-01-07T15:01:00.003-05:00

heyyy I haven't updated this in a while! Here's what happened since the last time. I was busy with college so I didn't do much for a while and then things started picking up again.

I drew the cover of this chiptunes album here, a compilation of multiple artists by crunchyCo:
get the album itself here: http://crunchyco.com/music/crcompilation.html
its pretty cool stuff. My favorite tracks are the first two and the last.

Made a new gameplay video of Super Banana Nababa, game I started to help out on in october, along with Bisse, Phlogiston and Im9today.
It shows me beating the shit out of the first boss Voodoo mask at Normal difficulty level without getting hit once! He is way more challenging at NIGHTMARE difficulty however, with more attacks that deal more damage and are harder to avoid.
Heres the vid, enjoy.

On related news, the results of the IGF competition are out, and Super Banana Nababa was not selected as a finalist. Ah well, there's always next year! Meanwhile we might finish it and pimp it up enough to snatch up a nomination next time.

Right now though I'm working on an entirely different project, a still unnamed exploration-based platformer in a sci fi theme with a slightly creepy atmosphere, yet with a cartoony feel with the characters. The protagonist is a firefly-like alien (not the show, the insect). Its a lot of work but I think I could finish it almost entirely during January if I don't get stupidly lazy. So far the game is roughly planned out, movement and basic things work, most of the work that's left is in designing the levels and polishing it out. Right now im programming an inventory screen and a map display.

I also have some commission work I need to deal with, but for now I'm taking a little break on things I consider "work", after that hectic college semester it feels good to work on stuff that doesn't have money attached to it for a little while.

Big Building Boom Blues vid and other stuff

2008-11-13T23:32:00.003-05:00

Made a gameplay vid for Big Building Boom Blues, check it here:

I am not working on games much right now, lots of stuff to do: college stuff, pixel art jobs to finish...

As far as games go, Super Banana Nababa, a game project I started to participate in since early october was submitted to the IGF on November 1st. I worked on that a lot during october,but not so much since after it was sent so far this month. The game isn't complete but what's there is awesome. Its a little less than halfway done maybe?

Sluggy's other adventures is advancing very slowly, mostly because its not very high in my current priorities, but also because I'm thinking of changing a lot about it, so much it could become barely recognizable from the demo I put here a few weeks back (check older blog post).
I'm thinking about putting together many of the various game projects I started from Sluggy as a base into one big game somehow. The code from these various different games is very easy to put together as it had the same origin. Thinking of doing something weird, like two parallel games that are played simultaneously, one that is exploration-based with a large persistent world and the other with a simple linear level structure. I'm trying to build around that idea, it could be fun but it'd take a long time and I prolly wont really work on it until SBN is all done.

New release of Sluggy's other adventure

2008-10-06T20:43:00.005-04:00

yaya! Heres a new release.
GET IT HERE!!

Its not visually very different, but instead the level succession now works differently: you play through all 20 levels now, none of them are secret anymore. Secret exits now lead to the spaceship mini game, and the bonus tokens that lead you there before have been replaced with extra life pickups. Finally,I corrected quite a few problems and bugs, such as the game never ending and your inability to quit playing by other means than CTRL ALT DEL. None of the new sprites I made are implemented yet, but the game is better organized now.

Right now I am helping out Bisse, Im9today and Phlogistion with Super Banana Nababa, which we have to finish before the end of the month, so I wont be working much on Sluggy in october. Also someone paid me for some pixel art and expects it for next week, so yeah.

What is next for sluggy, in a loose order of priority:

Add sound to the game. Its been silent for way too long! Ill handle those with a mic. Ive done a few of them already but I havent put them in yet.
Redesign a few levels that are boring, adding new enemies while im there
Implement the few new enemy sprites when theyre done
Add three new bosses. I had been working on another project a few weeks ago, and made a few bosses for it. Now the project is a little dead, but I feel I could give these bosses a second life in sluggy instead. Plus, their visual styles match with Sluggy's Adventures. Ill just have to tweak around how they work a bit to fit Sluggy's movement. (also the game they were originally made for had a hero that could shoot. As sluggy cant shoot, ill find some other means of damaging them. Probably going to be stomping-based like the other current bosses.)
Edit the current bosses, make them more of a challenge and more fun. Especially the dragon (currently found at about the middle of the game, its an awful boss.)
Finish drawing the world map and implement it as a visual interlude between all levels to give the player a sense of evolution and a goal.
Add music to the game, which I put last because someone might end up helping me out with this, so I wont work on it for now until I'm sure I've no choice but to do it myself.

