FIGHTAN' SOME DRAGONS

The official music video for "The Faster the Treadmill" by I Fight Dragons is out! Watch it here!

I began work on this for the band shortly after completing Grumatorium and later finished it in April. I Fight Dragons utilizes a lot of game controllers and NES era material into their music and performances so I approached this video from a similar perspective; I started by designing and animating gameplay footage from a fictional 8-bit game that the video would take place in.

The result was "the Adventures of Puddlenaut," in which a shark-armed diver hero does battle with deep sea creatures in order to mine mystical power crystals that are abundant in the underwater kingdom. The main grunt enemies, one of which is the protagonist of the video, were modeled after drowned fetuses since I couldn't find any deep sea creatures to fit the image I was looking for. Thus I ended up calling the main character "Fetusaur" throughout production.

After designing and animating the fake game footage digitally using a set of hand drawn sprites, it was a long process of animating the rest of the video traditionally and then compositing the two types of animation together where they overlapped.

There were several games that I drew inspiration from/stuck homages in for, but people's guesses as to what these are have been all over the place. To clear things up, the following are the only ones I intentionally inserted homages to:

Super Mario Bros

Inspiration for the level design, plus considering its status as the best known 8bit platformer, it seemed wrong not to include it.

Megaman

The original series is a favorite of both myself and the band. I included homage to these games in the final boss scene, in

which the chamber has the same time pausing shutter style doors.

Final Fantasy

A favorite of the band, but a game I know hardly anything about (on account of my distaste for RPGs). Every game seems to

revolve around magic crystals according to my brief research, and so the story of "the Adventures of Puddlenaut" is centered

around glowy crystals.

the Katamari series

The first two games are some of my favorite, if not my favorite, games. In a group shot of enemies there is a vaguely Katamari

shaped, green plant in the back (unfortunately it got pretty cropped out in post production).

Portal

The sequel looks like Pixar-inspired garbage, but I adore the original. There is a certain cuboid cameo for all of two frames

during a camera movement early on that is virtually invisible without obsessive pausing.

This is the first and last time I'll ever incorporate video games in my work however, as the internet's over-saturation of crappy video game animations is frankly nauseating.

Stay tuned for BarfQuestion Games debut title "Hitting Stuff at a Building" and a new installment in the SuperVillain series during the next few months! Check out the previous entry for more information because I am all full of hectic and busy and it is difficult to write more things for you when I am moving around this much.

HOLDUP, WHAT IS THE

People seem a little more panicky than usual about there not being any updates, and with reason, because there haven't been any updates. Contrary to assumptions however, I have been hard at work this entire time. What's the deal then? After Valentine's Day 2010 was released, I ended up working on two projects that (unbeknownst to me) wouldn't see release for a long time. 

The first of these projects is the music video I was commissioned to do for I Fight Dragons. Production was finished in late April, but it's been stuck in Atlantic Record's "Marketing Hell Zone of Ultimate Apathy" ever since as the suits decide how best to 'utilize it.' The joys of professional work!

The second project is nearing completion on my end, and it is a game that goes by the title of "Hitting Stuff at a Building." I bumped the adventure game off my immediate list of projects in favor of this, and it will be BarfQuestion Games premiere project. I'll finish working on this in a few weeks and then it'll be sent off to programming. Have a teaser!

Within a sprawling urban landscape, an enormous complex is being constructed. Truly a pinnacle of both human engineering and lust for packing miserable people into constraining spaces, the tower (even while under construction) stands out as an unprecedented achievement upon the horizon. That is until a BarfQuestion with a badminton racket discovers the construction site.

The gameplay is the resulting chaos of this chance encounter. It's racquetball meets badminton meets breakout, all while dodging avalanches of potentially lethal debris, evading the cops, inflicting misery on the construction workers, and finding new and interesting things to hit at the building (and everything else in the vicinity). Features could potentially include unlimited randomly generated gameplay, thirty unique cutscenes, mini-games, and multiple endings.

