Abbymations (Early Access): Game Over - Abby's Black Friday Bust! (Patreon)

The Synopsis:

Ooh! 

Seems Abby fumbled that roll to sneak out of her stocks! Maybe her new owner will have the keys?
Either way, its...

GAME. OVER.

Press start/insert a coin to continue?

Alts:

Countdown:

End-Screen:

The Rant: 

So, as I was working on the Turkey animation, I started thinking about how I could tie Abby into a Black Friday themed game over. Black Friday is usually about sales, so why not a slave auction?

This one was both more and less complicated than I expected it to be. It was less so, in that the general composition came together rather quickly. Less so in how the execution flowed, unfortunately. 

See, the thing about loops is that, for characters, they're relatively easy, due to how simplistic characters tend to be. When that character is in an environment that must loop, ehrgh... not so much. Worse, if the perspective for that background has more than one vanishing point (in this case, technically three). This is because details must loop and the number of details in backgrounds makes this much more difficult to keep track of than with a single character.

Luckily, because these videos emulate "Game Over" sequences, they also allow me to emulate the limitations of video in the 16-32-bit era, namely a "decreased" frame rate. Because of this, I can mask the actual looping and get more out of doing less work. By making the background simple enough and keeping the tiling as its own separate element that faded in both detail and transparency as it receded further into the background, I could mask the actual loop point. That being said, it still needed actual loop points, and determining those was a massive ass-pain.

 Its also keeps me from having to draw more frames for Abby's walk loop as well, the effect of which is masked by keeping her boobs normally looped (albeit without tweens). It's all quite fascinating; if Animate/Flash (and really, animation/non-illustration software in general) were more ubiquitous, I wouldn't mind offering the files as rewards for peeps to check out. Other patreons can offer those things because almost every illustration software is compatible with the Photoshop PSD format, but anything else (2D animation, 3D, etc) is mostly limited to the software for which it was designed, though I think 3D modeling and animation have workarounds for the various post-productions (usage in games, VFX, etc) that format tends to require.

For the second half, I was kinda burning out on the idea of having to do more work than necessary, both for the auction podium and for the other slave girls Abby would be standing next to.  This is because Abby is not, and never will be, so important to the lore of the Abbyverse that she'd get her own sale, and thus there needs to be other slaves for which she is in competition with to find new owners. That being said, I'm not interested in designing new characters for a one-off animation, so I just duplicated Abby, stretched the proportions appropriately and recolored them. In hindsight, giving them longer hair would have helped sell it better, but I'm hoping no one minds.

This attitude towards more work also affected the background. Rather than taking more time to design a background, I just took the podium, Stretched it out and lowered its opacity to hide it in the background, since it doesn't make sense to let the auction take place in a blank void. Maybe in storyboards, sure, but definitely not in a finished animation!

Oof. Reading this back makes me feel a little guilty for implementing so many shortcuts, but I also really wanted to hit Black Friday as a deadline (which I missed, in terms of posting). Nevermind that this won't make sense for the general public, since they'll be catching this a week after Black Friday anyway. That's kinda the rub with any form of commercial art more complicated than a single illustration (and even single illustrations can get complicated), there can't be any form of "laziness" because actual "laziness" shows in the negative quality of the finished result. The type of "laziness" artists self-deprecatingly refer to is more pragmatism, and a necessary self-education to produce better and better works faster and safer.

What do you guys think? Let me know in the comments; your input lets me know how I'm doing? Catcha over Yonder!

-Saunter!