Emrox's Reviews

[I LOVE YOU]

Hey this is very aesthetically cool! Love the visual intensity, the nice little touches here and there, and that part where it's silhouettes on the flashy color BG.

If I may go on a tangent, that will make sense in a second:

Something that happens with a lot of people who are really serious about art stuff, and has happened to me personally, is in an attempt to get better they start obsessing about finer and finer details - getting every line perfect and redoing drawings fifty times, etc. Which is sometimes good because you reach for higher standards, but sometimes you can get so bogged down in the little details that you lose some of your ability to paint in "broad strokes," so to speak. For example, if I just spent hours and hours rendering one bit of animation, I might hesitate to put wacky video-effects on it, even if that makes it look cool, because I'm afraid of negating all that hard work. When this kind of thinking is applied over a whole project, the finished thing can come out kind of diluted - less punchy and less interesting than it would have been if I had just cared a little less.

I'm bringing all this up because I love the "broad strokes" in this - the flashing colors, the effects, the way the images are composed on the frame. It has this intense immediacy to it - a sort of rawness that sometimes people will lose over time, as they get too focused on the finer details of their work. So I just wanted to take a second now to say *please preserve that thing!* Obviously I don't know what your life's plans are or whatever, but if you're going to keep doing art, I want to give some encouragement to keep doing this kind of thing, and to not get in the habit of getting too attached to the work to fuck it up a little - to not get into the habit of pulling punches. Because you've got something good here, and it would be cool to see you keep pushing in this direction

snotrat responds:

dude thank you for this comment. i am honored that you have written somethign so insightful, and yes, it was what i was going for. i made this whole thing to rid myself of that perfectionism. with animation specifically it is difficult not to get so bogged down in detail simply due to how mindless and grindy it is. but with this one i made most of the scenes in one short sitting without much refinement and it looks so muhc more emotional to me because of that.
i sort of hated this amv to be honest because i made it partly to express ceraint feelings i was having and i dislike watching it myself now because of it. but maybe i'll try to look past that and appreciate it.
drawing like this is so pure and fun. again, thank you for appreciating and your comment

[Rook the Crook]

Hey I really like the texture of the lines on this (the square-brush low-smoothing thing is something I get a lot of mileage out of myself) and so I wanted to ask, are you able to shit that kind of thing out really quick or do you spend a lot of time undoing or sculpting with the eraser or whatever? For me, every once in a while I can get into the right mindset where I can produce a lot of good rough-looking stuff fairly quickly, but most of the time I just get bogged down in fine details, even though the rough lineart thing is supposed to make the process go a little faster.

Forgive me if this is a weirdly presumptuous review! Any thoughts on this would be interesting to hear.

foneycone responds:

This was the first full-length cartoon I made with this kind of linework, and I made the whole thing in chronological order, so you can see I got a better handle on it by the end. I started out mostly by sculpting with the eraser, but by the end I was able to do it by my own brush strokes pretty quick. I've never been good with pen pressure so it was a learning curve for sure, I found that regularly adjusting the size with certain details and shots also helped. Always preferred low smoothing, both in speed and look

[-Sugar sugar-]

When I watched this a zillion times 15 years ago I always thought it was kind of a mistake that he just had the one set of smiling mouths to lip-sync with, and would just switch to the frowning closed mouth after he finishes speaking, but watching it again now, even though I still believe it was laziness on edd's part, I kinda like how the smiles flavor his facial expressions as he gets progressively beat up. Adds another layer, sorta

(still looks fuckin stupid when he looks side to side though, that part makes no sense with the smiling mouth!)

[The Last Piece of Cake DX]

You know what I kinda miss with this update is in the original version, when the dad says "looks like you'll have to kill me for it" and the background goes red it like, switches over to the pixelated rasterized art at that moment and there was something unintentionally creepy about that - almost like a very subtle version of what they call 'deep frying' an image now. It doesn't really affect my enjoyment of the thing (still great after all these years) but I am curious if anyone else remembers this or would agree that that moment has a little less "punch" in this enhanced version

[Roguebot Rumble]

I like the game! This morning I asked Bill if he could sing a few lines on a song I'm producing and he said he'd do it in exchange for a review of his new game, so for the sweet sound of Bill's voice I'm going to write up some stuff I thought about while playing the game.

