Can Eevees play shmups?

I went from wanting a simple comic page to animating a shmup screen.

It began as a cute little idea of Jet, Pierrot and Booster attempting to play a Virtual Console port of a questionably difficult (but still considered EASY by the community's standards?!) arcade game.

Over time something crept in my mind and asked:

"But what if move?"

...

I played a bit of it to get a feel/ have a point of reference. I had no idea there were so many cores in this game. The crunchy laser makes me cringe.

I started going through the 2nd and 3rd passes of the initial comic panels. Pretty standard!

And then I drafted assets for a mock up game, only picking the core (hah) elements from the inspirations I've drawn from.

In hindsight, Lunatone would've made extreme sense for a Gradius boss, huh? It's even shaped like one! And it's SPACE themed!

Ah well, maybe next time...

My favourite part was designing the little player ships. Who're those Pokémon ya Gentooer?

Then it's compiling all the crustiness into one scene.

Then it's a bunch of tweening. I don't know how to describe the way I animated this, but I can say this - the head always leads the rest of the body.

When the movement pattern is complete, you can essentially wing the player ship's movements! After that, it was figuring out how to make the footage look worse so it resonates with the arcade ports of the 90s.

YEEEEEUS.

Last and certainly not least, adding the sounds. The soundtrack I used comes from the PC Engine/T-gfx 16 version of Gradius. I'm not even sure if that version was on the Wii shop channel, but it sounds really good with headphones on! And no, it's not the boss theme, that would drive everyone up the wall.

And that's about it! Hopefully this sheds a bit more insight into some of my more animated pieces.

Thanks for reading/looking o7