Happy Halloween!

I didn't make a costume this year, so to make up for it, I put an oven door behind the secretary's desk, along with this delicious recipe:

Sega Employee, a la carte

"3-Time Bake-Your-Employee Contest Winning Recipe!"

Ingredients:
5-7 Strategically-placed buckets of candy
At least 5 dumb employees (12-15 if dish is prepared for party or social event)
Warm, charming atmosphere (such as candy hut or game studio)
Costume (keep 'witch' identity secret at ALL COSTS)
Candy Bar (or fruit-flavored substitute if craving 'Alexis')
8 (six inch) Carrots

Directions:

1. Pre-fatten dumb employees over the course of a month or two prior to event. (Use candy buckets)

2. Get employees accustomed to standing near oven door.

-idea: "Hey Brenton, come watch this hilarious YouTube video I've found..."

3. Keep employees used to seeing your face. Perch near elevator or entryway (or just wander halls randomly talking to people).

4. Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) 5 hours prior to event.

5. 3 hours prior to event, hang candy bar in front of oven door (use fishing line -- they'll think it's floating by magic... tee hee!)

6. When employee nears oven door, pop out from under desk and boot them into oven.

7. Repeat steps 6-7 as many times as necessary to fill oven with yummy fattened employees.

8. Bake 2.5 hours.

9. Caution: will be hot! Let cool at least 20 mins.

10. Carrots are for flavor.

11. Enjoy!

Drone Escape, thus far

Ok, so it's still early on, in fact this isn't even completely the first pass of blocking, and there are no drones yet (besides that inexplicable tiny one floating screen left). Thanks for looking! Trav

Golden Axe Reel

Wooot!

Just finished up stringing together some of my favorite work I did on Golden Axe: Beast Rider.

Feel free to call me out on any lousiness you see -- it'll feel good to say "HA! Don't care... not fixing!"

But how do I REALLY feel?

This is a test animation I did to get a feeling for how the drones in my new animation will move. This is really rough, but it helped me figure out things such as firing mechanics, path of action, and how to effectively eliminate IGN... err... I meant "how the back flaps will operate"...

For those that don't know, which is probably most of you, IGN.com gave Golden Axe a very biased and unfair (and uninformed) review.

Thanks for looking!



PS. Color scheme is totally up for critique!

Golden Axe: Beast Rider FTW!!!

Wooo hoooo!!! I'm officially published!!!

Okay, so I was credited for Iron Man, but I didn't take great pride in that credit as I only worked on the game for 3 weeks. However, I have poured heart and soul into Golden Axe: Beast Rider for the past year, and I am super excited that it has been published.

Now, while I know you are all going to run right out and buy it and look for my name in the credits, there's something else in the credits I'm even more excited about! My wife Nikki has a credit in there! Her first credit EVER! She's under Special Thanks. If I have my way, you'll be seeing Nikki Howe in the credits of a lot more projects in the future!

Trav

Here's one of my animations from GAX. I'll be piecing a reel together soon! A little intro to this animation:

Jeff Cooperman and I shared what I consider to be the coolest part of Golden Axe: the Twins. One has metal boxing gloves (we call him Mituunz), and the other has spiky leg-armor (we call him Buutz). Jeff did most of Mituunz's animation, and I got to do Buutz. They wanted something to distinguish the two when they do brutal attacks, so that when the player fought against both at once (which does eventually happen), they could tell instantly which boss they just got attacked by strictly by the move. For Mituunz, Jeff decided a throw made the most sense (it's a really funny animation where he plops a hand down on Tyris' head, then picks her up by her hair and tosses her. hahahaha!). My thinking was that if I were that size and I was fighting someone the size of a chihuahua, my first instinct would be to just punt that thing across the field. And it worked well, because Buutz was supposed to have mostly foot-attacks, so a kick fit right in.

Hope you like it!

AnimDrone 1.0 (mission classified)

This is a turntable for the "opened" and "closed" stages of my yet-to-be-textured-and-rigged Animation Drone, which I'll be using for my next AM project. Hope you like it!

Trav