BarfQuestion International Development Conference

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)!?

Side Projects Assemble! Ganglotron is on the scene!

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 regret to inform you that the Hype Engine is time-soluble.

The 550 frames of animated assets needed for the drastic website redesign are finally complete! The crazy part is that the new website is entirely contained within a single page, making the frame count all the more unreasonable. Now, to the programming backlog with you!

Speaking of the programming backlog, HSaaB bug testing is progressing slowly but surely. Game development is an extra job for both of us, so we can only really put aside 2-4 hours a week for it. But unlike past years, we're sticking to it fiercely, like some kind of carnivorous tape. Redundant, since tape obtains nourishment by way of consuming the movement freedoms of other organisms.

And with that, we set sail for a new land in 2016! One of new heights and possibilities! A new vista that will leave you stunned! Flabbergast! Outraged over when the hell am I going to get around to animating of Rictus of Sock already! The name of this sheer cliff face we're currently locked into a flaming crash course with?

Why, it is Zehkiflorn!

Zehkiflorn Web Design Warmup

A third of the year on comicstuffs like Syphilis Rice, another third on general preproduction headpurgery (and prettying up Hitting Stuff at a Building), and here on the last third I was starting to wonder why I was feeling depressed. Upon sitting down to do some actual animation work, the pen started scraping paper molecules off the index cards and osmosis siphoning them directly into my bloodstream, converting them into some kind of animation-based antidepressant. Wow, it's like doing what you love makes you happy or something.

The original 2007 BarfQuestion website

When I say I'm back to animating, that probably sounds like I'm doing work on that Zehkiflorn reveal trailer I said I was already working on. It was a bit intimidating, diving straight into something like that after 66% of a year with little to no animation, so I'm working on the website redesign instead right now. That might not sound like something that would entail a whole lot of animation, but this heavily interactive iteration of Tales of BarfQuestion is tailored specifically to murder data plans. You're welcome.

Skraw!

 Looking back at the history of the website, you can tell I did not much care for web design outside of my shaky, initial efforts. The sketchbook design from 2007 is, I think, where the current comic page comes from. It will never die. It is unable to die.

The short-lived original original comics page where you had to manually click links to the individual image files for each comic.

The site's second form was a big step down. After four hours of searching my archives and the internet, it appears that fortunately all evidence of its existence has been wiped from history. Merely a collection of links to basic pages circling a malformed, poorly proportioned BarfQuestion that looked pretty damn pleased with itself to be standing in a spotlight, unaware that it was the star attraction in the "Biannual Unwarranted Displays of Hydrocephalic Enthusiasm" pageant. This version had all the terrible- bad art, advertisements, those previous two things I mentioned and nothing else. Certainly not discussion forums. I see you starting to correct me, and I'm telling you to forget about it. Those never happened.

After Sketchbook Doodlytimes and Monetized Freakshow Spotlight came Phase 3, or as I unaffectionately refer to it, BarfStar Runner. I think this was the ultimate low for me. I wanted (needed? seemingly at gunpoint?) to redesign the site on a whim and I remember throwing it together in a weekend. Zero original thought, and generally the kind of minimal effort involved in BLATANT PLAGIARISM. Unfortunately this has been the longest running design and serves as a monument/power plant for efficiently generating a steady stream of shame.

The start of something not-suck...?

I'll finish up animating the new (and first good) design this month, and when bug testing finishes up on Hitting Stuff at a Building, Danielle will be coding it in Javascript + HTML5. It looks like it should be mobile compatible as well, but its bandwidth costs will certainly not be. I've seen a disappointing trend in web design to just link together all your social media accounts. This approach is safe and ensures you'll remain compatible with all the technological trends, but I'm going in much the opposite direction. I don't want to see the internet continue to devolve into a featureless newspaper, filled with inane details about personal lives and videos of people playing video games. I think it important that the internet remains a bizarre carnival of unchecked creativity.

(while I was digging around looking for the old website designs, I found these creepy sprites from a 2007 Smash Bros style game Komix Games and I almost made before before making SpermRider: Seed of Destruction instead)

Preproduction Excitement Rush

During August I finally managed to just about finish the mountain of concept art required for Zehkiflorn. The sheer amount of time just to do the design work should probably serve as some kind of ominous warning about what I'm about to undertake, but I've plugged up all my sensory orifices with hopes and dreams long ago, so now all I can perceive is an eternal, hellish expanse of rainbows.

