Hey!
So I took a few days off after uploading Merchant Maiden, thanks for checking it out uys and leaving great feedback on it. I really enjoyed making that one and it sent me down a rabbit hole learning more about game music, user interfaces and all sorts and I haven't quite scratched the itch for making animations that have a very game inspired feel.
I'm still going to add the behind the scenes stuff for Merchant Maiden on here which I said I'd do, I started experimenting with this new thing and I blinked and about a week had passed so I thought I could share what I've been up to with you guys before the Merchant bts.
My channel has clearly been hit pretty hard by a combination of me taking a year away and also youtube having some changes in how it operates as well and I realised that if I wanted people to see my stuff I had to be adding to shorts, posts etc between videos, its a lot to ask for an animator but I don't want videos I worked hard on like Merchant Maiden to reach a fraction of people I feel it should be reaching.
So that led me to Crow encounters, an idea I had whilst writing the next cartoon and realising that it had about 3 different "endings" or jumping off points. I thought, I can share shorts of the cartoon, (shorts, reels, tiktok etc) as I make it, then with connective material have a good sized animated mini episode at the end to upload fully.
Since then, I've been experimenting with the concept, structure and some previs elements for it.
Just above is a mockup for the HUD that shows our crow protagonist (design still in progress) in a menu with the window being reserved for the fantasy world he will be navigating. The idea is that each episode of the short starts with an encounter flashing up - enemy attack, npc encounter, puzzle, whatever fits the tonnes of scenarios I have that I've wanted to write into a short like this already.
In the full video these will make sense as part of a quest or chapter.
Now for the world of the "game" I wanted something that was visually fun and appealing and fit the HUD aesthetic but I also wanted it to feel like an actual environment with depth as opposed to just a cartoon background which brings me to blender
I am currently very early in the process of taking the purple cartoony background and turning it into a more 3d looping environment like the image directly above. The colours and elements in the blender version are currently placeholders but it's starting to shape up nicely I think.
Overall the elements should combine to make something that is super fun and engaging I hope at least. I'm going to have 2d npc and enemies in these 2d environments and with some artistic tweaking will hopefully have them mesh together without looking mismatched.
So expect some more updates soon, I'm planning to incorporate more game type mechanics in the toon like dialogue options, a map drawing minigame that gets messed up and eventually I want to try having a ff7 style battle scenario but one step at a time for now.
Anyway, very wordy update on this, I won't blame you for skim reading but please look at the pictures lol
Thanks for the continued support guys! (and I will get on to that Merchant BTS too)
Fax