Livin' in the Fantasy Kingdoms

It's time for another post on Fantasy Kingdoms. Again the stuff is major fun because I had to become accustomed to the style and it's always fun to try something different. I think my absolute favorite thing to work on was the dragon pup. It was supposed to be an ultra cute baby dragon that would have six different skins for holiday seasons and promotions. Unfortunately only the original and the Mother's Day version were ever made. I was going to make one unique animation per cycle for each variant. So you can see from these two they are slightly different, with the Mother's Day version emitting hearts:

I think these guys ended up selling pretty well. I'm very fond of them myself. Here's the original concept I sketched before deciding on the final on the bottom right:

 

I also ended up creating a statue of the grown up version of the dragon with plans to have it also be an animated characters with multiple versions, but unfortunately I was placed on another project before that plan was carried out.

 There was one other character I created and animated for Fantasy Kingdoms and it was the Harpy. I don't think she was very popular with the audience in terms of sales, but I still had a lot of fun drawing and animating her:

And last, here is the concept I did for the Harpy:

Monster Island XI Tokyo Drift

I think this will be the last Monster Island post for a while. I animated so much there's a lot to throw out there. But I wanted to make a post about two more of the characters I did the art for and then animated, since I wasn't always able to create characters on the project.

First up, we have the "blood monkey" and the "blood baboon." Originally we were provided baboon art from an outsourcer for the monkey, which was somewhat confusing, so I was tasked with making the monkey. But then we still had some baboon art, so why not? After drawing the monkey, I then used elements of it to create the baboon with some of the facial parts I cleaned up the the outsourcer. I'm fond of the look and animation of both of these:

After that we have "lab chicken," who I guess is some mutated chicken escaped from a lab. It was sort of a rare miniboss that gave good loot if you were ever to fight it. This one was a lot of dumb fun to create. He shoots mind rays!

Here are some of the concepts I did before arriving at the final chicken beast:

And last I want to show the Mothman, because it was one of my favorite bosses to animate as it was a change of pace and kills through psychic energy. Mothman art done by Alicia Andrew:

Animation for Rewind This

So last year I was contracted to make an animation for the great documentary Rewind This! and it was an amazing experience. The basic outline was to make sort of a timeline to show the different video formats throughout the ages, from initial to today. I didn't touch upon all of them, but I covered major ground.

Since I had a limited time to work on this short outside of the hours of my day job on the video games, I decided to use elements of UPA cartoons and Terry Gilliam style cut out animation, but of course in my own style.

So here we go! (Also ignore the buffering time out it's going to do at the end, it's an intentional joke on streaming video)




So on that note, here's some initial sketches I did for the characters I would use:

 

Also there's a complete animatic I had turned in ahead of time:

 

Fantasy Kingdoms

I did some work on the Facebook game Fantasy Kingdoms with a few assets as well as some creatures. It was always a great experience because when working on assets it was a very individual thing where it was yours from start to finish. Also it was very foreign art style to me that I had to get accustomed to, which is always a good challenge. The other great thing is that you get a lot of direct feedback from fans whenever an asset comes out because one of the main draws for the players is getting something new to place on your isometric playspace.

A few of my best pieces I think were the clockwork doll and the spider carriage, both supposed to be within the steampunk sets:

 

Eventually I was tasked with creating creatures and animating them. I tried to bring a new precedent and add value to the creatures by having them go through a longer cycle of movement since in general creatures in the game were assets that just kept a constant idle motion going. So first we have the Fae, which is a kind of magical deer version of the centaur with nature elements:

Then there's the Valentine Pegasus Carriage which was a very good seller I hear. Really not my favorite but it was a bit complicated to put together a carriage and flying horse for tween animation and I am proud of it: