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Night Binge Competition WIPs

Published: February 3rd 2025, 10:28:35 pm

Even though I don't really like to share WIPs and prefer to make posts with only 100% finished artworks I think I really need to share more updates on my art progress since there was a huge absence of activity from me and it's especially important to show what I was busy working on in such situation, just to reassure everyone, even if some stuff is still not finished.

This was my main commission project of the month which is still not finished but it's getting there. I tried to work on it in parallel with Jack commission which was a secondary comm project and do equal amounts of progress every day when I was in a working mood but still I ended up finishing Jack comm faster, I guess because it's a bit simpler, although both projects are very time consuming.

I remember every pixel animation commission (and personal weight gain Commodore 64 pixel animation sequence with Mark) being very time consuming, every time I do them I disappear for half a month or more and then I always feel awkward and have to apologize here for disappearing. This time things got even worse as I have an exceptionally complex animation here which is like no other, plus I worked on a Jack comm in parallel, so no wonder why I disappeared for whole three weeks since this last Lycaon post.

Animation was commissioned by RexLioness, I already worked with her years ago, it was a very exciting commission because it was the first time I got asked to draw a Tex Avery character as a comm (it was Crisco Kid, the Mexican wolf guy I drew a lot of times back then) and also it was my first purely fart focused commission. It's hard to describe how much I was thankful for such a commission request but if only I knew how much more our tastes actually meet it wouldn't take me several years to work with RexLioness again! I didn't expect it at all that anybody will ever fall in love with my OCs and especially Zed so much that they'll decide to buy a comm with them from me, let alone a big animation, let alone FART FOCUSED ONE, so I can't even put in words how much excited I was to start working on it.

So here we are, my first OC commission and this is not the only thing that makes it unique.

It's been a loooong time since I did any free-style pixel art with my OCs, the last ones of such kind were made only at the very beginning of my OC era and there were only few of them. After that, I got carried away trying all kinds of retro systems and their limited graphics, always complicating everything with all those limitations and rules, limited palettes, stretched pixels and so on, never giving myself a full freedom to draw my characters in pixel art however I want. And here I got a big chance to do it again!

It's still not a full freedom here and I still have some certain conditions and limitations I have to follow but compared to what I did recently you can call it free-style.

We agreed to pick 90s point-and-click game aesthetics for this project. Point-and-click adventure is an interesting genre. I'm not really good at these games and it's not my favorite to be honest but I always loved their style. While often being boring and monotonous compared to more fast paced platformers and shooters, these games did well compensating their lack of action and luring players in with their outstanding and captivating visuals, mainly all those very well detailed backgrounds. It really worked in my case. To be exact, we chose DOS point-and-click look, most well known early games of that genre were released for this system, including Sam & Max: Hit the Road, Leisure Suit Larry, Maniac Mansion: The Day of the Tentacle and others. Also DOS adventure games had the most liberating graphics compared to more limited Amiga although it was also known for having a lot of good adventure games and this freedom is what we were looking for.

Can't say I dug this topic really deep but from what I learned it seems that limitations for these games were pretty simple.
-Their resolution was always 320x200 pixels.
-Backgrounds allowed up to 256 colors which is A LOT, some of them even had some color artifacts which made them look like drawing scans, regular pixel art usually doesn't allow such luxury.
-Character animations are more limited, they can surely be any size and there seems to be no limit for animation frames but the only problem here is that every character could use only 16 colors. I tried to check this information and looked through many different screenshots from many different games and it seems to be true. No character there used more than 16 colors, very rarely it was 15-16, usually it was around 12-14, I guess to save space for special animation that requires extra colors, like a character holding some differently colored object.

So, I had to stick with those limitations and pick 16 colors for each character. Mark was the easier one as he doesn't use many colors but Zed was trickier since he is more colorful and detailed so I had to ponder this concept a lot.

