Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Laster

Laster is my first game published under Bluebotic. I built it specifically for a contest hosted by Kongregate and Stride Gum. The theme was "How long can you last?" It's a simple side scrolling avoider game with a single input (hold spacebar to thrust, release to fall). I added slider controls for thrust and gravity so the user can dial in their own physics. The protagonist pilots a glass bubble-like ship (symbolic of a bubble gum bubble). The bubble contains green biofuel. You must collect life forms such as trees, cows, and humans to refuel your ship. If you run out of fuel, you will fall to your death, and if you hit any of the floating block buildings, your bubble will shatter. The goal is to simply last as long as you can, and try to beat your best distance. The speed gradually increases at a constant rate. There are also mines, a fat bird man power-up that slows you down and fills your tank, and an orange man that speeds you way up. The original music was written by my friends: Jason and Geoff George, and Joel.

I built a brand new as3 game engine for this project, using only the free command line Flex 3 compiler, and a free sprite painting app called Pixen. I wanted to prove that its possible to build high quality Flash games using only free tools. I plan to dial in this engine as I build more games, then release it at some point for game devs to use as they please.





Saturday, February 28, 2009

War In A Box

I've been building a multiplayer rts flash game at work, and writing a set of tutorials on how to program multiplayer games. Below is some of the art for the game. I am creating the assets for the screens, menus, levels, etc, in Photoshop using free photographic textures found online, and applying multiple layers of texture and detail to create representational elements from totally random source material. Lots of copy and pasting. Below is the main menu, lobby, and a couple of level backdrops that I built today. The game sprites aren't finished yet, but I threw a few in for a sense of scale:

main menu:

level: Killing Fields

level: Sub Zero

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Cloud People revisited

For some reason I decided to go back into the painting Cloud People from over a year ago and add some detail and fix some things that really bothered me about the image. I liked where I was going with it a year ago, but it never got to where it needed to be. It still isn't really "there" but I like it better now. Maybe I'll go back into it in another year...

Cloud People 40x40 Acrylic on Canvas (Before and after):

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Game sprites for Scion toolkit

A bunch of random game sprites I drew for the game programming tutorial kit I've been working on at work...

Friday, October 10, 2008

Scrolling Backgrounds

A set of scrolling backgrounds I drew for work to be used in the game programming tutorials I'm writing:

Shoot! Splash Art

An illustration I did for work to be used as splash art for a series of game programming tutorials I wrote on building a simple side scrolling shooter in Flash.

Monday, September 29, 2008

Urban Game Art

Some urban graffiti game themed art I made for a promotion at work:





Sunday, June 15, 2008

Ziro: page 4

Page four: Ziro wanders the desert until he stumbles onto a concrete tee pee with an iron hatch...

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Ziro: page 3

Project Zero is now just called Ziro (the character's name). Finished page 3 last night.

Life Drawing: one minute gestures

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Project Zero: page one and two

I found some coyote references and finished page one last night. Learned that I can't draw four legged animals worth crap. Guess I need more animals in my comics. Also wrote some more of the story.

Monday, June 2, 2008

Project Zero: Page Two

Yesterday I wrote a short story while checking e-mail and women at The Pharmacy Cafe. Then I went home and drew a couple pages of it. Woke up this morning and painted page two. I'm calling it "Project Zero". I still need a coyote reference to finish page one:

Friday, May 30, 2008

Parking Lot Tribal

This is a one page comic depicting some sort of chase that culminates in a standoff between a post-civilization huntress and a band of red monsters in the parking lot of a Wal Mart in ruins. I think it fails as a good example of sequential art, but I like how the female character turned out. I'd like to further develop the idea of one page stories/comics, as it seems to fit my busy schedule and short attention span.

The White DOT

I've started building a set of Flash game programming tutorials at work, and am designing unique splash screens with original art for each tutorial. This one depicts The White DOT (Destroyer of Timelines), standing on top of the ruins of a Flash ui timeline. DOT is a robot wizard from the event driven worlds, and represents freedom from Flash timeline dependency.

Infection

A few months ago I got pretty sick. Perotid glands in my neck stopped working. I drew this on a whim the day before I started getting sick. A couple weeks later, I realized that it was a perfect illustration of my infection. The invaders are even going for his head/neck. I just scanned and painted the drawing in Photoshop last night.


Friday, March 21, 2008

Jeff: one minute study

Jeff Burke 3x4 graphite on paper 2008