2010 is like a pair of conjoined twins but one of them is always doing twice as well.

HOLY RECTAL MUCUS. 2009 is almost over and between delaying projects and not updating the comic, I finally realized how horrifically flaky I've gotten lately! That is terrible because I am disappointing myself for shirking on my dreams. And that's not going to fly anymore. I've decided that my New Year's resolution is going to be to pump out material without regards to my current limitations. Life is too short to worry about whatever it was that I was using as an excuse for delays earlier. Which was probably time or something dumb like that. Wait what?

So with that, I am going to be restarting the comic late this week/the start of next week. I have also prepared some previews for what you can expect in 2010! Enjoy with excitement and anticipation perhaps!

"Valentine's Day 2010"

As with previous years, I can't say too much about this one because the person I'm making it for reads this blog and I don't want to spoil anything for her. But the image kind of gives away what the general setting will be I suppose. Space is all glowy and pretty!

I Fight Dragons music video

This is the music video I've talked about in the last few posts that I'm currently working on for a really combustibly awesome band called I Fight Dragons! I'm still keeping the song title a secret because secrets are fun and you can stash them under things like some kind of hoarding rodent.

"Adventoast"

Also previously mentioned, this is a big adventure game I am planning to do in Flash! It'll be pretty open ended, feature a ton of fully animated cutscenes, but also have a few central story lines to give it a little bit of direction. I'm still working on coming up with the story/design elements for it, so I don't know what else to say about this. 

"SuperVillain V"

This time around SuperVillain is hitting the beach for a well deserved working vacation. Things are not looking so great for a nearby luxury cruise liner. The perspective in this picture is kind of confusing. This installment will just be a quick fun runaround before I undertake the huge epic story of SuperVillain 6 in 2011.

"Empire of Sock"

This is now confirmed as part three of the now four part story line. There's just too much to be done still to fit into just this one episode. More on it later!

These are the base five projects I absolutely will force myself to get done. If I (somehow) have time left over, there are two standalone toons I will do to close off the year. Additionally there are a couple of other collaborative game projects that could potentially happen but I'm not announcing them because I have no idea if and/or when they'd be done. But no getting those hopes up.

As I've mentioned previously, I am a huge fan of the first four Silent Hill games, so I think I'll close off this entry with photos (click to enlarge!) of this indescribably awesome James & Pyramid Head amigurumi set my amazing, amazing finacée made for me this year for Christmas. 

If you genuinely liked the new Shattered Memories game you should feel bad.

November is the time for Novembering. And really long posts.

I finally wrangled together all the material I was talking about in my last post and as you may have noticed, the site is a bit revampy! And by that imaginary adjective I mean there are four new main pages, some new shirts, and a ton of new content on the Stuff page! So now I can chill out, plug some new stuff and share a surprising amount of preproduction material from Grumatorium (which is surprising because I rarely plan anything out ever which I guess is why I'm using the bathroom in the kitchen while no fewer than three objects in the house are melting somewhere in the house).

These are probably my first ever storyboards and I still can't remember what possessed me to do these because I hate storyboards. Anyways, click to enlarge as they are quite shrunkined. In these you can see that the monster was initially called a Grue after the text adventure monster of the same name before I was able to come up with a real name (which is Pluggith, for those of you without compulsion disorders who didn't go through the movie frame by frame during the activation sequence). However the Grue bit mutated into Grumatorium eventually during a late night stupor during which I convinced myself that a 'Morguatorium' was a real word/building in which people were being dead. 

As I worked on this, for awhile I was intending to inject some bulky continuity into my work concerning the humans trying to genocide the BarfQuestions because they got in their way of being boring and monotonous. I scrapped most of those ideas due to them being boring and stupid but the laboratory they're running around in still has plenty of signs pointing towards that intention.

For those who missed it, NewGrounds was awesome and ran a huge banner ad for about a week featuring ten select Halloween movies, one of which was mine. I love NewGrounds. Except for all the people who didn't bother to watch until the end of the credits and then proceeded to ask me continuity questions.