I am going to start a video montage of some of the game's current gameplay tonight, ill put it up on my youtube channel when its done (and add a link to it here naturally). For now, play the game! Also, feedback is welcome!

Edit: Heres the video!

A little gameplay video 1

2008-10-01T08:57:00.002-04:00

Made a lil gameplay video of The Sad, Sad tale of Finnsworth, private eye in space on youtube. I encourage anyone who played the game to make one of their own...

I wonder if someone out there has the skills to play through the whole game...
Do you...?

DO YOU?

More drawing for more fun

2008-09-29T23:42:00.001-04:00

Drew another pic today, fun fun fun
It looks like a monster I drew for a mobile game a while ago and also looks a lot like a boss I made for Sluggys' adventures. The boss is functionnal and pretty hard, its the kind that jumps around and belches lazer and whatnot. Its pretty hard. I didn't make it for that game originally though, so ill have to change its code around a bit for it to work with the different physics in Sluggy.

the pic on deviantArt:

Weeeee by ~FrankieSmileShow on deviant ART

the drawing video:

Drawing fo' fun'

2008-09-28T17:12:00.002-04:00

Recently made a digital painting, here it is on deviantart:

Tar Monster by ~FrankieSmileShow on deviant ART

A video of me drawing it:

it was fun.

Its a boss idea for Sluggy's adventures, basically. He propels himself around by shooting tar-ish stuff. The tar doesnt damage you but pushes you back. As the fight goes on, tar is building up in the bottom of the stage, and its too thick to swim in, so its as if the ground slowly grew higher or something. Its still at the idea stage though, I'm not sure about how itll work yet.

New anim for dat guy

2008-09-21T15:13:00.003-04:00

New animation for that guy, a walk cycle.
Did that during a programming course last Friday (Sorry programming teacher you are not reading this are you? Of course you aren't!)

2008-09-18T23:30:00.002-04:00

Another small update, that's the basic sprite of a boss for Sluggy's Adventures. I like him.... hes gonna be a pretty dynamic boss, the kind that runs around, jumps and shoots.

Today's work...

2008-09-15T22:30:00.004-04:00

College today, so tiny update

New version of the snail now with walking and death animation. thats the large snail, there will be a more common, tiny version of them too.

It might not look large here, but the games' native resolution is 320X240, and the pixels will be tripled so the final game display is 960X720, making that snail actually three times larger really.

Picking an old project back up....

2008-09-14T17:12:00.007-04:00

I recently decided to finish up a pretty old project of mine that I never really finished, Sluggys' other adventure.

Its basically a platformer game, sequel to my very first games made with game maker (my first games ever pretty much, and the projects that got me started with pixel art), Sluggy's adventure 1 and 2, both made around 2005.
Ive no idea if those two early games can still be found anywhere. They were very buggy and ugly, but quite a bit of people played em.

Last year I started to work on this new one, "Sluggy's other adventure". It was more or less just an excuse to draw more pixel art and show off how my art developed over time. The game went along well and I designed quite a bit of levels, they were full of secrets and were pretty fun, but then I sort of stopped working on the project, not really knowing what to add next. My main problem was that I didn't know how to tie the levels together. I thought of a world map, but couldn't come up with a good visual concept for it, or design a nice layout. Before giving up on the project entirely, I quickly put together a playable demo of it, without any world map, just levels that follow each other.

DOWNLOAD
It had a few bugs, but has quite a bit of levels to play, and lots of secret levels too (there is about 20 levels in all, but a single game will get you through only 6 or 7 of them at a time, look for the secret red exits).
Also the game ends abruptly one level after the boss. To quit the game at this point you will have to do CTRL ALT DEL I'm effraid. Also the game was made with an older version of game maker, so it will not work on windows vista.

