Weekend Challenge: The Transforming Octopus!

Bad Piggies Weekend Challenge 26 July 2014

Build a what!?

Let me start off with this little bit of motivational speaking, in the style of all things Ambitious but Rubbish.

As crazy as this Weekend Challenge is, which is somehow build an octopus from a little pile of Lego, a few tubes of Krazy Glue and a few crated engines from General Motors, I didn’t think it was crazy enough. If the challenge involved attempting a moonshot, you might as well make it completely impossible for your crew and yourself by redefining your terms of participation in the Weekend Challenge. Just so you can make such grand sweeping statements like “Don’t Call me Shirley “We did it not because it was easy, but because it was hard“. 

Face it, refreshing the Bad Piggies Facebook Page for a dozen times a minute and ‘ambushing’ the Weekend Challenge announcement with an immediate image post is something everyone can do. But what about waiting patiently for the topic, taking a nap and coming back tomorrow with donut tanks filled to the brim and internal brain spaces cleared of any boring household chores unwanted distractions?

That’s right, the first five minutes of you coming out of good ol’ uninterrupted sleep delivers the best kind of creative environment baconly possible. If you’re like me, you might even dream of fictional re-imagined 60s’ rocket ships made possible by modern technology and how to cram the most amount of combustion chambers into the smallest possible cylindrical volume without the barest bit of respect to thermodynamic efficiency.

But you didn’t come here to hear me rant and rave about whatever invaded my mind, now ten minutes after waking from my nap and unwelcome distractions such as “honey, where’s my dinner” start to rear their ugly head. No, you wanted to hear what I had planned for the Weekend Challenge and how to make the entire Pigineering Crew mutiny and abandon ship to play Angry Birds Epic.

So what did I have in mind that was so terrible?

Bad Piggies Transformer Octopus

This contraption is more than meets the eye…

I wanted to build a transforming contraption. As in seriously, plot out a desired final form, work backwards slowly by trial and error to fold, rotate, transmute, de-evolve said result back into its component parts until it looked like nothing more than a single-celled organism looking as forlorn as like you told it there’s a zillion years of painful evolution before he could be an eagle or a lion.

And then you play it back, like five hundred times over the course of a few hours, scrapping the prototype along the way until you had an “eureka!” moment where at least one component managed to transform itself correctly amid an ocean of epig failure.

Bad Piggies style Angry Birds Transformer Octopus

Bad Piggies with tentacles! Run! Run far away!

But as the saying goes, epig failure is the mother of success, so eventually King Pig’s cranky old music box encountered the Allspark and transformed into an enormous mecha-octopus in front of everyones’ gaping eyes, affixed in fear upon the monstrous contraption towering above the city hoping humanity didn’t make the mistake of decommissioning the Jaeger Program just yet.

Piglets and Gentlehogs, allow me to present the most insane contraption of them all, the progenitor of all things Transformers and Bad Piggies – Orion Octohogx!

• • •

Bad Piggies style Angry Birds Transformer

Name our first Bad Piggies Transformer in the comments box!


• • •

Engineer’s Notes:

To get the animation for the octopus working right, I went to a supermarket that had an awesome Japanese produce section and played with a gigantic octopus tentacle. Seriously, it was huge.

Visit our Facepork Page for more bacon-infused insanity and be sure to check out our YouSnout Videos for more tales of epig failure.

Tags: , ,
Category: Bad Piggies, Pigineering

Comments (21)

Rank: Master Slinger with 5390 points
By PiGurporal Porker (@mpg973)

@Les-Toreadors I made a deadly and very crazy Octopus that can take the eggs of Angry Birds, very professionally. I name it, Angry Octopus!
http://youtu.be/zEk3MkqhISY
Just watch this video to end, but anyway I couldn’t stop his Madness!
Used only the Power-Ups of Super Glue!

Rank: Sling God with 35410 points
By Joey (@joeyba)

Madness indeed! That video is really good. @mpg973 should get a creativity badge :)

Rank: Master Slinger with 5390 points
By PiGurporal Porker (@mpg973)

Haha! Thanks @Joeyba , Making this Octopus was unexpected!
Everybody, Get the Unlimited Power of Darth Octopus!
https://dropbox.com/s/5cm30xb1ed4yijc/BP%20Unlimited%20Power%20of%20Darth%20Octopus.png

Rank: Explosive with 2470 points
By Les Toreadors (@les-toreadors)

Madness!? This is PIGGY ISLAND :)

Your videos are good but is there something you can do about the framerate? For comparison I record at 30fps using Fraps; there is no performance issue on any ‘modern’ multi core processor and works even better if there is a second hard drive to dump the recorded video into.

