Turble - The Animated GIFs

I got a little bored this weekend and played around with some old "Turble" work from back in the day (another project I am yet to complete). Then I got even more bored and though, "I should make it pixelated!"... Having never really worked with Pixel art, I'm probably pretty amateur at this...

And just to add to amateur hour, I thought I'd make some animated GIF's out of the pixelated characters... So here's some animated GIFs!

Pixels!
~ Mark

kill turBle

When I was concepting some villains for Turble back in the day, I came up with this guy... He's a little mutant thing in a ball. I only had time to animate him rolling around and messing Turble up for the time being, but he'll do some thangs I'm sure...  Ahh, time. Actually, time is the reason I went with creating an Orb for a bad guy... What's easier to make than a circle with some limbs? Eh? Yeah... Maybe I'll just end up scrapping this guy, but he's simple and I wanted to accomplish SOMETHING today... Especially after just attending a design conference, I think you're supposed to be inspired after those...

This particular character has no name yet... I've been referring to him as either "Ball" or "kill turBle" (because of the scrolling text on his screen). Maybe he has potential.


Alright, enough reading. Do the usual. Click the image, watch an animation, up my analytics, then let them drop until the next post... I'm sure if this little ditty keeps up long enough I'll be filthy rich in no time...

How exciting! He rolled!
~ Mark

Turble Taters!

This new character might be a little twisted... But it's a cool enemy and I'm keepin' him gosh dangit! If you remember the days of Mario there was a character called "Bob-omb", a walking bomb which would explode if you touched them... Well I've created a character named "Taters". It's a creature stuffed inside a potato sack with a bomb strapped to its mouth. Get too close and it blows up. I actually got the idea from the animé "Ninja Scroll", where one villain would sow people up and stuff explosives in them. Only this character isn't an unwilling creation, he's more like a really diabolical teddy bear.

Ironically, I animated this character while waiting in an airport this morning... Yikes.

As you could probably guess, the name "Taters" comes from this character being a walking potato sack with a label on it that says "Taters"... Anyway, I'm thinking of having him be a creation of "Ragavont".

You can click the image below to view his animation work. You'll notice there's a "hurt" animation for Turble now as well. Boo yah!

Gimme yer' tots!
~ Mark

Turble Robot

Good things come to them that wait... Everyone else gets this post.

So I've been in Chicago since Wednesday at the HOW Design Live conference and thanks to the Hyatt charging you for every dump you take in their toilets, I've been avoiding the "internet fees" as best I can. So no posts. But all is not lost. The great thing about attending conferences is that while you're sitting through self-centered artists talking about how far the perfectly designed stick up their anus goes, you actually get some quality doodle time in (it's actually not like that at all, it's pretty interesting stuff, but there's been a few gems, blech). On one particular morning, I sketched up a delicious little robot for Turble to duke it out with. Then after a night of doing what it is we do in a new city, I stumbled back to my room during the wee hours of the night/morning and did some VERY sloppy Flash work...

Today I went back to that Flash file and did it over... This is the end result.

 The robot enemy is actually a revised version of a robot Dan sketched up a while back for the game.

I've incorporated the previous Turble post's animation to put it into perspective as well. I'm happy with the end result. Sadly the conference is a little more intense over the weekend (and quite good), so I doubt I'll have much time to do anything else before I get back home to my lovely wife on Monday (who I miss terribly right now).

Anyway, that's all I got.

$13.50 for this post,
~ Mark

Turble - Martini Madness

Another Turble Update...

My good friend Dan, when I originally showed him my concepts for Turble, thought the game should be called "Martini Madness", due to the fact Turble's cannon looked like an olive... I love that name. I love it so much that I decided to name Turble's tank "The Martini Madness". However, I wanted to take the tank a step further and hopefully introduce some new elements to the game.

The Martini Madness is now going to be more than just a vehicle... It's going to be a metallic ball made up of rings which will rearrange themselves to form various weaponry and vehicles. This will be Turble's main weapon throughout the game. I imagine as the game progresses the player will be able to upgrade Martini Madness to create new weaponry, etc... Below is a quick animation of how it will probably look in the game. Click the rings and view.

 Yeah, a lot of text for such a little animation, but I'm on a tight schedule this week.

Deal,
~ Mark

Turble Animations

Sometimes it's healthy to take a break from one project and dabble in another... I'm the king of this process . I'm certainly not going to stop working on Son'Uva any time soon, but for today I wanted to just play with another toy... Turble the Gerbil!

Up to now it's mostly been concept art and animations which would never fly in the real world of gaming. So I decided to crack down and create Turble in all his animated glory. You can view a brief demo animation below... Ignore the dullness of the background, that's something I'll have to work on later. The focus of this little ditty is Turble. Click on it!

