William Thorup

Illustrator, Motion Graphics Designer, Animator, and VFX Artist

Category: Atari Jaguar Dev

“Look What I Found” – Illustration

I have been painting allot lately. Unfortunately, most of it I am not able to post on my personal blog or portfolio yet. I am involved in comic book project for someone else, and I am doing concept work for some films for Thor Media. So, at the the end of the day, I am all “drawn” out, and looking forward to dinner and an episode of Star Trek. But, I have been recording most of my work, so, hopefully that work will transfer into time lapse videos for everyone to watch and enjoy in later posts.

With that being said, I am working on personal projects when I have the time, especially Jaguar stuff. And that is focus of today’s post.

This piece is a concept piece for an opponent in the Reversi game project called “Intellection”. In story mode, the main character will face off in a game of Reversi against all the gods in the current lore of the story. The lore consists of gods that are personifications of the different aspects of time. (i.e. past, present, future, eternity, etc…). I won’t spoil the story too much, but the primary goal of the main player is to return time to a normal state, by beating the gods in the game of Reversi. Sounds a bit better than an average game of Reversi right?

When I am not drawing for work, I am working on game design documents and assets for our Atari Jaguar games. I really enjoy thinking about a game and its various functions. From game play, style, length, world, music, and characters. There is so much to consider when creating a game with a narrative, not including all the technical stuff, and it really is a challenge.

We have 4 working projects (read more at http://bitjag.com/ out developer page). At this point I have two of the shorter games 75% fleshed out on paper. There will obviously be changes to certain details, but the documents give us a great starting point, and a fall back, if we don’t wish to explore possibilities and just get things done.

March 30, 2014
Atari Jaguar | JagCorner Review | Iron Soldier

Another JagCorner video to talk about. We have kind of been all over the place with the kind of YouTube videos we would like to do. We know we will continue to do the BitJag Development Journals, and we are pretty sure we are going to keep doing the JagVirgin episodes as well.

I guess the reason why we are jumping all over the place is because we are trying to counteract all the negative coverage of the Atari Jaguar. Lets just say, this console doesn’t get the highest score on most gamer’s Hi-Score lists, but it’s unfortunate that there is so much negative for a system that has so much positive. I guess one of my personal goals with doing these JagCorner videos is to promote the great things about the system.

Moving on, what I really wanted to talk about was the opening skit for this review video. I am taking these videos as an opportunity to build a portfolio and push my visual effects skills, and I was glad to see that this shows well in this video.

Jacob and Bryce helped me come up with and execute the concept and it came together almost flawlessly. Everything was done in Blender. Modeling, Texturing, Rigging, Animation, Camera Tracking, Compositing, Editing, and Rendering of the entire video included. I love the Blender tool set, and it never seems to fail me.

The hardest part about this video was the camera tracking. There were no purposely place tracking points in the shot, and the one section I had trouble with was when I stepped out of TV Specialists back door and then the camera swings to the left, revealing the Iron Soldier. I had to manually track 20 or so frames to get the camera swing, simply because all the information in the show was too blurred to track. Other than that, the track was fairly easy, with just a few minor slides and jitters in the final result, almost noticeable. At the end of the day, the entire production was 30 man hours. I wanted to spend more time, but we set a goal to have it released by Thanksgiving.

The end card is a bit special. To achieve a more nastalgic feel, I rendered it out at 320×180 (a 16:9 resolution) and then scaled it up to 1920×1080 with no filter. This maintains the jagged edges on the polygons making it still feel like a low resolution, up-scaled to a high resolution.

Overall, the result was almost exactly how we imagined it, and I love it when that happens.

December 5, 2013
Atari Jaguar | 20 Years – Do the Math | Anniversary Video

Isn’t it amazing? A console that was so commercially unsuccessful, is still very much alive and kicking today. This console did much worse than the Sega Saturn commercially, and for a console that is under the great Atari name, this is surprising, and was quite surprising back then as well.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Atari Jaguar, click on the name to go to the wiki, or continue reading for a quick run-down of what this console generally is for many fans.

Without going into much detail, lets just say that the Jaguar’s history is rough. It was released in November 1993, with much anticipation. At first it did well, but unfortunate set backs began to determine it’s future, early on in it’s life. There are many reasons for it’s commercial failure, but I really only one focus on one for now.

The leading consoles of the time had something that the Jaguar couldn’t really get a handle on. A mascot, a title franchise, a symbol, to help sell the console. While Nintendo had Super Mario, and the Legend of Zelda, and Sega had Sonic the Hedgehog, Atari really didn’t have much in the way of recognizable characters or symbols or something that the player could relate to on a more personal level. Besides their logo and maybe Pacman, they didn’t have much. (Ironically there was never a Pacman game on the Jaguar.) The arcade generation was beginning to close around this time, and titles like Tempest, Centipede, Space Invaders, and Pacman didn’t appeal to a larger audience as a whole. Players wanted story, worlds, and most importantly, characters.

