Play it at www.sammysamurai.com

In late November of 2008 I found a forum post on Flashkit that linked to a contest from Mochiads. I wasn’t too excited about the prizes, the runner-up prizes were almost a joke, but I saw this as an opportunity to rush and actually finish something. Winning would be a plus. I hadn’t released a Sokay game in 2008 so I felt it was my last chance.

So I wanted to plan something that I would be able to finish within a month. That meant it had to be a lot simpler than my usual grandiose visions. I passed up on the opportunity to work with the Donut game I’ve been working on because there was a lot of animation that needed to done that I didn’t want to think about.

I had recently been inspired by the Studio Ghibli film Tales from Earthsea. I didn’t think the movie was very good but it has some awesome background design and a few shots had some excellent parallax scrolling going on. The parallax shots were very quick but captured my attention. Thanks to digital compositing they were able to blend many layers without making it obvious where one layer ended and another began. Continue Reading…

Looking through my old artwork, I found these files…

I made these a little over 5 years ago. These are based on a drawing I made — and more like it . The Flash movie was a demo of how I could execute a game cinematic. The Papervision stuff I’m doing right now is looking awfully similar. I started developing a game based on these concepts but I went in a very different direction. It’s one of the projects I’m going to get back to one of the days.

Back then I was still in art school. Basically my free time was spent drawing and working on Thugjacker. I lurked Pixelation all the time. It’s a forum for pixel artists, if you haven’t heard of it. Lots of inspiring work there, a great place to get critiques. Pixel Joint is another good pixel spot.