[outmanodd]

Strange Dev Sights

You can see a lot of weird things when working on a game. Glitches and frankensteined assets galore! We got to talking about our favorite Brawlhalla ones during the BCX animation panel, where I mentioned the above pictured stretchy-armed eldritch monstrosity. Sometimes when you view all the frames of an animation at once, it looks a little disconcerting! Other times, some thigh assets can look very out of place. But, its all in service of a greater good! The 'back end' monstrosity makes the player facing experience nice and pretty, when all is said and done.

[outmanodd]

Here’s some behind the scenes stuff I dug up from Hugin/Munin development on Brawlhalla. We wanted to play up the musical theme, so we concepted up attacking with musical notation in various ways. This move in particular wound up having a wildly huge hitbox initially, and we quickly widdled it down to roughly half the size it originally was.

[outmanodd]

Stuff incoming?

Been a while since I posted anything on here, but I’ve got a lot of work I’m sure people would love to see. So maybe I’ll post some of that.

[outmanodd]

No More Lab Zero

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Lab Zero imploded recently. They’re the studio that made the games Skullgirls and Indivisible. I was a contract animator for them during almost all of their existence. So it really sucks to see the whole thing go up in flames, largely because of the selfish actions of one person. It personally pains me to both not have so much of my work see the light of day, but to not have so much of the TEAM’S work not see the light of day. There really is a very non-trivial amount of things that were planned for Indivisible that are now unlikely to ever happen. Not to mention the dissolution of a really top notch art team! Really just a terrible shame.

Luckily, a lot of the art team seems to have reconstituted over at Future Club, and I look forward to seeing their output! I myself am now doing animation work elsewhere. Life moves on, and I’ll always be thankful for the opportunities my superiors at Lab Zero gave me!

[outmanodd]

And to wrap it all up, the last thing I can show you guys, and a good callback to my Skullgirls work, Annie of the Stars! I did this little bit for Annie back in 2018, so plans to get her out there had been in the works for quite a while.

[outmanodd]

And here’s the animations I’ve been sitting on for the longest! All the stuff that you’ll see most often in the game! Go stand on the edge of a ledge in Indivisible and you’re seeing pixels directly from my hand to your screen! These got done in two waves, one set before the crowdfunding occurred, and one set closer to launch.

[outmanodd]

This character was handed to me as ‘Hunoch’, I wasn’t aware of the character’s dual nature until the game came out. In hindsight, he was pretty clearly set up for it. You’ll notice that outside of the blue shades, some characters have other markings that act as color guides for parts of a character that will need to change color in a special way. Hunoch and Xiboch in Indivisible use this coloring technique to show their sun and moon. We also did this in Skullgirls, you can see it prominently on some of the work I did for Beowulf.

[outmanodd]

For some reason the stars aligned and I was given a bunch of animations to do for Antoine! Like the Kushi/Altun skydive, Antoine’s downstab is a clear example of characters being the sum of multiple artist’s work.

[outmanodd]

Kushi and Altun have a big combo attack they can do. The animation is broken up into several parts, they fly off the screen then come back down into the screen where the enemy is. A regular sky attack! Worth noting that a lot of artists and programmers work together to make something like this work. You may notice unshaded parts of this animation, those are frames that I didn’t touch. Things I didn’t touch here include the flap loop, which has aspects for both characters, the recover animations for both characters at the end, and the dust effects from the impact. The attack itself was roughed out by another animator and passed off to me for adding and correcting details, as well as cleaning and shading. Then it gets passed from me to more artists for proper coloring, and later to programmers for implementation. It’s a pretty big team effort!

[outmanodd]

Important lore characters, Angwu and Bhadra! I was actually pretty psyched to see that these were the first characters you get to play as in the game. Looks like I did these in 2018.

[outmanodd]

A couple random things for Kampan

[outmanodd]

I only did one animation for Vasco, cool character nonetheless. Worth noting that this was handed off to me as ‘Vasco’ but the final name for the character wound up being ‘Latigo’.

[outmanodd]

Every once in a while Lab Zero liked to use 3D reference to keep mechanical elements looking consistent. Baozhai wound up being the most interesting use of this in my whole stint, since her cannon backpack isn’t super visually self explanatory. Throw some smears on top of it and who knows what’s going on!

[outmanodd]

This was the first enemy I got to work on for Indivisible! And also the last enemy I did work on! I remember enjoying making the intestines jiggle a bit here.

[outmanodd]

This I touched back in 2017! Not too long after the crowdfunding campaign if I remember correctly. This is the only thing I did for Qadira.

[outmanodd]

Adding more work

Boy, its been a long time since I posted anything on here! Things have changed, tumblr is a different place. I’m inclined to post the rest of my Lab Zero work here, at the very least, since I’m a completionist like that.

-Brandon Brizzi

[outmanodd]

I did several animations for Indivisible’s playable prototype! Top to bottom we’ve got Zebei, the archer, Tungar, the sword turban, and Razmi, the shaman. The prototype is available for free RIGHT NOW! You can go download it and find out more here: http://indivisiblegame.com/