My goal for the month of October has been to covert the original MIDI based music from QBob into a more sonically robust modern format. I made a passing attempt to do this in the early 2000s when I thought Amiga tracking programs were the future of music. Madtracker was my go to program for creating sample-based techno songs and I managed to convert the track “Erie” but that was about it.

Cut to 2024 and I have actually expanded beyond the scope of shareware music software. My current DAW of choice is FL Studio. It has all the features necessary to directly convert .MID files into FL Studio’s file format. It actually comes bundled with a fairly good sounding general MIDI patch too. I could have just imported the files, used that patch and called it a day. Instead I took the time to hand craft various synths and samples to better match what I imagined these songs sounded like back in 1996 when they squeaked out of my old Soundblaster 16/Waveblaster card.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I also made lo-fi Waveblaster versions of all the songs too for posterity. That said, the new versions are sounding great. I have more-or-less finished the music ahead of schedule. The only thing left is give them a final mastering pass which is always a challenge since my PC speakers aren’t very accurate.

What is now going to follow is probably the most time-consuming part of this whole project. The goal is to completely redo all the game sprites to make them have smoother animation, alpha channels, and a more consistent style.

My plan would have been to use Adobe Flash to do all the animations, but then Adobe killed Flash in 2016. What I didn’t realize is that Flash was rebranded as Adobe Animate and now has a more video production focus. I have been (re) learning the software and I feel like this will work nicely. If this wasn’t an option I would probably have to buy Toon Boom Studio or some other program I am completely unfamiliar with.

So far I have completed two character make-overs and the game is already looking more slick and colorful.

Continued in QBob Progress Report #3.

This is a wrapper I created to launch promotional animations for Ajenda Interactive Media. The idea was that you could scroll through the dozens of animations we created and launch them from this page. Unfortunately, we only had one animation to feature at the time this was launched. Be sure to click everything you see.

The Ajenda Creativity Engine is a self-promotional Flash animation I did for Ajenda Interactive Media. It won first place (category: Entertainment/Games) in Chicago’s Association for Multimedia Communication’s first annual FlashFest.

Flash Lives on at the Internet Archive

You can view the animation using their incredible Flash emulator.

This  is a movie that I helped Nova put together using Flash. She did all the art and sounds and I helped her move things around.

Here we have a half-assed game I made with flash. There is no way to win and one way to lose. Avoid the red creature by using the arrow buttons to move your character. The fact that I got the enemy to move towards the player was a big deal for me. This basic animation could be the basis for some real games in the future.

This is my first serious attempt at interactivity in Flash. Like the title says, this is a fully-functional head. You can make the eyes move, drag it around, make it talk, resize it and rotate it. Big-time fun for all!

This is the sort of thing that happens when technology falls into the wrong hands. You know you love it, so don’t even pretend.

…and this is one of my better flash movies. Starring John Burgess as the voice of the old man. The joke is ripped-off from a Cheech and Chong gag.