I've finished a new song! It's an instrumental that tells a little story. This composition is the centrepiece for my album: here the gate that it's all about is opened for the first time, into who-knows-where. After this the real drama starts: the next song is about how the entire facility needs to be destroyed in order to stop creatures from flooding in!
The first 2 minutes of this song actually started as the soundtrack for a cancelled Ronimo game, all the way back in 2012. I wrote a few short pieces for that and this one made it in. I started by building a rhythm from workshop sound effects, like a tape-measure sliding back in, and then composed the rest from there. While the atmosphere worked really well with our game prototype, the rhythmic sound effects turned out to be problematic: the game also had real sound effects and that didn't combine well. So I simply removed the rhythmic part from my song and then it sounded good in the game. I think this is a beautiful example of how creativity and iteration work: the things you make serve a purpose in the process, even those that get scrapped in the end.
When that game was cancelled, this track went into the fridge. Nevertheless it remained one of my favourite tracks and I came back to listen to it quite often. I wanted to do something with it, but didn't know what. Back then it was only 1:50 minutes long and that felt too short to be 'finished'.
Then I heard Home By The Sea by Genesis. I'm a huge fan of Genesis so it's not rare for me to listen to their music, but this particular time I suddenly realised that I could try doing the same structure for my own song. Home By The Sea is basically two songs in one: it starts as a pop song but halfway it quiets down and then at 5:07 a big beat sets in and it becomes an amazing instrumental. I wanted a similar transformation in my own song! So I tried emulating that vibe, but I failed and it doesn't sound anything like the original. In this case however it did capture something else: I really liked the resulting sound! To me that's another great example of how creativity can work: take an inspiration and then morph it into something completely different to make it your own.
I continued from there, turning it into a 6:25 minutes long piece. That actually makes it my longest composition since I was in a prog-rock band over 15 years ago.
For the title I drew some more inspiration from Genesis. The original title of my song was "And Then The Halls Were Empty", but the more active second part didn't fit that quiet title anymore, so I needed to add something. Genesis has a wonderful pair of songs called "Unquiet Slumbers for the Sleepers..." and "...In That Quiet Earth". I figured I could do something similar with the title of my song, hence the ellipsis (...) in my title. (Note that the second half of the title also sounds a whole lot like another Genesis song, but that's actually a coincidence that I didn't notice until I started writing this blogpost.)
The inspiration for the final bit (starting at 3:44) comes from the song Prelude 1 by Floex and Tom Hodge. Here the result is closer to the inspiration, but I feel my composition is different enough that it's become its own thing. I actually met Floex (Tomáš Dvořák) at a conference a few years ago and was fan-boying to the max, since his soundtrack for Machinarium is one of my favourite game soundtracks. Especially the second half of The Glasshouse With Butterfly is mind-blowingly beautiful. Turns out Tomáš Dvořák is also a very friendly guy to talk to. :)
Since I've started the tradition of creating cello sheet music for all of my songs, I've done so for this one as well. From the perspective of the cello this isn't my most interesting composition, but if you'd like to play the cello parts, you can find sheet music and an MP3 to play along to (without the cello) on music.joostvandongen.com. This website also has sheet music for all my other compositions.
This song actually completes the line-up for my album, which will be called "The Ageless Gate - A Cello Tale". All 13 songs are now complete, making for a grand total of 47:03 minutes of music. The only steps left now are mixing/mastering and making things like a cover and booklet, since I want to make a proper CD out of this one (as well as put it on streaming services like Spotify, of course).
Showing posts with label cancelled projects. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cancelled projects. Show all posts
Sunday, 24 May 2020
Saturday, 29 March 2014
Guys With Guns: concept art for a cancelled Ronimo project, or: Being asked to pitch for a publisher's project
I have previously discussed pitching your games to publishers, but that was from a very specific perspective: if you already have plans for a game and are trying to make a publisher interested in that. Once a studio has gained some credibility the opposite can also happen: sometimes a publisher is looking for a developer for a game they want made, and they ask a bunch of game studios to pitch for that project.
Around four years ago (early in development of Awesomenauts) this happened to us twice, in both cases with well-known publishers looking for a fresh and different take on a famous franchise they owned. Today I would like to show the concept art our artists made for one of those, and explain how these kinds of pitches work.
Note that things like this are almost always under NDA, so I cannot mention the name of the publisher or the franchise involved. An NDA ("Non-Disclosure Agreement") is a common type of contract used in the games industry in which two parties agree to keep something secret.
When a publisher has a project for which they are looking for a developer, they often ask several developers to pitch for that, usually three to five. This way they can choose the plan that best fits what they are looking for, and can give each developer a chance to show what spin they would give to the game.
