Black Squirrel

Black Squirrel's most accurate reference, also from the FIFAD Fad.

Black Squirrel
Profile
Aliases:	None
Real name:	Unknown
Interests:	Spriting, Game making, collecting retro games etc.

Black Squirrel, or "BS" for short, joined the MFGG forums on the 16th January 2005, but lurked around many months previously. Having worked with TGF for nearly 2 years, he discovered MFGG by accident, and decided to look around.

History

Before Black Squirrel discovered MFGG, he discovered the once thriving SFGHQ, which was used as a resource for his game-making skills. Downloading practically every TGF library there, he moved on to MFGG, doing the same thing. It was quite likely that he played a significant part of the bandwidth problems at the time, but not knowing this, he extended his TGF libraries until he had everything from MFGG, SFGHQ, KFGD and ZFGN (The last two are no longer in existance). Once there were no more libs to be downloaded, BS decided to actually concentrate on making games.

There was a gap between making games for a period of a few months, where he became interested in research into finding new things in some ROMs (Especially Sonic games, which had inspired him from an early age). However after registering at the SWS2B forums and acting a bit n00bish eventually being kept in 'Pending approval' brought him back into the world of game making. BS still visits SWS2B and Sonic Cult/X-Cult from time to time.

Still unexperienced at game-making and tired of failed attempts at making games, Black Squirrel became bored once again and decided to create his own game making website, BSD. and eventually register on MFGG's forums. Registering at MFGG became the most influencial part of Black's internet 'life', and he still remains there today.

MFGG introduced BS to the greater spriting community, which interested him more than game programming, and he soon became an active member. His first attempts at spriting weren't too great, but they slowly improved and now his work is regarded highly by fellow members. Learning how to sprite also improved BS's art skills, possibly being one of the reasons his artwork at school is also reccomended. However, due to his scanner being a bit slow, and most of his work not being accessable outside of his school, not much is shown off at MFGG. Attempting to draw using programs like Photoshop don't end well either due to the fact his mouse doesn't run smoothly anymore.

Black Squirrel's MFGG Update Icon before the change to MFGG 2.0

A year passed at MFGG and BS was rewarded the super Happy Heart badge (A badge created not long before he recieved it) for not being warned throughout the year. He was also nominated for best newbie at the MFGG 2005 awards, although he didn't win. Eventually having made his way into the community and recieving many other badges for his sprites/reviews/submissions, he was nominated to become part of the MFGG staff team as part of quality control and moderator of the submit-it forum (Sharing with Parakarry, although Trasher, ShadowMan, Retriever II and Thunder Dragon are also part of quality control). Accepting this role, he remains in that position now, and aims to serve MFGG proud.

Character

Black Squirrel's 'furry' or character is, as the title suggests, a Black Squirrel. BS was originally a Sonic edit turned into Ray the squirrel, then recoloured (badly) back in the days before BS descovered advanced spriting. The original edit was actually by a member known as 'Blues the Squirrel' from SFGHQ. Black and Blues have no relation to each other and only met once at topic at MFGG.

The character of Black Squirrel has often been regarded as strange due to his eye colour being the same as his fur colour, and the pupils being red. This is the result of bad recolouring, but has been kept anyhow. As well as having black fur, BS has a blue "stripe" along the back of his body and tail, and along the front of his arms and legs. Depending on the perception, this can be one thick line that covers the back, or two lines that are along the bottom left and bottom right of his back. BS also has grey shoes, as supposed to the red ones that Sonic has. The most obvious part of BS is the tail, which replaces Sonic's spikes and allows BS to glide (As well as balance). It has been said that this tail is strong enough to hold the rest of Black Squirrel's weight too.

Stixdude created a version of Black Squirrel with white eyes and black pupils (As well as a coat), which insprited BS to improve upon his character's design. So far no changes have been made however.

Known Work

Black Squirrel's spriting career really started at the introduction to his custom Mario backgrounds/items. Although they were simple, they worked really well with most Mario styles used at time, and were well thought of. Since their creation they have been used in a number of fangames, one of the most recent being Super Mario Epic 3 by Captain Jeff Silvers. BS no longer thinks these sprites are upto his current standards, but are still liked by many people, of which he is thankful for. "Tileset 06", a project started by Black Squirrel, is a major update to his old tileset, demonstrating how his spriting skill has improved. Although currently a WIP, it is already much larger than many of his previous sheets, and has been used in many fangames already (Super Mario Greetings, Super Mario Land 4 etc.)

An early drawing request topic was also started by BS through boredom. This involved him 'drawing' other people's characters in 'circle' form. They were quickly made and weren't of great quality, but many people liked them for whatever reason. The topic eventually grew out of MFGG and into BS's own forum too. Since then, request topics have been frowned upon for taking over the Arts board, so now BS only draws/sprites people's characters if he owes them (Of which there are still quite a few). These 'cicular drawings' have been dubbed many names; "Blob forms", "Circley characters", "mini versions" and many others. There is no official name for them, but they do appear in many 'tests' that BS does.

He is also mainly responsible for the not-so popular Dopefish fad, which ran through for a couple of days before eventually dying. BS still keeps a dopefish in his signature.

Super MFGG War, another half-fad based on the game Super Mario War was also compiled by Black Squirrel. However, all he did was compile sprites, music and levels created by other members at MFGG). Members like Lee and Akruru were largely responsible for Super MFGG War's content however. Also, Kitsune Yamato should be credited for the hosting of the first version. Super MFGG war occasionally pops back up to the top of the PPP for various reasons, and version 2.0 is available to download.

More recently, Black Squirrel has been concentrating on making various rips of "Obscure" games, submitting many obscure Mario sprite sheets to MFGG and achieving the "Most Positive Contributor" MFGG 2006 Award along with Retriever II. His work is usually useless, yet strangely interesting when compared to 'normal' sprite sheets, ranging from mainstream games like "Wario Land II", to strange, pirate NES games such as "Kart Fighter" and "World Heroes 2", many of which have never been ripped from before. He has also ripped from many other games too, ranging from Sonic the Hedgehog, to Bomberman, and spanning to many platforms that many don't have the patience to tackle (Like for instance, the Virtual Boy).

He also seems to be one of the top contributors to this Wiki.

Trivia

• The nickname or abbriveated name for Black Squirrel, "BS" is also the term used to abbrivieate "Bulls***". Unfortunately Black Squirrel was unaware of this when he chose his username, but as it isn't used that often, it doesn't make much of a difference.

• "Black Squirrel" remains as one of the most unimaginative usernames on MFGG, however his character is one of the few Sonic edits that no-longer resembles a hedgehog of some sorts (Other Sonic edits on MFGG have now been improved/changed so that they are completely custom).

• As well as being part of MFGG's site staff team, BS was also a global moderator of Kirby's Fan Gaming Dreamland (KFGD), a smaller site than MFGG, but shares the same basic concept of it, except specialising in Kirby games rather than Mario ones. KFGD has recently closed down following ZFGN of last year, however.

• BS is not actually Black in terms of skin colour. He is a white, British, male (human).

External Links

• Black Squirrel's Domain (BSD)