Description
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqhePIv2FsU Link to watch the full music video!
This is my animated portion for the MMV collaboration Zycrant (Fani) hosted! Song: Memory by Sugarcoat. The theme was "memories", so I had a lot of fun reflecting back on my times with the game MapleStory and the YouTube community and friends I've made over the years.
Again, Go watch the full thing! ...or right-click-loop my part :D.
(Copy paste of my YouTube comment, maybe there's keywords in here that'll help with algo/visibility, ionno).
Behind the scenes insights:
So, I was originally invited to this collab back in the start of 2025, which makes this a little over a year in the making! I don't think I have made a MMV since like... 2010... But I was into the idea of trying it out again and joining this with some of my friends. Then I got more excited for it when they decided that the theme was "memories"! Each animator had their own take on how to express this theme, with their own circle of friends and stories to tell. I really loved how the full video turned out, and it was a lot of fun working together on it, so another shoutout to go watch the full collab if you haven't yet!
Anyway, while I knew some people, I was kind of the odd one out within the group. I was friends with some of the animators, but I wasn't as close to most of them as they were with each other. So when I was thinking on what to animate, I decided to go in a direction that was a bit more familiar + accessible to everyone... Which was leaning into the nostalgia of the game MapleStory itself!
So the start of my animation highlights the journey off Maple Island to Victoria Island, leveling up, getting a bamboo hat, losing it in drop game, then shiddin' my pants from the Orbis balrog spawn... Those are all deep-rooted gameplay memories that I've always wanted to montage since it's such a shared-gameplay experience many of the old school mapler's had haha.
Then reflecting back to my gameplay experience when I was a kid, what got me to look outward from my own solo experience was seeing top-level bossing videos on YouTube. (Shoutouts dray86 lol). So in the video my gameplay experience montages recognizable players like Tiger, Suuushi and Fangblade. From there, I continued to level up and play the game.. So many hours in Ant Tunnel Park lol. Then... my personal experience with MapleStory took a complete change once I started creating videos on YouTube. So in my video, I wanted to transition my POV as the player from within the game itself, to the "Maple YouTuber" spritefan2.
I wasn't sure how best to visualize this "spritefan2" YouTube era in the video at first. I had ideas of montaging clips of my old videos, but it was looking a bit too cluttered and chaotic. So I landed on a plain (Mapling Times-like lol) background, where the years tick up while friends + members of the animation community increase over time. I thought it worked out perfect, since creating collabs that pull together dozens of people have always been my favorite part of the process. As I was adding characters to this sequence, I kept going like... "omg if I add this person, then I need to include this person". This happened until I hit around 130 people!! But then, special thanks to Zackattack, Hunter, Bulbawhat, & Fani for supplying me with more sprite sheets of people I wanted to include. With that, I ended up with a total count of 245 characters in this sequence!! Maybe a new-record for number of maple-characters on screen! I wish I could include EVERYONE and I apologize if I missed you/anyone, but as fellow animators, you must know the pain I went through to collect all of these spritesheets haha.
ANYWAY - ik this is a long breakdown & thought process for this video. But I took this as an opportunity to create my love-letter to both the game Maple Story and the animation community here on YouTube. I was making this video as-if it were my last animation, but by the end of it... IONNO, KINDA WANT TO DO MORE... (I'm busy tho). I've come to accept that this animation hobby will always be fun as long as it doesn't interfere with life too much, and it keeps me connected with other animator pals. :D
So big thanks again to the old MMV community for pulling me into this one. And thanks to anyone who actually took the time to read this. All of ya'll who continue to watch and engage in the comments mean a whole lot, I appreciate it! face-red-heart-shape
#maplestory #메이플스토리 #animation #spritefan2 #메이플