Frogs and Flies from Newgrounds!

Time to kick off the year with a new animation I made for Pixel Day!

A little backstory/process!

Other than my short film 'Dogs of the Planet' (more on that below!) and a few loops, I didn't get as much time to make animation during 2019, BUT, at some point @Aap invited me to make a short duck-segment for his brain-twisting pixel animation Indian Runner duck! (go watch it!).

I made this part:

I hadn't done much in pixel art before other than a few small things, so it took me quiiite a while to get it to work. As space is so limited you have to be aware of the placing and color of every single pixel. But despite the difficulties, I think it ended up working after all. There is a "crispy" and vibrant quality of working in such a low resolution which I found appealing.

SO, after that I got inspired to try my hand at something more 'elaborated' on pixel art, and Newgrounds' Pixel Day seemed like the right excuse! Also there was the Loopdeloop challenge coming up, I usually like to make loops as a way to experiment with different things in animation, so, Why not do both things in one?

The inspirational theme for Loopdeloop was 'WHOOPS', so after a weird brainstorming I ended up with this frog which keeps being misleaded to press an unwanted button, here is the very first animatic:

Warning: it's SUUUPER rough, but I like to share it in it's most crude version as that's how the process normally starts.

So, with that defined I asked my composer pal Moralo González (who I've collaborated with in a good bunch of stuff by now such as the game Dinomelt ) if he was up for the mission of making a tune for this weird pixelated animation. While he had done chiptune esque-music, I wanted to see if he could make something both alien sounding for this weird ambience, and also more pure in terms of chiptune sound.

All of this resulting in the sick jam you hear in the final loop.

Meanwhile I finally began animating, starting with a resolution of 160x90 as it seemed to make the pixels stand out while not being so restrictive to work with, first starting with only linework and later on coloring. On this last aspect I got a bit greedy with the coloring style, trying some dithering effects (pretty much making multi-color pixel patterns. to simulate light-shadow effects) This is one thing I thought about recalling old Pokémon gameboy sprites such as this precious thing:

This took a lot more than anticipated throughout the animation being a more manual process (with a few shortcuts in some cases but in many parts done pixel-by-pixel) with the frog character having 20-30 unique frames.

There's probably a big basket of pixel art tricks I've yet to explore in terms of coloring, but for now I'm happy with how it ended up!

And that is how this poor frog looking for elusive nutrients came to be!

'Dogs of the Planet' coming to Newgrounds!

OOoohhh that's right!, I have another thing to announce!

This is the short film I finished last year, (here's a post I made back then) it's about time to finally web-release it! I have the impression it may be more of an internet short, so we'll see how it goes! I'm planning to first launch right here on Newgrounds by the end of January!

Hey Newgroundsss!

Been a while since my last upload here, and it turns out I've been quite busy working on my latest short film, 'Dogs of the Planet'! Check out this little sneak peek :)

As you can see it's a trailer, which I haven't seen that many of here on NG, but I found it still fun enough to share here as a brief collection of loops. The plan is to have an eventual web release of the full short (starting here on Newgrounds!) but that will be announced once I have a defined date.

It had been quiiite a while since my last propper animated short, the last one was... wait, Lizard Brain Freeze? and that was 4-5 years ago!! These past years I have focused a bit more on exploring games, and still keeping the excercise of short animated loops. So, motivated by a short loop I made for the loopdeloop challenge last year (the same GIF you see below, made with the base theme of ...DOGS), I began to collaborate with a musician friend to finally get back into a new (at least 'medium' sized?) animation project!

This is a short about ... well, dogs, particularly dogs who find themselves in a post-human world, as you can guess, it may (or not) be as serious as it sounds ;)

There are a few coolibert updates related to other projects for a later post, BUT for now I wanted to focus on this little ball of morphing canines, I find it pretty cool to announce it here considering how Newgrounds is what got me into trying animation in the first place.

ARF!!!

Hey Newgrounds organisms!
I like this page as a blogging platform, so here goes an update on recent stuff:

First a small recent thing: 'La Yema' ('the eggyolk' in spanish), this was kind of my Halloween project, I'm still participating regularly on the Loopdeloop bi-monthly animation challenges, as they have been helpful to explore weird ideas to try on loop form. the last one with the theme of FEAR led me to make this weirdness.