Back to the new stuff for the site, my little hidden away animated gif archive on the Stuff page quadrupled in size, so if you're the kind of person that needs to put gifs on bloody everything you should go check that out!

Additionally I made two new shirts which are now available for purchase! A SpermRider shirt which was requested a lot after Seed of Destruction was released and also a new SuperVillain shirt because the design just had to be done.

So what's next? I've been commissioned to do a music video by a brand new band which I was going to keep secret, but they already leaked it. So the new video is for I Fight Dragons, and they are punchintheface awesome so you should check them out. Above is the only other thing I'll release about the video (the main character) and also the fact that it will involve a type of traditional animation that I don't think has ever been done before.

That's all for now. I'll be back hopefully within a couple months with the new music video completed! Thanks for reading this rambly post. Speaking of rambling ramble rambly rambleton. Oh and the comic is starting up again this Monday. I hope. Ramblepants.

Quick Halloweenery Posting

The Halloween toon for 2009 is out and you can/should watch it here. I would write more now but I will be updating the blog again in a week or so, so I can just do it all then. I've got a bunch of storyboard things for Grumatorium to post but I am so tired I think I will just drool into the keyboard for awhile and then lose consciousness. 

The Plan for the Fall/Fall Plan (Roll upon impact)

Well summer came and went and I was awfully busy moving and also being kind of lazy/basking in all the attention Seed of Destruction brought in and so I got very little done. However! Summer is ending and I'm blasting back into full gear on all the projects I want to finish by the end of the year! And here's a super longwinded explanation of all that stuff:

Grumatorium

This will be the first new addition to the 'toons' section of my films page in well over a year now. The story follows three BarfQuestions that unwittingly find themselves in a vast abandoned underground research facility, where they awaken a freakish experiment.

This took a long long time to animate, but it should go slightly faster now. I plan on submitting this one to a bunch of film festivals, as I've only ever attempted submitting to a film festival once with the Closing Hour back in 2008. It worked out really well then, and I think that it's always good to expand your horizons.

SuperVillain V

The last 2-3 SuperVillain installments have been all sort of wound up in some kind of conflict and have gotten progressively more and more meaty and complicated. I want to step back for a bit and get back to the series' roots this time. There is a 'plot' but it revolves less around conflict and more around SuperVillain doing what it loves in a way we have not yet seen. This will be a quick and fun run around before we get into the super long and complicated plots for episodes 6 and 7.

An adventure game which does not yet have a title

Komix Games and I are planning on doing a SuperVillain game still, however it is being delayed for at least three months, if not more. In the meantime, I sort of inspired myself to do an adventure game after I made this comic:

My programming skills are pretty meager, but I think they'll manage for this. This is one of those projects I don't like announcing because I have no idea if it'll work or not but whatever. I'll give it my best shot. Also games are neat.

Pyroguin

I'd like to end the year on a happy short little toon and this will be that toon. Not saying anything else about this for now! Nyarrh!

So there it is. I am also working on a few smaller projects:

• Short graphic novel for the 500th comic

• 4 more main pages, and 2 redesigns for existing main pages

• A ton of new shirts for the store, which is in desperate need of updating

MOTIVATION TRAIN VROOM VROOM I MEAN CHOO

Advent of Sock

So I finally managed to finish Advent of Sock! This last week of super explosive updating is hopefully making up for the massive production delay that happened over the last half a year. Anyways, this one clocks in at almost five minutes, and features Sulek's new song "Nothing at All" off of their album Believer's Lane.

The next installment in the series will be entitled "Empire of Sock" and I'll begin production on it later this year. I had previously said that the Sock series would be a trilogy, but I'm starting to think it would be better if it were four parts, as there is just so much stuff that has to be fit into Empire already (Advent was necessary just to set up a fraction of the craziness that will be taking place in it). 

