Heeyyy, inter-net. On September 8th, Sony’s going to release a “Game of the Year” edition of LittleBigPlanet. It seems like a popular thing to do – several other games are releasing “Game of the Year” editions – but I guess you can’t call it “One of Many Games of the Year” because it doesn’t quite roll off the tongue. For this fancy edition, they got some people from the community to make some new levels for it. If you play the game, you will find out that one of those people is me!

The level is called “Cereal Isle”, and I’m not sure how this part’s going to work, but there might be a video of me talking about it before the level starts. Again, I don’t know exactly how they’re incorporating it, or if they even are at all, but they shot some video of me being genuine and boring, so the potential is there. Prepare to laugh. Here is a photo of them setting up video equipment in my living room.

So go buy a copy, or borrow one, or take it out from the library. Or don’t. Either way is cool.

If you want a little window to pop up and let you know when I am and am not watching “Enchanted” on Blu-Ray, my PSN name is “TangoCharlieESQ”.

In other LittleBigPlanet news, my Flight sister*, Vera Brosgol, made a sticker pack that you can download for money. Look how great it is! They even re-jigged the Media Molecule website with all her pretty pictures. That girl is a fine drawer.

* Do not ask her to confirm this comment.

Update. If you haven’t tried this game, and you own a Pee Ess Three, apparently you can go download a demo. Hot sauce! Also in that link, they answer burning questions about how you’ll access the new Gee Oh Tee Ouai bonus levels BY ME and they call me one of the eighteen “super users”. My cousin was a “super user” once, but he got cleaned up. Now he owns a car dealership. Improvement? QUESTIONABLE.

Finally, after several weeks of work, I’ve published my first LittleBigPlanet level. To find it, fire up LBP, go to the search feature, and enter “Tender Buttes”. It should come up. Click through for some more screens, some planning drawings, and a little bit of griping.

Update: Media Molecule picked Tender Buttes as one of their… uh… picks of the week! Also, there’s a video of someone playing it, and not finding ANY of the awesome secrets! The video’s after the break.
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Whoops, time to replace that San Diego post. Very timely.

In addition to this site, I post to a Livejournal account. My thought was that I’d post drawings and some of my other work here, on this site, and keep the Livejournal for blowhardish inter-net ramblings. Lately I’ve been doing animation at Studio B during the days and freelance animation at home during the evenings, which leaves little time for drawings but lots of time to think about blowhardish ramblings. So the Livejournal has been updated relatively frequently lately. I also started Twitter-ing, primarily because it’s a fun exercise in trying to be amusing and/or relevant in only 144 characters. Follow along, if you like!

• Livejournal
• Twitter

I also integrated the “Links” column to the right. Chock-full of great things to check out.

Not only did he have the costume, but he played the piano awesome. The whole convention was awesome. Exhausting, but awesome.

Delilah didn’t take home the Eisner, but I wasn’t surprised or disappointed. Samuel L. Jackson presented the award, so when I heard him read out my name and the title of the comic book… well, I’ve decided to accept that moment as a consolation prize. If anyone has a recording of that, please let me know. I need a new answering machine message.

Flight 5 sold extremely well! Apparently at least 400 copies found loving homes before the end of Saturday, and the pace continued on Sunday. A reasonable guess would be that I was at the table for 66% of my time at the con, which means I would have signed at least 250 copies, each of which would have had a little Delilah or Selim drawing in it. That seems pretty surprising to me. Some pages turned out to have themes or something. If you’re a person that has one of those copies, I’d love to see a scan. Or go post them on the Flight forums.

A lot of people got meeted! Some of them I’d never met before, and others I felt like I’d known for a long time on the inter-nets, but had never met in person. Hey – turns out everyone was really awesome. I was surprised to run into a few folks from Vancouver, the most surprising of which happened at the airport. A friend I worked with at a studio five years ago sat across from me while waiting at the gate, which was surreal since he had moved to Japan, and I hadn’t heard from him since, and he had been at SDCC the whole time. WEIRD.

There was a lot of great stuff to pick up, of course. Notably, I grabbed a beautiful print by Vera and a couple t-shirts from Nucleus (more awesome dudes to hang out with!). I also developed a weird fixation on Revoltech figures, and brought home a couple of those. Lots of video game companies were demoing their stuff on the floor, too, and it was exciting to get some good first-hand experience with LittleBigPlanet, Mirror’s Edge, and Battlefield Heroes. This fall will be a very non-productive time!

Another awesome experience was meeting Travis Charest for the second time. The first time had been in Vancouver about fifteen years ago. I had taken a portfolio of really crap, really high-school drawings to get his opinion on, and he was a lot nicer than he could have been. So I took the opportunity to thank him for his kindness. He said, “let me guess – now you’re pencilling X-Men?” and I said, “ahh, no. But here’s my Eisner-nominated comic!” and we laughed together. Hilarity ceased when he asked me to sign the comic. It seems like it took a long time to get the courage to put that pen to paper.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to come by the Flight table and say Hi. It was a lot of fun to meet everyone and chat, and I hope everyone’s enjoying their copies of Flight and/or Constantinople. Also, so many thanks are due to Kazu, Amy, Johanne, and Amy’s Mom for all the crazy work they put into making the con awesome. I felt tired at the end of the day, but I can’t imagine how bushed those hard-working people must have been. I feel spoiled to be able to hang out with you dudes.

Welcome to the brand-new TonyCliff.com! The major difference between this version and the last is the new blog-type style. I’ve adopted this format for two reasons: recognizability and ease of use.

More and more artists are posting their work on the inter-net, and many of them are using Blogger or services like it. Loads of artists are representing themselves with long, vertical sheets of their work and postings. And then the links and “about” sections are off to the left or right. So if you browse a lot of these pages, you get used to interpreting the way the information is presented, and that’s why I thought I might conform my own website to this format. My website design skills are nothing special, so I don’t need to try to astound a visitor with a new and groundbreaking interface. I might as well make the content as easy as possible to approach without throwing up any interface barriers in the way. So with the blog format, the arrangement of the information should be familiar and easy to digest.

Theoretically, if I use the Categories and Tags properly, that should also make it easy for dudes to get at theoretical posts that theoretically would contain the theoretical content they’re looking for.

But ALSO it will make it so much easier for me to update my website. With the last site, it was so cripplingly imposing to edit anything that I never actually did.  It involved firing up Dreamweaver, cutting up pictures in Photoshop, and then wrangling links to make sure nothing was broken. It was a huge pain in the ass.

This new site uses Wordpress to power all this bloggy-ness, and hopefully that will enable me to post in a more timely fashion. Fortunately, it also allows complete customization, so I’ve been able to modify the look so that it’s not so generic as, say, Blogger pages are.

The downside to that is that it involved learning CSS and enough PHP to assemble Wordpress’ features. Fortunately, they have books on this sort of thing, so that helped. Also extremely helpful, though, were Luc Latulippe and John Martz, both of whom are awesome people (you may recognize some design features from their websites). Additionally, I added Cabel’s “FancyZoom” feature, and so thanks are due to him, too. I also referenced some other Wordpress themes – see the “About” page for more information.