Noisy Beetle

clyde's picture
noisy beetle.gif

I just wanted to have something to doodle with in Clickteam after making Shadow Doctors.
I really enjoyed the process of
1.drawing a tile,
2.making some sprites,
3.making some sound effects,
4.choosing a motion that will be triggered by collision.
As I went along, I tried doing these steps in various orders and I feel that the later frames are more unified
as I developed more ideas on how the various steps could refer and be informed by the others.
I've just been making a frame every once in a while, but I've decided that I'm done.
you can contact me if you like:
clydebink at gmail
Twitter: @cafefiction

Credits:
Made with Clickteam Fusion 2.5
Made most of the images with Gimp
Made most of the sounds with Music Creator 7 using the Hybrid VST

Gifs:

Beetle:
http://bestanimations.com/Animals/Insects/animated-beetle-bug-1.gif

Promotional Poster Sources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXV4TMk8BZ8
and the original beetle gif.

Author: 
clyde
Made For: 
An event

Comments

sergiocornaga's picture

This is really great! The

This is really great! The sound is very satisfying, as are the various interactions encountered. I could have played it for longer, but it definitely doesn't wear out its welcome, and the last (interactive) frame might have been my favourite in terms of visual design.

fortunepalace's picture

very cool!

i saw an exhibition of early japanese video art in a gallery a couple of years ago, and some of these slides are really reminiscent of that (except that a big dirty beetle has gotten trapped inside the display somehow)

This is a good beetle

This is a good beetle

Danni's picture

This is kind of unsettling!

This is kind of unsettling! But it's weirdly stimulating in a way.

ihavefivehat's picture

Wow that was really cool. It

Wow that was really cool. It felt loud and jarring, but in a fun and kind of endearing way. Loved walking through the different screens. It felt I was defacing paintings. That beetle animation is so good!

mkapolk's picture

i enjoyed blundering around

i enjoyed blundering around this abstract landscape like a dumb little confused beetle. the sounds are fun and evocative. it seems like your process made a really good exercise for exploring these kinds of aesthetic interactions. i definitely noticed what you meant by the compositions becoming more cohesive as they went on. i think i might try something similar!

clyde's picture

Here is the .mfa It might

Here is the .mfa
It might save you some time if you decide to go through with it.

AttachmentSize
2016Nov_doodle.mfa6.16 MB

Yum

This has a satisfying arc to it. A bit surprising, as the musical progression of moving, changing, and ending on the right note (rather than the more explicit approaches to narrative) often falls a bit flat for me in sound-games. The cohesion of the final few areas makes a remarkable difference.

clyde's picture

I was excited to discover

I was excited to discover that I could basically start a new frame in ClickTeam by copying the last one and changing various assets and movements. I'm pleased that the resulting game really shows a progressive internalization and refinement of the few aspects I was trying to organize in repeated relationships. I was happy that I was constraining scope so well as I moved along and I think the frames do begin to develop a thicker consistency by doing things like subtly referencing former frames while having more typical pairings between sounds, movements and shapes (I don't know anything about color, but I just got a book about it).
The last frame that is reminiscent of a YouTube video buffering was just a clever idea that I wanted to try (on a different thread from the progression of the other frames), but once I played through with it at the end, it just kinda capped all my desire to continue with the project. I wouldn't say that that purple frame was what I wanted to achieve or what the other frames were working towards, but somehow it satisfied me in contrast to making the others and feeling that I could reiterate on them indefinitely. I think that it has a similar bookend effect when playing it. I wonder if it's because we've been conditioned to pause our attention at that buffering symbol or if it was just enough of mixture of abstraction and something familiar that it acted like a punchline of some sort.

Hah, interesting. I don't

Hah, interesting. I don't think I consciously parsed it as buffering symbol, but rather as a grand reference to the sound-making circle-shapes themselves, which I first imagined were eggs -- the kind that might belong to this species of beetle. Following the more active/threatening levels, the simplicity and tidiness of the shape also feels conclusive, and makes a comfortable, stable denouement that still retains the appropriate amount of strangeness.

Son of a dolphin's picture

interesting thingy

interesting thingy