Instead of waiting for my Inkling pen to charge, I dusted off my wife’s old Wacom tablet from college. I grabbed the angler fish from my sketches I liked best, threw that on a guide layer in Flash, and traced the sucker. I’ve never used a drawing tablet before–it works pretty well once you get the hang of it, but it’s pretty fricking tiring to use. I imagine they’ve gotten better in the last six years or so, but it makes me wonder if all the Flash artists I know are secretly ripped in their drawing arms.

I thought the tablet was pretty cool for drawing outlines, coloring, and erasing–but for any really fine stuff I ended up switching to the mouse. Once I had the outline in, I started carving it up and rigging it in Flash. The pectoral fin, fishing lure, and upper jaw are all in one group which can pivot while the rest of the body is still fixed. I went ahead and set up a “slider” right on the jaw from fully open to fully closed, but I haven’t decided how I’m going to do an actual chomp yet.

I’ll probably break up the chin piece and the bobber into different segments so I can give them a little bit of wiggle. Skewing the pectoral fin on the y-axis does a pretty good job of making it look like it’s moving, so I’ll probably do something similar for the tailfin. I’ll probably also break the stomach off of the main body so I can do some tummy expansion and jiggles once this bad boy eats some fish.

In terms of design, I’m still very much at the “toy” phase. I threw on some simple WASD/arrow movement and set the jaw to open/close based on the x-coordinate of the mouse. Just tinkering with this gives me enough direction for where I want to go with this: instead of shaking a phone like I first thought, I’ll have the player navigate the Angler fish with WASD and “shake” the mouse to shake its lightbulb. It’s a pretty ridiculous motion (navigating with the left and shaking with the right), but I think it’ll be pretty fun.

play version 001 here