Not even sure how long it takes to build one skyscraper, much less three skyscrapers.  Construction officially started on Monday, today is friday, so apart from missing part of the destruction of a parking lot ramp, haven’t really missed much.

So that’s why I showed this to my class last night.  I started it out by asking, “Who here has seen Monty Python stuff before?”  A few hands went up.  One girl asked, “is that like an anaconda or something?” Another said, “I’ve heard of ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’ but I’ve never seen it.”  The one student who actually is older than me rolled his eyes (I was too, in case you’re wondering).  Another student said, he’d only seen it because his girlfriend insisted he watch it (hope for the younger generation I guess!).

Still – I played this, there was glorious silence for 15 minutes, interjected by me yelling out things like, “we can do that with Photoshop now!” and “that’s basically motion tweening!” By end of class, I saw one girl redoing her project using black and white pictures cut out and put into Flash – and a few mentioned they were going to look for more Monty Python stuff over the weekend.

There’s a lot to keep track in this game idea, and so, just like I tell the students, this isn’t something where you throw everything into a pot and let it simmer — you have to prep first.  Thing is, I don’t know what all the ingredients are.

So what do you do if you don’t know where to start?  Turn on Flash and stare blankly at the screen? Nope.  I’m going back to the basics.  I have my pages and pages of notes.  I have vague ideas about levels and mini-games in the game.  I’m going to grab pencil and paper.  When I can’t draw out Evil Onion backgrounds and imagery any more, I’ll switch over to this.  When I’m tired of trying to figure out how to get lots of little bits and pieces to interact, I’ll go back to the onion.

I think that when I’m ready, what I have to do is come up with the game dynamics, fake some animation (little blocks instead of fully fleshed out characters) and get them to move and behave how they have to.  Once that works, I’ll go back and make clean animations.  This is what usually kills me.  I jump straight to the icing, forgetting the cake underneath.  Let’s see if I can be any better this time around.

I’m still working on the new onion story, trying to come up with some new interesting backgrounds – right now, I’m playing with poster ideas, using various sketch software on the iPad to try and come up with something.  Hell, I even played with 123D Sculpt to try and make a 3D onion…. that’s not coming out as well as I had hoped.  If only I could just sculpt him in real clay, then scan him in.  Because, you know, I have access to all that kind of equipment … or even clay. For now, here he is, squashing a flower.

One thing that keeps coming up (thanks in part to Theresa bringing it up on occasion) is, what other kinds of rude things will the evil onion do.  She wants him giving the finger.  What finger?  Do I have to give him arms first?!  Will he need legs too?  Will he end up looking like Chairface Chippendale, except an onion and not a chair?  This is a slippery slope, innit?

Still, today is the first night of class, and I’m going to see where this new batch takes me. Teaching is always an odd thing to me, since I’m working off topics that are very familiar to me, I don’t really feel like I’m teaching as much as I’m just explaining the obvious (yes, I know, obvious to me), but I generally feel that this stuff should be fairly easy to pick up once they give it a chance, and I should be there to just elaborate on the simplicity (or complexity) of the general ideas.

This is my second quarter teaching Flash, and I think it’s going to help me get to the ball rolling faster on the onion.  I think I’ll be taking the iPad and sketching during lab time a lot this quarter.

Since my Flash class is almost over, I’ll use it as an example.  When you decide you’re going to build something, like say, a cartoon, you start out with your basics – the concept, maybe a few paper sketches, initial storyboards, etc.  None of these have anything to do with Flash or ActionScript coding.  Thing is, can’t go any further into Flash until you have these bits done.

That’s like your trip to the grocery store, just to get:

1. Tomatoes
2. garlic
3. fresh basil
4. ground beef
5. Angel Hair pasta
6. Red wine
7. Oregano
8. Parsley
9. Cayenne pepper
10. 1 16-oz can of tomato sauce
11. marinated mozzarella balls
12. Olive Oil (both extra virgin and regular)

That’s an extensive list, you need to keep your kitchen better stocked… As you can see, the basic concept is a pasta of some kind. Now what? Can’t throw it all into a pot and magically have everything come out tasty.  Just like Flash, you have to do some prep work. So first you have to identify ingredients (cooking) or identify animations (have a cat running across the screen?  How will it animate?  Should you separate out the limbs into their own animations?

If you’re animating a cat running down an alley, that’s like the sauce for our pasta. The alley is the pasta, and any assorted bit and pieces might be the garnish at the end.  Hey, it’s not a perfect analogy, but it works…

Your pasta (the alley scene) needs to be prepped and ready to go for when the kitty (or sauce) runs through it and really mixes up this metaphor all to… (dare I say it?) pot.

I don’t know how you plan on drawing this alley, but like pasta, it needs to be cognizant of the kitty that’s going to run through it (or mixed into it, whatever).  A good pasta will complement the sauce, in the same way a good background really makes your animation punch out. And you definitely want the pasta ready when the sauce is ready, so let’s get a pot of water boiling.  Toss in the Angel Hair and keep an eye on it, you want it al dente. Once it’s ready, drain and put back in the pot. Once your background is ready, make it a movie clip and save it for later.

So, if the garlic represents the legs of the cat, you can animate these individually, so you don’t have to built it all at once.  In the case of garlic, smash with the broad side of a chef knife (or a santoku – I like those better), THEN remove the peels (they come off easier this way).  Now dice and set aside (I’m assuming you have prep bowls?

