For the last few years I've known and said I wanted to make a film. A real film. Something I can take on tour when it's finished and stand on it's own, outside my jumble of web content. This, of course, causes a bit of a problem concerning what to do with my internet audience. The herculean effort required to even attempt something on this scale is terrifying, and that naturally means fewer (than the already sparse) updates I can put out. The fans will feel abandoned, but to stay engaged with them takes valuable time away from the project I really care about.
The first draft of this post was written yesterday and it was very optimistic in nature. I promised to invest great effort to create audience outreach tools for BarfQuestion's 10th Anniversary, such as a Twitter account to keep everyone posted with lots of free content and extras (production updates, animation PSD files, more frame giveaways, preview clips). It would take time away from production, and even though audience feedback only comprises 5-8% of my job satisfaction, I'd suck it up and do it anyway for the greater good.
And then the election results came in. From the collective prolapsed anus of America that mistook the presidential election for a reality show, to the stuck up idealists who voted third party or "protested" by not voting, to the religious who voted for the actual anti-christ just to preserve bundles of cells less complex than the organisms on their dinner plates, to the indifferent and apathetic 40% who shirked their responsibility to vote altogether in favor of continuing to waste oxygen: I realized that I found the prospect - of continuing to provide free entertainment to anyone who very well may have contributed to the destruction of everything this country has striven for over the last several decades - to be completely repulsive.
When I'm already struggling with how to balance a feature length project against dumping more content into the internet, this shit really makes me want to just drop the internet plate altogether. I would just feel bad for my foreign audience who already has more than enough America-related problems headed their way.
The terrorists are not immigrants or people who follow a hate-religion different from America's favorite hate-religion. Terrorists are fat, sagging goblins that spew hateful lies to make us afraid of our own country for personal gain. Fuck this country and the American people. I am more ashamed to be one of your number right now than I am of that one time I tried asking out a Hmong girl with a valentine written in Japanese because I thought the calligraphy looked cool without realizing how horrifyingly racist that would come off as.
Back in the distant lands of 2010, Danielle found an online tutorial about how to code ActionScript games in Flash. The tutorial instructed the reader on how to make a game in which you, a paddle, use a ball to destroy apples in a tree. The very most basic of brick breaker clones. Having completed the project, I saw her excitement in having coded something. And I decided in that moment to obliterate that small happiness forever.
"What if we made it more elaborate?" I said while lightly tapping in the first nail. "You could be a little guy knocking down a building! What if we added procedurally generated levels of a building with cutscenes in between them?". Meeting with little resistance I decided to query further, sweeping my hand along a shelf of antiques. "How about adding different kinds of bricks and building materials?" This, of course, destroyed the fancy procedural generation script that had already been completed. I either did not or could not recognize the shattered finery on the rug. More. There must be more.
"Racket physics! And we'll need new levels! We'll make new levels to replace all that hard work you just did! While you're at it, how about we add construction workers that call the police on you! Oh! Yes, we should have multiple game over conditions! We'll need a health meter, and power ups to go with it like buckets and sandwiches. And let's add more level designs while we're at it!" Unable to accept the fact that this would be just another brick breaker game, no matter how many bells and whistles we duct taped to it, I proceeded to push us deeper into madness. "Let's add something besides rocks that you can hit at the building!" Having seen the resulting rock re-skins, I could not let this scab go unpicked. "What if they each did unique things, like broke or exploded? Let's put in multi-ball functionality and an inventory bar while we're at it.
How about a remote control that brings in a wrecking ball? Wouldn't it be cool to fight a UFO with a wrecking ball?"
Years had passed at this point and the once simple tutorial game had already been reprogrammed from scratch, including several code revamps to handle all the new ideas I was polluting this once innocent project with. But my nagging suggestions and torrent of new assets had only increased with time. Three mini-games were planned and the groundwork laid out for them. More bosses. The collectibles system. Easter eggs, including a cheat system and a new hidden game mode within it. Remastered the cutscenes. Made a new cutscene gallery to replace the old ugly one. Added corrupted cutscene files to the game which replaced all the sprites with cutscene frames and almost irreparably broke the game. The level auto-complete system. Randomly generated countdowns. Procedurally generated room interiors. An actual ending to the game, instead of an endless loop of levels. More cutscenes. Throwing out of the previous groundwork for the three mini-games and adding the Demolition Carnival in their place. Unique cutscenes for all the bosses.