We knew that we were not the only developer in the race, so we tried to come up with something special. Most of us had played and loved the franchise when we were younger, so we were really excited to try our hands at bringing a new and modern spin to a classic.
We created a budget overview and wrote a design document in which we explained how we would evolve and change the gameplay. Our artists created concept art for several possible visual styles the new game could have. Since we wanted to give the publisher some choice, we decided to create art for more than one visual style, so that they could pick what best fitted their vision of the game. I think these all look great, so this blogpost is really just one long excuse to show you these awesome drawings by the Ronimo art team!
Style G, by Olivier and Gijs
Style A, by Tim
Style B, by Gijs
Style H, by Martijn
We sent the art, budget overview and design document to the publisher and then waited for their answer...
...
Nope! Unfortunately, they didn't choose us and went ahead with another developer.
(On second thought: knowing now how great Awesomenauts turned out, I am actually very happy that our pitch wasn't chosen!)
Not winning a bid like this is all part of the game, of course, but we were very disappointed at the reason given: they told us that both our game concept and our art were the best they had received, but they didn't believe we could technically pull off a multi-platform 3D game. This felt very lame, since they could have figured that out before they even asked us to pitch. Not that I think they were wrong: we had never worked on those platforms before and had never released a commercial 3D game, so this would have been a big challenge and I doubt we could have finished it on time and on budget with the experience we had back then. Nevertheless it felt lame that they didn't figure this out before asking us.
Still, I can imagine why they asked us anyway. My theory is that they were probably curious to see whether a young and innovative team like us would come up with something very special and insanely awesome. Instead, we 'only' came up with something that was better than the competition, but probably not enough to make them willing to take the risk of working with such a technically inexperienced team. So if our pitch had been even better, we might have gotten the job despite the technical risks. Of course, this is only my own theory, since we never complained to them about the procedure and thus never got a further explanation.
Despite that we didn't get the gig, it was an interesting experience to go through this process and we still have this awesome concept art! ^_^
Below are some more sketches made by our artists. These didn't make it into the actual pitch, so we never sent these to the publisher. Which makes me curious: which of the styles in this blogpost do you like best?
Concept art F1, by Gijs
Concept art F2, by Gijs
Concept art F3, by Gijs
Concept art D, by Olivier
Around four years ago (early in development of Awesomenauts) this happened to us twice, in both cases with well-known publishers looking for a fresh and different take on a famous franchise they owned. Today I would like to show the concept art our artists made for one of those, and explain how these kinds of pitches work.
Note that things like this are almost always under NDA, so I cannot mention the name of the publisher or the franchise involved. An NDA ("Non-Disclosure Agreement") is a common type of contract used in the games industry in which two parties agree to keep something secret.
When a publisher has a project for which they are looking for a developer, they often ask several developers to pitch for that, usually three to five. This way they can choose the plan that best fits what they are looking for, and can give each developer a chance to show what spin they would give to the game.
We knew that we were not the only developer in the race, so we tried to come up with something special. Most of us had played and loved the franchise when we were younger, so we were really excited to try our hands at bringing a new and modern spin to a classic.
We created a budget overview and wrote a design document in which we explained how we would evolve and change the gameplay. Our artists created concept art for several possible visual styles the new game could have. Since we wanted to give the publisher some choice, we decided to create art for more than one visual style, so that they could pick what best fitted their vision of the game. I think these all look great, so this blogpost is really just one long excuse to show you these awesome drawings by the Ronimo art team!
Style G, by Olivier and Gijs
Style A, by Tim
Style B, by Gijs
Style H, by Martijn
We sent the art, budget overview and design document to the publisher and then waited for their answer...
...
Nope! Unfortunately, they didn't choose us and went ahead with another developer.
(On second thought: knowing now how great Awesomenauts turned out, I am actually very happy that our pitch wasn't chosen!)
Not winning a bid like this is all part of the game, of course, but we were very disappointed at the reason given: they told us that both our game concept and our art were the best they had received, but they didn't believe we could technically pull off a multi-platform 3D game. This felt very lame, since they could have figured that out before they even asked us to pitch. Not that I think they were wrong: we had never worked on those platforms before and had never released a commercial 3D game, so this would have been a big challenge and I doubt we could have finished it on time and on budget with the experience we had back then. Nevertheless it felt lame that they didn't figure this out before asking us.
Still, I can imagine why they asked us anyway. My theory is that they were probably curious to see whether a young and innovative team like us would come up with something very special and insanely awesome. Instead, we 'only' came up with something that was better than the competition, but probably not enough to make them willing to take the risk of working with such a technically inexperienced team. So if our pitch had been even better, we might have gotten the job despite the technical risks. Of course, this is only my own theory, since we never complained to them about the procedure and thus never got a further explanation.
