Hopefully most of the visitors here at ForTheLose.org are into animation, because, well, that’s what this site revolves around. If you are interested in animation, odds are you’ve at least used Adobe Flash once or twice. Once you play around with it and learn the ins and outs, you’ll find that Flash isn’t a hard program to work with at all, it actually makes the animation process alot faster and easier on you. If you’re anything like me, you probably enjoy watching others work in Flash. It’s always interesting to see how people animate different things and what their techniques are. Here are a few sites I visit daily that center around Flash as well.
CastleCrashers.com
If you visit NewGrounds.com, odds are you heard of Tom Fulp’s pride and joy, Alien Hominid. Well, his company, The Behemoth (the ones who developed Alien Hominid for consoles in Flash), are putting the finishing touches on their next game, which is totally made in Flash, Castle Crashers. The developers kept the fans wanting more by throwing out videos of them animating and working on various aspects of the game as well as pictures of levels, characters, and many other things that they’ve completed. The site is full of media to inspire any animator out there to create whatever their heart desires. Castle Crashers is due out near the end of Summer 2008 for Xbox Live.
MondoManiatrics.com
http://www.mondomaniatrics.com/blog/
MondoManiatrics.com is a development blog for a platformer built in flash by a single person, James nolastname. He keeps his visitors updated regularly with the progress of the game with newsposts four or five times a week. He posts pictures of the characters and of the levels he designed as well as videos of him animating random things, such as the run for the main character. He also gives the visitors access to the storyboards and concept art he’s drawn to give us an idea of the process involved in creating a successful game. This is one of my favorite flash-based sites that I check out daily.
KeyFramer.com
Chris Georgenes is a professional Flash artist, which means he basically makes a living off of Flash… that lucky bastard. Some of his work has been featured all over the place, and one of his pieces, an ad for Coca-Cola (made in Flash), was featured in Times Square, New York City. Even though he updates very rarely, his site is chock-full of tons of great links to other flash sites, as well as professional video tutorials on how to animate and work with Flash. This is definitely worth a bookmark.
Here are some other sites that are home to some of the most successful flash animations around the web. They may not help you to learn flash, as the sites above would, but the animations on them are very inspiring. I’m sure you’ve heard of them already:
DeletionQuality.net - Home to the Castle series by Oscar Johannson.
Fusion-Revolution.com - Home to the Killing Spree series by Sam Green.
Explosm.net - Home to the Joe Zombie series as well as the Cyanide and Happiness comic strip by Rob Denbleyker and co.
You can also find videos of me animating and drawing random little things in Flash on the Videos section of this site. I’ll be adding more in the future, so keep an eye out on that. I hope you’ve enjoyed this article, and if you did, don’t forget to bookmark us or join our RSS Feed!
Cya’.
July 4, 2008 @ 6:28 am.
Hah! I haven’t seen any castlecrashers movies yet, but i already love it, cause the drawings is so awesome! Gotta get a 360
PS: Forthelose 3.0 is awesome ;D