Hey Friends!

First of all, Happy Pixel Day! I'm sorry I don't have anything specifically made for it. But I did want to celebrate by sharing with you what's been keeping me busy this month! Especially since it's a pixelated platformer.

I started working on a video game! I'm learning Godot and I've been watching tutorials and learning the software for the last 3 weeks. And I have a 30-second video of what I made within that time! It's rough, I have no sound effects, but it's all my hard work! I'm proud of how far I've come since I started working on the project.

I'm going for a blend of NES and vintage Comicolor cartoons. The ones that were mostly made up of shades of red and teal. I find the look of those cartoons to be very charming. It's as if Cuphead and ShovelKnight's aesthetics were mixed with some clown DNA.

Meet the main cast a circus family;

Sunny: a clown girl who's late for her curtain call and must travel from her trailer and through the circus to get to the spotlight.

Devi: Sunny's gymnast sister.

Benedict: Sunny and Devi's father and the strong man for the circus. Quiet but stout.

Fritta: The ringleader mother of Sunny and Devi. She's loving but strict.

As I am brand new to Game Dev, and to coding, a lot of my focus has been making energetic and fun animations that make the player fun to run around as. I'm hoping to make a lot of fun slapstick mechanics to solve puzzles. Right now I've got a banana pill slip, but I want to catch the clown on fire, smash her, and various other gimmicks to help make your way through the circus.

I hope you enjoy this VERY early look at my current project. I've never had more fun in my life than seeing this come to life so far. Have a lovely pixel day!

I'm really excited to announce that I helped with this video! I did animation on quite a few of the shots. And I would love it if you checked out the trailer and supported the Kickstarter! Working with Jhano has been a blast!

The Kickstarter is half way funded and is going strong.

Hello Friends and those who randomly stumble upon me!

Life's been wild the last few months. But before I get into that I want to share some cartoons I've made and or show previews of content that'll be coming to my Newgrounds profile very soon!

Super Mario Pixel Plumbing!

Firstly, I made a recreation of the Mario Movie promotional video, the Mario Bros Plumbers commercial! I did it in the style of SMW (with some slightly bigger bodies and faces for more acting!) and threw in a bunch of visual references to past games, a surprising amount of them were from Mario is Missing and Mario Paint.

I wanted to post this on Newgrounds on MAr10, but I saw that because I didn't own the audio it would most likely get taken down. So I apologize for linking to a Youtube video, not the greatest newgroundians etiquette. But gotta do what you gotta do!

A Furby Chucky Cartoon

I'm going to post a Chucky parody in a few days, waiting for April Fool's shenanigans to die down! It's currently on Youtube censored and an uncensored version is currently on my Patreon. But I also plan to share the uncensored cut on Newgrounds, as I said in a few days so it's not competing with April Fools stuff.

Here are some screenshots!

It was one of the last things that I did for Animeme. I wrote and directed the short, worked with another animator and a talented BG artist, and worked with 4 voice actors, and an audio engineer. It's roughly a 3-minute long short created by 2.5 artists in a month. It was an amazing learning experience to get to make something narrative focus for the fucking Animeme channel. Sadly the guy behind Animeme/YoMama didn't promote the short, buried behind a 5 years too late Family Guy skit about Disney buying Fox in 20 fucking 23, and then gave himself a writers credit, didn't directly credit me as the director of the short, but credited himself as the entire video director. It was all pretty shitty, and I had to step away before blowing up on this entitled prick of an employer.

But...

The UnEmployeement Arc

I was let go of my animation job of 12 years. I was furious, devastated, and saddened by the news. "Hilariously" in the same week I was sexually assaulted and had a public internet falling out with a bigger YouTube friend whom I used to be on their podcast. Basically, the two things I was known for working on Yo Mama and Pizza Party died in the same week. The floor quite frankly crumbled underneath me.