On major difference you'll notice is that he's not riding on his trusty metallic steed, "The Martini Madness", he's on foot... I think his cannon-mobiles will be acquired as you play and upgraded. For now, he's got a cool little space-pistol for cappin' cyborgs, mutants and cryogenically frozen yet now reanimated fiends from the past! ... None of which are in this animation. So enjoy this breath of fresh air because there isn't any in the future!

Adorable,
~ Mark

Ragavont Animation Test

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I came up with a villain for Turble while screwing around in Flash... I figured I might as well show off the animation work... Although it's buggy and not all that impressive. But whatever...

When the file loads CLICK ON THE ANIMATION (I emphasize this because no matter how many times I've given this instruction with previous interactive flash files, somebody always manages to be annoying and say "It doesn't work, what do I do?"... YOU CLICK THE FREAKING FILE WHEN IT LOADS!!!!... "Oh, it works now, thanks"), then use the arrows to move Ragavont around. Up to jump, down to duck, left to move left, right to move right, and space bar to use his attack. I would have added a background, but my laptop has unfortunately kicked the bucket... Flash file included. C'est la vie.

Click the below image for so much fun (And be patient, I don't have a loading bar, so it won't show up immediately)!

 

 CLICK THE FREAKING ANIMATION!

~ Mark

Turble Villain #6

Concepted another villain for Turble to engage combat with along his dangerous journey towards awesomeness. This concept actually came from screwing around in Flash where I needed to quickly doodle up something to animate while I messed around with Actionscript 3... Which is not a fun language when you've spent the better part of 6 years learning Actionscript 2... Oh well.

Anyway, he's a little rag-doll creature, sort of a homage to "9", which if you haven't seen, watch it, it's pretty cool. He uses a sewing needle for a sword and a button for a shield. I haven't thought much about what his attacks will be, but I'm sure it'll be something "yarn" related... In any case, enjoy the picture, because I'm going to be without a computer for a few days... Stupid Mac Book Pro is stuck in sleep mode and apparently it's a defect a lot of those models have... So if you have a macbook that's over 3 years old, get ready for fun... Sigh.

Ragavont!

~ Mark

Turble Concept Art

You know, in all the villain chaos, I forgot I don't have any real concept art of Turble... so yeah, here's one for our little furry hero!


Martini Madness!
~ Mark

Turble Villains #5

I like elephants… They're cute, my mom loves them, they helped train Tony Jaa into the killing machine he is today… There's just one thing that they're lacking. They don't spit hot fire! Out their trunks!

This is yet another concept art for a Turble Villain… He's cute, yet tortured. Even the cuddly ones feel pain…


Elephire!
~ Mark

Turble Villains #4

Part 4 in the concept art for Turble... Originally I doodled this guy to be the anti-Turble... Mainly due to his color Yellow being opposite Turble's Purple on the color wheel... I may keep with this theme due to the fact I haven't designed a main antagonist for the game yet... Or have I?!?! ... I have not.

I'm thinking the background images for these concept drawings may be the style I use for the game's backgrounds. I like simple. Making this character's wings pixelated was done purposely... I thought it gave it some uniqueness. I am pleased.

Without further ado...


Pixel Dust!
~ Mark

Turble Villains #3

Villain numéro trios! It's a cyborg bunny who spits vines and plants from his mouth… Not really sure what I was hoping to accomplish when I drew this one, but I'm just pleased that he kind of looks like a carrot. I wouldn't expect there to be any vegetation in a post apocalyptic world… But then, can you really blow up the ocean? … Maybe this bunny was created to spread new vegetative life on the planet… But then he wouldn't really be a villain anymore… I guess that just makes Turble an Anti-Hero.

There's a bit of subliminal messaging in the bunny's concept… He's spreading seeds and growing new life… Bunny's mate A LOT. So Yeah. Take that. I can be deep! Turble's got some real philosophical stuff goin on behind the scenes, aight??


There's also a flying creature in the background… I just wanted to fill up some more space… He's not a boss, just one of the game's enemies.

Bunny Hop!
~ Mark

Turble Villains #2

Had some serious inspiration today to do some more concept art for the Turble Bosses... This particular one features a super intelligent trout operating a mechanical... amphibious... Whale thing... I think it's pretty awesome. Not sure what a boss battle with something like this would be like, but I imagine it would take place on some kind of water level. And I imagine in a post apocalyptic earth the water won't be clear and clean... It'll be icky... and will probably be something that hurts poor little Turble...


I don't wanna' hurt the little guy, I hope he wins.

Mecha Trout!!
~ Mark

Turble Villains

I haven't forgotten about our most beloved futuristic, cannon-wielding, space gerbil... Whilst in the boringest (word?) of meetings today I sketched out some new bosses for my far-from-even being close to being close to finished side-scroller "Turble". Basically all the bosses are going to be some form of cybernetic-infused mutant... Because the plot will involve Turble going through the post apocalyptic wastelands of Earth in search of power cells for his dying robot uncle... Hence, the bosses are cyborgs who most likely have power cells... We have good ol' Danny G to thank for that classic plot.

Someday I hope to get cracking on this game... But in the meantime, enjoy the concept art!


kill turBle!
~ Mark

Turble

Turble is a flash game which I'm currently developing for Six AM Comics. The idea came one day when I was doodling with my Wacom Tablet and drew a purple little dragon riding a futuristic cannon (which resembled an olive). I liked the character so much that I whipped up a real quick flash file where you could drive him around and shoot the cannon. You can view the concept by clicking the following picture:

It was a very simple concept in nature. So simple that it had me reminiscing about the simpler days of video gaming. I figured it'd be cool to pay homage to the old sidescrollers for the NES. I spoke with fellow Six AMer, Dan, and we began brainstorming ideas for the plot. Dan thought the purple dragon looked like a Gerbil, so we decided we'd call him Turble... a gerbil from a post-apocalyptic future. The basic plot we came up with was as follows:

Turble is about a space age girble named Turble - who has a Grampa. Grampa, unfortunately, is a deteriorating Robot. Turble has been asked by Grampa to seek out energy sources to keep his joints going so that they can spend as much time as they can together. Turble, being a good grandgerbile, decides to help. Unfortunately, all the energy sources are in cannisters that are strewn around a post-apocalyptic landscape where robots, mutated creatures, and killer bugs roam. Turble will have to be quick, strong, and agile to get through the landscapes and defeat the bosses at the end of the level.

Next steps for this game involved some concept art for enemies and bosses. I had stopped working on Sonuva for a while to develop the look and feel for his game for a while. However, the taste of Sonuva was still in my mouth, so I re-concepted the Hunter character as a boss for Turble. This was the end result of that idea... again, click the picture... because pictures are more interesting than plain old links...


As you can probably tell from the thumbnail above, a large amount of actionscripting was required to develop the boss test. When it came to Flash work, I was always a timeline-based developer, i.e. I treated animations like a virtual flip book, drawing each frame and making my flash files ginormous in size... This game has been a very educational experience, having to work strictly in code... which for a while was almost entertaining... unless it didn't work right... in which case I just got mad and gave my computer the silent treatment... which proved to be unproductive.

This is as far as the actual development of the game has gotten. Other aspects of the game however have been just as interesting. Fortunately for me, I have a lot of friends who are musicians, and as a result, I've been lucky enough to receive contributions to the game's soundtrack. My good friend, Peter Thompson (whom I designed the Two Good Friends album cover for) converted one of his songs to MIDI format for me to use... and it was amazing. The song is called "Never Ending Fields of Pain", and for some reason it totally captured the old school Nintendo feel when played in MIDI format. The song is playing in first gameplay link in this blog post.

In addition to Never Ending Fields of Pain, my friend Dan Gillespie (who runs a very cool musical blog called "Microsong") was checking out the game and thought that Turble was riding a giant Martini Olive and composed a song called Martini Madness, which you can listen to here.

Dan also contributed a song he wrote a while back called Never Nova, which you can check out here.

All of these songs have turned out so perfectly that I could totally see them as becoming just as memorable as some of the older NES game soundtracks which have stuck in our heads over the years... Duck Tales, Mario, Zelda... and if you don't know what I'm talking about, than you obviously weren't a true child of the 80's... and I pity you.

The following were some character concepts I had come up with for the game... if you've read any of my other posts, than it's possible you came across the picture I did with my brother, and you may notice that a lot of the following creatures ended up in that drawing. I'm all about recycling ideas...


Dan also drew some interesting enemies for the game. One in particular was this crazy looking evil robot with blades for hands... he personally gave me nightmares and I had no choice but to unleash his fury on the post-apocalyptic world of Turble. You know what to do... click that picture:


Yeah... I should apologize for that animation's ending... we are pretty proud of ourselves over at Six AM Comics... The robot originally had legs, but for the sake of easy animation, we removed them and let him levitate... like a future robot should.

Anyway, that's as far as I've gotten on the game. I intend to finish it at some point... preferably after I finish work on Sonuva... but I'm sporadic, who knows, maybe I'll betray both games in favor of a new idea...

Must... Focus...
~ Mark