Squids 2

A while ago i was contacted by the lovely Audrey Leprince to work on an iOS project. She had just started her company (the Game Bakers http://thegamebakers.com/) after working on big budget games at Ubisoft for some years and had some cool ideas. Of course, being of the moronic kind, i declined and the uber talented Jerome Reneaume got the job. The result was Squids, a great game for iOS devices, android and PC with simple yet rewarding gameplay and great art direction.  

Fast forward to april 2012 and Audrey contacted me again. They were working on the new Squids game and would i be interested to work on the narrative vignettes, Jerome being too busy with other aspects of the game. This time i said yes and i'm glad i did.

There was a lot of work to do and little time to do it. and to make matters worse i was to leave for Vietnam a few days after the deadline to start work at Gameloft. It was all very stressful, and i slept very little and in the end i failed to deliver all the planned vignettes. But Audrey, Jerome and the rest of the team were very supportive and helpful and in the end the game made it to the Apple store on time and it was great.

It's called Squids: Wild West and it can be yours for less than 2 dollars.

Here are some of the vignettes (if you are planning on buying the game be aware that they may contain some spoilers), starting with the test i did, all in Photoshop:

After that i opted for pencils on paper with inking and coloring on Photoshop. To speed up the process i worked with basic shapes for the backgrounds while trying to be as faithful as possible to Jerome's squids designs.

If i had more time i would have changed some things, or done them differently, but all in all it was a great experience and a valuable lesson (like i should get my hands on a good monitor for a change).

To end this post, some of the vignettes that i couldn't finish on time or didn't make it into the finished game.