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.

head turn

As much as I tried to resist doing this head turn, it turned out just fine. The animation in Toilet Puck is very limited. I did not want to ever have him turn his head, but inevitably there will be a scene where there is no way to avoid it. So here it is. This was the easier part; the tricky part will be when he is not imagining himself with a superhero body, when he is just Toilet Puck, because I will have to animate that clip he holds on to. Tricky, but I like a challenge.

freeze frame

Each of these vignette shots will have about half a second of animation before the freeze frame, kinda like this.

last of the vignettes for this sequence

Well that was crazy fun to do. This episode might include a musical number. If it does have a song sequence, then there will be a whole other set of vignettes that needs to be done.

from rough sketch to finished drawing

I'll work on the background tomorrow.

its a scene

Flash is not the best program for imported bitmap backgrounds, especially one that zooms in and rotates, so this will have to be done in some compositing software. This flash version is just for fun.

flying puck

Did a quick animation of Toilet Puck's cape flapping. If I tossed in a BG that slowly pulled back, it would practically be a finished scene.

excuse me

Add one more to the vignette. This time Toilet Puck saves a girl from the clutches of a bad guy.

vs.

These vignette shots are so much fun to do! The character, Toilet Puck, is like every kid out there that is into comic books. We all have dreams and fantasies about being a superhero ourselves.

montage or vignette?

This is another shot from a vignette of Toilet Puck imagining himself as a superhero. I was calling it a "montage" before, then I got a lesson in the difference between a montage and a "vignette" from my girlfriend...literary types, go figure.

This is how the picture progressed, from rough to clean and colored.

plodding ahead

Well, I finished boarding episode 02, more or less; there will be some changes that need to be made to it down the road. But for now it is as done as it could be. So I went ahead and started boarding episode 03. There are a lot of still shots like this one in episode 03. This is Toilet Puck imagining himself as a superhero again. This time fighting off Ninja Bank Robbers.

tell me it ain't so?!

What does this mean for Toilet Puck? Is this the end? What will happen to the super-hero washroom? The intrigue, the drama, the answers...in the next episode of "The Refreshing Adventures Of TOILET PUCK!"

close up

This is a panel from the storyboard. It's a close up of TP. Technically, his head would not fill the whole screen. But there are good reasons to do it this way; first, and most importantly, it's funnier looking. Second, it saves me from adding a BG, which would be mostly obscured anyway.
I wish I could take credit for coming up with this, but I saw an episode of Sponge Bob where they did this on a close up shot, and I thought it was pretty funny. So I am using it on a Toilet Puck close up.