I grew up playing a lot of video games. I remember going out to any restaurant or mall that had an arcade in it and dumping thousands of quarters into any machine I laid my eyes on. From classic games like Donkey Kong to modern games that were first released on consoles. But I’ve always been most fond of fighting games and “Beat’em Up” games. These would include titles such as Street Fighter, Double Dragon, Mortal Kombat, Final Fight, Fatal Fury, Streets of Rage, and many more.

I got into a lot of fights when I was growing up and I also was bullied constantly. And whenever I fought back I would always end up in some kind of trouble. It made me feel like an outcast and that everyone was out to get me. I always felt like I had a need to fight back but was never allowed to. A stigma that has stuck with me all through my adulthood. When I joined the military, I did it for the purpose of being a fighter. But my experience showed me that fighting was something I had to pursue on my own.

I got into fighting games as a means of escapism. Where I was allowed to go to a place where I can take out my aggression without getting in trouble. The whole point is to fight to survive, beat the bad guy, and save the day. But there’s also cool backstories to characters on why they choose to fight. In the Street Fighter series, every fighter fights for a different reason: Guile fights for revenge, Ken fights for glory, and Ryu fights to meet the next challenge.

Sprite animation is always something that I have been interested in. I get inspired by animations that I see on Youtube. There are many websites where you can download sprite sheets of videogame characters, backgrounds, and textures for your own use. Some people make their own games with them, while others make their own movies for people to watch.

This is something I’ve wanted to try and do for my Final Project. I started off using some sketches of my artwork for the Cobalt character. Cobalt is inspired by guys like Ryu from Street Fighter. A stoic protagonist that doesn’t take crap from anybody. I then started to use images of well known pop culture figures and using a the Pixelate/Mosaic filter to make them look like videogame characters. I mostly used Photoshop and Premier for this project and applied what I learned in Time-based Tools to make it look good. I also used Animate to make my own animated GIF to include in my video.

The challenge was figuring out what to draw so I just used references I got from other games. Using my own sketches was difficult and fun though. It’s something I intend to do more of.

I hope you all enjoy. And I will continue to make more stuff like this in the future.