The making of Bad Timing

>> PROJECT – SONIC BAD TIMING <<

:// INTRO

I never thought I would find this project. Ever.

One of the reasons why I like having a site is because I can finally catalog the work.

Sure, there have been many projects which were started and never completed. Some might still sit in creative limbo. But this one here is special.

It’s special because it is my first completed project.

This was an idea, which went through pre-production, ( sloppy ) production, then final release.

There are so many stories which can be told of those long hours creating this small piece of flash animation. But here are the cliff-notes.

:// EVERYTHING BY EVERYONE

There was a year gap while I was accepted into college. It wasn’t because of grades. I actually had to send my school transcripts to get translated (in New York) and sent back to me to have them unsealed by my school (thanks CETis).

During that year, I spent a lot of time online. Mostly learning the ropes of an all English Windows OS. I lived in Mexico, don’t blame me.

Then one day, through providence, I discovered Newgrounds.

I had started to become obsessed with Flash as all ( the cool ) websites were made in Flash. Not to mention the awesome Flash animations which flooded Newgrounds.

I became so obsessed with Flash, that I almost enrolled for web development at school. Almost.

Then the day finally arrived. We were going to be taught Flash in school.

For the first time in my adult life, my body was ready.

:// THE PROBLEMS OF THE FUTURE, TODAY

There were 3 main categories on the Newgrounds site. Basically it broke down like this. Hand drawn animations (egoraptor anyone?), animations which used video game sprites (rise of the mushroom kingdom, baby!), and flash games.

So of course, I wanted to make my own video game sprite animation.

I went back to the beginning, to the roots, to my Graceland. Sonic the Hedgehog.

( SEGA does what Nintendon’t )

I thought of the final boss fight where Sonic is on the Death Egg fighting Metal Sonic and Robotnik ( also known as Eggman for my Japanese players out there ).

Those sprite sheets

:// .FLA

It took about to solid weeks of work to get this done, by that I mean every waking hour during those two weeks.

Basically, I would get up in the morning, go to school, day dream about the project, bug my buddy Joshua Dodson for any technical help he might have on flash, go back home, the scouring every corner of the net in order to source my assets.

Thank you Lord Vader for The Spriters Resource.

This project was a mess. Everything cthat could go wrong went wrong. My old Compaq PC was just barely able to handle it ( it ran Warcraft 3 though ). My 20 gig hard drive was borderline maxed out. My folder structure was non existent.

The final product is a sloppy piece of work.

But a lot of love went into it.

I have no idea how over 14k people have seen it.

Those Twitch numbers would be nice.