Despite that we didn't get the gig, it was an interesting experience to go through this process and we still have this awesome concept art! ^_^
Below are some more sketches made by our artists. These didn't make it into the actual pitch, so we never sent these to the publisher. Which makes me curious: which of the styles in this blogpost do you like best?
Concept art F1, by Gijs
Concept art F2, by Gijs
Concept art F3, by Gijs
Concept art D, by Olivier
Friday, 2 November 2012
Shining a light on how pitching to publishers works
When at Ronimo we released the prototype for our cancelled project Snowball Earth last week, I mentioned that we pitched it to tons of publishers. So what is that like, pitching to publishers?
In the past five years we did a lot of pitching for a lot of different projects. Despite that the pitches for Snowball Earth were not successful enough to land us a deal, we did get the hang of it enough to get some good deals going: we managed to sign Swords & Soldiers HD for PS3 with Sony, and we managed to sign Awesomenauts for XBLA and PS3 with DTP. We learned a lot from our contacts at publishers on how the process works, and today I would like to share that.
Before I start this story, please note that pitching can have many forms. For small distribution-only deals, things can be a lot simpler than this, and each publisher will have his own way of handling things. This text is my impression of how it works when you want to sign a larger title and want not just distribution, but also a serious development budget to be part of the deal.
The first step is what most people think of when they think of "pitching": a meeting with someone from a publisher, where you show your project and hope to get their interest. Most of these meetings happen at big events, like Gamescom and GDC. They usually last exactly half an hour, as the publisher is having meetings all day, every 30 minutes. The person at the publisher you talk to, is often called the "acquisition manager". Events like GDC are very exhaustive for him/her: seeing a new pitch every 30 minutes for three days, easily means listening to fifty pitches!
Getting an appointment for such a pitch is not very difficult. For our first pitches of Snowball Earth we just emailed a ton of publishers about a month before the event, and quite a few were willing to see what we got. If you want to meet one specific publisher, it can be difficult to get to the right person, but if you just mail a ton of publishers, then getting 10 to 20 different appointments at an event like Gamescom is quite doable. When we did our first pitches we hardly had any track record and we still managed to do around 15 pitches in only three days.
Note that arranging an appointment at the event itself is a lot more difficult, since most agendas will be full already. It is always possible to arrange a couple of extra meetings on the spot, though.
Many people claim that it is important to first check whether a publisher is doing stuff in your field, and of course it is, but this shouldn't be a restriction. Publishers are often shifting from one market to another and it is not always possible to know they are doing this. For example, when we pitched to DTP, they hardly had any presence in the console downloadable market, but they were apparently shifting in that direction and launched several such games in the years after we signed with them.
At a first pitch, you don't need a lot of details yet. You need to show the game and communicate why it is going to be awesome. Details are not important. A rough ballpark figure for the development budget and when the game would launch is enough at this point: details will be discussed later, and only if the publisher turns out to actually be interested in the game.
A common remark from publishers is that a pitch does not require a fancy playable prototypes. They claim to be interested in awesome concepts in their early stages as well. In our experience, this is only true for experienced studios. If you don't have a proven track record yet, then you need to compensate for that and having anything less than a really cool, playable demo makes it impossible to get a deal with anyone.
As I said, the publisher-person you pitch to is usually called an "acquisition manager". This person's role is a bit more complex than I realised beforehand. Of course, at first you just need to make him (since I never met a female acquisition manager, I will use "him" here instead of "her") enthusiastic about your game and interested in signing it. The acquisition manager is the gatekeeper: if you can't get him to like your game, then he won't show it internally to his colleagues and you definitely won't sign a deal.
However, the acquisition manager is not the person who can actually greenlight a project. For that, the game needs to be approved by several departments inside the publisher:
To sign a game, each of these departments need to agree that it is a good idea to do so. So just having a good game is not good enough. You really need to raise enthusiasm on a lot of fields outside the game itself to make it work.
Now where does the acquisition manager stand in all this? If he likes the game enough that he wants to take the next step, then he is going to show the game to all the other departments to try to get a greenlight from each of them. This brings the acquisition manager into a wholly different position than one might expect. Suddenly he is not the person you need to persuade, but the person who is going to persuade others on your behalf! If you can make him love your game, the acquisition manager is your most important friend inside the publisher!
Therefore, if the game is good enough that you can get beyond the first pitch, then it is key to provide the acquisition manager with all the info and material he needs to pitch the game internally. If you showed him a trailer during the pitch, then he will also need that trailer to show the game to his colleagues. Schedules, budgets, track record, prototypes, design documents, concept art, trailers: the acquisition manager is going to need all the good stuff to pitch the game internally, and as a developer you need to provide it to him.