Before I start the madness of production on that however, I'm going to be making two shorter animations.  Everything on the site lately has been bulky and/or series installments, which has left the toons page without any updates for over a year now. My next project doesn't have a title yet but it'll be an upbeat noir-ish standalone story with lots of challenging character animation. Afterwards I'll start on SuperVillain V, which unlike the last two to three cartoons, will be story/drama light and return to the fun, carefree run around style of the first one. Anyways, enough forecasting, I've got more work to get to. See you in a month or two!

Rodeo of the Sperm

The gaming event of the century is finally here. You need to go play SpermRider : Seed of Destruction right away. For those of you unfamiliar to the project I've been working on for the last half a year, see the trailer which you'll find a few entries back. (Go play it on NewGrounds if you have an account there so that you can take a shot at unlocking some achievements!)

Originally I had planned for the original SpermRider cartoon to end with a big city rampage and a fight with the military, but I was lazy and into cutting corners back then as it was only my second animation I had done for the site. So in a way this is SpermRider 1.5, and makes up for the scenes I never animated. Anyways, this is the last of SpermRider for awhile until 2010 or 2011. Around that time I'm planning to wrap up the series with the third installment, tentatively entitled Spermoboros for now.

As an added bonus for people who follow the production blog, I made some wallpapers out of the game's loading screen artwork (minus the ugly advertisements). I'll eventually add these to the "stuff" page of the site but I don't feel like updating that yet (as I'm working on some new main pages).

Click on the image/link you want for full size.

Except for the DS theme, click the link for that one.

Fullscreen

Widescreen

DS menu theme (R4 and apparently, M3 compatible)

PSP

Well, that was a long post, but this is exciting and exciting things deserve lots of word spewage in an unorganized and frantic manner. Next up, Advent of Sock is on the final leg of the production journey. Once I figure out this crazy HD business and edit it, we'll finally see the little orange gumdrop induce havoc on the world once more and I can move on from this production back up that's been plaguing me for the last half a year.

Hey look over there! It's AN UPDATE. Almost.

First of all, there's a new full length Sulek album out (and I really should update the store with a link to it already)! For those of you looking to get it, you can buy a physical copy with a bunch of new artwork by me here or download it from iTunes by searching for Sulek. The album features a whole bunch of new and very awesome songs that you might have heard in SuperVillain 4 and Valentine's Day 2009 and some new ones that you'll be hearing over the course of the year in upcoming BarfQuestion projects. In short, check out Believer's Lane right now.

SpermRider : Seed of Destruction is a game. That is very awesome. Let me tell you about it in broken, fragmented sentences. About half a year ago Komix Games and I started development of an entirely hand drawn and physics heavy flash game based around the SpermRider series on this site. At this point it's practically done, and we're just working out the last few bugs and getting it sponsored. 

Enable HQ for better results!

The game features a story mode with five levels, and in addition, four unlockable mini-games that range from challenges to letting you build your own custom scenarios. It also sports 2-3 minutes of brand new animated SpermRider action in the form of cutscenes that you'll find in the story mode and three tracks from Sulek including the classic Ski Bumps and two tracks from Believer's Lane (Midnight Train and Rhubarb). 

It's hard to pin down, but I think this should be wrapped up and ready to go in the next week or two, but I can't promise anything. Also, if you haven't noticed, I am over my horrible writer's block and the comic is updating once more!

Well I'll see you guys once the game is out, and again when I finally finish Advent of Sock, which I will now proceed to furiously color as this movie just needs to be done already. Be done.

Game Takeover! Comic Postponalanche! RAUGHHHHHHHHH

Some people might have noticed that there hasn't been any weekly comic action going for almost a month now! Sorry about that. The reasoning behind this temporary drought is L;KAJGLKAHSL;GKHALS;DHGLAH SO MANY GIGANTIC FREAKIN PROJECTS. They have, yet again, trainwrecked in a spectacular show of non-cooperation and ill timing.

