Loading Screen Design - Snake And Kaz Discussing Something On The Way To The Next Mission.  Probably

Snake yerba mate fidget animated sprite!

Oof. Being an indie dev I have a spare stylus just in case mine breaks and I have to wait for a new one to arrive.

Reblogging the devblog from my non-MGS life!

Running water turned out to be tricky to animate!  We needed a suitable background for the waterfall level in our game, but it needed to be a small enough number of frames, be looping, and also not be too distracting from the action in the foreground. 

I’ve spent a lot of time drawing things OTHER than water most of my life, but luckily we have a lot of streams and rivers near our home, so I went out to do some sketching and observe the flow.

Some time recently I got an iPad with a pencil, so that allowed me to work with color and maybe get some of the subtle changes.  But I’m not a painter by trade, so these clumsy attempts are more about observing and trying to intuit what color should feel like when you see it onscreen.

At first I thought this rushing river would be really cool!  But I had the scale all wrong.  There’s so much motion happening, and at the scale of the gameplay the animation looks choppy.  It would distract from the motion of the action in the foreground, and would make the whole scene look way too messy.  Back to the drawing board!  

I’ve settled on this calmer scene, which isn’t the rushing river I really wanted, but it won’t compete with the foreground sprites for attention.  The animation is much smoother too, except for the waterfalls which still may need work.  Making animations for Unstable Scientific has been one of the most challenging experiences I’ve had as an artist so far, but I feel like I’m learning so much in the process! 

These are so beautiful! They remind me of reading John Belairs books as a kid.

Childhood can be scary.

A collection of some of my hand-drawn horror looping animations!

Trying to draw buildings

Reblogging background art I'm working hard on!

Continuing work on the Waterfall Level background.  More columnar basalt, but the waterfalls need more detail!  

Self-reblog from the other game I'm working doing art and animation for!

I’m working on the art for a swooping melee-attack damselfly right now, and wanted to get a more realistic wing animation.  This turned out to be fairly challenging, first because insect wings move so quickly.  Even a 12x speed video won’t capture more than a blur.  There’s plenty of dragonfly slow-mo videos shot with professional cameras, but damselfly videos are harder to find.

Why damselflies?  Because they rest their wings folded atop their bodies, looking better for a 2D perspective in our game.  Dragonfly wings would look odd, seen edge-on.   My search for a reference took me to some fascinating places online.  Japanese researchers back in the 1980′s had studied the flight mechanics of damselfly wings, down to the forces acting on individual sections!  Check this out:

University of Tokyo, Flight Mechanics of a Damselfly -  AKIRA AZUMA, SOICHI AZUMA, ISAO WATANABE AND TOYOHIKO FURUTA  https://jeb.biologists.org/content/jexbio/116/1/79.full.pdf The black and white gif I included is from photos taken from this paper. Next, I found at a video that illustrated damselfly darting with fluid mechanics simulations.  https://youtu.be/erd8FibfPR4 (the other gif is carefully taken from this video and reassembled so it stands still, for use as a reference).   It’s like the damselfly swims through the air, using two sets of paddles - and still, the movement appears strange and counterintuitive.   The only reference I couldn’t find was on the color shift of an ebony damselfly’s wings.  I had to fudge it, half from blurry video frames, half trying to not look too busy in a pixel-art animation. This has been fun, challenging, and a deep dive into a rabbit hole I otherwise would have overlooked! 

OMG it’s the insulid phasmid from Disco Elysium!

the term "phasmid," meaning "stick insect," comes from a latin word meaning "apparition" or "phantom," due to the creatures' ability to hide in plain sight, and then move around and scare people.

the largest phasmids likely remain undiscovered; the longest insect known to science was a phasmid from a species that remains formally unnamed and undescribed, even since being captured for the first time in china in 2014.

a female specimen of the quasi-mythical australian species of gargantuan stick insect was sought by a curator of museum victoria for three years before he encountered one, also in 2014. upon realizing what it was, he says, “I started screaming."

Holy crap this was a ride

people will say "why cant the eldritch gods just be nice to humans :((" and then kill a bug for existing near them

So sorry to hear that. I kept seeing you guys and your work and I was super excited since PW is my fav mgs game. But I think it was a good run while it lasted, and props to you guys for putting your heart and soul into it, and I say it's really appreciated. Hopefully you guys make a new game, but who knows.

Thanks.  I really appreciate it.  We’re definitely making a game.  We’ll be using the engine and most of the assets, but it’s kind of hard for me personally to move forward right this second.  We had a story to tell with Peace Day and I’m not giving up on that just yet.  I have all these animation resources...I’ll do something that’s not within the apparently volatile medium that is a fangame.