As I've probably mentioned, it's been a lifelong dream of mine to be a filmmaker, but what really swayed me toward animation was the limitless power it gives you to realize anything you can imagine. The last years of self-educated animation have made me realize just how vast that freedom is. In the past, if I were to animate something set in a city, I would just draw some normal buildings without much thought and have done with it. But why limit yourself? Animation makes you into a god. What a waste it is, to not fully explore that potential.

Once I started creating a new world, I couldn't stop, continuously adding details and coming up with new ideas as a result of those details. Harkening back to "Monarch", a big theme in Zehkiflorn is the obesity epidemic. There is currently a worrying trend to alter our surroundings to accommodate more personal mass, rather than to take any personal action to alter the source of the problem. And it got me thinking about what the world would look like if this greed set the standard by which our buildings were designed and built. I started designing doors that were obviously once door-shaped, but have been massively expanded to accommodate more girth. And then that got me thinking about how this would effect room layout, reducing corners and distances required to walk from one area to another. And then that inspired more design work to design buildings that were centered around colossal elevator mechanisms, which in turn created new scenarios and characters specific to these behemoth contraptions. And that set into motion designing thin shapes and hard corners out of all human made constructs, because these woefully out-of-touch humans would enjoy having their environment reflect and reaffirm their own pear-shaped image. Days later, I'm swimming in designs and notes about how this world looks and functions based on the addition of just one root detail.

There is always the fear of over-designing, but I'm really happy with how everything has turned out. It finally has 'that feel' to it, where I no longer feel like I'm spitting out scribbly moving doodles, but really making something with real depth to it. Something I feel really passionate about. And it really has to generate copious amounts of passion, because I have no idea how much enthusiasm this is going to require in order to finish. This all probably sounds a little alien (and potentially disastrous) compared to my normal fare, but just hang in there until the reveal trailer. There will be surprises for all the fans. All five. Anyway, production is go!

Click here to see larger version so the difference is actually noticeable.

Weeks and weeks of nonstop mental diarrhea is a bit exhausting and I've burned myself out a couple of times, so to give myself creative-off days, I started remastering my work in true 1080 HD. The original shorts on YouTube are mostly film ed with a cheap DV camera from a backlit, window mounted brace I made out of more index cards and tape. A few years back, I 'remastered' them in HD for Vimeo, but all that involved was filming the frames with a cheap HD camera off of a table with slightly improved lighting. This (final) time, I'm subjecting the frames to the same process I developed during Empire of Sock which involves scanning the frames and touching them up digitally, including digitally enhancing the colors (although I haven't really started that yet since I'm still in the black and white stuff). It's a really good time to get around to this, since some of the older frames are starting to yellow with age.

I'm already a little worried that The Five will riot, 1) because I might be coming off as a bit of a George Lucas and 2) the really early projects show maybe a little more detail than they should. That is to say, they look like absolute shit. This was nicely obscured early on by the fuzzy digital video quality, but you can't hide anything from the scanner. But I actually kind of like them like this. Seeing all the poorly-erased mistakes, smudging, and reference lines in there is kind of nostalgic. I'll try to keep the original low quality video files around for as long as possible on YouTube, but if you are (for whatever reason) really attached to them, download and archive them. Just another reminder: you can use KeepVid or a similar service to capture the YouTube ones, and the on-page links on my website to download the Vimeo versions. Get to it though if you're going to, because my work on Vimeo and NewGrounds is going fully HD starting today. In fact, my first three projects are live in HD right now! 

Eat This Child (NewGrounds mirror)

SpermRider (NewGrounds mirror)

SuperVillain (NewGrounds mirror)

NewGrounds set to 1080p actually looks better, especially in the first one. Vimeo is downgrading my videos again, despite me being a paying customer. Might have to switch off of that service soon.

The next time I see you will probably (hopefully) be for the release of everyone's favorite disappointment: Hitting Stuff at a Building! That is, if anyone even has Flash installed on their computers anymore. Speaking of which, I desperately need to throw together a new site design to act as a placeholder for the next year or so until we have time to make that crazy site redesign I keep foreshadowing. Freak out as hard as you like when everything suddenly looks different.

RIP Flash

Up until now, I've been very obstinate about sticking with Flash, despite its plummeting popularity and support. Filmmaking has been a lifelong dream of mine, but in my late teens and early twenties, flash websites featuring animations and games were a big inspiration to me, such as Newgrounds and Homestar Runner. However, with the recent maelstrom of exposed vulnerabilities and malicious exploits found in Flash, I've finally come to accept that the ride has probably been over for quite some time. At least it coincides well with my transition away from web-based content and into film festival projects.

a terrible, incomprehensible reject comic- just for you!