Sure, Atari tried to create mascots with Bubsy and Trevor McFur, but these characters lacked appeal, not to mention, the games they were in, weren’t that much fun to play. So, as consoles with more appealing franchises took the market, the Jaguar slowly sank into the background, and eventually disappeared with the advent of the Playstation and Nintendo 64. The third party developers moved on from the console, and, in 1996, Atari was sold off. Also, official support for the Jaguar ceased.

With all of it’s faults, the Atari Jaguar was still revolutionary for its time. It was one of the first consoles to push out games that were entirely 3D. Titles such as Iron Soldier, Hover Strike, Battle Morph, all showed that the Jaguar was leagues ahead of it’s competitor’s. And while Nintendo, Sega, and Sony didn’t really have any sort of online capabilities until 1999, the Jaguar had support for online and locally networked games. Which included the only console port of Doom that had multiplayer support. As for those who grew up in the arcades, this system had amazing reincarnations of arcade classics, such as Tempest and Defender. And for the people who grew up with Atari, those who played the games, or programmed for the systems, who went to the arcades, the Atari Jaguar represents a culmination of everything that made Atari what it was.

This brings me back to why the Jaguar is still going strong. The last system that Atari ever made, and the embodiment of everything that Atari was. For someone who grew up with Atari this means allot, and is one of the pinnacle reasons why my brother and I want to make games for the Jaguar. Not because we want to make games, but because we want to make games for a console that represents our childhoods. Proving that a console’s success isn’t based solely on sales. That a community of dedicated gamers and programmers can bring value to a system, and hopefully the bi-products of that dedication is good games.

In May of 1999, the hardware, and development code was released into the public domain. Allowing developers to make and release games without having to worry about licensing. This is the catalyst that allowed the community to grow. This along with that dedication to the Jaguar is what allowed for many titles that were initially canceled, to be restarted, and eventually release later on. That dedication, is what kept developers together, and has given us great titles like Downfall (produced by Reboot), and Elansar (produced by Orion), Games that were released 17 years after the console’s “death”. Very few consoles can tout that they have this strong of a community, many years after official support has ceased. It is a testament to the consoles quality, and the quality of people who support it.

I am not sure where the Atari Jaguar will be in another 20 years, but I am enjoying the great success it is seeing today. BitJag hopes to contribute to this success, and we hope to see many more people flock to this console, and many more games in the future. Here’s to 20 years of the Atari Jaguar.

November 22, 2013
Atari Jaguar | Brawler – BitJag Game | Box Art

The Jag stuff still goes forward. Project 3 final has a name, “Brawl”, and a start on the box art.

This was an awesome piece to work on. And I first need to thank Michael Buhler for his input on some final decisions on the background and title text. He is an amazing artist and you should check out his portfolio HERE.

The lighting and color were my favorite parts of this piece, and all the pieces seem to fall in place, when I need them. Something that I should have spent some more time on, before starting this piece, was draw up some concepts for the male character. I like the way he came out, but I think a bit of forethought would have saved me some time in the long run.

Again, enjoy the time lapse video, and check out the new update video at http://bitjag.com/. There are some updates to concept art on that page as well.

October 5, 2013
Krita | Character Illustration | Jouster

Some more stuff for our Atari Jaguar project. I have been working on story ideas and concept drawings for our jousting game, and this design came to mind.

If you haven’t already, head over to http://bitjag.com/ and check out the three projects that we have in the works. Not a whole lot of visual concepts yet, but stories are being put together and their general concepts are listed on that site.

What I enjoyed most a about this painting was the lighting. The composition and the pose could be better, but I think the good lighting helps make up for that. It really brings the viewer’s eyes to key and attractive points in the painting, and overall, it is very comfortable to look at.

On another note, if you haven’t noticed already, most of my most recent paintings have all been done in Krita. I am in love with the program, the interface and default shortcuts work great with my Cintiq 13 HD, and overall it seems like a much smoother experience than Gimp lately. Gimp has been having some serious issues with my hybrid ATI graphics setup, and so, I mainly use gimp for my graphic design work.

Don’t get me wrong though. Gimp is a great program, and it has been especially useful lately because of all the web graphics that I have been doing. Krita just provides a workflow that feels smoother and faster to me, and I think that I will be using it for many of my paintings in the future.

July 29, 2013
BitJag and JagCorner

Please excuse my silence over the last few weeks, but I have been involved in some fun projects, and one of those is my brother and I have officially started our Atari Jaguar development.

Our dev name is BitJag, and we are using the JagCorner name for our YouTube videos and other media. I have mentioned in previous posts about the project that we have been working on for the Jag, but we have expanded, to three separate projects.

We often find ourselves way over our heads, when it comes to the scale of projects that we do. So the other two projects, which are nameless right now, are much smaller, but will be used to stretch our abilities considerably. Check out the Projects page at http://BitJag.com/ to see some of the details for those projects.

We also have our first development journal posted. It isn’t much, but there is some cool footage of an animated sprite character test on the Jaguar console. There is definately more to come. I have been working on some visual design concepts for the battle system, and working on story as well. We will be talking a bit about this stuff in the next dev journal entry, along with some more details about our other two projects.

July 20, 2013