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There will be characters who check wrist watches, characters who check pocket watches, and characters who check mobile phones, all integrated visually and mechanically in the same game. If you follow the game, you’ll know there is gameplay associated with checking your watch. The art direction of that film is, well, incredible, and they did a great job of keeping the actual time period ambiguous…it could be the 50’s, it could be today, it could be the future. My biggest inspiration for the timelessness we’re going for is Pixar’s film, The Incredibles.
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I think 60’s retro spy-fi is as cool as the next guy, but it goes in an out of fashion, and it can be subtly alienating even when it’s in. If you look at the collection of spy images I posted way back in September 2009, it’s very easy to visually date some of them, and I want to avoid that. It’s important to me that the game’s visual design be timeless, not retro, not futuristic, but ambiguous, where it could be happening at any or all time periods. Talking about these classic illustrators brings me to questions of time period, and namely, “When does SpyParty take place?” The answer is, “yes.” I want to explicitly thank my good friend Dan Zimmer, who publishes the incredibly beautiful Illustration Magazine, for introducing us to most of these illustrators. We’ve spent days deciding exactly which wrinkles to include and which to elide on a just-past-middle-aged eyelid.
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Leyendecker, Harry Beckhoff, Robert McGinnis, and Herbert Paus. We call the result naturalistic and illustrative because it’s based on nature and sound anatomy, but without cleaving too close to realism, using instead the simplifications and stylizations perfected by classic illustrators, people like J.C. We also needed to skirt the Scylla of realism and the uncanny valley on one side, and the Charybdis of slapstick cartoon exaggeration on the other side. I want the visual and design aesthetics to work in concert to deepen the game. With a game like SpyParty, where the design and gameplay aesthetics are all about deep subtlety, it was important that we hit that level of subtlety in the visual aesthetic as well. We call this style naturalistic and illustrative. We’ve spent months and months defining the style of the characters, and I’m really happy with the results. You need someone like that for indie games, and to have somebody this talented in all of those areas is amazing…I am incredibly lucky to have him, and so are you, since he’s going to help make the game the kind of “perfect jewel” that is the reason I’m indie in the first place. While most of the industry is following movies and specializing roles to the point where an individual artist might only rig, or do textures, or animate, John can do it all. John’s the perfect artist for SpyParty, because he’s amazing at all the artistic disciplines, from concept through modeling, texturing, and animating.
SPY PARTY GAME SPY BIRTHDAY FULL
After six years of that, I figured our working relationship had been battle tested, and so when I started working on SpyParty full time, I also started working on John full time, to try to get him to come work on the game. I would develop some crazy mostly-broken system for skinning or painting or animating the creatures, and John would do amazing and beautiful things with it, and not hate me afterwards. This rate of growth simply cannot be sustained. So, it’s true, I have doubled the team size. It’s been hard to keep this quiet over the past year, and when somebody would ask me if I was making the game by myself, I’d answer “yes” and rationalize it on a technicality, since we haven’t actually put anything John’s done into the game itself yet! Full disclosure: John has actually been working full time on SpyParty since September of 2011, we’ve just kept it a secret until we could reveal the new art style with a cool selection of characters representing some of the diversity we’re trying to achieve.