We got deeply into this stage with Snowball Earth with a couple of publishers, and the first part of this trailer (which I posted two weeks ago) was made specifically to show their marketing departments what kind of vibe their advertisements could have.
Having explained what departments need to greenlight the game, where did Snowball Earth fail? I think almost everywhere. Successful 3D platformers are a rare genre, so the sales department might not think the game is going to make enough money. Since the game had some innovative mechanics, it was even more difficult for them to estimate how it would sell. (This is a general trend we see in publishers: our games always have unique, innovative elements and publishers don't really understand those until the game is quite far along in production.) Marketing didn't know how to sell a game that was so split between more serious and more kiddy mechanics and graphics. And above all, the producers will have noted that at that point, no one in our team had ever released a full commercial game or touched a console devkit...
If all the steps above go right, the result is "greenlight": the publisher decides they want to sign the game! After this come negotiations for the rough deal, followed by the draft contract and negotiations about contract details. And then, finally: a signed deal, which will hopefully result in a good game and budget!
In the past five years we did a lot of pitching for a lot of different projects. Despite that the pitches for Snowball Earth were not successful enough to land us a deal, we did get the hang of it enough to get some good deals going: we managed to sign Swords & Soldiers HD for PS3 with Sony, and we managed to sign Awesomenauts for XBLA and PS3 with DTP. We learned a lot from our contacts at publishers on how the process works, and today I would like to share that.
Before I start this story, please note that pitching can have many forms. For small distribution-only deals, things can be a lot simpler than this, and each publisher will have his own way of handling things. This text is my impression of how it works when you want to sign a larger title and want not just distribution, but also a serious development budget to be part of the deal.
The first step is what most people think of when they think of "pitching": a meeting with someone from a publisher, where you show your project and hope to get their interest. Most of these meetings happen at big events, like Gamescom and GDC. They usually last exactly half an hour, as the publisher is having meetings all day, every 30 minutes. The person at the publisher you talk to, is often called the "acquisition manager". Events like GDC are very exhaustive for him/her: seeing a new pitch every 30 minutes for three days, easily means listening to fifty pitches!
Getting an appointment for such a pitch is not very difficult. For our first pitches of Snowball Earth we just emailed a ton of publishers about a month before the event, and quite a few were willing to see what we got. If you want to meet one specific publisher, it can be difficult to get to the right person, but if you just mail a ton of publishers, then getting 10 to 20 different appointments at an event like Gamescom is quite doable. When we did our first pitches we hardly had any track record and we still managed to do around 15 pitches in only three days.
Note that arranging an appointment at the event itself is a lot more difficult, since most agendas will be full already. It is always possible to arrange a couple of extra meetings on the spot, though.
Many people claim that it is important to first check whether a publisher is doing stuff in your field, and of course it is, but this shouldn't be a restriction. Publishers are often shifting from one market to another and it is not always possible to know they are doing this. For example, when we pitched to DTP, they hardly had any presence in the console downloadable market, but they were apparently shifting in that direction and launched several such games in the years after we signed with them.
At a first pitch, you don't need a lot of details yet. You need to show the game and communicate why it is going to be awesome. Details are not important. A rough ballpark figure for the development budget and when the game would launch is enough at this point: details will be discussed later, and only if the publisher turns out to actually be interested in the game.
A common remark from publishers is that a pitch does not require a fancy playable prototypes. They claim to be interested in awesome concepts in their early stages as well. In our experience, this is only true for experienced studios. If you don't have a proven track record yet, then you need to compensate for that and having anything less than a really cool, playable demo makes it impossible to get a deal with anyone.
As I said, the publisher-person you pitch to is usually called an "acquisition manager". This person's role is a bit more complex than I realised beforehand. Of course, at first you just need to make him (since I never met a female acquisition manager, I will use "him" here instead of "her") enthusiastic about your game and interested in signing it. The acquisition manager is the gatekeeper: if you can't get him to like your game, then he won't show it internally to his colleagues and you definitely won't sign a deal.
However, the acquisition manager is not the person who can actually greenlight a project. For that, the game needs to be approved by several departments inside the publisher:
- The marketing department needs to see how they could reach an audience with this game.
- The sales department will want to calculate how much sales the game is likely to make. Of course, this is impossible to know beforehand, but they can for example look at how similar games did in the past and base an estimate on that. The expected sales should of course be higher than the budget. The budget does not only contain the development fee that the developer might be asking, but also things like marketing, localisation and QA.
