#gamedev

Top o’ the blog post to you. My name is Cassie Murphy. I’m an illustrator based in Seattle, and the lead artist for Trundl.buddy and the Ghostly Wifi-lactery. I draw every glowing, drippy, spindly, nubby, blocky, undulating, craggy, Non-Newtonian Thing in this game.

Though this is my first game studio experience, this isn’t my first video game. That distinction goes to a one-button game called Dinglefling, wherein you must release a family of dingleberries from a cat’s sit-upon to land on items in a room. It was a vague realization that I wanted to do 2D game art. When I moved to Seattle, I met some folks that dug my art style, and the amorphous dream that spurred me to move here began to take shape at Spite House.

SWITCHING GEARS

During life in Virginia, my art developed a one-note style and subject matter: Cute. Fat. Cats. My cat paintings got me featured on Animal Planet’s “CATS 101”,Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls, HBO’s Game of Thrones Compendium, the Critics’ Choice Awards, E! Online, BuzzFeed, Nerdist, Tor.com, Threadless, TeeFury, Geek and Sundry and Cat Fancy, to name a lot. I painted hundreds of client cat commissions and slung prints at conventions across the Eastern seaboard.

After 8 years of pun-based feline success it began to feel like work (in a bad way) and I gave up the ghost. Er, the cats. To draw ghosts instead.

TRUNDSETTER

(The puns die with me.)

Working on a team like this is a creative’s fever dream. Our SoDo warehouse workspace buzzes with the urgent energy of invention and/or the trillest (only) trap in the building.

It is also the most challenged I’ve ever felt in my professional life. I’ve never needed to work on a team to create cartoons before, let alone whilst meticulously ensuring the art fits not only the lore we’re weaving, but also within the technical bounds of Spine and Unity. The re-work process is a hard reality of team-based art-making; something I’m mitigating through simpler sketches and real-time concepting. Learning, when done right, is never comfortable.

Being the lead artist affords me a surprising measure of creative control over the project as a whole. It feels like pressure, but also gives the satisfying illusion of power in this monster of a process. My favorite thing to do is slip things into my art that inspire a change in the story or gameplay: faces in the canyon walls, ghost expressions conveying their motivations, lava lamp-like innards of massive Wi-Fi towers. Sometimes a design goes over like a lead balloon (R.I.P. wispy skeleton-robot concept). Other times I design a character or environment that elicits rare, sweet guffaws from the lovable gruffians I work with.

THE CANYON

We’re in the final stretch of developing the canyon, which sets the template for future biomes, so I’m hoping we worked out all the kinks. The main kink = my making the dimensions and format of each asset work correctly in-game (see Ray’s post).  It’s a continual learning process between the dev and myself to make the pieces of our cartoon world fit together. For example, the canyon walls shouldn’t follow one-point perspective as I would like to draw it, but rather need a flat bottom so as not to float off the ground. Unity takes care of the perspective. Or breaks it. Unity takes care of and breaks a lot (visually), I’m learning.

I love a challenge. Needless to say – and saying it anyway – I’m pouring my heart into this game, and I can’t wait to show you more. Stay tuned.

Cheers,

Cassie

Hey there! I’m Soren Laulainen, composer and sound designer for TRUNDL.buddy and the Ghostly Wi-filactery. After spending a little over a decade scoring films and webisodes, this is my first foray into interactive music – which, to me, continues to be a relatively nascent and unexplored territory.

TRUNDL.buddy is a deliberately small project with high ambitions, designed small so that the inevitable scope creep doesn’t capsize us. An exercise in creative opportunities borne from constraints. A game which certainly won’t fully realize every creative goal I would love to accomplish  – immersion! synesthesia! synchronicity! – but might break new ground all the same.

Finding the “musical soul” of the game is an exciting process. Our character begins life as mindless, expressionless robot, but those eyes are brimming with idiotic bliss: the impulse to just drive imbues him with a sort of dogged enthusiasm in spite of his empty mind. And what better way to capture both a lack and extreme intensity of emotion than with Vocaloids?

Vocaloids are synthetic pop singers who have become very popular in Japan. You write lyrics and melodies and the Vocaloid software synthesizes vocals automatically. I’ll be using them for the main theme in TRUNDL.buddy, which we return to a few times throughout the game. My goal is to have them convey parts of the narrative and adapt to various choices the player makes throughout the game. Here’s one of my first music sketches with them.

Soren Laulainen
Music Composer and Sound Designer
sorenlaulainen.com