Jake and I are in the thick of it right now.

He’s busy implementing all the systems the game needs to run so we can begin play testing and I… I’m busy making pretty pictures.

That said, some of these pretty pictures need to move. Not so easy. I decided to take a moment out of my tutorial reading the other day to find some inspiration and possibly some direction in my effort to learn Flash.

Enter Dan Paladin.

Castle Crashers (probably Paladin’s most famous work) was an early source of inspiration for me to make games, even though I wasn’t quite aware of it at the time. I just remember vaguely thinking that as much hard work as it must have taken to make, it at least seemed somehow possible as opposed to say, making the latest Call of Duty. Now The Behemoth and studios like them (not that there are, i just meant… shut up) maintain a sort of heroic status in the eyes of indie game developers across the world.

Anyway, I just wanted to take a moment to share that animation is hard. Like really hard. For our placeholder animations in the game I just drew a character in photoshop, opened them in illustrator, broke them into symbols, brought em into flash, and hacked together an animation. Good enough for play testing but not at all good enough for a finished product. After watching this video, I see now what is actually happening behind the scenes of Paladin’s masterful work. He’s actually drawing the symbols right in flash and when they need tailoring, he redraws them. Duh! That’s how he avoids this debacle:

So I’m off now to learn the ways of the animator and hopefully one day some aspiring dope will write an article about my work and title it: Here’s to you, Parker Whitney.