Week 2 Recap


Posted on October 17, 2011 by Eric

Now that the dust has settled since our private beta launch 2 weeks ago we’ve really been able to sift through all of the feedback we have received and start working on some updates. This past week our users submitted a lot of ideas and we hope to deliver some of these changes / new features by the end of Week 3. However, one thing that remains unchanged is the creativity of the artists on graFighters, and the awesome characters they have been uploading. So without further adieu here are the standouts from the second week.

Rising Star

Pan Andy
“Cyborg Panda. All he wants is a hug.”
Crafted by: JHC

If the fights were based solely on intimidation factor Pan Andy could officially park himself at the top of the leaderboard. This terrifying combination of panda and titanium lures you uncomfortably close then shreds your face. It’s probably the subtle classiness that comes from the top hat and bow tie that makes you think he can be trusted. However, with a record of 35 wins and 6 losses he must have some kind of weakness. We just don’t know what it is yet. Can we please find this guy a worthy opponent!?

Current Leaderboard

Fallen Hero

Pixel bob
“The only eyeball that is made of blocks, Bob dreams of being a doll factory worker.”
Crafted by: abledbody

Pixel bob got off to a hot start racking up 28 wins and just 3 losses in only a few days time, but since that sprint of domination he has gone missing from the activity feed. Bob, if you’re still out there… give us a sign! It’s possible that you completely exhausted yourself and need a few days to recover, or maybe you saw a commercial for Clear Eyes starring the one and only Ben Stein and decided to walk down to the pharmacy to get that crazy looking retina taken care of.

Most Popular

Trogdor
“Burninating the countryside”
Crafted by: PaperGangsta

Clearly a lover not a fighter, this ancient internet relic of the early 2000′s has taken a break from burninating the countryside to put those consummate V’s to the test in the ring. With a record of 0 wins and 7 losses his fire might not pack as much heat as it used to, but his sleek frame made from an “s” shape with a slightly different “s” shape is just as enjoyable as ever.

Top Users

el-luco
“The Tree Slayer”
Already on your second page of the sketchbook!? Nicely done el-luco, we would love to see characters like ludicrous head being uploaded all day long.

Jigsaw
“The Collector”
Ok, we get it. You still have an awesome collection of action figures that make for really sweet grafighters… and you are good at drawing. Well done sir.

IceCreamSandwich
“IceCreamShakespeare”
Top 3 reasons you are the most poetic fighter in the graFighters kingdom. 1. “Schmogasborgathon of tastiness” 2. Visible Nipples “The invisible-Man’s nearly invisible cousin.” 3. “the California Pimp Slap”

Staff Picks

After much debate, these are the characters who ended the week at the top of our list:

Moustachio
“After the death of his brother, the guy from the Pringles can, Moustachio set out to avenge his death. Losing face in the process.”
Crafted by: doodlesofdestruction

ManBearPig
“Elusive like a pig.”
Crafted by: IceCreamSandwich

dr. Bubbles
“fun fact: great with mayo”
Crafted by: el-luco

Noticeable Trends

ManBearPigs, Mustaches, America (needless to say it was an awesome week)

Site Updates

Footer
Change Log
2 new levels:

Stats After Week 2

Characters Uploaded: 457
Challenges Sent: 4264

Summary

To be completely honest, the Noticeable Trends section pretty much summed up the week. A ton of facial hair, the map of the united states with flexing coastlines, and multiple man/bear/pig concoctions. We can’t wait to see what week 3 has in store for us!

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Beta Launch and Week 1 Recap


Posted on October 11, 2011 by Eric

Week 1 Recap

Yesterday concluded the first week of graFighters beta testing. With it being the first time we have ever opened up our game for anyone outside of the graFighters inner circle, we were really excited to see what kind of response it would receive. The official welcome to graFighters email was sent just around midnight last Monday and within 20 minutes the characters started pouring in. It ended up being a late night for our team, not because we were cracking down on new bugs, but because it was even more fun than anticipated to upload our own drawings and try and take down the characters of our first beta testers.

With this post the graFighters team would like to honor the characters and artists who created the most buzz through Week 1.

Top Fighter aka: The Champ

AOH MAN
“AAAAAAAOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHH, man.”
Crafted by: locomo

Without a doubt the most victorious character thus far in the graFighters world is AOH MAN. Touting an outstanding record of 134 wins and 1 loss AOH MAN is seemingly unstoppable. As his articulate character description may suggest, he hasn’t climbed the ranks quietly either. Seemingly unfamiliar with the word modesty, AOH MAN is almost as good at trash talking as he is at winning fights.  And while other characters on the site may look at him as a villain, we say what good game would be complete without one!?

