After ten weeks of some pretty massive crunch time, we’ve finally released “2-Bit Bub“, a platformer game I art directed with GRL Games and a bunch of other very talented and amazing artists and programmers:

Game Design and Programming: Graeme Devine
Programming: Paul Reynolds
Programming: Alan Gray
Art Direction / Technical Art: Spencer Lindsay
UI Artist / 2D Artist: Mike Berg
3D Artist / Animator: Liem Nguyen
Fluffy and Eager Intern: Oliver Davies

Our HOLYGODYOU’REAMAZING clients at W+K were:

Compassionate Captain Ahab: Ann-Marie Harbour
Exhausted and Mighty UI Designer: Michelle Childs

Our concept, which I think came out pretty well, was to incorporate plates from the movie which we got from Laika as well as footage we shot up in Portland at their studio.  By mapping the images onto planes and low-polygon models, and keeping the camera locked in one axis, we were able to pull off a series of pretty convincing environments that both leveraged the awesome artistry of the teams at Laika and kept the polygon count low enough to move fast on mobile.

We used Paper on the iPad for a lot of the concept sketching.

If you’re interested in how we made all this happen, this is a rough outline of the art path from 3DS Max, into Maya, and then into Unity3D: