The Hero Returns

I got to see Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse last night with a bunch of good old DigiDudes, not to mention an old friend who just happened to be an animator on the movie!

Me with my hero Nick Kondo at Lincoln Square in Bellevue after the show.

Nick Kondo was a year ahead of me at DigiPen. Even back then everyone knew he was gonna do something great. I interned at Nintendo Software Technology for a summer while he worked there, and we worked together at WB Games and Signal Studios. He taught at DigiPen for a while before rocking Animation Mentor and getting an animation job at Sony Imageworks in Vancouver, B.C. His first feature was this crazy good movie! Everyone's rightfully so proud of him.

Loved Spider-Verse. Loved Nick's work in it. Hope to see it (and Nick) again soon.

In honor of the occasion, I present to you the sprites I did for Spider-Man 2: The Hero Returns -- a hardly known mobile game from the dark ages (2004ish) that a small team at Handheld Games made for Sony Pictures Mobile. It was my first job doing art and animation in videogames.

Sized-down Spidey

 

Poor pixelated Mary Jane

Xmas GIFs

I went ahead and bought the full version of ProMotion NG after realizing how much easier animating pixels would be using layers, so I'm experimenting with some fun Christmas animations before getting back to my little Visionaries thing.

Actually based on my house and wife's car.

Knights Of The Magical Light

I like doing pixel art and animation. I've decided to take a short break from animating in Maya to do some new pixel pushing.

I've chosen The Visionaries toy/cartoon from the 1980s as my inspiration since it's pretty obscure and had a ton of unrealized potential. My goal: Pretend I'm working on an officiallly licensed Super NES game adaptation and do animation sets for a few of the characters, along with whatever else I come up with.

Here's what I've got so far:

Leoric. Just standing there to establish the look I want.

Starting with Leoric there, I'd like to do run, jump, attack, transformation and totem spell animations for a couple Spectral Knights and Darkling Lords. Doing a vehicle or environment would be fun, too.

My dream Visionaries game for the Super NES would be a classic, side-scrolling action game in the vein of X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse or Captain America and The Avengers (see images below).

X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse (Super NES)

Captain America and The Avengers (Arcade)

Character Design Challenge

I started submitting to the Character Design Challenge on Facebook back in August. I haven't done October's yet, but here's what I've done so far.

August's theme: Insect Warrior

September's theme: Candy People

My honest opinion: No matter how well I do on these, I'll never get more than 30 likes. There's a lot of great work submitted, but there's also a lot of garbage that barely meets the posted guidelines and still gets 500 likes. So it's mostly bullshit, but it's a good excuse for me to draw characters the way I want to draw them.