It was also an attempt at making something suspensefull, so the animation timing ended up being a lot more different than what I usually make. Another unusual thing was that aside from the sound effects, I also made the 'music' this time (music in a vague way, maybe it's more 'cues' than actual songs), I used ORGMaker which was pretty cool to test around once again (it's the same software which was originally made for music on the classic Cave Story).
 

Also, GAMES!
I'm still trying stuff in the world of games, so here's a few atoms:

'Ducks!'

This game was originally made for the Construct 3 game jam last year, well I recently got an award for Best Game on Ludopolis! A rising videogame festival in Valdivia, Chile. it got a pretty good response, so it's a good motivation to revisit and expand on this project.

Kick Punch, Eat Meat!
Now this is a more unique project, I've been working on art for this game by RobotMonkeyBrain, It's a 'deck-building' game on an early stage of development, follow its Intagram site for more updates on the game.

Mysterious (dog) short!

Entertaining as it is to make games, I want to keep focus on animated content. I actually haven't made a propper short in quite a while so I just began a new project I'll be updating a bit more about later on the (rest of the) year.
(hopefully before Smash Bros Ultimate comes out!).

Thanks for reading this noodle, now here's your reward:

Hey Newgrounds!, long time without an update, so here's a thing:

Just finished a quick GAME project, a little 'RPG' battle called 'Arcane Cereal Duel'!
Take a look!


 

Now I'll expand a bit about its making:

This one was originally created for 'The Very First Extra Credits Game Design Jam!' I had missed the Ludum Dare jam the previous weekend so this was a good alternative.

The inspirational theme for this game jam was a video where they talked about the concept of "Awesome per second". What's that, you ask?, well it's pretty much a critique on games that could deliver a better overall experience if they were shorter by getting rid of boring/less memorable parts.

After exploring a few ideas I liked this one as a way to make a content-heavy short game where there were a bunch of elements around you and you had to find the best way to use them in your favor, in some way like a Point and Click, but in battle form.

The game was made over a weekend on the 48 hour jam, barely finished a functional version, (the original one is up on itch.io if you're curious ). I liked the results, so I took some time I had through the week to update the graphics and a few details I wanted to improve from the first one, testing, dialogs, and a slightly varied enemy pattern.

I worked once again with Construct (3), which I've found great for the graphic implementation, I wasn't so sure if the battle system could be easily achieved, and after a few tests it became all about using variables properly, using only mouse controls made it a lot simpler too.

If the characters look familiar to some extent, they are the 2 wizards I rescued from a previous short animation from 2017 called 'Ketchup Golem'!, now called Wizlog and Spirk, an RPG battle was a great excuse to revisit them!

A fun fact, this is the first game where I actually make the music!, it took me a bit to tinker around, and I finally used ORGMaker, this one was originally created by Studio Pixel for the music of Cave Story, so I wanted to see what could be done with it. I don't have much of a background on this area. Possibly any oldschool RPG player may be able to tell that the battle theme is created following the same structure of old Final Fantasy Battle music.

It was also fun to toy around with simple dialog 'cutscenes' in the style of old rpgs, I like how a simple change of expression, along with a sound and dialog can do a lot to compensate for its simplicity. 
 

While in the short term I want to focus a bit more on animated content, this game was a pretty fun side project with still a good deal of animation.

What do you think? Is this something you'd like to see more of?

Lizards and Fish from Newgrounds!

Here's a little thing I've been making through the year: not too long ago I began making custom "token cards" designs for creatures  (which are mostly used as a complement on Magic: The Gathering) for the Cardamajigs store, and now a second series of ANIMATED cards are out!

I wasn't really aware that lenticular printing could allow so many frames of animation (actually a total of 8 in this case!) so it's been great to make a few things with this technology, it's pretty much some kind of GIF you can have in your hand.

If you're interested, either for your Magic battles or just to collect animation in physical form, head to the store!

Clay-morphed beings of Newgrounds, I haven't dropped by in a while, so it's time for a little update on sprouting molecules:

As the title says, not long ago I found a video of someone actually speedrunning Dinomelt! a 100% run!!!