In Flash, FYI, the prep bowls are the library…  and what each little bowl holds are movie clips, graphics and or buttons.

Back to this kitty running down the alley – does the head need to animate?  Maybe not, so you draw a single image of the head (kinda like opening the can of tomato sauce and moving to the side by the prep bowls).

The kitty’s tail will move around a lot, you’ll want to animate that.  Like tomatoes that need to add textures to the sauce.  Chop up the tomatoes.  Into a prep bowl!

The kitty’s body may not need to be animated, like the ground beef, it waits for the other bits to influence it.  Draw it and put it in a prep bowl to the side!

Now we combine all these bits.  The running kitty (or the pasta sauce) both need to be set up properly.  In the case of the sauce, we need to saute the garlic first.  One large sauce pan over high heat, use the light olive oil, and brown the garlic.  In flash, make a new movieclip and put the kitty’s legs in the first layers.  Once the garlic is browned, add in the ground beef. Or put the kitty body layer over the legs (since the front facing legs may need to be in layers above the kitty’s body, you’ll want to put the body layer in-between the legs – or in the sauce, stir till the beef browns).

What’s next?  The kitty needs it’s head, so put that into the movie clip in it’s own layer. That’s the tomato sauce, FYI…  Tail gets placed in too.  Toss in the chopped tomatoes.  Spruce up the kitty, go back and add some nice touches maybe to the striping on the head and tail. That’s the oregano, and other spices.  Still needs a little extra oomph?  Pour in some of that red wine.  Now, let the fully animated kitty sit in your library.  Or let the mixed sauce simmer for a little – lastly add the basil (tear it by hand).

Now let’s grab that background alley (or pasta), put it into the main timeline (or bring it in front of you), add the kitty (or sauce) on a layer on top (pour it on!).  Get any little extra bits on a layer above the kitty, to add depth (say, garbage cans to run between).  With the pasta, you’re adding those mozzarella balls.

In flash, you may want to add a “start” button or something for the animation to start.  In cooking, that’s called a fork.  Please also notice, no onions were needed to make a delicious pasta.

I’ve gone and rambled again…  So, the thing I seem to ask all the time, both to students and friends in general.  Did I just make any sense?

So the dreaded if/else statement was the topic du jour. I spent the entire evening writing on the whiteboard. No computer, no “start-up Flash and do what I say.” Well, I told them, “open up NotePad and type this in.” Some felt I meant a literal notepad and wrote only in the notebooks, even after I said, “you’re turning this in.” I have a few cellphone snapshots of people’s work, and I have to say, my eyes hurt, just a little, from fighting the urge to roll them up through all this.

So, sunshine and if/else. How else can you start explaining the concept, really? Most folks (I’m not part of “most folks” in this case) don’t think in terms of programming logic much. At least they don’t recognize it as such. I don’t usually either, but I have wondered, as I wait at a frozen bus stop in February, “if I hadn’t ducked into a Tower Records during a rainstorm in Santa Barbara back in 1994, would have ended up in Chicago in 2013?” The answer to that is probably “no.” That’s another story and I digress.

Simply put, choices we make based on variables in our lives are just like programming. Each leads to new choices and new paths to go down. Which makes <insert deity here> a snarky coder with chip stains on <his/her’s/its> D&D t-shirt. Or at best, we’re all living out the longest and oddest Choose Your Own Adventures books ever written:

If you want more coffee before your 11am meeting, turn to page 1173, if you think you can keep the yawning to a minimum, turn to page 1554.

Where was I? Oh yeah – if it’s sunny out, go to the beach, but if your boss sees you, don’t go to the beach:

var sunny:Boolean = true;
var boss:Boolean = false;
var beach:Boolean = false;

if ((sunny) && (!boss))
{
     beach = true;
}
else
{
     beach = false;
}

This took the better part of an hour to go through. I think by the end most were getting it – in the broadest terms. Next class, we’ll try and apply it to something more tangible than weather.

Both Tiny Planets and Mirrorgram are basically a couple of steps in Photoshop except all done on the phone, and with an odd little instant gratification – no sitting in a room by myself tweaking pics, I can show ‘em off to whoever’s around!

At any rate, I discovered that sometimes, even the simplest little tools – that most designers pro’lly scoff at – can produce some really cool effects – I’m particularly proud of the “skull,” above, that started out as quick snap of the snow covering the courtyard bench outside my building. A little twirling, and mirroring, and suddenly it was smiling right at me!

It reminds me of what we all do, part inspiration, part skill and training, and a whole lot of just straight up sweat and tears. I rolled into town too late for my own inking session, but I’m watching the processes of initial draft, refinements, and application in various stages right now.

Similarly my projects are part research, deconstruction, build and create. The onion’s eventual return is reminding me of all this. I haven’t even started redrawing him, I don’t know what he’s going to look like (other than oniony and red), but the first step shouldn’t be deciding the right tool, since I don’t know what that’s going to be yet.

I can find 3D sculpting tools and make a real-space onion, but how well will that import into Flash? What do I need to learn to get that to work? Is this the best way to bring the evil onion back?

Which brings me back to tattoos. It’s easy enough for me to show off a sketch and say, “I want this,” but my concepts of placement differ from the person who would be applying the actual ink. The person who knows how anatomy and art mix. Right design needs the right tools, and the right know-how. Ultimately it’s all planning and follow-through.

Which bring up the real point of this post. Here I am, and no fresh ink will be applied on me, due to damn timing.