Pennant
I was asked to make an illustration for the launch of Pennant, and put this together in an afternoon. That amp in the background is based on one of the first things I bought after getting my first job bagging groceries, a Crate half stack that sounded terrible.
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.
Power Core
I made this power core to try out using EEVEE in Blender, but it was later incorporated into Budbot.
Frog Run
Backyard
Spent a bunch of time working on this backyard scene. It mostly just turned into a huge exercise in making a bunch of props for this back yard. Never got around to actually animating anything back there. A lot of this stuff eventually fed into the rest of Dogburg.
Pickup Truck
This truck is actually based on my first car, a blue mid 90s Mazda B2200.
Garbo
That yogurt cup is actually based on the Siggi’s Mixed Berry yogurt I still eat every day.
Seagull
This Seagull took a while to model and rig, but I did get a lot better at weight painting tricky things like the shoes. Still pretty happy with how these bend.
Honda Civic
This Honda Civic is loosely based on the hatchback Civic my friend Ryan had growing up. I reuse this civic a lot, and eventually repurpose it for the Peppo’s car.
Gas Station
This gas station was the first time I tried making a larger scene that all fit together. I of course got lost in the weeds making a bunch of props to fill up the place and never finished it.
My favorite thing to come of this is actually that slushie. It makes an appearance in a lot of other projects down the line.
Bust Out
When Bust Out launched a blog, I illustrated something for some of the posts. It’s been an interesting challenge to figure out a unified style that works in both 2D and 3D.