I'm a big fan of events like Games done Quick with their usual Super Metroid races and the like, where players go in-depth about the game details and 'optimal routes' (that was one motivation to actually have a 'speedrun' medal here on NG), so it was amazing to see that this game had some speedrunning appeal, take a look if you're into that!!

Finding more Dinomelt feedback, and playthroughs on youtube has been a cool motivation; After finishing the game I've been taking a break before getting into what could be a next 'big project' due to other human-related duties, but in the meantime I'm making a few tests for an expanded build of 'DUCKS'.

Also, just out of experimentation I began using Instagram, which, while probably not intended, has been a fun platform to share quick animations around.

I also made a microscopic GIF-Comic for Halloween... so far that's my ONLY Art submission this year!?... Perhaps I should do something about that.

Splurt!

Hello Newgrounds!,
Time for a little (but also huge!) announcement!

Long-story short, on 2016, as part of the competitions of the Chilemonos Animation Festival (the biggest animation festival in Chile); I took part and won a pitching contest on new series for Cartoon Network LA. with a 'byte-sized' series called "Mantequillo"!!

/(You could translate it to 'butter kid' or something like that), it's based off some comics I had made for a chilean webcomic site called The Comic Fome (here's one (in spanish, though))

This led our small team to make two short pilot skits with this characters, as interstisials for the channel. For a while we weren't sure abut when and how it would become available (otherwise I would've made the announcement a long time ago!!!) But at last it's gone live on Cartoon Network LA (Latin America)! you should be able to watch it from the comfort of your device of choice as they also uploaded it on Youtube (see below).

It's reaally short and simple, but give it a watch! :)
 

Hey Newgrounds!

First of all, thanks to all who've played through and taken the time to review Dinomelt!, the response has been great over its featured weeks on Newgrounds and I've been paying close attention to all the feedback so far.

If you enjoyed the game (or if you're into OST collection, because why not), you can now get the Dinomelt's OST, by the coolibert Moralo Gonzalez on Bandcamp right now!! It's on "Name your price" mode, but consider supporting his music work by throwing a bit more than 0$.

Making the OST was a pretty unique part of the process, since it's among the few development tasks I didn't produced, but got some 'directing' to do instead; I had worked with Moralo before on numerous UNI works on Design School (most notably my first 'released game' Mastica Astros), but so far Dinomelt is the biggest project we've worked on in terms of scope and required music volume.

Proposing each track was an unusual challenge to get into, as the "Explorative Platofmer" genre comes with pretty unique musical needs in terms of ambientation, the biggest challenge being defining the 'world themes'; as the player is more likely to spend a lot more time into each area; which meant that the world tracks made by Moralo had to offer a lot of variety, while consistently covering an atmospheric mood of each area, something that doesn't apply to the rest of the OST which covers the boss battles, conversation themes, and later story-based tracks towards the Endgame. For a 'relatively short' game, we're pretty glad to have finished with a final volume of 14 tracks on the game! (well, maybe 11 if you don't count the brief 'fanfare'-type tracks).

I also made a little cover for your ocular absorption.

Splurt!


 

Hey Newgrounders!

Before it was too long, I wanted to dedicate a post to a game I made for the Construct 3 jam : 'DUCKS'! And share a few doodles because why not... -I have at least a few posts to make about Dinomelt, those may appear first in the blog- 'Ducks' actually got #1 game of last month... WHAAAT...  So it's a good time for a little recap of making this little game in the Construct 3 Jam... Let's go!

Construct 3 Jam - Good Things Come in Threes

It took me quite a bit to figure out what to do with the 2-weeks game jam, a number-based theme was still too wide to settle down with an idea, so the 1st week was just planning for it and looking at ways of making something fun which could take advantage of the '3-theme', without seeming too obvious. A part I find pretty motivating in game development is character design, so I decided to do something related to 3 characters, I thought about 3 rats, 3 worms, 3 different birds, and at the end it was just fun to go with 3 different DUCKS..

I looked back at The Lost Vikings, which was a great inspiration for a three-character game, but I didn't wanted to do a platformer (because of 'Dinomelt fatigue') or something too complex for the jam like an inventory system like Lost Vikings had, so I started playing with an overhead perspective and simple asset ideas. 

Then came the ducks!!, I doodled around and the result were 3 desings I liked and were varied enough, one is the 'well-rounded' duck, the other is a heavy "brick-like" duck, and the 3rd one is just a "floating"(in the levitating way) duck.Each one should be able to bypass a certain obstacle, but also have a 'weakness' in a way that they had to work together, so it was about time to hop into the program!

My experience making other C2 games (Mastica Astros and Dinomelt) was really helpful to quickly jump into development of the game, as I didn't have much issues with the basic movement behaviours, the character-switch mechanic, and implementing objects and animations.

The thing that took me the longest was making a system to efficiently define how the ducks would interact with each obstacle. that's where Construct's "families" came in handy, as they allowed me to put all ducks into one, and define all of their properties inside of the family, adapting it to each ducks' properties (Though (blocks  bullets), Floats (goes over spikes), Shoots (shoots...)...).

At the end, I made 6 levels where the ducks were slowly introduced to avoid starting with too much information, and see how much I could do for a 1-duck or 2-duck puzzle before getting too high on complexity (at the left is one of the many sketches I did for each stage, looking for interesting but not so obvious ways of making a way for the ducks (and some random creatures around...)).

I found a little time frame to add a little backstory just for the sake of completion, I actually intended more 'cutscenes' between stages which could develop the characters a little more, but that didn't have much priority for the jam... and that was IT!

After seeing the response, level 3 and 6 got a bit insane because they came really overloaded with objects, and there was a danger of dying and having to restart the level by mistake! From this experience, puzzle design was all about managing layers of complexity, defining the given information, and finding the right interactions, so it really requires some more focused testing, which is something to keep in mind for further projects (or potential upgrades of this one!).

Another thing that bothered some players were the hitboxes as it was an unusual perspective to define them, and the speed of the ducks, especially on the later stages where ducks have to travel longer paths, and the chance of failure gets higher- which means, restarting again! oh well-...

That said, players really liked the ducks in general! And this was a fun side-project to work on. While I don't have plans of making an expansion right away, it's a fun premise to keep planning on.

SO, how well did Construct 3 do?

For the most part, it was mainly 'C2 with a more efficient/structured User Interface', As other jammers have mentioned, working with images' properties in different ocassions made the engine crash, but that's mostly bugs which should be checked by now and the upcoming versions.

That said, there are a number of more technical improvements I'd like to point out:

-Sprite animation editor is so much better to work with, pretty well structured, as an animator, this is IMPORTANT.
-On-stage animation previews and defining starting animations are both really helpful to check and solve simple issues.
-Exporting (nodewebkit and html) was really fast, and nodewebkit offering export settings was a huge improvement over the C2 process.

-Being able to share a remote preview of your game is pretty handy, I didn't used it that much, but just thinking about how much I web-tested my previous games (always exporting them, uploading them, linking them...) It's a really well recieved feature!

So that would be it for 'DUCKS', I hope it was an entertaining read, Tune in next week where I'll explore deeper into Dinomelt's origins, and until then, may the ducks be with you.

Hello Newgrounds!

After more than 2 years of melting development, I can at last announce that DINOMELT, is up!!

Here goes the final Release Trailer!

One thing to note, is that it did come with a buggy start (the game had a few (hopefully only) "1st day-bugs" which triggered at times when NG medals were requested, making the music go away, and even making the game crash!! (oh peanuts!), turns out, it especially affected users without accounts, which may seem like an obvious thing to consider, but it was never tested in that context on NG until launch) it should be running well by now, so give it a go! (but if anything comes up, please consider sending me a PM with the details :)).

In that sense, I expect this game to keep evolving for a more 'complete' version, so all feedback is welcome.

That said, thanks to all who have played it so far, reviewed and reported bugs! (and huge thanks to Tom for the frontpage feature! :O).

Now that I can finally call this stage 'done', I'll be making posts regarding the process of the game and the multiple alpha-beta-stages, also, let me know if there's anything about the game's process that you'd be interested on reading about!

DUCKS!!!

Last week, I made a game called 'DUCKS' for the C3 JAM, it was great to make something that was NOT a platformer for a moment, and focus on simple duck-creatures and obstacles. I have a lot of stuff to write about that one (and also about using the C3 beta) but I'll be leaving that one for next week!!

CUACK!!