Adventures of Chris is a traditionally hand-animated adventure platformer starring an overweight, nerdy 7th-grader with an eternally enthusiastic disposition. When he gets kidnapped by a whiny child vampire and transformed into a helium balloon as a joke, he reinterprets his transformation as a superpower and floats off on a globe-trotting adventure to save other kidnapped kids. Chris finds himself exploring a whole universe of Saturday-morning-style villains, magic, mutants, and superpowers around the world, recalling the television and games of the 90's, when the emotionally serious and the seriously wacky comfortably coexisted.

Post news Report RSS April 2018 Progress Report (A New Demo and the Evolution of Smog Monster)

A new demo of The Adventures of Chris is now available for download as progress continues! Also, check out the evolution of one of the game's boss monsters.

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Work on The Adventures of Chris continues! Currently, I have a working demo containing:

  • The complete introductory sequence
  • The Kingdom of Lost Balloons
  • Mexico (Jungle/Mayan Temple)
  • Malaysia (Stilt Village)
  • Transylvania (Count Junior's Castle)
  • Los Angeles (Freeway/Refinery)

Siberia is next on the agenda - and we're already a ways toward completing the artwork! I'm especially looking forward to the boss of that level... should be a doozy. The demo (PC, Mac, Linux) should now be available for download here at indiedb.com!

The Los Angeles level is the newest completed, and may still need a little bit of tweaking difficulty-wise. But I do like Kyle's new design for Smog Monster.

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One of my favorite things to do when working on the game is to watch lead artist/animator Kyle rough out new character concepts. As someone with little artistic talent, it feels a lot like magic to me. Smog Monster has been a villain in my game since very early days, so I was excited to see him get a "real" design.

For some reason, as we were sitting down to sketch out Smog Monster, we gave him a baseball cap and a cigar. The idea that a monster made completely out of pollution would also smoke a cigar cracked me up. I also loved that the details immediately raised questions about this guy - is he a Dodgers fan? Why? Why does he smoke? Does he need to or just like to? Did he used to be human? What if he didn't? What if LA smog just pulls for LA teams?

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So Kyle did the rough animation above, and Smog Monster mostly looked like that for a while, until I realized that he needed a new personality in his dialog to match his new look. In the earlier OUYA version of the game, Smog Monster was basically an excuse for dumb jokes that, unfortunately, never got laughs. He needed to be more than dumb. So I worked out a new character description for him.

As I was telling Kyle about the new direction for the character, he apparently got inspired to redesign his appearance to match the personality that I had changed to match his appearance! So he sent me a new sketch - this time with a huge, puffed-up chest and a facial expression to match his new role as the kingpin of Southern California emissions. So the final design was more a bit iterative than I originally intended.

I don't know about you, but I like Smog Monster's new shape and expression. I hope you'll enjoy his new dialog and personality as well in the new Los Angeles level!

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