Telegram from the Titanic

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.

FUCK.

After 10,000 years, it's free!

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.

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.