Wacky Bus
Back in June I started working with Tony & Kyle of Mostly Bits on a game for the Playdate. They had the idea to make a little game where you drive a bus that changes shape.
The thing I wanted to figure out was how to actually model and animate all of this in Blender, and then export a bunch of sprites to use on the Playdate. I started by modeling everything and then making materials for the black & white. It also helped that I had already made a lot other vehicles and props to drop in there.
This has worked surprisingly well, and it’s been really fun to see the animated pieces working on a Playdate.
My favorite thing so far has been this character I drew for the “administrator” of the Wacky Transit Authority. He hates Wacky Bus so much.
We’re trying to put together a playable demo right now, so hopefully I’ll have something to share very soon here 🚌💨
Plugbot
Following the slow death of Budbot, Mark and I decided to take on a smaller scale project for the 2022 Lost Relic Game Jam. At this point the two of us had enough experience in Unreal Engine to be able to put together this game in about a week and a half.
I had a lot of fun animating Plugbot doing a bunch of goofy things, like plugging into a socket and then pushing himself out of it.
You can download & play what we came up with over on itch.io.
Budbot
Budbot was a game that I worked on for a few months at the beginning of 2022. My friend Mark and I were trying to build a soulslike game together. I talk about a lot of the process we went through in my 2022 Recap, so here I just wanted to show some of the details that went into working on this.
I started out the project trying to make a unique character that I could have some fun with animating. Early on the the idea is that Budbot would throw his shield to stun Bossbot. Later we moved toward Budbot using a hammer because that seemed like it would make more sense.
From there I just started going super hard on environmental design & animation. We definitely over-indexed on making the art and animation before figuring out what the core gameplay loop was. Even so, I think some of the art that came out of this is still pretty cool.
Animation
Learning how to do gameplay animation on the fly was definitely the most challenging part of a project like this. There is so much nuance and technical detail involved with making great feeling gameplay animation, and I was 100% out of my depth there.
