#pack bgtes

I wanted to be all cryptic and cards-to-my-chest with this site and the project(s) I'm working on, but that's not really how you get people invested in your stuff.

There's plenty I don't wanna yap about just yet, but as for what I'm doing here;

This is Boltzmann Expy. He's wants to be a supervillain.

And the best way to learn is by teaching, so he's gonna teach you how to do it too!

Bex here is making a tutorial series. His "lessons" range from evil lair design, to espionage, to philosophical inquiry as to what makes an action qualify as evil. He's got cartoon logic on his side and a penchant for chaos.

This series is set to take place within the world of Minecraft (so, I don't have to draw backgrounds, but can instead build the sets) and expand on it's world building in ways similar to the way the MCYT fic communities do whereas the movie failed spectacularly (seriously, that thing gave me so much more confidence in my own project).

(Their name is Marbles, they make the end of each episode. They happen to be glitched, but they're doing their best. This is also one of the finished scenes I have so far) The hopes is that the series will last a dozen or so 15-25ish minute episodes where I can practice/ teach myself different animation techniques and tell the story I wanna tell along with some other... fun stuff that I'll reveal when it's time (cough 1-19-7 cough).

Every character uses a different animation style;

Bex is animated in After Effects through puppet animation, his 2D assets all being premade in Krita and then manipulated in a 3D environment

Pack is a PNG who gets physically drawn with markers before being squashed and stretched

Sprite is made with pixel art

Marbles is a sketchy animatic with outlines shown and proportions left loose

??????? is fully cleaned and animated smoothly in 2D

(This is concept art of Pack, she's based on Pack.png and she's here to investigate some suspicious activity. She also happens to be a living piece of the UNIVERSE who wanted to better understand players.)

I've got a ton of concept art for this thing, but it's wayyy off from being ready yet.

So I was thinking, Why not start showing my concept art, my works in progress? I've always been nervous about doing that, but that seems to be how indie creators find their footing; they show their rough stuff so people can see how they grow.

(This is Sprite. They're on the same mission as Pack, but have a very different point of view than she does. They both work for the Administration, or Admin for short.)

I'm really excited about this project, but it has a long way to go before I can even air episode 1 and I've already been working on it for a year!

...

Well, that's not entirely true... Technically a large part of this project was started in January of 2021, but for the sake of what I'm talking about right now, this batch of stuff...

... has been in the works for about a year with a ways to go before episode 1 is ready.

Imma keep at it and imma show y'all how I'm doing. Feel free to ask questions or check in on my progress every once in a while.

Sincerely,

[REDACTED}

Some concept art of Pack.

Her skirt is a handkerchief skirt of the pack.png map and her tie is meant to be the waterfall in that image.

Her eyes are all skyish like that because she sees from the top down. She sees the world like she's looking at a map. To her, players are the little arrow-dots. She can't see what's directly in front of her the same way someone with first person vision would.

Her malar rash is due in part to her being disconnected from the UNIVERSE and her code's reaction to playerhood, but also because players can't get the seed for pack.png anymore through natural generation since the mechanic changed. Her code tries to read the ported data and it manifests as a rash. Plus, it looks like the little line of stone on the cliff face.

She's meant to look both like a modern young lady, but also like an old timey princess since she's from a bygone era but also actively working in a high tech agency.

She acts like it too. She has a lot of older wisdom due to being around since beta (she misses how brightly saturated everything used to be), but she's also in the know about modern updates, player slang, and building standards/trends.

At one point I thought about giving her wrinkles, but to be honest she still acts pretty childishly (her immortal self giggling about the silly little modern players) and she's not THAT old. Her knowledge and memory is, sure, but her playerhood isn't. So... imagine being conscious years before you're actually born, seeing and hearing everything without being able to touch or say anything, and then when you are, you're stuck in a body that hasn't matured enough for your brain yet (a baby who already knows quantum physics but has never walked before). You've lived for decades, but only been physically able to interact with the world for a few months. High INT with low WIS except... she's also watched players build stuff on her seed and listened to how they've grown and interacted with each other before it was no longer viable. She knows the concepts behind social interaction, but hasn't gotten to practice them herself much yet.

sketches for what the title card. I like the current version, but I'll probably still modify it at some point. Also a little group doodle of the cast.

Some head shots of the main cast.

Fun facts:

Bex's entire outfit, down to his roller skates, is all based on clothing items from my own closet. Even his hair and eye shape are modeled after a wig and a set of contacts I regularly wear to conventions.

Pack's hair is meant to read like strips of paper since her outfit is based on both the seed for pack.png, but also its overhead map image. I was debating on whether to make it green to be like the iconic hill from that image, but it didn't look right with the little pompoms she has for the trees. She's meant to have a weak chin.

Sprite's outfit also comes from my closet, but I modified my sweater into a vest for them and gave them my old yellow middle school uniform shirt to wear underneath it. Their hair has the same awful split ends like I used to when I was in grade school.

Marbles technically has stubble, but it's pretty faint and doesn't usually show up. They also have four ears, the two on the sides of their head and the two on top.