- The content specialists (I don't know whether there is an official name for these) need to agree that this is going to be a good enough game and that the mechanics will work in a full game.
- The producers need to check the studio to see whether the team is good enough to actually finish this game and get it through all technical checks.
- Due diligence: the publisher is going to check whether the developer's company and team are stable enough that the developer is, for example, not going to go bankrupt in the middle of development.
To sign a game, each of these departments need to agree that it is a good idea to do so. So just having a good game is not good enough. You really need to raise enthusiasm on a lot of fields outside the game itself to make it work.
Now where does the acquisition manager stand in all this? If he likes the game enough that he wants to take the next step, then he is going to show the game to all the other departments to try to get a greenlight from each of them. This brings the acquisition manager into a wholly different position than one might expect. Suddenly he is not the person you need to persuade, but the person who is going to persuade others on your behalf! If you can make him love your game, the acquisition manager is your most important friend inside the publisher!
Therefore, if the game is good enough that you can get beyond the first pitch, then it is key to provide the acquisition manager with all the info and material he needs to pitch the game internally. If you showed him a trailer during the pitch, then he will also need that trailer to show the game to his colleagues. Schedules, budgets, track record, prototypes, design documents, concept art, trailers: the acquisition manager is going to need all the good stuff to pitch the game internally, and as a developer you need to provide it to him.
We got deeply into this stage with Snowball Earth with a couple of publishers, and the first part of this trailer (which I posted two weeks ago) was made specifically to show their marketing departments what kind of vibe their advertisements could have.
Having explained what departments need to greenlight the game, where did Snowball Earth fail? I think almost everywhere. Successful 3D platformers are a rare genre, so the sales department might not think the game is going to make enough money. Since the game had some innovative mechanics, it was even more difficult for them to estimate how it would sell. (This is a general trend we see in publishers: our games always have unique, innovative elements and publishers don't really understand those until the game is quite far along in production.) Marketing didn't know how to sell a game that was so split between more serious and more kiddy mechanics and graphics. And above all, the producers will have noted that at that point, no one in our team had ever released a full commercial game or touched a console devkit...
If all the steps above go right, the result is "greenlight": the publisher decides they want to sign the game! After this come negotiations for the rough deal, followed by the draft contract and negotiations about contract details. And then, finally: a signed deal, which will hopefully result in a good game and budget!
Friday, 26 October 2012
Drooling dogs and weird boys for Snowball Earth
When I revealed our cancelled project Snowball Earth from 2008 in my blogpost earlier this week, I said that one of the problems that publishers had with the game and that kept them from wanting to fund it, was that the main characters were robots. Apparently it is difficult to reach a large audience with robots, and the fantastic Wall-E is a rare exception to that rule.
Although we had a clear vision for the game ourselves, we did not ignore this critique, and our art team (Martijn Thieme, Ralph Rademakers, Olivier Thijssen and Gijs Hermans) started making new concept art for the main characters. This was made after the main prototype was already finished, and was intended purely to show to publishers how the game could change to fit their marketing department's requirements better.
Especially the dogs came out pretty hilarious. They were replaced with real dogs, but those still needed to be able to roll around. Our artists came up with a (for the dogs) quite dizzying solution...
Click for high resolution
We didn't think it was necessary to make both the dogs and the player non-robots, so a number of alternative robot-dog designs were also made, to see if our art team could come up with something else that might appeal to publishers better. I personally especially like the bulldogs, which add a lot of cool and I imagine could have made for a nice upgrade later in the game. :)
Click for high resolution
Speaking of robot dogs, this is the concept art of the original Robodogs, which are playable in the actual prototype:
Now to the main character. A lot of redesigns were made. The common element here is that they all needed to have the magnet for pulling the dogs back, and some kind of heating device for melting the frozen world. May I especially draw you attention to the one with the teapot on top of his huge hat? The Ronimo art team seems to have a certain tendency towards that kind of awesome craziness... :)
What I find particularly interesting here is the lesson that our lead artist Gijs mentioned a while after drawing these. They all come in groups and they share a lot of common elements, like the suit or the shape of the head. Many are variations to the same ideas. This might be a fast way of working, but Gijs concluded afterwards that in a sense it also cripples creativity: working from a previous design limits the imagination to things close to that previous design. The better way of doing concept art, is to make most designs really different, and just start from scratch every time. This results in a much more diverse set of designs and ideas. It also doesn't even necessarily take more time: not all designs need to be shaded as detailed as these.
The final image I would like to share today, I was particularly delighted to come across in our archive. Publishers were unsure about how 'cool' the project was, exactly. Was this a kids game, or was this for teens and older? We felt it was a pretty 'cool' game and not particularly for small kids, so one of our artists made a number of alternative skins for the main character, which could be unlocked. Zombie Robot! Hot Rod Robot! Bumlebee even! Yeah! I really like the attitude in the skins and poses in this one!
