This is a WIP opening cutscene for Unstable Scientific! I got a bit too ambitious and made FMV animation for some of it, but other parts are still just in sketch mode. But you can see the characters and the backstory exposition dump!

Original music by the Supermarcato Brothers!

Screenshots from the Silver Craters and Basalt Bluffs levels!

Custom spectrometer sketch to be used in one of the cutscenes.

Updated forest/jungle level BG to be taller and deeper.

One of the trees from the Basalt Bluffs level. I finished it this week, using Pixaki to get through a lot of the more tedious parts on my ipad. I’m using a lot of bristlecone pines as a reference to get the ancient look for the trees, but I know, I know they’re from a different ecosystem entirely… And yes, it’s inspired by Evynd Earle!

I’m not really a coder, but I don’t want to have to wait to see how the background art will look when it scrolls - and I want to troubleshoot it before it gets to Dustin.  So I made a little Processing sketch to see how the landscape will scroll. It’s not perfect, can only do horizontal (not vertical parallax), and has a weird bug, but effectively gets the job done.

Pixel, Chandra, and Tau in their workshops where you can get different upgrades. Each character will accept a different type of item in exchange for boosting armor, weapons, and a variety of high-tech mods (like pet drones!).

I researched the motion of damselfly wings to better animate them, and it took me on a deep dive of a particularly odd field. Come with me down a cool rabbit hole!

Lev Hoffman at the end of a level!

Silver “trees” for the Silver Craters level. I photographed silver crystals in the Smithsonian Museum and used them as reference for these pieces.

Tau is so sick of Lev’s shit.

Adventures in animating water, a process description with lots of sketches.

Continuing work on the Waterfall Level background. More columnar basalt,!

Here’s some of the process for making the waterfalls level background and animation.

We can finally capture video again! This is part of a forest level for Unstable Scientific - we’ve got bubble rocks, patrol bugs, and swarm bots happening now, plus music by the Super Marcato Brothers!

Some of the process for designing the AI boss bot. I spent a lot of time looking at a sea urchin carapace, metal reflections, and H. R. Giger art details. Not including the animations yet!

You can feed the patrol bug bananas!

I just finished the art for the simplest enemy we’re going to have: A cute patrol bug with sharp spikes to be a bother. Doesn’t take much to set this guy little off!

Some super-basic forest level action! We have swarm-intelligence wasps that sting you and music by the awesome Super Marcato Brothers. This isn’t a complete level by any means, just a test to see what kind of creatures and mechanics we need to make next. :-D

New enemy - the swarming mine mothership! This gif doesn’t really show the swarming behaviors though - that’s for a later video.