Prompt: Facade

Word Count: 507

Below is my entry for the Writers Jam 2025 using the prompt word, "Facade."

Enjoy.

Intergalactic Facade

My head’s spinning, and I need to sit down. It seems so confusing, I had no idea what my friends and I were getting into. It’s almost as if this whole world was a facade. But first, I think I need to explain what happened.

First, there’s the people I was with. There was that candy person called Qlicks. They came from a different planet and they were more of the emotional type. Impulsive they were and they are occasionally unwilling to change their beliefs and thoughts. I don’t know which planet they came from but they really were not influenced by the sweetness and joyfulness that there might have been.

Then, there's that robot, Model X, but we all just call him Xob. He’s cold and passionate. Emotionless is his heart, or, his motherboard. He’s usually stoic and he’s incredibly insightful. I mean, that makes sense when he’s designed by the smartest person in the Xektoralm Galaxy. But I don’t really know the purpose of his existence. I don’t mean to be rude, but I have no idea why or for what purpose he was created for.

And then there’s me. A human. Everybody always says that I’m the last of my kind. But I get all “soul-searchy” whenever somebody mentions it. Everybody always treats me like a convalescent just because I am the only human left in the universe. But I may remember something about humans, or maybe I really am the only one left. So, that’s me. Everlysia Kim. The last human in existence. Or so I thought.

In the spaceship, my friends and I were just hanging out. That was until we intercepted a very peculiar message. It was from humans. Saying that they have been imprisoned on a faraway and distant planet. Eager to realise that I am not the only one, my team and I sprung into action. We discovered some sort of old, decrepit prison island and we assumed that the humans were trapped inside there. So, we had to take out the guards with our powers. Qlicks used their candy powers to trap them in gum, Xob used his energy blaster. But me, I had a ray gun. When you’re a human, you don’t really have magical or special cybernetic powers that everybody else in the galaxy has. It makes me feel unique but it also makes me feel overlooked.

We looked through every single cage but we could not find anything. I started getting queasy. I cannot believe that this message may have just been a facade to keep my hopes up that I really wasn’t the last one of my kind left. My team tried to comfort me, but it didn’t really help. So we just went back onto our spaceship and cruised around the galaxy. Maybe I’m not the last human being in the galaxy. It’s a huge universe out there, with a lot of different worlds. Maybe I am the only one, maybe I’m not. But at least I’m not ostracised from the whole galaxy.

Flash Animation! Wikipedia describes flash animation as, "an animation that is created with the Adobe Animate (formerly Flash Professional) platform or similar animation software and often distributed in the SWF file format." And I'm going to teach you how to make flash animations! I’ll teach you how to make a simple tween.

One thing you must know about Flash animation is that Adobe Flash/Animate will crash. A lot of times, so SAVE, SAVE, SAVE your work as often as possible. Files tend to get corrupted so make sure that you save it on a file hosting website (like Google Drive or Mediafire) before it gets corrupted. Note that I’ll be using “Adobe Animate” for this tutorial. Despite the fact that it’s a different version, most of the versions of Adobe Flash seem to work the same.

Okay, for this tutorial, we are going to be animating a simple ball bouncing animation with tweens. You can do this with hand drawn animation but animation simple shapes like squares and circles are much easier with tweens.

First, open up Adobe Animate, click on “File” then, “New” and then this’ll pop up.

For this, click “HD” and then you set your Frame Rate to “24.00.” The frame rate is the amount of frames there will be in a second of the animation. The standard number most people use is 24.Like what Rebecca Sugar said, “Every second that you see is twenty-four connected pieces.” But feel free to experiment with higher or lower frame rates. But don’t set it to be too high or too low. Adobe doesn’t really like it when you do that. Then, after that, click create!

Then, you’ll be greeted by the REAL DEAL.

Your setup won’t look EXACTLY like this but you can arrange it anyway you like.

Okay, so, at the left side is your toolbar, you’ll be needing it for tools such as the paint bucket, paintbrush or the shape tool.

At the bottom is the timeline, it’s where the organisation of animation content will be, like layers, keyframes and normal frames.

At the right side is the more miscellaneous stuff like the properties bar, colours bar and the library bar.

If you’ve clicked on the paintbrush and drew a few squiggles, you would notice that this program works differently from other tools like Paint Tool Sai, Krita, Photoshop, ect. That’s because Adobe Animate uses VECTOR GRAPHICS! That means the art uses shapes instead of pixels and it can be resized without ever losing quality! Neato!

Next, you should click on the shape tool, drag it to resize the shape. After that, you should select the whole shape, right click and then click “Convert to Symbol.” You should see stuff that says whether you want it to be a graphic symbol and the name, keep the name as it is and click “OK.”

Tada! You’ve made a symbol! A symbol is a reusable element in an animation that you can reuse multiple times in an animation!

Next, you should see this in the timeline.

Right click the 25th frame and then click, “Insert Keyframe.” Next, at the 25th keyframe, you should drag the shape from the left part of the stage to the right part. In between these two areas, you should right click anywhere in-between the two keyframes and then click, “Create Classic Tween.” Click the “Play” button or press enter and you should notice that the shape moves smoothly between the stage.

But we want the movement to be more smooth. To do this, click any part of the purple part. Then, at the right side, you should see this. This is all of the settings for the tween.

Click on “Classic Tween”, click on “Ease In Out”, and then you should double-click quad.

Now, press the “Play” button or press enter and you’ll see that the shape gets faster and then slows down near the end.

Congrats, you’ve made your very first tween! Tweens look pretty good after some practice and usage. Just keep at it and you’ll get there!

Thanks for reading! I’ll link some of my favourite animations that use tweening!

It's Low-Poly day today! I don't have anything but here's some stuff I was a part of that's a little bit related to low-poly!

I don't have an animation, someday I'll do Splatoon justice!

The GameCube Collab is out!

thanks so much newground peeps

IT IS OUT! CHECK IT OUT!

APRIL 30TH 9AM EST

ON NEWGROUNDS AND YOUTUBE

BE THERE OR BE SQUARE

While you wait, check these things out.

Happy Sunday!

MY PICO DAY ANIMATION IS FINISHED!

It'll release April 30th at 9AM EST! And of course, it'll release the same date and time on my YouTube channel! And, the YouTube version will have subtitles!

To remember this moment, I'll quote one of my favourite Tankman lines.

"Did the kid down the street with autism give you a haircut?"