The Most Epic of Epic Battles Awesome

This weekend, I sat down with my son Aidan, and he art directed me through this battle scene. He was very specific about what he wanted, and made me go back and add every bit of expected detail.

Titanic Kungfubot Offensive: Behind The Scenes Ep.1

As most of you know, I work at Cartoon Network. More specifically, I work in the "Cartoon Network Digital Media Games Studio." (A bit of a mouth full I know.) My role as the Art Director allows me to work on pretty much every game that comes through the door in some capacity. Since most of our games here are tied in to shows that air on our network, I also get to work with some fantastic characters and story set ups. Yeah, I do have a cool job.

Today I thought I would give you a little "behind the scenes" look at how our latest game, "Cartoon Network TKO: Titanic Kungfubot Offensive" came to be. We are all very proud of this game, and for a small internal studio like ours, it was a big accomplishment. Our goal was to create a legitimate online multiplayer fighting game that looked good... in Flash. Of course we wanted to be sure we put some of Cartoon Network's coolest characters in the game, but that in itself posed a few issues.

First issue: Size relationships. While it is true that many fighting games have characters that vary greatly in size, we were faced with a production timeline that did not allow us the luxury of custom animations and hit boxes that were unique to every character. Also, having a giant alien from the Ben10 series punch tiny Flapjack in the face was not extremely appealing to the team. (Ok, it was to some of us, but only because we laugh at silly things.)

Now, if anyone knows me, they are aware that I like robots. I really like robots. So as the team sat down to brainstorm the visual approach for the game, I was already thinking of ways to include some mechanical goodness. Andy Makely, who is the lead programmer on the game, first mentioned robots as an option in a casual conversation we had in the hallway. Soon after that I sat down with the Senior Animator on my team, Noel Saabye, and robots were discussed as a real possibility. We figured that robots could take a few hits to the chin without getting "beat up", and if we did it correctly, our characters would look super cool as hulking metal giants.

My next task was to convince people that it could (should) be done. I drew the sketches above to show what a few of our characters might look like in mechanized form. (If you notice, "Goop" from the Ben10 animated series was considered, but later eliminated because of transparency issues.) This got the ball rolling, and set into motion the project that would become TKO!

One of the major issues that we faced as a team, was how to create all of the animation that this game would require. Anybody who has played a traditionally animated fighting game knows that the number of drawings needed to include multiple moves for multiple fighters is pretty insane. With such a small team and short production cycle, that wasn't going to be possible. And the fact that our team was set up to develop mostly 2D Flash games, the option of creating 3D assets seemed like a rather lofty goal.

Maria Vito, a contract artist here in the studio, just so happened to have studied Computer Animation in school. She was familiar with the 3d animation program Maya, and after looking at the drawings let us know that she could model the robots for us. It turns out we didn't have Maya in the studio (2D traditional animation team, using Flash) so she used the Blender program instead. I have to take a moment here to give Maria some serious kudos. Not only did she throw herself into this task, but she did it while teaching herself a completely new program. Working off of my crude drawings, she modeled, rigged, and textured every character in the game. Ok, I am jumping ahead of myself...

So with our new 3D assets, we set out to find a workable way to set up the game. We still needed to build the game in Flash. What we decided to ultimately do was model the robots, skin them with the character designs, animate them as frames in Blender, export the frames as .png files, import those .png files into flash on a timeline. Bam. There you have it. Simple!

While the characters were being modeled, our animator Noel was roughing out all of the moves needed for the game. (The above sheet shows SOME of the moves needed...) His rough animations were used by Maria as a guide for her 3D work.

The art team worked very closely with our game designer Brad Merritt to make sure that each move did exactly what he wanted it to do. Brad is a crazy fighting game fan, and he knows what each move should do and why. And how quickly. And how fast it should recover. It was really fun working with Brad on a game like this because he was always able to explain the cause and effect of each move and the strategy behind the button mashing. (Below are two of the first roughs Noel did showing some of the simplest moves.)


While all of the modeling and animating fun was going on, I continued to design the characters in the game. Above are a few of the early character designs based on current shows.

I also worked with Maria to transfer the designs over as textures onto the models. Textures always make me chuckle, since in my mind they look like the character exploded in some way.


And this is what we ended up with. Cool moving robots that look like Cartoon Network characters. I think you will see if you play the game at all, that this technique worked pretty well. Thanks to a hard working team of artists, programmers, and a fightin' game designer... the kids are fighting with robots.

This is just a small chunk of what I want to show you. I hope to talk about all of the great visual effects in the game, as well as the overall design aesthetic and backgrounds.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned!

CLICK HERE TO GO PLAY IT!

Titanic Kungfubot Offensive - BETA!

This week is a cool week for me. It's the launch of an "Open Beta" for the robot fighting game that I have been working on the last few months. The official game launch is August 17th, but until then you can help us test out some of the finest cartoon robot tech around.