In other (older) news, I also designed this poster for Sulek as they've got a few upcoming live shows. Check out their Myspace for more information on show times! Additionally, they now have an official website at http://www.sulekmusic.com which you should also visit!

I apologize to everyone for not knowing in advance that these would be slow moving projects, but I assure you that I've been working my crapping facilities off to get them completed. However, if you were understandably disappointed by the first half of 2010, holy-scalding-pants-zipper-fresh-out-of-the-dryer, the second half is going to be more exciting than jet skiing into a volcano filled with those little plastic ball-pit balls. Behold my new queue of projects that I'll be starting on in a couple weeks:

1) SuperVillain V

2) Empire of Sock

3) Short toon, TBA

In addition to this, the slow-butt projects from the first half of the year will be showing up sporadically as well. I hope it will be exciting and not in a "I'm so disappointed that I'm excited" kind of way.

INSUBSTANTIAL UPDATIN TIME

The update hiatus is fortunately nearing an end, as things are beginning to bear some semblance of sanity again. I've been spending every waking minute on the new music video, but now that's it's completed I can start to relax and resume activities I enjoy like sleeping.

So you're probably wondering that, if the video is done, why it isn't online yet. Like with the last few music videos I've done, the band who commissioned it (I Fight Dragons) wants to delay the release for a week or two until we can do one big coordinated release. 

However, I Fight Dragons is currently on tour and in about a week or so there's a good chance the video will be playing live during their performances. If it begins playing live, I'll post an update on the comic with details of when and where they will be showing it. If the internet was an old radio with a bunch of stations you'd probably rather be listening to I'd tell you to stay tuned! BUT I DON'T HAVE TO BECAUSE YOU'RE GOING TO ANYWAYS. THIS ISN'T A RADIO.

Oh yeah, and the comic will start updating again this Monday (May 3rd).

In older news, the Wisconsin Film Festival was really neat. Watching an enormous projection of something you made with a live theatre audience is intense. At one point I think one of the jokes went over the audiences' heads but about five seconds later one person abruptly went "HAH" very loudly. It was awesome.

So now I begin on the next group of projects! In the sidebar where I list my current projects, you'll notice that the two new game projects now have working titles! These are subject to change but I suck at coming up with titles so they'll probably just stay as they are. I'll talk about these more after the music video is released. 

After the games page is populated a bit, there are going to be loads of series updates for the next 12 months. If you're only sticking around for SuperVillain or Sock episodes, they sure are on their way.

tl;dr- Music video is done and will be out sometime in the next few weeks with a possibility of live showings, the daily comic is coming back May 3rd, plus new games are now in production, followed by more series updates!

In the next post: ACTUAL INFORMATION

VALENTOON

Valentine's Day is here and so is a new Valentine's Day cartoon (Also on Newgrounds here)! You should maybe be watching that RIGHT NOW if you haven't already. This one picks up immediately after the one I did in 2009 on the evening of the zombie invasion, so it wouldn't be a bad idea to have seen that one previously.

I need to find a way to write down all of the info on all these randomly appearing species in my work. I inadvertently come up with backgrounds on all the creatures while designing them, but there's no subtle way to include it (as they are probably better left untouched). Though if I were to clarify all of this lame continuity junk, people might stop assuming SuperVillain to be a child. 

The cow was made by my mom for my birthday last month! (It doubles as a box)

Anyways! I will now be launching full speed into the long delayed I Fight Dragons music video, whilst occasionally in my incredibly limited spare time, be working on the 'secret project' you might have seen pop up in the progress meter section on this page. My fiancée discovered she was incredibly talented with Flash recently, so we are giving making games a try! The pilot game doesn't have a title yet, but I'll post more about it when I can.

Hopefully I'll be reporting back in a month or two with a super neat music video (and possibly a game)! Enjoy, and Happy Valentine's Day!

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.