Animations for our floppy-eared, tuque-sporting little dog were drawn frame-by-frame by Sara Gross of Two Bit Art. She made all the new art for Word Up Dog using Photoshop, then I converted it to vectors using Adobe Illustrator’s trace function. She used clean lines and simple shapes that lend themselves really well to this technique.
Check out the evolution from sketch to completion of our nameless hero, the little dog who finds himself suddenly stuck underground with only two skills: diggin’, and spellin’.
We two Sara(h)s, aka “Da Honeys”, had a ton of fun on all the new art. Much 80’s rap was heard and fun was had by all.
Me and ma homie Sara Gross of Two Bit Art be whippin up a bangin mobile game called Word Up Dog. It’s a spelling game… hilarious amirite?
I was eager to work with Sara on something; not just because we both have the same awesome name, but because she draws these amazingly derpy-cute characters like Oregon Whale and Stitchy. Her more serious art is super beautiful too of course – check out her webcomic Menagerie. But it was her bizarro Orca Jam 3 tshirt design that sold me.
“This is the story all about how my life got flipped-turned upside down. I was chillin in my crib just digging for some grub, when outta nowhere the ground swallowed me up!”
The main character (the Dog) is no Fresh Prince – he’s probably the opposite, more like a clueless suburban wannabe. But this is a cheesy, family-friendly game. The kind of tidied-up hiphop culture you could tune into on NBC and watch with your kids.
I’m porting my Flash spelling game Word Up Dog to mobile… again. Last time I failed to get it running fast enough so I put the release off for a year in the hopes tech would improve. It has! This time I’m using Flash’s Stage3D and the results are way better – this game just cruises across the screen now, smooth like buttah.
I’ve teamed up with Sara Gross (Two Bit Art) to imbue heaps more mojo into the characters and art. Check out her concept art:
And this time rather than relying on Google Translate for my French and German localization, I’m trying out new crowdsourcing services Ackuna and Crowdin. If you’d like to help and speak French or German please jump in there and make some suggestions!
Thomas Shahan talks about the origin and process of his art for Incredipede in this video. Rather skillfully produced, and I think he did the music as well. Such a talented guy, Thomas.
Colin and I released Incredipede one month ago on October 25th. It’s available for sale from our website (via the Humble Store) and also on Good Old Games. There’s a Flash demo version now making its rounds on the internet, which is apparently quite popular in China and Spain. We’ve had great press in Rock Paper Shotgun, Gamasutra, Indie Game Magazine, Verge, PC Gamer and Edge Magazine. People love Thomas’s beautiful art and the game’s quirky original mechanics.
One of the gatekeepers in Incredipede. Vote for us on Steam Greenlight.
But it feels to me that most of the world is still waiting to discover Incredipede, because it’s yet to appear on the One True PC Distribution Platform: Steam. There’s no doubt about it: they won. Even I (Sarah) use their store to find new games, and often buy games through Steam rather than directly from developers. The most common question we get from people looking to buy Incredipede is “will I get a Steam key when the game is released there?”. The answer is yes. When!
As you’ve probably heard, Valve recently changed the way they accept indie games like Incredipede onto their Steam store. It used to be you’d email them directly and hear back yay or nay or (more often) nothing. It was obviously an understaffed and un-ideal system, and to Valve’s credit they’re trying to improve it. Incredipede has been one of the first games to use their new submission system Steam Greenlight. On Greenlight, games are voted for by the general public and the top 10 are accepted onto Steam every month. Being a relatively unheard of unreleased game, Incredipede had little chance of getting enough votes in time to launch with Steam. The onus is on the developer to bring players in to vote for their game, a challenge that IMO makes the controversy over Greenlight’s $100 fee seem downrightsilly.
Incredipede flew up the ranks after release and is hovering at #20, which means it’ll likely be accepted in a couple months. Colin’s planning some improvements for the Steam release and we may push it back to February or March to avoid the post-Holiday hole. We’re both quite confident that this is going to happen, but it’s been demoralizing to have to wait, checking that number every week to see if it’s moved.
Animations for our floppy-eared, tuque-sporting little dog were drawn frame-by-frame by Sara Gross of Two Bit Art. She made all the new art for Word Up Dog using Photoshop, then I converted it to vectors using Adobe Illustrator’s trace function. She used clean lines and simple shapes that lend themselves really well to this technique.
