Collaboration draft ver 2.0

So me and Yu Jing has been collaborating to try and make turn my stickman up a notch and aim for the skies! So just a couple of things he had to utilize to make the stickman epic.
No1: Action lines to convey speed and power
The inspiration comes from the dragonball series where they emphasize on the use of action lines when they fly or do a strong charged attack.
No2: Cracks on the wall to symbolize the strength in attacks the stickman does whenever he attacks the wall
Small debris will fall with each hit and you will able to see the visible cracks and damage when the stickman deals damage to the wall.
No3: The final attack which is the charge shot that will be released from the stickmans hand. As the rotational spin of the sword gains speed, so does the energy that will be compressed upon the stickmans hand. The inspiration from this is from megaman where he holds down the charge button and lets off an energy beam to destroy enemies. It is seen at 4:32

No1

No2

No3

Below is the updated smexier version of the stickman and effects made by the epic and most godly Yu Jing :D

The one above me, during the last attack didnt really portray the epicness of an ending because it finished too fast so...i asked Yu Jing to lower the framerate for the final attack and make the explosion more massive so that the viewers can see it and below is the final result :) Enjoy.

Collaboration draft

Due to the fact that this was a short semester, we did not have enough time to even start on our second project proposal so Hilmy ( our lecturer ) suggested that we should partner up with our classmates. Since everyone had a special ability, we should "use" each other and make a second project. The person I choose to work with is Yu Jing. I will be relying on him to provide me with the special effects to make my stickman sexy and I myself will try to provide better flow and make my stickman attacks more realistic. Hopefully it would look better than before >.>" The overall choreography is still the same as the original but I made some adjustments by changing some poses to better get the feel of attacking and cutting out some unnecessary frames since Yu Jing told me that providing special effects for 1200 frames is a bit too much. LOL

Below is the link to my stickman revamp (probably) I tried uploading it in the blogger but somehow it doesnt work so yeah....

My stickman ver1.1 o_o

To try to achieve the flow that I mentioned , I used the website Pivot animators forums to learn more on how to create such actions. So that meant back to the basics @_@
Below is a link to alot of tutorials on how to animate properly for beginners. It helped immensely but somehow learning how to animate properly within a few weeks, in my opinion doesn't make me worth enough to animate a choreographed fightscene but meh whatever I tried hah.
List of tutorials
First off I had to study the movements of easing whereby you will do an action and the reaction will naturally slow down. Think of it like a run, if you start off at full speed and want to stop, you will need to slow down instead of just stopping abruptly.
Easing
Next would be learning about fluidity and realism. Fluid is where you chain actions together to make it seem like it flows like water; smoothness in a way and realism is where you make the movements seem realistic by using physics to make movements real.
Fluid/Realism
This post really helped me alot as my stickman had to do quite a few acrobatics when he was swinging the sword around and jumping up and down like a monkey. The link shows multiple acrobatic moves and the writer explains quite well on each jumps.

Although these methods taught me alot however I still had to work with the absence of a proper guide with sword attacks and thats why youtube is your best friend LoL. 

3rd draft

So I finally made my third draft and this will be the baseline of my theme for power.The reason why I chose this character was because he had a large katana to convey power and somehow its attached to his hand which he wields. He will be fighting against a wall and with each hit he does towards the wall, a green bar above the wall which displays the health will deplete accordingly.
To convey additional power, I will have Yu Jing a coursemate of mine to help out with adding in some special effects to bring out more oomph for my stickman. Namely action lines some swipes at the sword to convey speed and to have some small dust bubbles come off when my stickman lands/jumps from the ground.
 At the final seconds I made it so that the stickman will hold up his hand and charge up an energy shot and that was why for a few seconds he was standing there doing nothing. The energy shot will then travel a small distance and the stickman will rush towards it and cut it spreading the energy towards the wall.

Ill will be basing the jump slash from shinobido at 0:37

My stickman did the multiple stabbing motion thats based from Devil May Cry Dante's trillion stab

During the end my stickman does a charging shot like in Megaman and does a charged shot towards the wall

It is seen at 0:26.

2nd draft

So...I was busy drawing my stickman when i encountered a new website namely pivotanimator.net . They provided an application just like flash but they specialize exclusively on stickmen. So yeah, screw the original drawing and taking time to flesh out every single stickman! Ill use this application and make my stickman faster seeing as that I am lacking in time. Below is my first tryout using this animator. 

