Designing the Unpaid Intern
JUNE 12TH, 2020
I'm the art lead for unpaid intern. Its my job to try and make stuff look good. I spend most my time drawing. Also a lot of time with selections. Sometimes too much. Selecting colors. Selecting items. Selecting brushes. Selecting images then selecting smaller images from the images. I will say this: If you wanna be an artist, learning to select things is important. No one talks about that because it's not advice worth reading. I talk about it all the time and no one likes it. Something I didnt select was animator Danny. But he's awesome. I liked our working together, un-selected as it was. Heres something I drew and Danny animated:
(now that’s what I call a bad case of the mondays)
So, lets zoom out a bit. The general art process goes like this: The first (most important) input to the game is mine, which is really just a bunch of drawings around the theme of the game. Then other people layer their work over it. Paul throws in some spicy VFX and coded actions. Erick rails nonsensically against the absurdity of being. Danny takes characters and gives them movement. JB bosses people around in a mean-spirited way. We stew it all together, nude, under the midwinter moon, and the sum of the collaboration gains complexity, functionality and clarity, cohering into art usable for a game.
I’m quite fond of that blond pompadour, but I think some my…less cultured teammates found it too bold.
During this process there a ton of scribbles, drawings, animations, and illustrations that get generated. If I sat down to walk you through all of the material we’ve conjured thus far, we wouldn’t have a blog post–we’d have a bad date. So I think it best to home in on a few key elements in our first art-focused devlog.
Let’s start with the player character: the Unpaid Intern himself. As you can see in the images above, we created concepts for a lot of different characteristics and visual traits–things like height, posture, expressions, hairstyle, and on and on.
Okay, so now we have a player character. So what? We need him to do…stuff. And believe you me, the Intern does quite a bit of stuff. He does Seven things, maybe Eight things, on an exciting day. His life is not enriching and he quietly yearns for release from his despair. That's probably why he likes to punch things so much.
(some animation inspiration from the classics…unless you’re a philistine)
(if you know, you know)
They don’t call them endless runners for nothing. Our guy? He runs endlessly, motivated by the lash of the oppressor. For inspiration, we looked at some sprite sheets from some of our favorite games and cartoons to get a sense of what went into a cool looking run because as we know, looking cool is half the battle.
—Che, Art Lead