Click for a bit higher resolution
At the end of this concepting period, we chose the two below as the new characters. This was just before we cancelled the game, so they never made it into the prototype. The bulldogs because they were cooler ('more MTV'). The boy because we wanted to get rid of the giant head of our original robot hero. The big head was a problem with a relatively high camera, because the body was hardly visible beneath it.
Which makes me curious: which do you like better? Our original two robots, or these two?
So these shots were made after pitching to publishers, which leads me to next week's topic: how does pitching to publishers actually work? Before we did our first pitches, I was incredibly curious to know, so I hope that will make for an interesting blogpost. See you next week! ^_^
Although we had a clear vision for the game ourselves, we did not ignore this critique, and our art team (Martijn Thieme, Ralph Rademakers, Olivier Thijssen and Gijs Hermans) started making new concept art for the main characters. This was made after the main prototype was already finished, and was intended purely to show to publishers how the game could change to fit their marketing department's requirements better.
Especially the dogs came out pretty hilarious. They were replaced with real dogs, but those still needed to be able to roll around. Our artists came up with a (for the dogs) quite dizzying solution...
Click for high resolution
We didn't think it was necessary to make both the dogs and the player non-robots, so a number of alternative robot-dog designs were also made, to see if our art team could come up with something else that might appeal to publishers better. I personally especially like the bulldogs, which add a lot of cool and I imagine could have made for a nice upgrade later in the game. :)
Click for high resolution
Speaking of robot dogs, this is the concept art of the original Robodogs, which are playable in the actual prototype:
Now to the main character. A lot of redesigns were made. The common element here is that they all needed to have the magnet for pulling the dogs back, and some kind of heating device for melting the frozen world. May I especially draw you attention to the one with the teapot on top of his huge hat? The Ronimo art team seems to have a certain tendency towards that kind of awesome craziness... :)
What I find particularly interesting here is the lesson that our lead artist Gijs mentioned a while after drawing these. They all come in groups and they share a lot of common elements, like the suit or the shape of the head. Many are variations to the same ideas. This might be a fast way of working, but Gijs concluded afterwards that in a sense it also cripples creativity: working from a previous design limits the imagination to things close to that previous design. The better way of doing concept art, is to make most designs really different, and just start from scratch every time. This results in a much more diverse set of designs and ideas. It also doesn't even necessarily take more time: not all designs need to be shaded as detailed as these.
The final image I would like to share today, I was particularly delighted to come across in our archive. Publishers were unsure about how 'cool' the project was, exactly. Was this a kids game, or was this for teens and older? We felt it was a pretty 'cool' game and not particularly for small kids, so one of our artists made a number of alternative skins for the main character, which could be unlocked. Zombie Robot! Hot Rod Robot! Bumlebee even! Yeah! I really like the attitude in the skins and poses in this one!
Click for a bit higher resolution
At the end of this concepting period, we chose the two below as the new characters. This was just before we cancelled the game, so they never made it into the prototype. The bulldogs because they were cooler ('more MTV'). The boy because we wanted to get rid of the giant head of our original robot hero. The big head was a problem with a relatively high camera, because the body was hardly visible beneath it.
Which makes me curious: which do you like better? Our original two robots, or these two?
So these shots were made after pitching to publishers, which leads me to next week's topic: how does pitching to publishers actually work? Before we did our first pitches, I was incredibly curious to know, so I hope that will make for an interesting blogpost. See you next week! ^_^
Tuesday, 23 October 2012
The history of Snowball Earth - now playable!
Today we release the complete playable prototype of our cancelled game Snowball Earth! This is the game that we worked on at Ronimo for a full year before we made Swords & Soldiers. Since Snowball Earth was never finished, we never really talked about it either and kept the prototype hidden. Such a waste! The prototype contains over an hour of gameplay and some really cool ideas, so it is awesome to finally show it to the world!
Snowball Earth is a really interesting game, both in how it failed and in the things it did well, so it provides tons of material for future blogposts. Today: what it is, and why it was cancelled!
Download:
Note that because this is an early prototype, this is all pretty unpolished! No tutorial, ridiculously long loading times, quite a few bugs and it only plays well with an Xbox 360 controller. However, the concepts of the game are really interesting and work well, so give it a try!
The trailer that we made early 2008 to pitch the game to publishers. Showing the player in the trailer was all the hype in Wii commercials at the time, so we tried a bit of that here.