Neither of us wanted anything to do with it at this point. A spaghettian titan of tangled code and jumbled ideas, desperately trying to be something more than the uninspired monster it was. Meanwhile, Danielle had surprised me with Cardiac Snowdrift in 2011 which was everything Hitting Stuff at a Building was not - concise, addictive, and quaint. With Cardiac Snowdrift out in the wilderness, HSaaB had become even more reprehensible. What was the point of this mutant hearse of a training-wheels game when Cardiac had totally supplanted it in that role? We did not know. We did not care. Hitting Stuff at a Building rotted in the depths of our hard drives for years, untouched and unloved.
But here we are. We finally pulled it together in 2016 and made a concentrated effort to finish it. I am still coming to terms with the realization that I am a horrible, horrible project manager and our first substantial game will be just one of millions of derivative indie-games that are over-saturating the market. This trend of nostalgia fixation and subverting retro game tropes is something I desperately don't want to be a part of. Having grown up without video games, I had very lofty ideas about what video games actually were, and when I finally got to start extensively playing them 5-6 years ago, I was disappointed with how limited most of them actually are. Seed of Destruction is more along the lines of what we'd like to make, but we played it "small" and "safe" with Cardiac Snowdrift and HSaaB in order to get a handle on how to make games ourselves. But we've learned a lot, and thanks to her trucking through this programming boot camp hell, Danielle's grasp on coding is now so high that her career is moving up as a result. We've come away from this a lot more experienced than before and that's what really matters at the end of the day.
When asked for comment, Danielle added "FUCK FLASH RRRHAAABBGGLKKKGGRAAAH". Needless to say, we will thankfully never be working in Flash again. Our next project is being built in Javascript and HTML5 and it has been phenomenally easier to work with. It doesn't hurt that I've learned to plan out the full scope of a project in advance, as to prevent another catastrophic idea cascade. Meanwhile, I'm working hard on getting the Zehkiflorn reveal trailer ready for BarfQuestion's 10th anniversary on January 14th, 2017. It's going to be a huge update.
So Hitting Stuff at a Building reached a state of completion for the seventh or eighth time, and then I was like WAIT A MINUTE all the bosses need cutscenes! and then all production on the books ground to a halt and I lost a week's worth of work on the trailer because of it and then I worked straight through most of the weekend on it and sad. I am the worst. The worst director.
While I pulp my face against this demon of my own making for next to no reason, the coding remains basically completed which frees up the programming queue. I don't know where queue gets off having all of these fucking vowels but here we are.
What that means is that the new website I blew several months last year making assets for is being coded. That is to say, Danielle is tearing through it with an inhuman fervor and doing an incredible job. Now I understand that news about a website design sounds not so impressive because websites who cares everyone just uses social media move on already and accept the heat death of human imagination already right WRONG. I don't want to sound conceited or anything, but YOU'RE SUPER WRONG. Seeing it all coming together and being able to play with all the little dynamic elements has been a really exciting experience (and there are so many more yet to import). I had previously hated mobile everything, but the mobile version is way more fun to play with than the desktop version. The ability to manually poke and prod all the squishy things turned out to be really engaging. It's looking to be far more playground than website at this point.
It's still in the very early stages, but we'd really really like for it to launch during BarfQuestion's upcoming 10th Anniversary Week in January. That's also the timeframe I'd like to launch the Zehkiflorn trailer in. But now that I've speculated a release date I've cursed both of them to rot forever in development hell. Oh and there's going to be a 10th Anniversary week in January. I'm lining content up for it now including the aforementioned two projects and maybe a 24 hour animation stream (I HATE STREAMS)!?
I'm excited to announce that Hitting Stuff at a Building is in the homestretch. No really, I'm serious. We finally stopped procrastinating and started plowing through play-testing. The final bugs are desperately running for cover from the UNHOLY LABOR STORM we are raining down on their filthy nonsensities.
On top of all this, I'm still trucking through the Zehkiflorn trailer. There's probably five? production blocks and I'm mostly done penciling in the first one (plus a bit of inking as well). I've been recovering from some persistent health issues that have limited me to working on remastering content for the books for a week or two, but I'm ready to get back into animating full time. Once the books are finished, it'll free up my spare time so I can also get back to remastering my old films as well.
A game, various remastered projects, the stray comic here and there, and maybe maybe maybe a feature film trailer oh no please don't give estimates we've talked about estimates you know the trouble this gets you into don't make me say it supervillain 6 2011 stop screaming you brought this on yourself biting me isn't going to solve anything
TWENTY SIXTEEN IS LOOKING TO BE OKAY.
* The pursuit of creating perfect children is both futile and impossible and the practice is in no way endorsed by BarfQuestion Films, BarfQuestion Games, or its subsidiaries on the scientifically demonstrable basis that children are fucking horrible.
I'm a self taught animator who's set up a little cyberspace shindig of various hand drawn animated works. You could go check that out. You could also stare hypnotically at this text. Here is a semicolon for you to focus on ;