When I started the game for the first time I wasn't sure if I was playing user-generated levels right away or something curated to introduce the rules of the game. Actually, I'm still not sure. The rating thing after each screen suggests it was all user-created but I thought maybe it would start out with some basic introductory levels and then graduate to random user levels at some point. That seems like a very minor thing, but I think knowing whether or not these are "intro levels," or even just "game-designer-created levels" makes a difference with how I approach them - I sort of expect the author-created levels to be very deliberate and have their design ideas unobfuscated by randomly placed platforms or whatever, so if I don't know if the level is created by the game designer, I don't know how much I should be reading into level design to see if it's trying to show me something. As a quick fix I would have some kind of indication if they're player made, like a little thing that says the author of the level when you start, or even just a tutorial that is very overtly tutorial-y with the text in the background that tells you what to do n shit so that when it gets to the random user levels they are very obviously the user-made levels. Taking "we barely got this done in time" into account, I'm guessing that's the sort of concern that would be addressed with a little more time in the oven, so whatever!

I also thought it was weird that restarting doesn't take you back to the same level you were on. It would be nice to be able to use what you learned from that particular failure, instead of re-rolling until you get an easy enough level.

The big explodey death balls were cool but I almost feel like they would be cooler if they didn't speed up & home in on you when you get in range - like they're fun because they're a big looming threat that you have to learn to work around, but they would always blow up on me pretty shortly after appearing so I would never get to do anything cool to avoid them. I feel like it would be cool if they just slowly followed you around and didn't ever rush into to you, and they did a ton of damage or insta-killed so that they don't always get to you but just have a very threatening presence. I get why this sort of thing could be weird - if too many death balls spawn they would probably bunch up and just be a weird cluster of death balls following you around, but you could probably fix that by giving them an acceleration thing, kinda like the flying mask in mario 2, but slower.

Hm this "review" is getting into backseat-game designer territory, so I will cut it off there! I'm looking forward to seeing what this turns into with the future updates. Good work guys!

PsychoGoldfish responds:

Yeah but did you use Firefox?

[Blooming]

I'm posting this to say I beat it and I want to brag about it!

I sympathize with the people who say it's too punishing - there were a few times where I had an idea of how to solve a puzzle but to get to the puzzle I had to run past some jugs or cats or whatever and I would die like 50 times on the thing that I didn't care about just to get another try at the part I was trying to solve. I also didn't like having to wait around for the picking of the flowers, and even though there were a few puzzles that were dependent on that, it added an extra bit of annoyance to the retrying over and over thing.

I really liked the puzzles though! And I like the level of challenge, I think just minimizing those sorts of annoyances would make it more appreciable. Some other gripes - I didn't like that there were petals just for aesthetic particle stuff, like if it's a main game mechanic there shouldn't be other stuff that looks exactly the same with no real function. I don't know what the non-coin jugs were for. It was also weird not knowing where it was saving checkpoints (actually I thought the jugs were doing that for a little bit?) These are minor things but when the game is really hard and potentially frustrating, the little things can add up!

HealliesGames responds:

You have every right to brag about it. x)

The fact that puzzles actually leave you thinking is a great achievement for me, as I feared they might be too intuitive.

Currently static jugs were used only for aesthetics, only to make exclaim at the first enemy jug encountered: "What the..." ahah!
The fact that they were outlined by the black border, pretended to be some kind of interactable object.

I fully agree on the particles.
I chose to recycle the petal sprite to dampen the time and dedicate myself to other things to arrive in time for the jam.

In addition, a little extra speed on picking the flower may decrease the rigidity.

Thanks for the detailed review, in these days I will try to fix by following your valuable suggestions.

[AIM - HAUNTED]

This is really great! The production on this is awesome, do you have some sort of secret sauce you're putting on that or is it just plain ass effects like basic saturation and compression or whatever? There is a really great sense of space and like, good attention to the different frequencies, or something.

moonslop responds:

thank u masta!! im glad you liked, its mostly an 80s synth plugin, a couple built in basses that i distorted and turned the cutoff down on, and layered percussion that is stereo spaced. pretty much everything is going through some type of compression or guitar amp! not to mention dynamics as well!

[Animation Industry Podcast 147: Rachel Gitlevich Shares How Titmouse New York Unionized In 2022]

In 2018 I took a year off of college to pursue a job offer, and in that time there was a teachers' strike that meant that many of my peers couldn't get the education they'd paid for for something like five weeks. Several of my professors didn't really care about the politics of the thing, but they *had* to strike because it was mandatory to for them be in the union to get work at the school. And so, they weren't allowed to teach the classes they wanted to teach, to the students who wanted to learn, disrupting the rest of the semester (they had 7 weeks to teach 12 weeks' worth of material), and in the end, the school didn't budge - the teacher's didn't get paid a cent more, and it was all for naught. Since then, I'm skeptical of anyone selling unionization as a miracle cure to anything.

