Sifteo, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and 2012

Woah! I'm back! Hello everybody!
2012 has been an exciting year with many things happening. But, you wouldn't know that reading Mike Makes Art because I haven't written a post on Mike Makes Art for a whole year. I stopped blogging the moment after I started working for a small video game company located in San Francisco called Sifteo, Inc. They make an awesome cube based gaming platform.

I did lose track of blogging, but I met and worked with a team of smart, talented people whose brains were full of great ideas. So, I wanted to get back into the habit of posting regularly. To start, I could mention the latest game I helped work on. We just launched TMNT Ninja Slide. It has turtles, puzzles, mousers, dark alleyways, mystery, and lots of pizza eating action. Check out TMNT Ninja Slide and other games right here!

To the art. This will continue to be mostly an art blog, so I thought I would share some concept art that was created a bit before production rolled around. Fair warning: I like animated GIFs, so there's going to be lots of GIF action up in this.

Don't worry. This is not the end of the game, but it pretty much sums up the spirit of the game, at least when I was making concepts.  Strangely, these exact scenes happened right after we finished production on the game. It was like I was seeing into the future.

Michelangelo had one of my favorite attacks, mainly because his motion defined the most amount of space the turtle sprites would be able to inhabit in the game, which is about 45x45 pixels.  I wanted to do a little test with some mousers and background tiles, so I whipped this up to test the whole attack sequence:

Even though I like the little jump he does, we had some good reasons why shrinking the assets a bit would fix some issues cropping up. It also made sense to cut down on the number of frames so the animation would be quicker and feel more instant when a player pressed the cube to attack.

Ultimately, these changes made it much more satisfying when attacking with Michelangelo. 

There's a bunch more material I could post in the future about TMNT Ninja Slide, other games I've been working on throughout the year, and some new comics material I made for 24 Hour Comic Jam this year. For now, starting up this blogging thing was a good enough milestone to hit. I just wanted to say thanks for reading. I hope you dig it.