(Click/tap the screen or press space to navigate through the images!) Hello everyone! For the past few months, I've been seriously thinking about "rebooting" my series of animation. As in, completely starting over from scratch. Mainly because I feel like my series could really benefit from a second go around, as I already have experience from making animations in the past 4 years and I can use all of that as a foundation for a newer series with revamped settings, rewritten and more fleshed out character personalities, etc. along with no longer having to follow the continuity of the older, clunkier animations I made back when I didn't really know what I was doing. Keep in mind though that this is just a thought I had in my mind for now and I can guarantee 100% that I'll go through with this reboot. But there's a very good chance that it'll happen in the near future, just not now (any new projects I post for the time being will still follow the old continuity). Additionally, one of the biggest things I'd really like to update for a potential reboot is the art style and character designs, as I feel like that could really use a refresh as well, as the art style of my animations has stayed basically the exact same since late 2022 with only some minor tweaks here and there (heck, Johnnie, Mr. Nesmith, Wolfin, and Toon Berger in particular basically haven't changed at ALL since 2022 design-wise). That means that I've basically been forcing myself to continue animating cartoons in an overly simplistic art style that I consider to be outdated and not as appealing anymore. So, just to see how a refined look for the series would look like, I spent the last week creating updated and more unique designs for 15 of my characters, all in a newer, more unique art style! (specifically a style that's heavily inspired by highly geometric thick-outline cartoons from the 1990s and 2000s, my main references were The Powerpuff Girls and The Fairly OddParents in particular). So, what I included in this project are images of all of the new designs! Again, keep in mind that there's technically no guarantee yet that I'll actually end up using these, as for now they're just a proof of concept and still subject to change. But I'd still really like to know what you all think of them! I'm aware that there's more characters that I could've potentially included rather than just these 15, but I prioritized these characters since I consider them to be the most "important" ones. However, I am thinking about maybe updating this project in the near-future where I add redesigns of some of the more minor characters too, so that's definitely a possibility! Also, the character models in this project are NOT vector sprites, they are just images I made for display. However, it is still very likely that I'll make vectors of them later! (continues in notes and credits)
(continued from instructions) As for the redesigns themselves, some of them look pretty similar to their originals (like the Nesmith twins and Toon Berger) while others look WAY different (like Mr. Nemsith and Steven Swindler). And you may have noticed that a few of them have received name changes as well! Specifically, David Nemsith has been shortened to just "Mr. Nemsith", Sunshine Moonlight is now just "Sunny Moonlight", and Myla Miller is now "Millie Miller". (And now that I think about it, I probably should've changed Bunnis' name as well lol. I'll probably change that in a future update). Now, the reasons I have for changing these names are pretty straightforward. For David, I changed him to just "Mr. Nesmith" since I decided that I want him to feel less like a self-insert of myself and have him bear less resemblance to me (he already acts pretty differently from how I do in real life and he still has a different last name, but I want to make the differences more obvious). I still don't know what his replacement first name should be, or even if I should give him one at all (speaking of Mr. Nemsith, I've thought about giving him orange hair so he could match with Johnnie and Janie more. However, the orange hair looked a bit odd to me, so I included a second version of the design with black hair instead, since I haven't decided which one I prefer yet lol) As for Sunshine, I changed her name to "Sunny" simply because I thought "Sunny Moonlight" slowed better than "Sunshine Moonlight" (although Sunny is still technically just a nickname of Sunshine). And "Myla" is probably the character I changed the most here, having her renamed from "Myla" to "Millie", and that's because Myla was originally designed by an old friend of mine several years ago, and I decided that I'd like my version of Myla be a distinct character that's separate from his version of her, hence the name change ("Millie" is also a nickname that another old friend of mine had!). Of course, these name changes are still technically subject to change, and I won't be using them for the regular projects yet. Because again, this is all just a proof of concept that technically isn't fully solidified yet. But anyways, what do y'all think of these new designs? Would you like it if I started using these? What do you think? :) (Also, if you're wondering why Gage The Gadget isn't here, I decided to leave him out since I realized that he'd basically just look the exact same but with thicker outlines and sharper edges lol. However, I will be sure to include him if I ever decide to make an update to this project with more redesigned characters!)
