Earlier this week Duncan & Jones 2 came out! If you haven't already, go watch it here:

I thought I'd do a little blog thing and talk about the making of this one, I would've done this sooner but I'm currently in the process of trying to get the PC I built to work, so I'm kinda stressed out atm lol.

Anyway, this one took 4 months to make, which is much shorter than the rough 7 or so months I spent on the first one. Which is funny cuz I think this one is much higher quality than the first, guess that shows improvement, but also mostly I think better management of time. I've gotten better more efficient at doing things, I hope I can carry that out in the

future to make episodes faster.

It also helped that I didn't have to work on a full 1 minute animated intro that I don't even like anymore lol, I didn't use it in this one because I think it's already outdated, and I didn't want to extend the length of the cartoon with something that I personally would skip every time.

So yeah, things went alot smoother this time. I wrote the script, did the voices and started work on the animatic. One of the first things I did was do up some model/design idea sheets for the new guys that'd appear in this episode.

These are some (horrible) first sketches for Doogle. I was originally gonna go for more of tough-guy kinda scum fella, the type of guy you'd see walkin around Dublin wearing a beanie. Then I changed my mind and decided to go for more of a weirdo/loser anime type guy. These sketches are kind of like those two ideas meeting together in the middle, and it's gross.

Here's where I think I nailed the final design down. I really liked the idea of this mysterious, intimidating edgy lookin guy that seems all cool, but then you realise ''Oh, his name is fuckin DOOGLE, this guys a loser''. And he is.

Here's the initial sketches for the big dude. He literally doesn't have a name, in the script I just referred to him as ''BIG FUCK''. I remember showing these sketches to my dad, and all he said was ''That's Ninja Turtles''. I was so confused at first but then I realised that this guy does kinda look like some Ninja Turtles character. He's not an important character at all so I guess it doesn't really matter lol

Here's the sheet for those two thugs that appear alongside Big Fuck (I think we started calling him Brock or something actually? Idk). Flash glitched out and didn't let me fully colour the guy on the right so that's why that's like that hehe. I do wanna take up a philosophy where no matter how minute a background character is, I want him to have somewhat of a unique design. I don't mean overly-design everyone, but just make them not look plain and with no thought put into em, ya dig? I wanna take this up more in future episodes for sure.

And finally here's the robot guy. Not much to say about this one, just designed a simple robot that I thought would be easy enough to animate while still lookin kinda cool.

You might have noticed that Duncan & Jones's designs have also changed slightly. This is just to make them more bouncy and expressive, I think it looks alot more pleasing. Similarly, something I wanna improve on is making the animation more fun to watch and expressive in general, while not using a million frames. I look to inspirations like Lupin III or stuff that Trigger does in anime like Kill la Kill, dynamic poses, using limited animation to the effect of comedy, all sorts of stuff like that I wanna employ to make it so that I can pump episodes out in a somewhat decent time-frame while also keep it fun to look at. I also wanna try and make some shorter episodes, so keep an eye out for that.

In general, I'm gonna make sure things start to run more smoothly. We had a few issues on the audio side with this one when we first published, @dogl and @ninjamuffin99 got into a few disagreements with the audio mixing and music, I heard Cam ended up punching Dogls girlfriend and they don't talk to eachother anymore or something? I dunno, point is we got it fixed eventually and we replaced the NG file so it's all good. I was just too giddy and uploaded the cartoon before Cam got a chance to hear Dogls final audio render, that's another thing I need to work on lol, PATIENCE.

I have a ton of inspirations. Stuff like @ChutneyGlaze's cartoons or @aalong64's Sublo & Tangy Mustard series, while they don't inspire Duncan & Jones directly, just the fact that these independent creators are making their own original web-cartoons on a consistent basis really inspires me, and I wanna get to that level someday. I think Duncan & Jones is a very flexible format, and I wanna use it as a catalyst to try new things and improve.

As for more direct inspirations, as you can probably tell, alot of buddy-cop stuff and action movies. Also weirdly, Eurobeat. It mightn't be so prevalent now but for the world and action and stuff, I wanna inject more Eurobeat flavour into it, if that makes any sense. No, no it doesn't. WHATEVER. I also wanna get better at backgrounds n stuff so I can make the world look all cool and futurey, not necessarily cyberpunk, but I want alot of neon and electronics.

And that's about all I have to say about that. This year was very good for me I think. I'm always so thankful for Newgrounds and my friends on here, for giving me the opportunities to make what I love. Seriously, @TomFulp and the rest of the NG team, can't thank ye enough.

This ended up being a very long post so if you read it all, thank you! Look forward to more Duncan & Jones in the future, 2020 should be a good year. Christmas Special? Yes. Halloween Special? Yes. Pico Day Special? Hell yeah, I wanna do all of those eventually lmao. But not all in one year obviously

Thanks for reading, and thanks for watching my cartoons. Have a Merry Christmas Newgrounds!!