Tag Archives: creative

Kickstarter Plans For Traditionally-Animated 3D Game

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Firstly, anyone who has been reading this blog knows that I have been planning a hand-drawn 3D game, using traditional animation for the characters. This game never had a proper title, but I’m giving it one now:

James – Journey of Existence

Catchy, right? No? Ok, it’s a tenative title. Anyway…

I’m also announcing my tenative plans to launch a Kickstarter campaign to help fund this project. Ok, anyone who read past posts would have seen this coming a mile away, but it feels good to finally say it. Such a Kickstarter wouldn’t be up until late in the month, but keep an eye out for it; no Kickstarter is successful without supporters!

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What’s Wrong With The Gaming Industry?

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Yes, the games industry is in a bit of a rut.

“But Jasper,” you say, “we’re in the midst of a next-gen revolution! Shiny new consoles are being released that are 10-times as powerful as what we were using before! Some of the best games of the generation were released in the last year! Surely these are great times for the games industry, right?”

First off, don’t call me “Surely.” Second, yes the games we’ve gotten in the last few years have been fantastic. If you time-traveled back about a decade ago and showed them “Skyrim” or “Grand Theft Auto V,” they’d wet their pants. But remember that for every good game like these, there are several mediocre ones that somehow get on store shelves, but even those titles are slightly better in quality. And all of these games seem vaguely similar, despite being of different genres. I guess I’m saying after years of gaming, I just don’t feel excited like I used to.

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What’s Wrong With The Animation Industry?

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Yes, the animation industry is in a bit of a rut.

First off, let’s cover the basics. Animation is typically divided into three categories in film: traditional/cel-animation, computer assisted animation, and stop-motion animation.

Traditional animation is like those old Disney movies you remember. “Snow White,” “The Lion King,” “The Little Mermaid,” “The Beauty and the Beast”, etc. These were hand-drawn: every frame (as many as 24 per second) had to be hand-made by a team of artists one by one.

Computer assisted animation is typically thought of as 3D animation, although 2D flash also counts (but I’m not counting traditional animation fixed in Photoshop or Post-Processing, as those still require an artist to create every frame). Here, animators don’t have to draw every single frame. Instead, animators draw keyframes as they normally would, but instead of an in-between artist finishing up extra frames for smoother animation, the computer automatically fills in the gaps for an ultra smooth clip. Animators can also use tools to fiddle with 3D models, and typically spend more time adding details and improving visuals. Therefore, it’s actually the easiest and cheapest of the three animation styles, despite the amount of knowledge and experience needed to use the computer software correctly, and that extra time can be afforded to making higher-quality work.

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Scary Halloween!

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During Devil’s Night, I was horrified to find my desktop computer’s hard drive was corrupted somehow, and my operating system wouldn’t load! Or restore! Or reinstall! Yikes! Not to mention, most of my work (including project files this site talks about) was on the thing!Happy Halloween!

Thankfully, after several hours of experimenting, I was able to give in and take out the hard drive, and backup the files onto another laptop. Thank goodness for external hard-drive readers, best $30 I ever spent. I didn’t get any sleep, but at least I’ll sleep well tonight… the night when hundreds of strangers will be knocking at my door asking for free candy… oh well.

To get you in the holiday spirit, here’s an old sketch that I happened to have on the barely usable hard drive. It was a simple art class assignment to sketch a human skeleton, but I looked outside the box and added a little style to make mine unique. Fitting to what Dust Scratch Games stands for, eh? Happy Halloween!