Junk-Indulgent Mark (Patreon)

And finally, the project I worked on for two weeks is finished!!
Honestly I didn't expect to work on pixel art that much this month, it was just a sudden chain reaction I didn't expect to happen. You see, foreskin day forced me to make a pixel art as a quick tribute, it inspired me to play around with Commodore64 aesthetics again, you saw my latest short animation with Zed and Mark but it was just the beginning. This time I got so much into it it changed my life pretty much for the recent two weeks, I mean I'm listening to Commodore64 game OST every single day (I still do), I read a lot about this system and its technical specifications, it became pretty much my new little obsession (or just a branch of my pixel art obsession).

So, the next random little thought which crossed my mind is to imagine Mark in a C64 style sitting on a flat background surrounded by food and having a big round belly, preferably rubbing it. But just as usual, a little good thought evolved into another big project, you know already that it's my curse to be unable to think small. The image I originally had in mind is what became a step 2 in this weight gain progression and my first animation was Mark slapping his belly and rubbing it. Then I decided to go much farther...

As I said in one of my recent posts, this project's complexity is almost equal to the one of my Chester Cheetah animation set and some aspects make it even more difficult. Sure, it has no complex sound versions which were one of the main reasons why Chester Cheetah animations were so difficult but there were several things I haven't had to deal with when working on a Chester Cheetah pixel art and most of it is all because I set a goal to make it 100% Commodore64 authentic with the use of Multipaint just like my previous Zed x Mark animation.

So, just to remind you what I had to deal with:

1. Commodore has a limited palette of 16 washed out colors so it's not easy to choose the right color combination compared to Chester Cheetah where I had an absolutely free choice. But it's the least of the problems I had to deal with.

2. The mode I worked in uses 2 times stretched pixels so they look like 2 pixel bricks. This was a common problem of the most 8-bit home computers from the 80s like C64, Amstrad CPC, Atari 8-bit family computers, Apple II and such. It's not like these computers couldn't display normal pixels, text was all displayed in normal square pixels and also some computers had different graphic modes where square non-stretched pixels were available as well. Commodore had two main modes, high-res and multicolor.
"High-res" was called for the ability to use normal pixels but in exchange you was allowed to use only two colors for each 8x8 pixel tile the screen was divided on which greatly limited the choice of color. Most games made in this mode use black as the first color for every tile and whatever else as the second color so it was more like one color for a 8x8 square. Monty On the Run is a good example.
Monty On The Run for C64
And just like Monty On the Run, most such C64 games were ports of games made for ZX Spectrum, an older home computer where such graphics were the only choice but with much more eye bleeding colors.

Monty On the Run for ZX Spectrum
Multicolor mode I'm using was much more popular for C64 games as it offered a better variety of colors, 3 colors + key color (the color of "nothing" which was usually black) for each 8x8px square but in exchange it was forcing you to use these horizontally stretched pixels, so it was pretty much a "pick your poison" situation. But people were rather deal with brick pixels than almost monochrome graphics.
Needless to say, making complex smooth shapes and working with small details is MUCH harder this way.
For example, Mark's eyes were a big dilemma because I have only 4 colors here, white is essential for his body, light blue is for background, yellow for eyes outline, key color is black for his spots and that's all, while his eyes are actually mint colored with purple pupils but I can't add anymore colors by any means, so I had no way but sacrifice the accuracy of Mark's design and make his eyes the same color as background and make pupils black, that's the best and just only option I had here.
In my previous animation I barely managed to figure it out just because the character image was much bigger. You see, there's no square which has more than three colors (plus black when needed).

3. And as I already mentioned, I could use only 4 colors per each square which of course much harder than having no such limitations.

So, comparing these two pixel artworks together, doing something 16 bit like Chester Cheetah is simple and full of freedom, surely there's some limitations just like in any pixel art but you still feel like you can just draw whatever lines and shapes you want and use whatever color you want as much as you want without any extra thought. With platforms like Commodore64 where you have to keep so much stuff in mind, it feels like before you put a damn pixel on a screen, let alone draw a line, you need to solve a mathematical equation first and do it every single time. I got kinda used to it and find working with these limitations pretty fun and entertaining but it's just waaaay more time consuming than a regular pixel art. I felt it especially when doing fart and burp animation. Usually making and animating farts and burps in pixel art is easy, I just draw random green stuff, copy it to more layers for animation frames and then apply a spreading filter with randomized seed and voila, with just a little bit of tweaking it turns into a perfect imitation of gas emission in no time. With C64 there's no shortcuts, I can still use spreading filter in GIMP but anyway I need to clean every single inch and fit it into this stretched pixels condition and also watch out for colors number per square being not bigger than 4.

