BazilRacoondog
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Mark the Fat Gassy Bastard + Bonus materials
🕑 Added 2025-01-01 01:26:06 +0000 UTCAs promised, here's new Mark animation project that was highlighted with just one little image in one of my old pixel art posts.
I was working on it little by little from time to time doing just one frame in a day to not distract myself from my more important plans too much and slowly but steadily I reached the finish line, pretty much in time to close this month with the last art post.
As you might remember from this old post, it was a pretty spontaneous idea inspired by my friend SpazzyHyena who made a quick fat burping Mark sketch which turned out way too inspiring. The results could be anything but since I'm in an Apple II mood recently I decided to make it an Apple II pixel art. This idea eventually expanded to animation with full-body image being added. 
After making hyper inflated Zed image based on Apple II character sprite designs (which is another animation project that needs to be finished) I got curious to see how well the same design can be used with hyper fat body kept in the same proportions as seen on a close-up picture. It turned out pretty good even though it left a plenty of empty screen space but this is actually what I needed for pretty obvious reasons. Most of my artworks usually lack space for gas alts so this time I got my chance to make it look REALLY tremendous.
And this time I decided to make another sound version. The final animation looks a little bit silly, a little bit primitive with movements lacking or looking robotic but mainly because I tried to be faithful to the system I'm imitating, sadly it's a common conflict with retro graphics that old, you can't make it too elaborate, natural and smooth, otherwise you're risking to lose its authenticity which is in choppy movements and primitive animation which represents the real thing only remotely. And as for the sound itself, well, it wasn't the strongest side of Apple II... To put it mildly. Most the time it was nearly non-existent in games, sometimes it was so awful you'd wish it just didn't have sound, just because it had the most basic 1-bit speaker similar to earliest IBM DOS computers and ZX Spectrum. And even with earlier Mockingbird soundboards it still wasn't the best in most cases. So, what I did is I spent a lot of time looking through dozens of Apple II game videos on YouTube searching for sounds that resemble farts and burps at least remotely and surprisingly I found some pretty good samples. The choice is still scarce but better than what I expected. I hope it's still enjoyable this way. You can still watch silent gifs if the sound is too annoying.
The video is hidden in attachments as it's all about farts, all the gifs and assets used in this project can be seen in an archive.
I also made a little prequel for this project that got started just by a little mistake.
Initially I drew Mark's head too big and decided to redraw it a bit smaller to give more space to his body (there's no scaling tool in 816/Paint aaagh), new head turned out neat but the older one with good level of detail was too good to just scrap as well so I saved it thinking I'll find a good use for it later. And I did by making a prequel part which required less space for body which means I can keep the head bigger. I'm gonna animate it a little too but later, for now I'm just posting one image as it's the very end of December and I need to share every bit of content I have so far.
And there's a bit more bonus materials, nothing horny, just small stuff I was doing in-between, mainly sprite work. SNES sprite is now animated in a similar three frame way Mario sprite from Super Mario World was animated.
Also made NES sprite for Zed, as you can see it's not too big and looks average compared to most NES game characters.
Tried to do PC-88 sprites too, used some existing character sprites as a reference here too. It's a bit tricky to draw small things with its vertically stretched pixels but it's actually pretty fun and having no other restrictions regarding color placement makes it more liberating.
As a result, I got a bit carried away making whole three different size sprites for both Zed and Mark! Exploring PC-88 game sprites made me realize they could be any size as PC-88 didn't have hardware sprites similar to ZX Spectrum or Apple II so everything was just a part of general graphics. Also decided to do slightly different versions with more solid black outline for bright backgrounds and blue outline for a more classic black background game style which was very common on PC-88. Sprites are not animated yet and I need to add Jack and Kit to make a classic 4 character set but I'll get back to it later.
Also, if you watch my art on Furaffinity or other places you probably noticed that I posted one of my ZX Spectrum concepts recently but with some extra images added that weren't shown here. That's true, I thought it's time to finally post all this old Spectrum stuff but I also got the right mood to draw some extra faux-game concepts right before posting, I imagined it for a long time and decided to finally let it all out. Check out Furaffinity post for a bit more description details, I just don't want to post even more text here.
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/59261264/
Despite it's already posted online I just think it's better to leave it here just for the record. 
You could also notice that the title screen concept looks different from what was posted here before, I added "Presented by BR Games 1983" below the title to make it resemble title screen more. I created BR Games logo one year ago and used it only once in a Blaster Master Zed arcade title screen. BR stands for Bazil Raccoondog and in my future fantasies I imagined using this logo for every game project I make (if I ever make any). In this ZX Spectrum title screen I shoehorned its design into this system's strict graphic limitations and made it much smaller as an in-credits version, similar to how actual gaming companies did it back then, you know. 
This little experiment along with looking at all different versions of different game company logos inspired me to do BR Games logo versions for every 8-bit system I love and know how to work with.
As a result, I made whole 6 logos with both big full-screen and small in-credits versions for each. System list from top to bottom is DOS with CGA graphics, DOS with EGA graphics, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, NEC PC-88 and Apple II. Actually, big C64 logo was drawn long-long time ago when I only started working with its graphics, it's another reason why I got so determined, I already had one well made version and it made drawing versions for other systems easier.
I feel pretty proud of the results. I tried to show each system's graphical capabilities at their best with each logo which required more complex ideas, this is why I put all these shimmer gradients, without it it would be just flat color blocks which is too easy and wouldn't make the difference between systems look as drastic as it can be.
Apple II logo was probably the hardest, as usual, since I'm doing all Apple II stuff in old 816/Paint where I'm so terribly limited in basic tools with Apple II limitations on top of it but I really like how it turned out, even small in-credits version. I had to make it a bit more wide than other logos but I had no other way. In Apple II I couldn't make the gaps between letters just one pixel smaller which resulted with more stretched design.
God knows if I ever put any of these logos to a good use in an actual game but it's never a bad thing to at least fantasize about it, it also was a good art practice to flex my art muscles, I love working with fonts a lot. Hopefully one day it will come in handy.
That's the last post of the year 2024 so happy New Year to everyone! I spent most of the day trying to write a big post to sum up the progress of entire year but it's too much to cover so I'll probably post it tomorrow, leaving my greetings here. Thank you for being with me and hope you're having fun.
Comments
RexLioness
Happy New Year! 🎉 All the recent Mark and Zed works you've been posting are making me even more excited for my upcoming commission >w> ❤️
