It’s been about a year since my last email. I got so wrapped up working on different characters & modeling different stuff, that I totally forgot to send an update of what I’m working on.
Turns out I got a lot done.
That first kickflipping frog guy was just one of many characters I made this year. I ended up animating a few of them, and spent a ton of time just building different stuff. Much of it was dumped into this backyard I worked on for a while.
Something I realized the other day was that part of the reason I’ve stuck with Blender (and streaming it on Saturdays) is that it’s just fun. I enjoy using it, learning about it, and getting better at the tools. It’s a nice feedback loop.
The most recent character I made was new frog guy, named Milton. It was pretty fun to remake him after everything I’ve learned about modeling & rigging characters. I put way more effort giving him an interesting shape/silhouette, and I think he turned out great. You can see him running over here.
Garbo
Of all of the characters I made last year, Garbo was far and away my favorite. One night I was pretty bored drawing and ended up with a bunch of random stuff, including a garbage can.
So then I redrew him, gave him arms and legs, and tried to figure out how some of these shapes would work in 3D.
Then it was just a matter of building him out and animating him running. I finally hit a pretty good stride with animating characters like this, so it was really cool to see it come together quickly. The rolling everything bagel is my favorite part.
I’m working on a game now
Building & animating stuff for games has always been something I’ve wanted to do, but never really knew where to start. Now that I've got some more experience under my belt, it felt like a good time to jump in.
In November I found a game jam (typically a ~1-2 week project) to work on just to get the ball rolling and see what that process is like. The game jam itself was kind of a bust, but it was great to get in and work on a game.
After the jam, one of my teammates reached out and asked if I wanted to try making a game together. So we started in December and have hit the ground running. I’ve been doing all of the art & animation stuff, and it’s been a blast so far. This is Budbot:
I’ve still been streaming a lot of this work, so I have been able to show the different builds of the game as we figure out how it’s all going to work. Here’s a demo from a couple of weeks ago.
Right now we’re still in the prototyping and concepting phase. I’ve been spending a lot of time building out different worlds to see what we can feasibly do as a two person team.
Hopefully, at some point we will have something playable that I can go direct people to to check out. It’s been super fun seeing all of these pieces come together into an interactive thing.
I've always loved video games, but have never actually made a serious effort at trying to make one. Feels like a long time coming.
Hopefully it won’t be a year until the next email!
Paul
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