Now, very recently I decided to wrap that game up. I'll rearrange and edit the levels, draw new visuals for the game to match my current art style and skill, and overall make it better. It should be about a week of work. I will also try to tie the levels together in a fun way, maybe a world map or something, to give the player a better sense of advancement. Here are two new enemy sprites I drew today, next to their old counterparts.

--Snail
old
new

--Ladybug
old
new

Some more games...

2008-09-13T16:18:00.009-04:00

Here's other shit I'm working on right now!

#0080FF

DOWNLOAD
Game project im working on with Souly from Pixeljoint. He was working on this with another dude who designed and programmed, who then abandoned the project. Souly's roommate I think made the background music.
I didn't have his source code but loosely used his technical demo for the overall idea. Right now the game never ends so you might want to hit ESCAPE to quit after a while. the S key shoots, and the arrow keys move. Things spin around you while you are not shooting to serve as a shield, and when you are shooting, they stop and shoot lasers. A few of the later enemies don't do anything yet and just go down and take lots of hits. The last enemy that does anything is the one that shoots lots of rockets, so after that point you can just quit playing. For this test, the ENTER key spawns more pods around you because I didn't program any way to gain new pods yet (and I'm not sure how that will work really yet)

Renauds' birthday present

DOWNLOAD
Heres how it works: in the middle of the screen there is a large gray meter going up in the background. This meter represents your life, and it goes up every time you shoot an enemy, and goes up by itself as well, slowly. The life is also a currency of sorts, because by going on the sides of the screen, you "spend" these points in two types of "upgrades" for your ship. On the right, you make your shot stronger. On the left, you buy cat heads that float around the protagonist and defend you in different ways (the first one is a rotating short range, weak laser for instance). Letting the middle meter fill up gives you an extra life, represented by the presents on the bottom of the screen.

That's a game Lurdiak and me made for a common friends' birthday. I programmed and made a few of the enemy sprites, and Lurdiak made the awesome soundtrack and some other enemy sprites. The game never ends right now, but there is new stuff in each of the 6 or so first waves. Me and Lurdiak will eventually work some more on this, maybe toning the birthday theme down a little and making it a more regular shooter in theme.

Poppenkast games.....

2008-09-12T16:54:00.005-04:00

I update again! Egad! Heres a few things I've been working on lately:

The two following games were made in around 3 hours each, in teams of 2 or 3, for the 3X3 poppenkast competition. At the time of the writing of this blog entry, these two are the only entries in the friendly competition...

THE SAD, SAD TALE OF FINSWORTH, PRIVATE EYE IN SPACE

DOWNLOAD
The goal of the game is to survive against hordes of space monsters using finnsworth's great chain laser weapon. Survive for approximately two minutes for a....surprise....
I worked on the visuals, and my buddies MonsterKingRen and Lurdiak made the programming and sound respectively. The games' visuals are all in 4 colors: white, teal, red and black.

The game is neat and sure was fun to work on. The only problem is that its too long and takes a while before it becomes any challenging, and then suddenly becomes ridiculously hard. Im sure you guys will have plenty o' fun with it though!

Big Building Boom Blues

DOWNLOAD
You, a sort of NINJA, rigged an abominable-looking building with explosives, and must repel down its side before the explosion catches up on you and kills you. Arrow keys move, the A key jumps. Time your jumps right to jump higher. There are two versions in the ZIP. A normal version which was made in 3 hours, and a Xtra version that I added stuff to, to make the game more interesting and control the difficulty somewhat.
I programmed it and made most visuals on that one, and Untitled made the games' wonderful soundtrack, as well as the skyscrapers' tiles.

Fresh out of the oven. Well, not exactly.

2007-09-24T18:38:00.000-04:00

More like, it WAS fresh out of the oven a few months ago.

Its a little treat, people! The mini project that started it all, that thing that made me wanna go ahead and make a mighty fine flash game! Yes ladies, its MY FIRST ATTEMPT AT MAKING A GAME WITH FLASH!
Its right there, in the new PLAY section of the menu. The lil fish there will tell you its under construction, but don't mind him. He's... special.

Arrows move, X shoots, CTRL changes weapons.
Aint it sweet! Well thats where it all sparked, yup. The game never ends, and you cant die, so yeah, have fun for the rest of your lives, lucky bastards.