Rank: Master Slinger with 5390 points
By PiGurporal Porker (@mpg973)

Oh, you’re right, I should upgrade my PC, I’ll do it. Thanks for the feedback :)

Rank: Explosive with 2470 points
By Les Toreadors (@les-toreadors)

May I ask what are you current specs like? I’m recording the current batch of piggy videos these few months on a very crappy old laptop from 2009, albeit with RAM maxed out and a second hard drive in the optical bay.

Older hardware is quite comfortable running 2D games like Bad Piggies.

Rank: Master Slinger with 5390 points
By PiGurporal Porker (@mpg973)

Windows 7 – Service Pack 1
Processor: Pentium(R) Dual-Core CPU E5200 @ 2.50GHz 2.50GHz
Installed memory (RAM): 2.00 GB (1.75 GB usable)
System type: 32-bit Operating System

My PC is really old and slow, but upgrading the hardware is really expensive in my country :( but I’ll do it soon…

Rank: Explosive with 2470 points
By Les Toreadors (@les-toreadors)

That’s faster than my crappy 6 y/o office laptop with a T4400 with max speed of 2.20ghz (non o/c-able) with Win7/32 bit. Graphics is Geforce 103M which is a crappy old discreet GPU.

What recording program do you use? Typically I use only fraps because it can record 720p at 30 to 50 fps no problems.

I think you just need a low cost $20 nVidia GPU (*) in your PCI express slot and 2D games like Bad Piggies would be easy to handle. And of course, a copy of fraps :)

* – nVidia always tended to work better for my budget hardware needs because they’re faster at the small cost of some graphical quality, and I refuse to spend 6 months of grocery money on what passes for high end hardware these days.

Rank: Master Slinger with 5390 points
By PiGurporal Porker (@mpg973)

Oh, I thought my PC is very slow, I think my options has errors, may you help me please:
https://dropbox.com/sh/rtndhwa0c26uad4/AAADPG0Bcpl6kCZ9pw0EyYeZa
I’m using oCam v16.0.0 for recording any videos, and use MWSnap 3 for taking photos!

Rank: Explosive with 2470 points
By Les Toreadors (@les-toreadors)

I highly recommend fraps for video record. Go google it :) The shareware (unpaid) version records 30 seconds with a watermark but you can see if it works better than what you’re using currently.

Fraps also does screenshots well but irfanview is better as it doesn’t lag up slow systems.

Rank: Master Slinger with 5390 points
By PiGurporal Porker (@mpg973)

@les-toreadors Thanks, I installed Fraps, but that records about 450 MBs in every minute, it’s very high, what do I do?

Rank: Explosive with 2470 points
By Les Toreadors (@les-toreadors)

@mpg973 – Mine is probably higher, going 720p at 30 or 45 frames a second.

Fraps dumps uncompressed video to disk hence the huge size. It’s completely normal, less processing power needed most likely, and not really an issue if you keep the recordings at a compact size. Or do it like me and just make an investment in a couple of really huge disk drives :)

Rank: Master Slinger with 5390 points
By PiGurporal Porker (@mpg973)

@Les-Toreadors I found a way, I record videos by Fraps, to make them lower size with same graphics, convert them by Any Video Converter Ultimate to MP4.
Thanks for supporting me :)

Rank: Explosive with 2470 points
By Les Toreadors (@les-toreadors)

Yep! That’s the key. Encode the raw uncompressed video with any type of video processing program you prefer.

I use Windows Movie Maker as it’s simple to use and produces quality wmv output. Also easy to edit (cut) and do transitions.

Other professional video making programs may offer more features but are also less automated and I don’t want to spend 5 hours in Premiere Pro to produce a 3 minute video.