Other Notables

Worst Fighter aka: The Chump

Frostbite
The barbarian penguin is back. He is 2000 years old.
Crafted by: PaperGangsta

Winning this weeks award for worst fighter (in almost as convincing a fashion as AOH MAN) is Frostbite who has tallied up an abysmal record of 5 wins and 73 losses. Even more unflattering than his record may be the 3 pats on the back he gave himself in the comments section. Maybe he has seen “Rudy” one too many times or just genuinely likes taking a beating, but either way his endless challenges to newly uploaded characters have become something of a welcome to graFighters gift basket, complete with a first victory and the probable false sense of confidence that comes from unknowingly beating the worst character in the game. Frostbite… we thank you for your generosity.

Most Popular

Ink Dink
“When Inkdink heard that graFighters was released, he grabbed the four nearest objects and rushed into the fight! Nothing says “I got this!” like icecream.”
Crafted by: UmbrellaExile

What’s not to love about this disheveled ball of scribbles? He’s kind of like that oddly sympathetic, evil mastermind who plans never work out. With 2 wins and 16 losses, this little guy is all bark and no bite, but the likes and comments don’t lie. Inkdink… get yourself cleaned up, you’ve just be named the most popular character of the week!

Top Users

ruggedboy12
“One Man Wolf Pack”
Maybe you could let us in on your secrets to mastering the uploading process. Seriously, how did you make those butt cheeks so good at grappling moves? And if there were any players with foot phobia you have surely scared them away.

ThornB123
“The Fearless Feminista”
Somehow you managed to pull off two of the sites most outrageous characters (Anne and Kawaii Uggs) in a tasteful manner. Oddly they even add to the elegance to your collection of alluring and undeniably cool drawings.

Leo_Crow
“The Michelangelo of MS Paint”
From smiling sea captains to “fruity” men in tights, your throwback, 16 bit style, is an inspiration for us all.

Staff Picks

When it comes to straight up impressing us here at the graFighters headquarters no characters did it better than these two:

rugged foot
“will take socks off for jelly doughnut!”
Crafted by: ruggedboy12

 

DudeOnHam
“This dude rides a mean ham. He doesn’t wear pants. He has a red hat and blue eyes. When he rides up on his ham, chicks drop like slinkys. What did you do today?”
Crafted by: blingblangblong

Noticeable Trends

Robots, Bananas, and Dubstep

Popular Requests

More levels and HP bars

Week 1 Stats

Characters Uploaded: 376
Challenges Sent: 3,447

Summary

Without a doubt this has been the best week we have ever had here at the graFighters headquarters. As many of you know the product has been in development (sometimes more slowly than others) for the past 2 years, so it has been so much fun to share it with all of the talented doodlers who have been eagerly waiting its arrival. There has been a lot of positive and constructive feedback provided so far and we want to keep it coming. Please continue to submit bugs, comments, and your own ideas to us using the User Voice icon on the bottom right corner of the site. Thanks and keep on drawing!

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Getting our develop on


Posted on July 7, 2011 by Dave Chenell

Hello from NYC!

So we know all of you are wondering what we are up to in NYC and we wanted to keep everyone posted on the current status of all that is graFighters. First of all, the team is split up for the summer for geographical advantages in our plot to conquer the world (you gotta start somewhere). This means 2 members of the graFighters team are reporting from NYC, while the other 4 members of the team are holding it down in Syracuse.

While we did open up graFighters this past spring for a brief moment, we quickly realized that it was in no shape for public use. After getting some feedback from users we decided to close things down again and get back to work. What happened in the spring was hardly a beta or even an alpha; we will call it the “yay it worked” phase, and we are happy to be much further ahead now.

We now spend our days scouring stackoverflow, coding, designing, and drawing, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

We have about 1300 users all signed up and ready and waiting to play. It ‘s a big motivation having that many people waiting for our game and we are getting more and more excited to show you all what we have been working on.

To hold you over, here’s a screenshot of the current graFighters homepage. Much more to come in the following months.

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It’s the wild wild west-


Posted on June 6, 2011 by Jen

-but not that cool movie with Will Smith. We’ve got something just as good, I swear. Even though Will Smith’s and Coolio’s combined powers are most likely over 9000.

Here’s some cool background animations for the level in development! ENJOY.

HORSES.

A FANCY BAND.

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Paper Trail


Posted on April 27, 2011 by Dave Chenell

First and foremost, graFighters officially works. We will upload a screencast/tutorial later today of the system in use. While we have only launched this current version to about 25 people, the feedback has been amazing. We are working on fixing up the bugs and should have a completely launchable version by mid May for you guys. We are stoked for this and can’t wait to show the world what we have been working on.