Frankie goes 2 skool

2007-08-22T19:53:00.000-04:00

How gnarly, back to college for me. That flash is going to take a while now, with about half of my free time gone. Ah well, Ill have to finish it one way or the other!

Not much flashy work on it lately, been mostly just correcting bugs and making the code prettier so if I stop working on it for a while and then come back to it, the huge blot of script wont feel as appalling. I didn't sprite anything new for a while now, so I'm drawing a neat pixel art comic for my college newspaper again, its gonna be a classy one. It'll involve FISH HUNTING FOR TREASURE. Yeaaah. (notice the recurring theme of ocean-dwelling creatures)

Ill mayhap end up making a section here for the comics I made. They're all in French though, I only translated two of them so far to the language of Shakespeare.

In other news GO GW6 YOU CAN DO IT

More flash work

2007-08-07T12:35:00.001-04:00

Still working on it! Wow, such an attention span!
The flash game im working on, a sidescrolling, arcade style shooter game, is once again moving forward!
Now established a way of designing levels without just spawning enemies based on time spent and guessing out timing; Ill animate the whole game like a normal flash and place "enemy spawner" objects throughout it all. Its a big relief to design the levels that way, the code-based alternative would have taken much more time. I think I will put up difficulty levels in which additional enemies appear, but I am not sure of this yet. Ill start by doing the whole flash, then think about the extra stuff.

I drew a few enemies now, I will send them to my pixel joint gallery as they're done (movement, shooting, death animation) The first section of the game is over an ocean, with boats, submarines, planes and water platforms shooting at you. Ill 'prolly throw in some stuff to blow up that doesn't shoot back, so that the first part of the game is easier, but still looks action-ey with explosions and special effects n all. Something else I want to do is to have a lot of fighting happen in the background, especially at the beginning of the game. Ill most likely animate those by hand as well. Something I really want to do is to make some of the fighting move towards the player: for instance, a two planes are in a fight far away, and as the level advances, one of the planes get shot down, and the surviving plane starts moving towards you, shooting. So you have to try and dodge shots coming from a new, third dimension (the background), while still paying attention at what happens in the foreground. Ill try some stuff out and see if it looks good.

Some stuff im not sure of yet: how will players get power-ups. Destroying crates? Thats a bit lame... Also, I thought of making a moment of the game where the perspective turns into pseudo-3d, where the ship moves towards the background, which becomes more clear and larger as it goes... I think I know how Id' do this, but im not sure, maybe it would look awkward.

More work...

2007-08-06T17:53:00.000-04:00

Still working on that flash game. I got a few enemies drawn, now im drawing some backgrounds, and ill try and put a test level together.

Also almost finished one of my last commissions. Soon enough I'll be able to focus on the flash almost exclusively, that will help. Bu with college starting again soon though....

iimusic.net launch and ZPZ

2007-07-31T23:52:00.000-04:00

I went to Zappa Plays Zappa at the Metropolis and quite enjoyed it! yayah if they go to your town, buy a ticket, brown. It was so good in fact that I decided to BLOG ABOUT IT. Thats something.

Also, iimusic.net, a chiptunes music label website, technically launches in 8 minutes! I do some visuals for them, mostly album covers and backgrounds. Check 'em out! They got a few albums up for download already, and its great stuff. Good luck to 'em!

current work yo

2007-07-30T13:51:00.000-04:00

Now working on sprites for ShadowKirby over GamingW, drawing backgrounds for a chiptunes music label website, and also working on my own kickass flash shooter game.

Some of the visuals for it will be put together and sent on my pixeljoint gallery. I will post some of them earlier in this thread over at the pixelation forums to receive criticism on 'em. You wont see everything there of course, but heeeey.

Im also working on a thousand lil projects that will never see the light of day, namely a dungeon crawler and a virtual city in C#, as well as my platformer Sluggys' other adventure in game maker (which is little more than a pixel art wankery project, but fun to work on nonetheless. Also game maker takes care of the tedious work, leaving only the high-end design to work on, so thats sweet.)
Get an early demo of that last one here.

Going to see Zappa Plays Zappa in Montreal tomorrow, cant wait for that. I was told that this show isn't as cool as the last one though, thats its more geared towards songs rather than instrumentals. Also heard Terry Bozzio and Steve Vai arnt there! This blows! Ah well, should be wicked nonetheless.