Btw, the last stages of animation where Mark inflates by his farts and explodes are the only frames I didn't check in Multipaint for authenticity so maybe some squares can have more colors than 4 there, the rest of the sequence is 100% authentic. I just stopped having a care at this point because fart explosion was a horny side thing and I just wanted to finally satisfy my dirty urges. The main sequence is all fine and that's the only thing that matters.

Another reason why this work is harder than Chester Cheetah animations is these goddamn spots. Gosh, I see why Dalmatians are rare characters in cartoons, animating spots is one hell of a work. But whatever, I'm crazy about Dalmatians and very much wanted a perfect Dalmatian boy for myself so I have to pay for this. Chester Cheetah has spots too of course but he didn't have that many different poses while here I had to tweak Mark's spots for 6 very different body states and various animations. And remember, it's MUCH harder to make it look fine with all these graphical limitations.

Also I think it's the biggest character I ever did in pixel art. Animated obese Volk navel-fucked by Vityai was big but damn, Mark fills an entire 320x200 screen in the end here, so it was really a plenty of work.

In fact, it very much reminds me of one of my first animations with Volk weight gain. Similar 2 frame breathing animation, almost equal number of growth steps and very similar body shapes but WAY harder with bigger resolution, more animations, C64 limitations and goddamn spots.

One more curious thing to mention about this project is text. Despite I said that C64 text was done with regular pixels, sometimes text was drawn with stretched pixels in multicolor mode, usually on some title screens and such. I'm still not sure about the rules of the text display, I know that high-res tiles and multicolor tiles can be combined on one screen and many games used it but just to ensure myself I decided to write Mark's lines in multicolor text. I tried to find a ttf font file in web because I had enough of copying letters one by one with Chester Cheetah but found only one where all letters are uppercase while I reeeeally needed to save as much space as possible with the smallest letters. Luckily, I found a very easy to use font constructing site and created my own Commodore64 font, you can download it here if you want:
https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/2460350/commodore-64-multicolor-mode
https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/2460379/commodore-64-multicolor-mode-1
There's two versions, regular one and the one where all digits and symbols like question mark, parentheses, braces etc are the same height as lowercase letters done especially for my project.
Also made a bolder font based on writings from a Thundercats C64 game:
https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/2460675/commodore-64-multicolor-bold


I wanted to do sound versions for these animations but this idea got rejected for various reasons.
First, there's nothing much to use sound effects for, only some farts, burps and explosion, with Chester Cheetah it made more sense.
Second, if adding sounds it would be rational to also add music but I didn't know what C64 music to choose for this, I listened to various OST but didn't find a melody with the vibe I need.
And third, I simply got too tired spending so much time on this project so I wanted just to let it go finally. Maybe one day after some rest I'll return to it and still add at least some sounds for fart explosion animation, it would be fun and can make it more hot. I was thinking that 8-bit fart sounds I used for Fox McCloud animations will fit this one much better because Fox McCloud was a 16 bit animation and such 8 bit sounds were kinda out of place. C64 is an 8 bit computer so these sounds would feel okay there.

The last technical aspect I wanted to mention is that all these struggles to fit perfectly into C64 limitations weren't entirely in vain. At least I think so. Technically, I think at that rate this work could be put on a floppy disk and run on a real Commodore 64 computer! It would be awesome for a furry artist to conquer such new territory nobody ever stepped on. But these are just fantasies, for this I need to find a passionate PC enthusiast who might help with it and who knows, maybe it's not that easy, maybe something in my work will need to be tweaked and changed to make it possible to run.

It took me a lot of effort to not think of this as another game concept hahaha, what saved me is the fact that creating abstract animated demoscenes for C64 is pretty much a common hobby around retro PC enthusiasts so making just animated stuff is a normal practice. Although I still want to draw some kind of a title screen for this thing someday later.

There's not so many exclusive side things as could be, I'm sorry, I wish I could do more belches and farts for other weight gain steps but mainly Step 2 got the most attention as earliest part of the project. I really spent way too much time on it and need to finally switch to something else, like commissions for example, and also I'm very much out of time with exhibition project and I really want to finish it. Just today I learned that participants of this exhibition will be printed in The Art Newspaper Russia, The Art Newspaper is a very luxurious international newspaper and getting there with my furry art would be an indescribable honor and I don't want to miss such a chance.

Maybe one day after some rest I'll return to these animations and do more. You know I can do it with my works from time to time. At least I hope you enjoy extra animations with extreme fart inflation and also the benefit to have an access to a full archive with all the materials for this project, it's all available in attachments below. Root folder has all the essential materials, each of the 6 weight gain steps, the whole sequence in a video format (wanted to make it one big gif but it seems to be impossible) and extra fart parts with explosion and without one. If you want to see any particular bit from some of these 6 steps like stomach gurgle animation, eating, lactation or belly slap you can open one of the numered folders and open animation folder, these folders have absolutely all the materials.