In other news, last Friday we closed our first round of investment at 200k from X.Million Venture Capital in Germany and officially changed our company from graFighters LLC to graFighters Ink.

So what does that mean for graFighters? It means that graFighters is no longer a what-if-idea, but a working product that has really great people behind it who are putting money into the vision in order to turn it into the best product it can be. If you know Eric and I, you know we have never been about the money, but apparently in this world things cost money (who knew?), and if you want to build really cool things, they cost a lot of money. Way more than Eric and I have lying around. This investment does not change anything on the vision or goal of graFighters, but rather allows us to deliver a better experience for all our users and build the great game that we envisioned two years ago.

We are very excited to be working with Djois and his team at X.Million and can’t wait to bring your all of your drawings to life.

UNY startups coverage
http://unystartups.com/2011/04/27/grafighters-closes-200k-seed-round-from-x-million-capital-ventures/

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GraFighters Theme Music


Posted on March 7, 2011 by Dave Chenell

Some retro inspired graFighters music for your ears. This is coming fresh out of the timeless musical archives of Pete Kistler. Enjoy.
Grafighters Theme v1 by grafighters

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It’s Christmas all over again!


Posted on February 28, 2011 by Jen

but only in the first part of this post:

Christmas Characters

The evolution of a few of the Christmas Characters

And now for the not-so-much Christmas part, but still pretty cool.

How we go about illustrating a level:

Step 1: As tacky as it is, everything started with a blank page. I measured a half to two inch borders. They made it look nice c:

Step 2: I got my acrylic paints, and busted out my raw sienna. Dropped a wash- BAM. Once that dried, I added a wash of blues, greens, and browns.

Step 3: I outlined each building with a .01 pen. Then I take some indian ink and outline the whole city. I repeated this process with tiny neon signs to be scattered. They’re left blank so they’ll be easier to mess around and combined to make even more!

Step 4: Matt’s in charge of making the bridge look spiffy. The painting process was similar, except for more red was involved. And exacto knives. Which were safely handled by Matt. He cut only a few (paper) faces up and playing mr. potato with his drawing.

Step 5: We then popped everything into this nice little program, Photoshop, and played with it until it gave off a good vibe.



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This is madness….


Posted on January 11, 2011 by Dave Chenell

While we know many of you are patiently waiting for the alpha launch of graFighters on the web… (we promise its coming even sooner than the last time we said it was coming soon). We thought we would give you a little sneak peak of the future. So here it is. The future…

Also aren’t vertical videos on Vimeo awesome? Yeah they are.
Props to @SamSkelton for the tinkering and the excellent filming.

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graFighters Holiday T-shirt!


Posted on December 13, 2010 by Dave Chenell

Lookin fresh.graFighters Holiday Tshirt

You can get the T-shirt here http://bit.ly/gXfO8g.

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Dirt off your shoulder.


Posted on September 30, 2010 by Dave Chenell

C0rne1ius decided it was time for an update on graFighters, we all agreed.

First of all we would like to thank everyone who donated to the kick starter project. While the funding itself was an epic fail, the support we received from the local community was fantastic. We set a big-time goal of $20,000 (go big or go home right?) which in retrospect, could have been a bit more realistic. However, the messages and help we received from both people that we know and people we had never met made the project a success for us. It’s great to see that so many people are as passionate about graFighters as we are.

On the funding end, we have acquired some funds from and undisclosed top secret location that we cannot tell you about. It may or may not have involved robbing banks, repelling from moving helicopters, and speedy wire transfers into offshore Swiss bank accounts. But the main idea is that, we are going to carry on, money or no money.

On the development side, (WARNING: NERD TALK DISCLAIMER) we are currently working on customizing and implementing animations for our animation bank to uploaded characters of different sizes and proportions. We are also writing an internal API for our completed decision web to interface with the rest of the system. This decision web decided what moves characters will choose in order to suit them and their attributes. In addition we are also beginning to implement our C0rne1ius algorithm, which assigns attributes based on how your characters were drawn using image processing. Lastly, we are redesigning the UI for the uploading process (which we demoed last summer) to for a better user experience, that is better suited for the technology we have already built.

We still cannot set and exactly launch date since that isn’t exactly our forte, we can tell you that big things are happening.

Again, just because the Kickstarter project is over doesn’t mean you can’t help out anymore. We have great plans available for small investors who are looking to contribute. All help does not need to be monetary as well, we are open to collaboration of all kinds. If interested in these kind of collaborations, to see what we can offer, check out enormo.us.

Overall a big thanks from the graFighters team for keeping us inspired.

wall of inspiration for graFighters

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