bazilracoondog

Jack and Mark Popping Contest

Published: October 23rd 2024, 3:02:23 pm

It's funny that I finished this project earlier than my commission that was started much earlier but whatever. Commission is almost finished too and will be posted a bit later.

I started this project a week ago when I publicly posted my old C64 animation with 4 of my OCs blowing up (this one https://www.patreon.com/posts/some-bonus-pixel-102620185) and received a very inspiring comment from one of my active followers. He asked "I know it's probably not happening in the future but what are the chances you make extra sprites of the max sizes rumbling and popping a la dig dug?" You know, the concept of popping is not a novelty for me, I'm doing it quite often to my works but for some reason this idea haven't visited me when I was doing this animation, so when he brought it up I felt a sudden strike of inspiration. Usually I don't pay that much attention to suggestions from followers but this time it really hit me. I also was pleased by the fact he mentioned Dig Dug, this iconic old game where inflating enemies with a pump until they pop is a key mechanic of the game which is probably the only game where such stuff is canon.

Here's gif of Dig Dug game process with inflation mechanics in case you never heard about this game.

So, despite the user's uncertainty about me making this idea real in future, I started working on it right after receiving his comment. I felt very tempted and motivated, especially since there already was a plenty of ready material in this commodore 64 concept that I could recycle easily and so I turned it into something like a "pop your friend competition" between Zed and Kit pumping Mark and Jack.

However, I decided to switch to a different type of graphics since Commodore had all those very restrictive sprite color limitations and chose Amstrad CPC which has a richer color palette which many people consider too garish but in my case it's very fitting for my characters and has pretty much all the colors I need. The only serious restriction of Amstrad that I faced is that only 16 colors out of 27 can be used simultaneously on one screen which was BARELY enough considering I have 4 characters with all kinds of differently colored details so I had very little left to choose for the background, so mostly all the background colors except light blue were taken from character palettes to fit in this 16 color restriction.

As a result, it turned out pretty nice but I really went overboard trying to do it "little by little" but instead I was spending several hours every day working on it for a whole week, even ended up finishing it faster than the comm piece I was working on in parallel. As usual, pixel art is easy to do as it consists of very simple processes which makes it very tempting but it's very time consuming so you don't notice how fast the time flies.

My goal was to make the characters inflate so much that their bodies meet in the middle of the screen before they pop and it took me 16 gradual stages of inflation opposed to initial 10 from the initial Commodore 64 concept.

The popping itself was the part that made me worry a bit because it's the first time I tried to animate such a complex physical process, I knew it should be limited enough to fit the retro graphics style and at the same time remain dynamic and impressive, in order to achieve this goal I had to remove 4 excessive frames which I found needless as they were making animation look too smooth and slow so it was a bit of useless extra work being done but it's a normal part of the process. As a result, I think I feel satisfied by how my first attempt at animated popping looks, the screen shake effect helped to emphasize it better.
(It also was very fun to draw Zed and Kit being blown away by the explosion even though it's barely visible in such a quick animation, I just thought it really needs it here)

It would be nice to add some good 8-bit sound to it which maybe I can do one day or maybe it would be even better to turn it into a real simple interactive button mashing game but such fantasies still remain just fantasies in my case so I don't want to give you too much hopes, better enjoy it just as it is in a simple animation form.

For now all I can offer you is the animation itself in a GIF and MP4 format (for those who might want to skip/replay a certain part since this animation is quite lengthy) plus the archive with all the assets used in this project, it's all available in attachments as one archive. For now it will remain Patreon-exclusive as the early access, I think I'll post it publicly one month later. I'm also planning to make a more spicy (read gassy) version of this animation with Zed and Kit having hoses connected to their butts instead of it being hand pumps and inflating their friends in a more dirty way with a different popping animation of course, it won't take much time to do but I think it will be a part of November content already, for now I should focus on other things.