So I knew Animeme was on its last leg, it had a huge flop and failure with its attempt at NFTS and the owner of the company is so bad at this that, he burnt out the few dedicated fans by reuploading old content over and over again misleadingly labeling it as NEW content. Destroyed what trust he had with the audience. His 5 Mil subscribe channel is struggling to maintain 10-15K views for each video. Occasionally the spaghetti will land but it's all RNG at this point.

The dude was able to drain some company out of 250K to finance his failing business. ANY actual animator could produce a PILOT with that kind of money. This dude somehow wasted it all one 3 episodes of his traced meme show and like 3 or 4 single 1-3 minute shorts (Furby Chucky, an Elon Musk Minecraft animation, A family guy skit, a south park skit, a Sonic furry skit, and uhh.. a 10-second Concaine Yogi Bear bit). Much of which is below most people's standards. He was paying his Discord manager like 5K a month to watch over his NFT Discord. So like I knew the end was coming, I thought I had like..til January to learn new software, build a portfolio, etc. My projections were thrown off by the dude's inability to take L's and kept making up lies about how the company is doing great and that he's gonna pay for us to go to Super Nintendo World. And then 2-3 weeks later, "I'm out of money and have to lay off the entire team so that I can live off reuploading old Yo Mama videos and make AI let's play while I hope some VC will fund me."

Animeme was a job that I should've left like 5-7 years ago, but the pay was too consistent, and not needing to find a new job every 3 months felt worth animating this man's terrible creatively bankrupt ideas. But because he needed us to reuse decade-old CS3 Flash files made by an ex-collaborator for his business to be profitable, I got very behind on animation trends. I'm still using Adobe while the industry has moved on to Toon Boom, and now with my finances where they are, I don't think I can afford to take the time to learn Toon Boom.

TBH, I think with my love of pixel art and my skill sets as an animator I think transitioning from features to Game animation might be a good path for me. I'm currently learning Spine while I do some animations for fan games or original stuff that doesn't pay well to build up a portfolio.

The Future

I don't know what my future holds and I'll admit my financial situation is got me pretty scared. But at the moment I'm foolishly devising my time to making a Youtube channel that will most likely flop due to how hard it is to get animation going on the platform, and working on a portfolio in the hopes to get hired later. Holding out as long as I can before getting a normie job. It feels pretty shameful to feel like I had a career and started back to scratch.

My main focus is to become the Community to Dorky's Big Bang Theory. I'm working on a few pixelated shorts because they are fast, fun, and affordable to make. I think I'll focus on making 1-minute skits for the shorts to bring people to the channel, then re-format them as compilations of longer videos to meet Youtube's algorithmic needs.

I guess what I'm saying is, expect more content from me on here soon. I relaunched my Izzi8bit channel into Pumpkin Dragon. One of my plans was to become a small fore-hire "studio". I know eye roll a one-person "studio". But when I was working for Animeme I was their entire production team for 2 years. I was the studio visual side of the studio. So it's kind of a tongue-in-cheek reference to that.

Anyways I made a highly marketable (and could totally be a plush stuffed animal) mascot, The Pumpkin Dragon itself.

Not sure what kind of response I'm expecting from this post, but that's kind of the gist of where I am at the moment.

~Izzi

Hey Friends!

First of all, I want to say thank you so much for such a warm welcome! I did not expect my stuff to be so well received! In fact, my Bowser short has double the views on here than on Youtube. And all the feedback is was great too!

So someone suggested I do a "Mario does shrooms" joke and I said why not. Sure it's overplayed but it could be fun. So I set out to make a cartoon in 48 hours start post-production (I'm still getting my sound guy to do audio mixing.) Well, I made it!

As soon as I get the sound mixing back I'll be posting it and on Youtube. Here are some frames from it.

Here's a look at some of my versions of the Super Mario World style for my upcoming series Super Bowser World. It's a tribute to Mario during the SMW Era of the franchise. Which I have deep nostalgia.

The first episode of the series should be ready for upload this weekend! And I've started working on scripts for the second episode, have concepts for others. One of which will be a horror themed, another is mockumentary! I'm really excited to see where I can take my pixels.