Homespun Fun: the Art of

By Ricky Haggett& Nat Marco

from Honeyslug

Hello!

ricky@honeyslug.com

nat@honeyslug.com

Twitter:

@Honeyslug

@KommanderKlobb (Ricky)

What it looks like now:

8 choc a block15 as you spike it18 life is sweet

We moved away from pixel art because:

1. There are loads of amazing pixel art games already.

2. At the time, we couldn’t afford to pay a pixel artist

3. Nat did an animation degree, specialising in plasticine, and we’d been looking for an opportunity to use her skills

Character Sketches

Making the KahootsIngredients:

PlasticineGarden wirePolystyreneParcel tapeGlue gunFoam (for the ears)Craft foam (for eyes & mouth)

Letter of apology to office cleaners

Huzzah!

The Cardborg

(roar)

Show Fast Show Aardman vid

Animation

The original plan was to make everything out of plasticine…

BUT!

Photographing the Kahoots gave us the idea of photographing other things too.

AND

Kentish Town has lots of charity shops, a big Poundstretcher and an amazing Haberdashery.

SO..

We hit the high street, armed with a budget of £35 and came back with bags of ‘stuff’

It’s worth saying here that Ricky is NOT an artist.

He has developed some basic Photoshopping skillz by putting his friends into stupid photos:

No planning.

Scanned/ photographed and treated everything.

Threw it all into the game.

Very few edits, only reworked key features like the Bounce Block.

Planned to have themed ‘zones’ but a haphazard ‘thrown together’ look was more interesting..

The down the back of the sofa idea was born!

PEGBEAST!

It just so happened..

that Nat..

put these things into the scannertogether…

and so…

BEHOLD!

(show intro song)

Animating Pegbeast and making him sing title song..

.. made us think of Pegbeast as source of tutorial songs.

(show songs: 16, 3, 12)

Background Fabrics

We deliberately left in the wrinkles!

Hand-drawn stuffNat sketched out the tutorial speech bubbles, and we liked them so much we decided to employ a hand-drawn approach for a bunch of GUI elements

Since the Kahoots existed for real, it made sense to use them for promotional materials. So Mark took them on a tour of London…

Promo stuff

(These then ended up in the game too, as a reward for progress)

Conclusions?• We aren’t professional video-

game artists.

• You don’t necessarily need to spend a lot of money to create a distinctive look.

• Working on things outside of your primary discipline can be really fun and good for moral.

Philosophy of Kahoots:

Be open to whimsy - ideas you think up

on the spot are often really good - act on them!

The theme is, there is no theme. Throw

anything in so long as it makes you smile.

Don’t worry if it doesn’t make sense.

A Good Idea?

Kahoots would probably have worked with a ‘traditional’ videogame approach to the art..

BUT..

‚Kahoots is a weird, weird game in all the right ways.. like echochrome on an acid trip‛ – IGN

‚The stop motion style of Pegbeast and the Kahoots raises it above the norm.. conjuring memories of Bagpuss or The Clangers‛ – Freeola Forums

‚Of all the minis, Kahoots has the most heart and character...Distinctive and Engaging‛ – PSM3

‚Though like any other game Kahoots is run by a series of computer code commands, everything in it still manages to look homemade, handcrafted and haphazard, in a nice way.‛ – News Shopper

‚Even better is the look of the game, which is all plasticine blobs and imperfect textures which actually works really well .. striking stuff‛ - TheSixthAxis

Music video / trailer

With Ben Hutchings aka Tootleg Boy

Show The Pirate Song

Play Kahoots trailer song

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