This is my entry for the Video Game contest hosted by =Czar-the-Dragon. [link] All the work on it was done after the contest was announced, but *Mirz123 has been wanting to do a full-length Classic Donkey Kong animation for over a year. This was simply an excuse to finally do it.

This was a full collaboration with *Mirz123. However, she insisted I upload it on my account since I worked on it about 10 times as long as she did. She created about 90% of the graphics. I made the other 10%, as well as modifying some of hers. I should note, while we did look at actual sprite sheets from the game for reference, the artwork is 100% pixelled by us. We took care to pay homage to the original, but all of the pieces were pixelled with alterations to fit into this animation. Also, the original game graphics featured flat-coloring. *Mirz123 added shading to the pieces, but made an effort to keep it minimal so it still had the same feel of the old version.

The animation is based heavily on the arcade version of the game, but there are elements of the old NES and other versions, as some things worked better that way. (We watched a ton of YouTube videos of the different versions.) I want to mention that the entire animation was choreographed and timed by me and *Mirz123. Meaning that we didn't just program a video game, upload the sprites, and let the program run. There were dozens of tiny animations which were pieced together and overlayed onto the background to create the piece. I wrote a program that would tell the system where to paste in the graphics and in what order and how to render them. I don't want to bore people with the full details of how I did it, but if there is enough interest, I'll write a journal entry giving more specific details. To see some images of the planning stages, click here:



BTW, the lettering is a replica of the original DK font (and other arcade games of the time). It was created using the "Arcade Classic 2" font by Pizzadude.

*Mirz123 posted an image of some of the graphics she created for this piece. You can see it by clicking here:



All in all, I think I put in around 50 to 60 hours of work into this over the course of an entire week. The program I wrote to assemble the animations is over 3200 lines long. 327 test renders were made before the final version was complete. The finished animation is 585 frames long, just 2 seconds shy of a full minute, and over 3 MB. Between the two of us, *Mirz123 and I created approximately 115 static images which are used throughout the finished product. My computer took anywhere from 20 to 30 seconds to render the entire animation from scratch on each of the runs.

EDIT: We won the contest. I'd like to thank =Czar-the-Dragon for hosting the contest, and for choosing our piece as the winner. Thank you very much.

EDIT 2: Received a Daily Deviation. I'm... speechless, to be honest. I'd like to thank =wisekidk, `CookiemagiK, =Kath602, =SparklyDest, and anyone else who suggested it, and ^krissi001 for featuring it. Thank you all very much.

Donkey Kong and all related elements are copyright Nintendo. This piece is done in a fan art / parody capacity.