Basically the SpermRider game is moving ahead a lot more quickly than I had expected. And suddenly I'm facing finishing the game sprites and in addition, doing a ton of soundwork and about eight animated cutscenes.

This means my schedule is pretty shot for Advent of Sock. I was aiming to blast through coloring during the last weeks of March and get it out before April hit, but since the rush has been put on the game this will have to wait. Again. Sorry. I hope to finish off the game as quickly as possible and finish this up in the weeks that follow. This seems to be the neverending project but I assure you it is coming. It's very close to being finished now.

The other issue this business causes is that I really do not have time for the comic, nor the energy. I have managed to draw a few comics but they are really pretty terrible. See example below. Trust me, the neverending comic break is for the best. It'll be back one day soon.

Oh man. Do you see why I'm not updating the comic??

Making of Evil!

Well I am hard at work trying to get "Advent of Sock" out in a timely fashion. So I thought I'd throw together another time lapse video of a typical production day! Hopefully I'll be posting again in a couple weeks with the finished cartoon.

The tiny Socks were made by my fiancée who is an awesome crocheter. You will be hearing about these more in the future when they become available for purchase! (Enabling the high definition button in the lower right hand corner of the player is highly recommended.)

DAY OF THE VALENTINES

It's Valentine's Day and there is a new Valentinesy cartoon up that I made for my fiancée! You can also watch it

 here on NewGrounds and here on Youtube. The Youtube version is standing in for the usual embedded DailyMotion copy until they get their act together. 

We are now ready to start production on  new animated content again, starting with Advent of Sock! Actually 2009 is going to be THE YEAR OF SOCK as I am planning to release both the 2nd and 3rd installments this year which is going to be crazy amounts of work. In addition, you can expect lots of new standalone toons, as that section of the films page needs more content desperately. You'll also see SuperVillain 5 and possibly a few games (I know, I say this every year). The idea is to release nine shorts for 2009, but we'll see how that goes as time is tough to come by. I'll post more notes and synopsises after Advent of Sock is released. 

In recent-ish news, my animated short "Monarch" from 2007 made it onto the Planet Kino DVD! For those of you unfamiliar with the Kino organization, it is a super cool world wide network of independent film makers who meet to share and screen their work. This is also awesomely ironic because it was an event at school where the Planet Kino DVD from a few years back was shown that made me want to get into independent filmmaking. Woo! Anyways, for those willing to pay the shipping cost you should check it out, it's full of a lot of excellent shorts from all over the globe.

In addition, Sulek has begun printing copies of their new full length album entitled "Believer's Lane" which will be released sometime late February/early March. This album is 12 awesome new tracks from the band including Marigold from this year's Valentine's Day short as well as Bazooka Tube Revisited and Clearly, Maybe, Crazy from SuperVillain IV plus Nothing at All which will be featured in the upcoming "Advent of Sock." Stay tuned!

Approaching 2009... I mean.. Ten days into 2009

Just shooting a quick entry to let everyone know things are still on track! Sock got delayed which is crappy, but it's halfway done which just puts one more short into the 2009 lineup. The comic is coming back Monday and will continue to regularly update for at least quite awhile. 

Basically what happened is that the three current projects all bunched up together and clogged the tube leading to Finished Product Land. I am making fast progress on Valentine's Day this year and as soon as it's done I'm finishing Advent of Sock. The SpermRider Game will hopefully be released around this time too. So basically I'm shooting for at least both toons to be released in February. If the game comes out then too that'd be great. I'll then post my plans for the rest of the year here. Until then not many production blog updates. This is just a slow start to an action packed year, in comparison to 2008 which was heavy on the work but fairly slow in terms of updates.

I'm also going to be starting artwork for Sulek's next full length album in a couple of days. It sounds awesome everyone. Really, really awesome. Yes. Also "Songs from the Doctor's Office" will be reprinted minus some of the artwork so it will be cheaper than the original version or so I hear.

Alright, enough chatter. See you all in February with loads and loads of happy twitchy things. Sorry for the delay.