Rank: Shooter with 800 points
By Danke_ (@danke)

Oink! Even King Pig’s Musical Box can be a threat to the National Security, turning into a crazy octopus with a huge apetite for anchors, kidnapping King Pig itself, not even a flying tank oil can stop that beast! Due to the almost indestructible alloy of wood, rusty iron and boxing gloves only TNT it’s the answer! Just use it wisely, blowing up half of the earth it’s not wanted. If you are not a fan of explosions, you may want to test out our latest and most secret plan, recreating Trypticon out of bacon! It’s just like that wierd combo of Orion Pax, an octopus and a pig, just bigger, and more T-rex-ish. (plus the size of a city) From now you may think that this thing has 9999 functions, but it has only 4: Eat, Destroy, Walk, Oink. You also may ask why we show you such incredible Pig-traption. Well, prepare your popcorn and beverages , Mech-Wars may happen next to your backyard (Note:for safety reasons, bring a helmet and quickly hide in a bunker in case of an Epig-fail, you don’t want a city sized gargantua to drop on you)

~ Cheers From Danke!

Rank: Explosive with 2470 points
By Les Toreadors (@les-toreadors)

Wow! That’s the best comment ever in the history of Piggy Island. And thanks for the name too :D

Rank: Sling God with 67705 points
By wrw01 (@wrw01)

Another ingenious invention with motors, propellers, springs, boxes and imagination. The wit in the write-up is priceless. Not sure which I enjoy more, viewing the machines or reading the write-ups (they do bring a smile to one’s face).

Rank: Shooter with 800 points
By Danke_ (@danke)

The write ups have a charm of their own, however writing them it’s time consuming, and the Bad Piggies Topic it’s not as popular as other AB topics. (lack of interest, well, what would you expect from a bunch of lazy pigs? )
Anyone who has the time, the effort, the knowledge and the imagination required can write in this style (but due to the allready mentioned fact, the users may need a bit of encouragement , in the form of shiny huge ostrich eggs, where they can find such treats? On a topic of course, with the help of the comunity, everyone may be able to write a post in this style. We just need green light from our lovely piggy administrator, and with a new schedule of writing, eating and sleeping such topic can be created, setting up the topic and preventing the little piglets from creating chaos through the office may be hard, but it’s easely fix-able with a huge trampoline)

Rank: Explosive with 2470 points
By Les Toreadors (@les-toreadors)

Yes it can be ironic, that we pigs are making a great effort to document life on Piggy Island in this crucial time where manual porcine labor is being replaced by OMGmachines and LOLtraktors. It is a wonderful time of free expression (because King Pig is too lazy to actually, govern..) and the drawing rooms of gentlehogs are filled with the most wonderful of ridiculous schemes to create the next generation of pig mobility.

However an estimated 99.99% of Angry Birds fans see pigs as just another source of 5,000 points and will certainly almost never gain full appreciation for just how intelligent pigs are (did you know pigs are more intelligent than Man’s best friend? OMG!) unless Rovio made an effort to unite the two feuding species, mayhaps by the introduction of a third animal type that makes a sudden appearance on Piggy Island, occupying the land and devouring all its juicy vegetation like an army of a million wooly sheep.

And then birds and pigs alike must unite to combat the threat from this new animal type just as humans (and elves, and halflings, and other races of the light) are spurred to cooperation from the presence of great evil such as from the likes of Sauron. Except sheep are definitely not evil and the presence of cute wooly sheep may be just the key species to mediate between birds and pigs and enforce a long-awaited ceasefire with promises of warm wool blankets that are surely more comforting than soggy trenches and twice-hourly shellings.

But of course time is needed to create such combined bird-pig allied Epic-ness but as we wait for a new Pig game from Rovio, the Few Good Pigs continue to work in candlelight in fear of Angry Bird attack, resolutely aiming to be more than just the sum of their pork and bacon, penning more and more whimsical tales of bacon-infused deliciousness to raise morale of a beleaguered population under siege from avian invaders since 2009.

Pig articles are like tiny islands in an ocean of a billion Angry Birds players, but desperate times call for desperate measures and every little bit of bacon helps the resulting recipe!

Rank: Explosive with 2470 points
By Les Toreadors (@les-toreadors)

Thank you for your continued suppork :) It is most appreciated.

By http://www.homeimprovementdaily.com/

Pretty nice post. I simply stumbled upon your weblog and wished to mention that I
have truly loved surfing around your weblog posts.
In any case I’ll be subscribing to your feed and I hope you write once more very soon!

Leave a Reply to Les Toreadors Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *