You're Going Places!

The announcement of an April 25 release date for Inchworm Animation, a new animation app for the Nintendo DSi, got me thinking about the portable animation-station options out there.

Developed by Flat Black Films, which brought you the rotoscope animation in Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, Inchworm Animation has grabbed my attention as a way to make sure animation stays 'fun'. I think it's safe to stay most of us got into animation because we thought it was a 'cool' and 'fun' profession. Not to say that it still isn't (I love writing 'Animator' on forms as much as the next gal), but when you're changing the font size for the tenth time in Camp Rock 2 ads, you start to second-guess your career choice.

But video games are and always will be 'fun' and the idea of having a make-shift animation station tucked away in my bag is kind of exciting.

This helps explain my actions online this morning - while trolling Etsy, a favorite past-time during my downtime at work, I came across the Etch-a-Sketch Animator.

How had I not heard of this as a child? Why had my parent's not bought me one? Did it actually work?

I like how even with those sweet electronic beats

to back it up, "Draw it, Save it!" still sounds really lame.

A quick Youtube search turned up this great old commercial along with a few other videos of the Animator in action - enough to convince me it was worth dropping the $25. Honestly, they had me at "a dot that's hot" but the promise of "going places" with it doesn't hurt!

Of course, I could always just drop $15oo on a laptop, but will the Lenovo ThinkPad X201t play my saved Super Mario game? I'm already up to World 6!

So sumi(-e)!

I posted a while back about a video game demo I had collaborated on with a friend of mine, Eric Robinson. While scanning through my older posts, I realized the images didn’t do the art any justice. At least, you couldn’t see any of the elements very well...

The game, called Kanji Kami, is meant to help the player study Japanese. It isn’t necessarily meant to teach you kanji; it’s mostly meant to help you recognize certain kanji and match them to their bases. To do this, Eric decided the gamer would play as one of two characters: Matsuo Basho and Murasaki Shikibu.


The inking was done with a calligraphy brush while all the shading was done in Photoshop. We wanted Basho’s geta to stand out so they were actually colored in. Unfortunately, we never reached the point of design for Shikibu.

Aside from characters, there was the matter of creating all the background elements. Eric wanted only a few assets but each one had to be versatile so we could use them multiple times and in different areas of the game at different scales.

The most important part, as with most productions, was to stick to the style. We wanted to mimic a traditional sumi-e painting as best we could.



Some houses…




Various trees and mountains…



Shrubs...


... and, of course, a neko.



Basho’s finished run-cycle. The animation was only tested in After Effects.


After the animation was approved each drawing was then compressed into JPEG form and re-sized to a perfect square so that it could be imported directly into Torq, the program we used to make the final demo.

Giving gaming a shot...

So, I'm terrible at this whole 'blog' thing. I think that's pretty undeniable at this point so I'll just leave it at that and move on...

About a year and a half ago I was living abroad, teaching for money and doing freelance work on the side. A friend of mine, the incredibly intelligent and ridiculously hyper game designer Eric Robinson, had been toying with an idea for a game all his own but lacking the artistic abilities to actually do anything aside from coding. Seeing some of my work and knowing we had free time to spare, he asked if I'd help him make a play-able demo of his game.


Thus 'Kanji Kami' was born. The game is practically useless to the Madden Football video game crowd unless one of those gamers happens to be studying Japanese in between virtual touchdowns. Who knows? You may be out there... It's basically a game that helps students of Japanese strengthen their kanji skills by 'absorbing' the correct roots to a specific kanji and 'repelling' the incorrect ones.


Eric created the concept and coded the whole game while giving me artistic direction. He had a specific look in mind for the game, mimicking old sumi paintings. To get that look, I inked all the animation and background elements on paper with a caligraphy brush I picked up at the Hyaku en Shop (Japanese equivalent to our $1.00 Stores). Then I scanned them into Photoshop and used the brush setting to recreate and color the gradient wash, trying to give it a watercolor look without actually having to break out my set of paints. I also created a simple 3D scroll in Maya to create the borders to the left and right of the game play area.

We finished the demo just in time for the annual Sendai Art Gallery's Foreign Exhibition and got a chance to reveal the play-able demo there. Since then, Eric and I have returned state-side and 'Kanji Kami' has been recognized on the web, featured as one of several games built using Torque:

http://www.garagegames.com/products/torque/tgb/

If anyone is curious about taking a look at it or downloading the demo, it might be easier to just head over to Eric's site (as oppose to scrolling through the list of games featured on Garage Games till you get to the 'K's). You can do that here:

http://ericrobinson.wordpress.com/portfolio/kanji-kami/

Enjoy! More blogs will follow like lemmings, with any luck...