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A talk we gave at the Develop conference in Brighton on 16/07/10 about how we made all the art for our game Kahoots (www.savethekahoots.com) ourselves, using things we bought, scanned, made or drew.
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Homespun Fun: the Art of
By Ricky Haggett& Nat Marco
from Honeyslug
Hello!
Twitter:
@Honeyslug
@KommanderKlobb (Ricky)
What it looks like now:
8 choc a block15 as you spike it18 life is sweet
We moved away from pixel art because:
1. There are loads of amazing pixel art games already.
2. At the time, we couldn’t afford to pay a pixel artist
3. Nat did an animation degree, specialising in plasticine, and we’d been looking for an opportunity to use her skills
Character Sketches
Making the KahootsIngredients:
PlasticineGarden wirePolystyreneParcel tapeGlue gunFoam (for the ears)Craft foam (for eyes & mouth)
Letter of apology to office cleaners
Huzzah!
The Cardborg
(roar)
Show Fast Show Aardman vid
Animation
The original plan was to make everything out of plasticine…
BUT!
Photographing the Kahoots gave us the idea of photographing other things too.
AND
Kentish Town has lots of charity shops, a big Poundstretcher and an amazing Haberdashery.
SO..
We hit the high street, armed with a budget of £35 and came back with bags of ‘stuff’
It’s worth saying here that Ricky is NOT an artist.
He has developed some basic Photoshopping skillz by putting his friends into stupid photos:
No planning.
Scanned/ photographed and treated everything.
Threw it all into the game.
Very few edits, only reworked key features like the Bounce Block.
Planned to have themed ‘zones’ but a haphazard ‘thrown together’ look was more interesting..
The down the back of the sofa idea was born!
PEGBEAST!
It just so happened..
that Nat..
put these things into the scannertogether…
and so…
BEHOLD!
(show intro song)
Animating Pegbeast and making him sing title song..
.. made us think of Pegbeast as source of tutorial songs.
(show songs: 16, 3, 12)
Background Fabrics
We deliberately left in the wrinkles!
Hand-drawn stuffNat sketched out the tutorial speech bubbles, and we liked them so much we decided to employ a hand-drawn approach for a bunch of GUI elements
Since the Kahoots existed for real, it made sense to use them for promotional materials. So Mark took them on a tour of London…
Promo stuff
(These then ended up in the game too, as a reward for progress)
Conclusions?• We aren’t professional video-
game artists.
• You don’t necessarily need to spend a lot of money to create a distinctive look.
• Working on things outside of your primary discipline can be really fun and good for moral.
Philosophy of Kahoots:
Be open to whimsy - ideas you think up
on the spot are often really good - act on them!
The theme is, there is no theme. Throw
anything in so long as it makes you smile.
Don’t worry if it doesn’t make sense.
A Good Idea?
Kahoots would probably have worked with a ‘traditional’ videogame approach to the art..
BUT..
‚Kahoots is a weird, weird game in all the right ways.. like echochrome on an acid trip‛ – IGN
‚The stop motion style of Pegbeast and the Kahoots raises it above the norm.. conjuring memories of Bagpuss or The Clangers‛ – Freeola Forums
‚Of all the minis, Kahoots has the most heart and character...Distinctive and Engaging‛ – PSM3
‚Though like any other game Kahoots is run by a series of computer code commands, everything in it still manages to look homemade, handcrafted and haphazard, in a nice way.‛ – News Shopper
‚Even better is the look of the game, which is all plasticine blobs and imperfect textures which actually works really well .. striking stuff‛ - TheSixthAxis
Music video / trailer
With Ben Hutchings aka Tootleg Boy
Show The Pirate Song
Play Kahoots trailer song
Thank-you! Please Question Us!