And yeah, you can notice that I gave each detail a differently colored outline instead of regular black outlines that I always used in my art. This surely made picking the right palette much harder with all the extra colors but it was required. A majority of characters in adventure games were drawn like this and I had to follow this rule to nail down the aesthetics properly. And I can tell the probable reason why black outlines were much less common in such games. 256 colors for background and 16 colors for characters is a very striking contrast between realism and flat style, black outlines are too bold and would make the character even more misfiting and out of place. Softer colored outlines help the character to blend in with the background and look more natural despite color limitations. Another advantage of colored outlines that they make every part more defined and standalone. If you look at the image above you can see that parts that actually SHOULD be black like Zed's eyes or Mark's spots pop up more, outline of Zed's ear doesn't blend with outlines of his snout and mouth, Mark's tongue outline doesn't blend with the spot above, brows doesn't blend with black spots and black ear and so on. So, I thought it's really necessary and I think it looks good. Trying new style on your characters feels nice in general.But if making 16 color characters sounds more like something common for me that I already done before, 256 color background was a way more different and new experience for me. Sure thing I already tried similar stuff with Vincent Frame artworks (one of which still needs to be finished) but they didn't involve any serious shading work, this time I had to make a real masterpiece of a background and make it look fitting the style.

It also was my first attempt to give my characters a proper living space which had to become canon for them after all my previous works usually involving some simple abstract backgrounds with geometric shapes and so on. I spent a lot of time pondering design ideas for every element and trying to make it look good altogether with well balanced composition. Shading also took me a while but it was fun. With some color adjustments and simply setting image to 256 color indexed mode I managed to achieve that retro graphics look easily, at least it looks authentic to me.

Honestly I still love the initial flat comic style look, it reminds me of Cartoon Network Studio game with Moxy that was a big source of inspiration for me. Surely in my case it looks more bland without shadows and with those monotonous non-dynamic one pixel thick outlines but this style surely could be used for future ideas, I just wanted to put my skills to a real test with this project and try to work with such a complex style at least for once, after all, way more adventure games had more realistic backgrounds like in Leisure Suit Larry or Maniac Mansion and very little had them simple like the Moxy game above.

When the character style was chosen and the background design was finished I had to think about character animations and this one has PLENTY of them, all I did so far is already shown above in a post image gallery.

All my previous most complex and time consuming animations such as Fox McCloud, Chester Cheetah, Etemon, Arnold Pitbull or Mark Spothound ones included just one character in one same pose except Arnold who had back shot as well, character expressions and movements didn't change really much and it was mainly all about all sorts of dirty stuff coming from their holes. Here I have TWO characters and numerous different poses for each to work with, it's a full fledged animation. Even animated talking is something I never did before. Usually when characters talk in my pixel animations it's indicated only by dialogue boxes while the character's face stays the same without changing.
It's excusable for retro game graphics and feels natural, however talking animations still existed, especially in DOS adventure games and this time I just had to try it.

The first example that actually came to my mind is speech animation from Scooby Doo Mystery I had as a kid on Sega Genesis but it's 16 bit and animation is a bit more simple here but you get the idea.

Honestly it wasn't really that hard, just a bit tricky and I had to use lip sync charts as a reference for mouth positions. I think it turned out neat.

I also made idle animation for Zed leisurely drinking soda, Mark should have idle animation of eating chips from a bowl but it's not finished yet.

The whole idea of the project is Zed and Mark having a comically intense belch and fart competition, it starts as just a regular late night snack binge by the TV but once one of them accidentally breaks the wind it slowly turns into a real havoc.

For now I have 4 animated farting poses for each character, I arranged them on one uniform sheet just to make it convenient and easy to show all at once. Plus one belch animation for Zed that is supposed to be in the very beginning as one of those eruptions which started their gas party. Gas clouds for all 8 poses are already done and animated but it still needs some adjustments. I'd say the whole project is about 60% done, what I have left is
-Mark's idle animation for the beginning where he eats chips from a bowl
-Belching animations for everyone
-"One hour later" text screen as a transition between the peak of their fart party and ending showing the destructive consequences.
-Different more messed up version of the background for the ending and character poses for this scene.
-All dialogue lines.
-And of course I have to put it all together into one big sound animation in Sony Vegas. .
I'm sure I'll be able to finish it soon, especially with no secondary comms distracting me now.

I'm sorry if farts is not your thing which makes this whole project mostly unenjoyable as it all revolves around it but I hope that at least you can appreciate it from a purely comical and aesthetic point of view since I put a lot of my love for the 90s style in this work as well and it's probably the most live thing I ever did with my characters so far.