College semester finished!

I was horribly busy recently, but its all over now!
Heres some of the things that hogged all of my time these past few weeks:

First, a 1-minute pixel art video:

This video took about 5 days of work. Its silly but fun, I like the result a lot.

Also, in our flash course we had to make two flash microgames. The games were to be handled by an external shell that would randomly play em. Because the external shell handles them, there arn't any play controls on the games themselves so just hit refresh when you want to try again.

first game is called DISASTER. Spin around the screen with your mouse to avoid the projectiles, and click to shoot the monsters eyes. you can play it here:
http://www.frankiesmileshow.leafo.net/Stuff/datthang/Disaster/jeu.swf


In the second game, you have to fill a watering pail with water, and then water some walking plants in the bottom of the screen. You can play it here: http://www.frankiesmileshow.leafo.net/Stuff/datthang/Botanix/jeu.swf

You can try out the final project with all of the student's games including my own here: http://tim.college-em.qc.ca/~microjeux/ though its all in french, and some of the games can be a little confusing even when you understand the language....And quite frankly a lot of the games are a little poorly made! Its understandable though, there was a lot of work to do this semester and not everyone was particularly interested to invest a lot of time in this one project.


Lastly I spent quite a bit of time working on a php website. The assignment was to make a website where you can register and then upload pictures. You can check the website there: http://tim.college-em.qc.ca/~coulomf7/index.php
Though it might go offline soon, its just temporarily hosted on my college's server for the purpose of the assignment. I couldn't really finish it on time but it had pretty much all required features.

New vidya, and some other stuff

Here is a lil cover for Phlogiston Game Music vol. 1

I posted this before but heres the new part,the drawing process video!
I thought I had lost the footage at one point so I didn't record the last half of the work, but most of it is there really, all that's missing is some tweaking on the character and the smoke from the missiles.

And I remind you of where you can get the album, here.

Ive done some more work on Recession, but its slowing down because of college stuff. But said college stuff is pretty cool: I have to make two games in AS3 and a deviantArt-like website with some PHP. The two AS3 games are for a collaborative project where all students make two small 10-second games, that are then all put together in some sort of warioware-like supergame where the player plows through an endless series of microgames to raise his overall score. One of my two games is a 10-second bullet hell where you fight a procedurally generated monster. In the second game, you have to water some weird walking plant monsters with a watering pail using your mouse.
The PHP website's concept is basically a deviantArt site that is specialized in sketching, doodles and pencils. I made the visual concept for it, a very dirty, sketchy-looking interface:

There is a toolbar on top that is missing in this screenshot. The idea right now is to have the sketchy background change entirely depending on the site section you are in.

Also I'm working on an AS3 game with Bisse, who recently came back from his mysterious radio silence. Welcome back, Bisse! It'll visually look a lot like some bastard child of Gyruss and Abadox, two awesome NES games that I played to death as a kid...

Most of the work on my personal game project "Recession" lately has been about the intro sequence. It will resemble the intro sequence of Day of the Tentacle in how it is made:

That is, a series of partly-animated slides. On most frames, the only animated part is some lip syncing, and in some others its a more elaborate movement. I guess I didn't really need an example to illustrate this but heh, I love that game...

I wont animate them yet, I'll start by outlining the base images, and then get to work on finishing the game gameplay-wise. I'll do the big animation work much later on, it will probably be the last thing I do on the project actually. So if I end up losing interest ill still have a usable, non-animated sequence as a bit of narrative. The intro sequence is all sketched and two of the base slides are done right now. Ill show some of them later, for now ill get to work on one of those AS3 games I need to get done.

Another album with cover by moi!

The J. Arthur Keenes Band released a new album, called Pamplemousse.

I made the cover art. Its looking juicy.
Get the album here:
http://www.iimusic.net/catalog/2009/10/the-j-arthur-keenes-band-pamplemousse

See the drawing process in this youtube vidyah here:


I still have like two other album covers on the way, one is almost done too.

Also I made a few more things for the Tigsource Assemblée competition:
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New album by Phlogiston out

Phlogiston put out a game music compilation album, its great! I made the cover. You can get the album here:
http://www.iimusic.net/plus/2009/10/game-music-1

I am working on three other album covers right now, I'll post em here as soon as theyre done. I recorded the drawing process for some of them.


Also I've been doing some things for the TIGsource Assemblée competition. Heres a lil blast

New portfolio is out

I have almost finished my portfolio site. Its a college project, basically we got to show off so we can get a good internship somewhere. Its not entirely done: I have some things to add on the animated background still, and also I want to translate the whole thing in french, as most companies around here are mostly francophone. I put it up to replace my old site hub here: http://www.frankiesmileshow.leafo.net/
Also I think the site might have issues with chrome! There's an odd white rectangle that appears on the lower left. It disappears as soon as the window is resized. Ive no clue where that comes from. Also the gallery seems to load very slowly in chrome too.

Ill also put a resume there later this week.

Finally picked up Recession again!

I haven't worked on Recession in months. But last week I picked it back up again and boy did I work! I placed all of the bosses in the game(except one that isn't finished yet, cant go in much detail about it, endgame stuff) , finished equipment and treasures, made a saving and loading script, fixed the map display, replaced the pause menu with a more useful one (where you can check your collected items, equip weapon parts...) and took care of many, many little bugs there and there.

There is still a lot left to take care of, but I took care of lots of annoying elements. This game is getting done! Finally!

Cowboys and crabs are two very cool concepts

Ive been spending some time sprucing up old projects! One of them is Crab Cowboy, that game I originally made for a Poppenkast compo. Making it longer, look better and play better. Heres a few screenshots of what I got right now after about two days of polishing:


Planned are 5 levels, 7 enemies and 5 bosses. So far I got all levels made, but only 3 of them are populated with baddies and only one is really finished, the village. I could finish dat thang within a week if I wasn't so horribly lazy. Need to refresh your memory about the original Crab Cowboy game made for the competition? Scroll down to the games section and pick it up. It was neat enough.

Other than that, very little is new, I got some college work, might be working on the visuals of a pretty neat XNL game with the XXIst Century Digital Boy software guys soon too. Also I've been compiling a lot of my past work to build a portfolio of sorts ill make in Flash. Probably something really lively full of animation and wacky shit, to sell my mad animating skills!

Vector illustration.

New pic! Another issue cover for my College's student newspaper, Le MotDit. This time its in vector art.

How will spiderman get out of this one!? Let's find out...