Obviously animation is a whole other field, but it bothers me that any cons of unionization seemed to be hand-waved away with "it's all propaganda and lies!" said half-jokingly. I've heard the someone-who-needs-to-be-fired-is-protected-by-the-union story too, and I don't think every instance of that happening is fake.

I guess what I'm getting at is that there seems to be another side to the whether-or-not-to-unionize issue that's totally getting neglected here! Something that really set off some alarm bells for me was this bit at 42:00: "You're going to vote in your own self interest... it's the people who want a union out of the goodness of their hearts that are easier to sway to the employers' side. It's the people acting out of their own self interest who ultimately make most of the progress for unions."

Why might that be? I don't know what's going on there, but I certainly won't be pro-union with that question unanswered!

For the sake of not coming off like an evil villain, I'll say that I'm all for combating employee-abuse, and I've heard plenty of horror stories in that vein, especially from blockbuster VFX houses. But if the reason for unionizing isn't to fight US labor-movement type abuse, and is instead more about how working in the animation industry isn't quite the creatively liberating work I thought it would be and now I want as much money as possible so I can live comfortably in the second most expensive city on Earth, you might have some other options that won't risk everyone's jobs getting auctioned off to South Korea!

I'm willing to be wrong about any or all of this - I'd just like to hear the other side I guess!

terryibele responds:

Interesting response and thanks for writing that all out. In the US - most animation is unionized which has created standard rates for things like storyboarding, script writing, animation, etc. (stop motion isn't unionized) - you can find all the rates here: https://animationguild.org/contracts-wages/.

For example, if you want to hire an animation writer, you must pay them a minimum rate of $48.65 USD/hour.

In Canada, animation is largely un-unionized. That means you can pay someone whatever you like Some people are underpaid and overworked and some are paid really well. Really depends on the studio, project, etc.

The intention with unionizing is to create standards for things like pay, benefits, time-off, lay-offs, etc. across all studios so that studios can't undercut employees. In a perfect world, everything would work out great, but as you pointed out, there are always two sides to every coin.

It sounds like you already know some details to the other side of the story. If the topic of unionizing comes up again in one of my chats, I'll definitely remember this comment and try to flush out both sides more.

As for the South Korea comment, a lot of animation is already outsourced to Canada from the US, because we're highly skilled and it's cheaper to produce here (lower pay, government tax relief, subsidies, etc.). I personally would rather take higher pay for the career I've chosen regardless of the risk of outsourcing, and if more animation gets outsourced to South Korea, it wouldn't be great here (although we'd adjust, just like the US has), but I would also I see that's as a positive thing for the animators pursuing careers in South Korea.

I view the industry as a gigantic community and have been trying to bring on more international voices to share their stories. I think if Canada ends up unionizing animation - I would hope the overall effect would be positive and lift the tide for all boats. Hopefully it may inspire people around the world, like in South Korea, to fight for better standards as well.

Thanks again for listening and taking the time to write your comment :)

[Comfort Characters (Invisible Listeners)]

man I love those weird background vocals that come in around 40 seconds. Really cool choice to not bury them in the mix and let them sorta fade into the forefront for just a second. What are those?

vermeen responds:

thanks! it's a sample from a US Air Force recording of Shenandoah taken from here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Shenandoah_(2017)_-_Singing_Sergeants_-_United_States_Air_Force_Band.mp3
the vocal snippet you're hearing should be around 0:05 of said file.
it's also mixed in with a separate vocal line i made with a vocal synth (Alter/Ego Bones).

[Fatal Mermaid]

Whoa didn't know you were still around! Where have you been all these years?

Ansel responds:

biding my time

[Peck and Coach Rumble Up The Battlefield]

So do you think they would be a duo like ice climbers or would they be like duck hunt where they're more or less a single entity? I'm thinkin it would mostly be coach doing the fighting but he uses peck as a weapon, swinging him around by the feet. And then there's coach's super move where you have to charge a punch for like 30 seconds but then instead of unleashing it on an enemy he always just hits peck (it insta-kills peck which makes it the most powerful move in the game, which is unfortunate because you can only use it on peck)

alicemargiela responds:

I thought about the same thing with Coach using Peck as a weapon! Just Coach using Peck as like a whip. Or I also thought Peck could be like Gir from that Nick Brawl game where Zim summons him and Gir explodes his enemies, but with Peck, Peck runs towards the enemy and gets killed instantly cuz he's worthless and unathletic.

[Musckles]

i dont get it

Bill responds:

I will fucking kill you.