My vision for the new website design is pretty specific, and I'm not quite sure which formats will be capable of realizing the new design while still being convenient to visitors (and hopefully mobile users as well). We're going to be sitting down once HSaaB is done and going over our options. And not just in search of a programming language to write the site in, but also a platform for future games. It's a shame, Flash could have been so perfect for both of these things.

hitting stuff at a building: seriously almost done, for real this time

Having grown up alongside the internet, I'm sad to see it devolve into a platform that caters specifically to unwarranted self importance, parasitic advertising, and absurdly overblown and unethical government surveillance. The new site will probably be largely self-contained and even more esoteric as a result. YouTube is walking a fine line, and the instant they switch over to a more intrusive advertising model, I'll be done with that service.

just remembered that this game was announced in 2010, can i feel any more disappointment and hatred toward one game? oh wait, portal 2

Here is a rough release schedule for the next several years (?), which as always, is bound to change at any time:

• Hitting Stuff at a Building (2015, hopefully)

• Zehkiflorn reveal trailer

• the Adventures of Puddlenaut game

• Website redesign launch

• Zehkiflorn

• Valentine's Day Forever

If you're awaiting a project that doesn't appear on this list, don't despair yet. There's almost definitely news regarding it just around the (maddeningly over-complex labyrinth made entirely of) corner(s).

The Start of Something Potentially Terrifying

Ever since Syphilis Rice #2 was completed, I've been busy wasting even more time on Hitting Stuff at a Building. Growing up, I was not allowed video games, save for a handful of free ones that would run on our old Macintosh (the same computer seen in the Making of Empire video as a joke, until everyone took it seriously and thought that I actually use a 20 year old computer for postproduction). I've recently revisited these games in order to finally beat them, and upon completing the last and most difficult of these nostalgia trips, I was greeted with nothing but an empty room. No ending, no text, nothing. I was frothing until I realized that all of my games so far have pretty much had terrible non-endings as well. That's my justification for spending the last couple of months adding even more junk (including ending cutscenes) to the already underwhelming and embarrassingly derivative timesink that is Hitting Stuff at a Building. All that remains now is to program the "final boss" and bug testing.

So, with all that roundabout whining out of the way, I reach the current issue. For the last few years, I've been jotting down lots of ideas for Film Festival Project #1. Alongside various HSaaB work, I'm finally organizing all of these ideas, 'script' writing, and drawing concept art. And wow. Not only was this complex to begin with, but my brain is vomiting torrents of ideas into this. This went from a "film festival project" in the same way that the Closing Hour or Grumatorium were normal shorts that I sent off to a film festival to a "FILM festival project" because it is looking like it is going to turn into an actual freaking movie. If Empire of Sock, a glorified fight scene, ended up being almost 10 minutes long, I cannot even conceive of the runtime of this. To clarify, I say that as someone who has never released something longer than 10 minutes. I think 20 minutes is enough to make me faint, and I have no idea what this will turn into. Let's not think about the production time. Please. I'm having an awfully fun time digging this grave.

Since the basic plot structure of the movie has been floating around in my head for so long, I really expected writing and designing for it to be a fairly simple matter, but every time I begin to flesh out a new area, I immediately get diverted down tangents, writing little details and stories around minor background characters or constructs. I'm kind of terrified of all of these ideas coalescing into an indecipherable mess, especially considering the primary venue of distribution will be theaters, in which it can only be watched once, when it's threatening to become something that will require multiple viewings to fully appreciate. I guess I should take inspiration from my own characters, enthusiastically throw caution to the wind, and microwave this car battery already. I'm in this primarily for myself after all.

Instead of trying to animate the entire thing in one go, or splitting it into production blocks (as with Empire), I'll be approaching production by picking whatever scene I want off of the storyboard and animating it in full. This means I get to see finished product on a regular interval which is great for my morale, and it also means I can release an exciting reveal trailer (that I've been choreographing in my head for some time) relatively early on.

Since you're A) reading the production blog at all and B) still following my work, it stands to reason that you know the drill by now. Scarce comic updates, production blog posts consisting of nothing but complaining about long production times, the works. Thanks for coming along with the ride so far, and let's hope you survive this next one. I'll see you next time with that "new" game release that might have been exciting if it had been released three years ago, but now resonates with me on the same level as discovering dried cat puke of an mysterious and indeterminate age.