I was basing the death on the oldschool styles when you get shot and die. The death is at 0.32 whereby a cowboy will get shot and die.

The blood seen is taken out from http://www.droidz.org/stickmain/ <--- it has alot of stuff uploaded from lotsa people and I just downloaded the blood and added it into my basic stickman

Next I tried doing a swordsman and here are the second result. I was going more for a gag action whereby a swordsman is running to attack then falls flat on his face. Again the stickman here is not drawn by me. I just took it from droidz. 

First draft

So I choose the paper medium by making the small animation into a flip book style and what I do know now is that I SUCK extensively at drawing lol. And that's just doing stick figures. I tried drawing some poses that my swordsman may be using and hopefully it will convey what my main character will be doing. I will also use the pivot animator to learn how to make my stickman more fluid on paper. The website is as follows http://pivotanimator.net/ . This program allows you to create animations based on stick figures.

 So there will be some change of plans towards my final piece.
For ver 0.1
1) Instead of 4 character classes, I will solely be focusing on getting 1 character class namely the swordsman to be as "believable" as possible.
2) No enemies but instead a wall will replace enemies (Hah)
4) Recreate the fight to be intune with Final Fantasy 7 One winged angel soundtrack
3) Have my fight at least last 20secs of fighting

For the music : I may need to speed up the tempo of the song to match the fight scene

For fight styles i would want my stickman to stick towards the samurai katana types of motion and an example of the fight scenes are as follows starting from 0:18

This inspiration comes from street fighter where the characters will encounter a bonus stage and try to destroy a car

For ver 0.2 (Final)
1) Add in additional things that will signify power
I - Wall has health bar
II- Each hit will slightly decrease wall Hp to indicate the strength of wall
III- Add in special effects when fighting against the wall(eg little chunks of rock falling when wall is hit)
IV-Decorate my sword to look more badass to signify power

Proposal 1 : Power

To show power I will be attempting to have stickman fights. It will only be a teaser that goes for about less than 30 seconds but I will be showcasing 4 main classes of stickmen fighting, the swordsman, the heavy blade, the theif, the mage. Each one of them will display power through the action skills they will be using to destroy a hoard of enemies in their path. It will be done using 2d and the medium of choice will either be by flash or by using stop motion by paper.
Stickman fights

Swordsman

 During 0:48 I want to use the fencing slashes to rip through enemies.


Thief
During 3:01( the video above) I want the thief to run though enemies appearing at the back and slashes appear on enemies samurai style.


Heavy blade

Taken from the moster hunter series, at 0:14 I want the heavy blader to feel the weight when swinging the greatsword and once it lands I want there to be some rocks and dirt being slashed apart to show that extra umphhh.



Mage

From patapon, during 2:40 the mahopon (magician) will shoot out lighning from the skies towards enemies or call a meteor from above to destroy enemies.

A taxi's life

So I was going back using taxi again on the same day and I went into this indians taxi cab with my girlfriend and we were making small chat until suddenly he pulls out this bad boy and begins flashing it at unsuspecting cars. I was like O_O the fk what are the coincidence that another person would have the exact same model as me. His however was more worn out and was on low battery so being the nice guy that I am, took out an extra AAA battery I had in my backpack and offered it to him. What can I say if a fellow laser pointer fan is in need of batteries the Bro code dictates that one must always off AAA batteries to another bro in need if he laser pointer is dying. So we had a fun trip pointing together at other people and pissing them off during the rest of our ride. :D

Said badboy

A taxi's life

So I took a taxi from the KDU campus to get to the LRT station and at the drivers seat who do I see? The very same driver as before who took me exactly to the same place the week before. The first time he saw me, he though I was a korean and began singing the PSY song gangnam style. He was a talkative guy (more towards the Ahmas style prying into my life lol) asking about my life and what I study. The second time however was more forgiving as he was about to go on his questioning spree... his favorite song came up on the radio and I kid u not this is what he said " U quiet ahh this song very nice ahh long time ago ur father favourite song I wan listen to this song first"

Another 4th media sample

This is a tree I drew for as the background of my game last semester :D

3rd media sample

This sample would be based on social interaction. Not sure if it would work but I had quite a bit of fun spouting bullshit based on this game. The name of the game is Observation game.

The objective is to pick a person, any person will do and you will have to analyse the person and give at least 2/3 facts about the person and why you believe it so. Your friend would then give it on a scale to 1-10 on how believable your statements are. After your turn then its switched to your friends turn. After a few turns both of you will tally the score to find out who's the King of Bullshit.

P.S Try not to say it too loud as other people might get offended on the things you say

The game is purely based on your imagination and your deductive skills and I would not want to see anyone get bashed in just because the fat person you choose over heard derogatory comments about himself then proceeds to beat the shit out of you :)

2nd media sample

For this media sample I went to a more real world setting where people always are unable to save money so I developed a game whereby your job is to save money to win at this game. This gamification is inspired by Jane McGonigal. Below is the game

Save your money game

Objective : Try to save your money on a monthly basis while not affecting your day to day life

Do not hit over the quota or else you lose.

Time limit: Up to you but basically it can be 1day to forever

How to play? :

Find out your daily spending for the time limit for the week (You can change the time limit to your choosing)

Monthly salary / weeks = weekly quota

Once finding out daily spending , that would be your quota for the day.

Quota X days of time limit to find out the quota of the week.

Try not to hit over the quota or you will lose.

(lending money is considered as a loss. However if you get the money back, then + it to the days quota to earn a little help)

Gameflow:

Find out quota à make list à try to budget based on list à try to find ways to minimize budget à calculate if quota exceeds budget or not à end

Gameplay

Once you have a quota, try to split the things that you do that cost money to a list and list down the price for each of the things done.

After listing down the list and jotting down the cost of each of them, try to set a budget to see the spending of your weekly basis

Try to separate the list into 4 which are : necessary
                                                                                 semi necessary

                                                                                Shit happens

                                                                                 Unnecessary

Necessary are things that must be done during the said time period in a day  e.g. food, drinks

Semi necessary are things that may need to be done but are not as important as the necessaries

You may cross them out if they are deemed unnecessary but it is up to the individual

e.g. buy a shirt, go on a date with girlfriend, cigarettes

Shit happens are acts of god that may screw with your budget and are considered a loss. They are unavoidable so hopefully this will not happen to you.

Unnecessary are things that you do unnecessarily that will hurt your budget more than necessary

e.g. Buying a $ 500 shirt, buying a $ 6000 watch

After making list, try to cross out any listed items anywhere that could be deemed an unnecessary.

If not sure between a list, try asking for a third party opinion and if 2 or more deem the thing unnecessary, cross it out.

This would be your budget for the week and if it exceeds the quota, try to cross out further semi-necessaries to meet your budget.

If your budget exceeds your quota, you may take some of the past excess quota to balance out the budget to win the game.

If you have an excess of quota , you can use the excess money to buy something unnecessary if it fits into the budget OR save the money in bank to obtain more money OR

For a harder challenge… the following week you can reduce the quota to exactly the budget and try to play again.

Happy playing J

 

1st media sample

To show what I can do, I'll be posting some games that I have made over the past few months and the first one would be one that I  worked on during the last weekend during the Game Jam. Its called fabulous fluffy and you are a monster with an eating disorder that fights other monsters for food. Below is the link to the game.
http://globalgamejam.org/2013/fabulous-fluffy

3 Different media work samples

Soo.... i will be showing media work samples in this blog. I am choosing a universal theme to link all my media work samples together. And this theme would be social interaction. The reason why I choose this them is due to the fact that in this era people are becoming more media dependent. When you go out, you can see people just looking down at their phones and ignoring reality. So what i want is to change this dependency towards mobile phones.

Cherry popper

Hey all this is Marcus here! This would be the first time making a blog so maybe a short introduction will be in order? Perhaps lol. Im Marcus Phua a chinese malaysian currently learning Game Development in KDU and this blog is made in order to showcase my material. However Im not too sure what can I put on the table so Im guessing I'll be needing some time to do soul searching. ( or I could just bullshit my way doing it since I have a PHD in Bullshittery) Guess thats about it I guess? If you managed to read this far kudos to you for reading a useless persons rantings and I hope for you to visit this blog now and then checkup on what I'll be doing for this few months.