GLO is a character made around 2022 when I was doing a bunch of concept sketches for robots and somewhere stumbled upon the idea of a “quadrupedal sniper” where I was inspired by particularly the design of a robot chassis named “Geekatron Quadruped” from an old ass game called “Mechquest”. The mech chassis actually had an attack on its own without many attachments to it and I found it interesting enough to design a concept.
But as promising as it was, I knew my history and so did other people. I was mostly known as the person who only did “concepts” but never really followed through them so when I was challenged to actually animate this character before I go back to making another promise of “oh this guy is gonna have so many animations”
And so I did. I think I did pretty well for a test concept.
Once I got my friend to admitting that I’m someone who can put pen to paper partially out of a justified spite that worked out in the end ,I went ahead and did more drawings to get a good feel for him, mostly to solidify what I imagined it would look like if he were to walk, jump and do other shitpost stuff since I never really tried my hand at making cleaned up and colored animation by this point in time.
Outside of the quadrupedal prosthetics, other stuff from his design came from….my persona.!
Im someone who usually changes the way I draw myself and thought that it would be quite a waste to throwaway a design just for the sake of feeling different so I recycled an old sona design and applied it to GLO with a few inspirations such as the archer’s hood and sizing up the goggles to represent more bug-eyed characters and what came out of it was something that I actually liked!
He was quite unusual for his time because of how strict I was on clarifying that this is a fighter who spent all his stat points into range, he wants to be far away from you as possible because positioning and range is where he works best at with how his sniper role works and how his legs position him in areas that is easy to reach yet hard for his opponents to read. It was unusual for his time because back then, he came from a stick fighting community that loved its up-close fights.
Super talented people who are great at both high-speed action without cutting the cost of clarity with super simple stick figure styles, they really do showcase the “less is more” type of idea when a stickman drawn in mere seconds can do a lot of things without the need of complicated angles or professional-level drawing. I’m not someone who’s good at high-action but I did want to lean into stylized editing and a slower animation pace to show that chill-yet-cool feel. So it took me about 3 months into uncharted territory for me to make this demo:
As much as I would love to roast myself over this extremely old demo for all its flaws, I wouldn’t be here if not for it. I wouldn’t have developed long lasting friendships and made pretty good impressions on others with this character and I sincerely hope you do look forward to working what I have in store for him.
Recently I wrapped the storyboards up and now things are kicking into high gear with rough animations, clean lineart, backgrounds and whatnot.
This is also a first for me as I’ve rarely taken the opportunity to be this open about the process of making an animation from start to finish but I’m hoping by updating this blog and posting the backlog of drawings I’ve done with great friends I get to fill this with a great history that’s both as entertaining as informative. Currently I work a job that leaves me free on the weekends so I’m relying on the old diary writings as I continue to keep working on this shot by shot but I’m hoping that you look forward to how it goes, more details later.