Next week, I hope to start a series of posts talking a lot about the game and what it took to make it work. I have some cool concept art to show, and I will let you in on a few things that we did to make it look the way it does. There are obviously many challenges that you face when doing online multiplayer Flash games, and those limitations sometimes force you to get very creative. Sound cool? Good. For now, head on over to the link below and fight some robots.

CLICK HERE TO FIGHT SOME ROBOTS!

Keep in mind, since this is a BETA, there will be a few issues popping up here and there. Some of the graphics still need polishing, and there are a few game elements that will be tweaked. Be sure to use the feedback form below the game to send in any comments you have related to performance, or general game play. Thanks for listening, and have fun!

Giant Robot Courting Local Water Tower!

The Spy

"I came here to find new worlds... not to spy for the Company. What happened? And how did I team up with this giant killing machine... Maybe I can lose him over the hill where the snow gets deep... "

VIDEO COMING SOON

Bot Helper

This morning I scribbled out a few bot shape ideas. In the story, the main hero character has a robot "helper" that goes everywhere with him. The overall design for the story is very simple, and leaning toward "retro" so I want to keep the characters (especially the robots) clean and basic. I will be doing a LOT of roughs like this, as they really do help flesh out my ideas. I am also in the process of writing the prequel story and coming up with a proper title. More to come!

Monday Morning Monsters

Happy Monday. This morning I did a few rough doodles to explore the next Drawergeeks topic, which happens to be "Giant Monster." Now, I did throw in a few giant robots, but the monsters are there too.

Oh, Now It's On

"Andy soon realized that he should have read
the instructions for his new power suit
BEFORE picking a fight with the giant alien robot."

"Is That Wall Moving?"

"You just had to grab that relic didn't you?"

The Cleaners

I decided to color up my last ink doodle, and as usual I got a bit carried away. The composition is a bit off, but I sketched all of these characters together by accident so that is what I get.

The Cleaners (Formerly posted as The Scrubbers) are a team of un-registered robots that are hired to do "dirty work." You see, in the future, robots are everywhere and all must be registered. After all, if they aren't registered, they would be... untraceable! These guys are like a robotic underworld swat team, working for the highest bidder. Some are obviously robotic, while others hide their mechanics quite nicely. All are talented at dishing out death... and all have robotic skeletons in the closet.

So there.

Alpha Bot Explosion!

Well, I am jumping the gun a bit here, but I wanted to post the rest of the "Alpha-Bots." It is fun seeing them all on a sheet. I feel like I have accomplished something! Now I hope to pair them all with limericks and assemble them as a kid's book. My son wants a poster, so maybe I will put that together as well.

Right now I am putting together two story pitches for the middle of December, while trying to line up work for the next few months. (shameless plug... call me) Hopefully I can show some of my pitch work soon.

"V" Is For Volto Trap

"V" is for the VOLTO TRAP
Crunches robots all up in a snap
When small bots are handy
He eats em' like candy
Then shuts down and takes a short nap

"U" Is For Uber Bot Man

"U" is for Uber Bot Man

He likes to help when he can
Will clean your toes
While picking his nose
Then cook your lunch in a pan

"T" Is For Traffic Hampering Signal Bot

"S" Is For Secret Sea Bot

If you ever wonder why Gorton's Fish Sticks cost a little more than your average store brand fish stick... this explains it. Captain Gorton sails his trawler only to the choicest fish-stick breeding spots, so that he will be able to catch the finest of stick fish. Unfortunately, the Secret Sea Bot guards the fish-stick hideaway and Captain Gorton has to whip off his rain slicker and wrestle the robotic sea beast until it gives up and lets his boat pass. The extra 24 cents you pay per box of fish-sticks goes towards Captain Gorton's gym membership. True story.

"R" Is For R7 Deep Sea Bot

So, what happens when you lose something in the ocean? You send this guy after it. Before he became a big wig treasure hunter, he was working at the YMCA cleaning debris from the bottom of the diving pool. Actually his first job was handing out locker keys, but to be honest he wasn't very good at it.

"Q" is for Quazar Scooter-Bots

If you ever find yourself in Quazar City during rush hour, you will more than likely encounter at least one speedy Scooter-Bot. Originally built to monitor and record reckless piloting, these bots eventually grew fond of the very violations they were sent out to control. Now they whip down the highways at extremely unsafe speeds and taunt older robot pilots.

I just wanted to say thank you to all of the people who email and comment on the blog about these "Alfa-Bots." I hope to finish out the letters soon and put them together in a book... complete with descriptions and all sorts of zany info. In my crazy quest to track down freelance work, these little drawings are my chance to goof off. Again, thanks.

"P" Is For Photon Rocket Bot

"O" Is For OctoMano Fish Washing Bot

If anyone tells you they have no use for a fish washing robot... they are fibbing to your face.

"N" Is For Nincompoop

"Hey bolt-boy, how about givin me a hand here."