Zanzlanz

I took a short break from gamedev to release a music video in time for Halloween!
It's my third SpongeBob remix, celebrating 1,000,000 YouTube views on my last one.

I admit, I spent more time on the video than the music, haha! So I wanted to document a couple of the challenges I tackled - someone must witness my struggles, right?

I had 4 biscuits

This scene was a fun challenge. Compare the final shot (left) to the source material (right):

Basically, I wanted the background without the vignette... but it's moving.

So, I used motion tracking to get the speed of the background each frame, then offset the scene by that amount to stabilize the motion:

Then I used an onion-skin technique ("echo") to overlay all of the frames on top of each other. Huzzah, I gained a full background! Then I could do whatever I wanted with the foreground, like add another character:

Rotoscoping

Speaking of characters... I rotoscoped pretty much every one of them! Rotoscoping is cropping out the elements in the scene, frame by frame. It's inCREdibly tedious, I tell you.

Rotoscoping everything allowed me to layer text behind elements, fade backgrounds, outline characters, and more. I basically treated each scene like a thumbnail in this way!

Rigging

The last challenge I'll mention is that of creating a controllable rig of Patrick. The music gets a bit unhinged for a bit, and I wanted to represent that with Patrick's movements.

Here's how I did it:

1. First I rotoscoped and separated Patrick from the background.
2. Then I painted (by hand) the region behind Patrick, so we can see what's behind him.
3. After, I separated Patrick's arms from his body, making sure to fill in the occluded areas.
4. I then deformed Patrick's layers to the music, and linked deformation meshes to his arms to help connect stuff up more naturally.
   

Where've I been? What's next??

Hi by the way! I sure have been quiet. I lurk though! I've just been working extremely hard to finish an update to my game "Mine Blocks." I'm excited for that, but also I've endless stuff lined up after that I'm dying to get to as well.

Happy Halloween! :)

(The Thanator scene from that movie is one of my all-time favorite cinema experiences!)

This is my most ambitious pixel art yet (or any art, for that matter)! I learned a TON making it; I spent about a month on it, conquering so many new textures and techniques throughout. See my process below:

I even made a mini art as a way to practice leaves. Two of these leaves made it in the final image - if you figure out which ones, you can take one leaf and one gem. Only one; save some for the rest!

Happy New Year, Cohost!

I just made a brand new version of my "Wave Function Collapse"-inspired algorithm.

My previous version was basically this:

Loop through all the blank pixels of the bigger image. The goal is to find a pixel that's super confident it knows which color it should be, simply by it comparing its surroundings to a small input image. Resolve that one pixel. Then do the whole thing again to find the next most confident pixel.

Well someone reached out to me about it a couple days ago, inspiring me to take another stab at the problem. This new approach is the same concept, except ALL pixels guess which color they should be, all at once. Then it iterates a few times over to gradually get clearer and clearer.

If that wasn't quite clear, here's an analogy 🦎:

It's like a grid of a million chameleons, where each one is trying to blend in with its nearby friends in order to best mimic the input image.

The big bonus of doing all pixels at once is I could easily implement it on ShaderToy, so it can run in your browser :O! Check it out:

It should be butter smooth on desktop - but sadly not so much on mobile.

If you're curious, you can make your own by editing my array of pixels in Buffer A. Just make sure to update the width and height in the Common script. I'd really love to see what patterns and variants you guys come up with!

With the proper adjustments, I can see this technique being usable for procedural map generation or texture synthesis. But in its current state, at least in my examples, maybe it's a little silly looking still ^^ What do you think?

And I call it ✨ Zanzlanz's Collector's Bundle ✨!

After I ported 11 of my games to my game engine (see yesterday's post), I decided to make a launcher to keep track of all 100 achievements!

I just wanted to make this post to highlight some fun parts of making the project:

I got paid in Oreo Cookies

In one of the trailers I made, I joked that you could buy it with Oreo Cookies (@1m19s):

And -- maybe I could have predicted -- a friend of mine actually shipped me this package in exchange for some keys of the game. I was absolutely beaming about it for hours!

I devoured the cookies and rained itch keys upon his inbox.

Coincidentally, there are exactly 100 achievements

I still can't get over the fact that when I counted up all the achievements for all 11 games, it came out to be exactly 100 achievements. I sat there confused and recounted 3 more times before I was convinced the numbers added up perfectly.

But all of the achievements came from the original medals I set up on Newgrounds.com!

Getting all 100 achievements is a big feat, which is why one of the rewards for winning is the ability to hijack my Twitter with an automated tweet about your win. A few people got close, but they stalled out at 90%, so anyone can still be of the first 10 winners.

The trophy is my marketing team 🏆

The trophy is just a dozen stretched cubes I manually entered in with code. There's a larger version of the mesh masked out underneath to add the black outline.

All things considered, doing the "branding" for this project really just meant I slapped the trophy asset on everything and anything :)

The launcher is secretly a 3D scene

At first I was going to arrange it like a DVD scene selection menu, if you remember those days. But then I settled pretty quickly on a flat grid instead. It still makes use of 3D through a neat interactive effect.

The way this is achieved is by using a perfect 90 degree field of view and setting the elements at exactly the correct scale and distance from the camera.

The 3D effect may play a part in the win sequence too.

Link

It would be weird to not link the bundle after writing a whole post about it! But better yet: all 11 games are totally free in your browser. Just, you wouldn't get the opportunity to take over my Twitter if you win :)