Game Experiment

It's been ages since Toilet Puck has had any news, no new episodes, no new developments, nothing. But all that may change soon. I really want to give this property another effort. It's a personal project, it's tons of fun, it keeps me sane. Anyway, I took the backgrounds from the first episode and decided to make a little point and click game out of them, like the many point and click 'escape from a room' games that you see on the 'internets.' There's nothing to it yet, no objects to pick up, no puzzles to solve, no keys to unlock, no story, no point really yet... BUT you can explore the bathroom with some simple navigation.  There are some secret spots, so move the mouse around the room and find the hot spots. It's just a start, but I think I could make a cool little game out of this. Will TOILET PUCK himself make an appearance? Will the other SUPER HEROES from the Toilet Puck Universe show up?  Stay tuned to find out.

a la South Park

This is what Toilet Puck would look like if I ever did a South Park spoof....hmmm not a bad idea. I think I need to get working on that one.

hiatus

crossing the road

When I have time I'll make the old lady actually walk, very slowly; for now she just shakes on the spot.

making it up as I go

All the character designs were basically one drawing of each character in a 3/4 front pose. I only create full front, profile, and back views if/when it comes up in a storyboard. So in this episode a full front view of Champ needed to be designed. No back or profile view seems necessary...yet.

wrestling episode

Storyboards are not usually clean and colored like this. However I did some test animation and animated almost all the expressions I will ever use on the Toilet Puck character before I ever did the first board. So it is just a matter of copying and pasting the proper expression into the board. Also the BG's are mostly already cleaned and colored, so I copy and paste those too. I am more concerned about the pacing than anything else.

another freeze frame

Lots of short cuts and tricks here to make it look more involved than it actually was. One of the tricks used is the staggered shake cycle, almost all of the animation in this scene is just a cycle of staggered drawings, with 2 to 4 frames per cycle.

Eureka!

One thing I do not like about many flash shows is the "flip." When a character or head turns from left to right, I see many shows take the lazy way out and simply flip the symbol with an equally lazy stretch as some sort of lazy anticipation. Did I mention I thought it was lazy? The "flip" works fine on a show like South Park because it's flat and it's supposed to be cardboard cutouts. But it bugs me when a show is supposed to look good, with good character designs and they use a cheap flip. Anyway, here is Toilet Puck's head turn, now full body turn.