Snowball Earth was our first official game as Ronimo Games. De Blob was not entirely made with the same team, and for Snowball Earth we had decided to really start our own company and make a commercial game. We were still students at the time, and this was our group-graduation-project. After we graduated, we kept working on it, but mainly on extra stuff, like the puzzles prototype that is also in the Torrent. The main game that we are releasing today was basically our graduation project at the Utrecht School of the Arts, and it was also our official start as a company.
Snowball Earth was to be a console game for the Wii or the Xbox 360. A 3D adventure in the style of Ratchet & Clank, although for our first game we wanted to keep things a bit simpler and more doable than the fantastic Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools Of Destruction, which launched around that time, and was a big inspiration for us.
After the colouring gameplay of De Blob, we wanted to find some new innovative mechanics, and went all out on that. So much so, that we ended up with not one, but two really interesting mechanics. These two mechanics are not just what makes Snowball Earth shine, but also its downfall...
The first and most striking mechanic is the melting. The entire world is frozen, and the player melts the snow by simply moving through it. This is a pretty spectecular effect: snow turns into puddles and then into grass, plants pop up everywhere and the ice disappears from the rocks. It is quite a sight to behold, and simply walking around while transforming the world around you is already a lot of fun.
When melting is enabled, everything around the player comes to life. I consider this completely dynamic system one of the most impressive things we have made so far. It was also an enormous amount of handwork to create, though...
The sound effects for Snowball Earth were made by Aline Bruijns, and the music by Erik van Woudenberg. They graduated in audio in the same year as we graduated in game development, and they did some great sound work on Snowball Earth! Aline later started the sound studio Audio Rally Sound Design.
Click for high resolution
By now several other games have done kind of similar mechanics, like Prince of Persia 2008's restoration of life after a boss has been killed. The effect there is a lot less dynamic, but it was still kind off odd to see a game release with a similar idea after we had already cancelled our own take on it. (By the way, I absolutely love that Prince of Persia game, definitely my favourite in the series! I think it's a very rare open-world platforming gem!)
The other unique mechanic of Snowball Earth are the Robodogs. These are little robots that run along with the player. When you shoot them with the right stick, they become physics balls and can be used as projectiles in combat, or to get them to spots where the player cannot go. The player can press the right trigger to pull them back. This allowed for some great combat and puzzles. For example, hitting enemies in the back does extra damage, so deliberately shooting your Robodogs past an enemy and then pulling them to hit him in the back is a great tactic, and a lot of fun to do.
The physics gameplay with the Robodogs turning into balls.
In terms of story, the premise was as weird as one would expect of a Ronimo game. In prehistoric times, a little alien robot on an orbiting spaceship accidentally pressed the wrong button and thus froze the entire earth! As punishment, he is sent down to fix his mistake. He goes looking for sources of heat, like volcanoes, to melt the snow. However, during his quest he finds strange fridges everywhere, and discovers that he has been deceived: a fridge manufacturing company has illegally sold all these fridges to the yetis, and this is what really froze the earth! On his epic quest, our little hero must battle the evil polar animals, close all the fridges, and prove his innocence!
With the two unique mechanics and all the hard work that went into Snowball Earth, why was the game cancelled? The answer is quite simple: no publisher was willing to fund the game, and it was too big to make ourselves. We pitched to all the big publishers: dozens of meetings at Gamescom 2007 and GDC 2008. Quite a few liked the game and kept communications with us going, and some even invited us to do internal pitches to the entire team in their offices, but in the end no one wanted to really go with this.
I think there were two main reasons why publishers didn't want to fund us. The most important was properly that we had no track record. Making a big 3D game with a team that has no console experience whatsoever is an extremely risky endeavour, and no publisher would want to fund that until we had proven that we could actually finish a game on console.
At the time I was totally convinced that we could make this game, but right now I am very happy that no one funded us. We wanted to make the game in only 1.5 years, and wanted to grow the team from 7 to 15 developers for that. Just finding 8 experienced developers is already a difficult challenge... Let alone finishing such a big game with such an inexperienced team!
Swords & Soldiers and Awesomenauts were both much more realistic plans than Snowball Earth, and they both took way longer than we expected. If we had actually started making Snowball Earth, it would probably have taken us at least 3 years to make it. In fact, with our current team (13 full-time developers plus a number of interns) and my current experience (two multi-platform console titles), we still wouldn't be able to make this in 1.5 years. Snowball Earth was just way too big for our team size and total lack of experience at the time...
Click for high resolution
The other reason publishers didn't want to fund the game, is that it was a difficult sell to their marketing departments. What similar games were out there, and had been a success? At that point 3D platforming had not been a big market for years (except for Mario Galaxy, of course), and our game also had all these original mechanics that could not be easily compared to other marketing campaigns.
Of course, I know now that making weird stuff is a good way to gain attention and thus great marketing for indie studios like us, so I don't necessarily agree with these marketing arguments. But there is another, deeper problem within Snowball Earth: the mechanics around the Robodogs were all pretty complex, and thus for a slightly more mature audience. The melting mechanics, however, were very kids-friendly, but didn't bring us any gameplay depth besides the simple fun of walking around melting everything. So our two innovative gameplay concepts just didn't mingle all that well. Now add that our main characters were robots, and that robots just don't work for mass audiences. Except in Wall-e, of course, but that's not enough to go by.
We tried addressing these issues by focussing more on the physics gameplay. So after we had graduated and had finished the main prototype, our game designers made a whole bunch of puzzle levels. They bundled those in a prototype level with hardly any graphics, but some really interesting gameplay. This level is much less polished, and the physics are not precise enough for such puzzles, but it does show the great potential of these mechanics. With more time, I think we could have turned that into a great 3rd person physics puzzler. These puzzles are pretty difficult with all their bugs and the lack of a tutorial, but I still think the ideas are great, so they have been included as a second level in the version of the game that we are releasing today.
Some gameplay from the puzzles level of Snowball Earth.
To react to the publisher critique on the robots, we also made tons of designs for non-robot characters. We have some absolutely ridiculous concept art of dogs in round spacesuits, so I will post those soon as well!
After a year of work on the game and no money and no publisher, we finally got access to Wii devkits. This allowed us to start developing Snowball Earth on console, so that we could finally prove to publishers that we could actually make this game. However, what if publishers still didn't want the game at that point? Then we would have wasted even more time on what already seemed like a failed project! So we decided to cancel Snowball Earth altogether, and start working on something smaller, something that we could actually finish ourselves, on those Wii devkits that we got. The became a little game called Swords & Soldiers...
(Of course, the history from then on was paved with a lot more success: Swords & Soldiers came out on Wii, PS3, PC, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android, and got great reviews and won several awards. Awesomenauts was recently released on PS3, 360 and PC, again to great reviews. Seeing Snowball Earth fail because it was too big, was exactly the lesson we needed to learn to keep it smaller and more doable in our next games!)
Snowball Earth is a really interesting game, both in how it failed and in the things it did well, so it provides tons of material for future blogposts. Today: what it is, and why it was cancelled!
Download:
Snowball Earth Prototype
Note that because this is an early prototype, this is all pretty unpolished! No tutorial, ridiculously long loading times, quite a few bugs and it only plays well with an Xbox 360 controller. However, the concepts of the game are really interesting and work well, so give it a try!
The trailer that we made early 2008 to pitch the game to publishers. Showing the player in the trailer was all the hype in Wii commercials at the time, so we tried a bit of that here.
Snowball Earth was our first official game as Ronimo Games. De Blob was not entirely made with the same team, and for Snowball Earth we had decided to really start our own company and make a commercial game. We were still students at the time, and this was our group-graduation-project. After we graduated, we kept working on it, but mainly on extra stuff, like the puzzles prototype that is also in the Torrent. The main game that we are releasing today was basically our graduation project at the Utrecht School of the Arts, and it was also our official start as a company.
Snowball Earth was to be a console game for the Wii or the Xbox 360. A 3D adventure in the style of Ratchet & Clank, although for our first game we wanted to keep things a bit simpler and more doable than the fantastic Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools Of Destruction, which launched around that time, and was a big inspiration for us.
After the colouring gameplay of De Blob, we wanted to find some new innovative mechanics, and went all out on that. So much so, that we ended up with not one, but two really interesting mechanics. These two mechanics are not just what makes Snowball Earth shine, but also its downfall...
The first and most striking mechanic is the melting. The entire world is frozen, and the player melts the snow by simply moving through it. This is a pretty spectecular effect: snow turns into puddles and then into grass, plants pop up everywhere and the ice disappears from the rocks. It is quite a sight to behold, and simply walking around while transforming the world around you is already a lot of fun.
When melting is enabled, everything around the player comes to life. I consider this completely dynamic system one of the most impressive things we have made so far. It was also an enormous amount of handwork to create, though...
The sound effects for Snowball Earth were made by Aline Bruijns, and the music by Erik van Woudenberg. They graduated in audio in the same year as we graduated in game development, and they did some great sound work on Snowball Earth! Aline later started the sound studio Audio Rally Sound Design.
Click for high resolution
By now several other games have done kind of similar mechanics, like Prince of Persia 2008's restoration of life after a boss has been killed. The effect there is a lot less dynamic, but it was still kind off odd to see a game release with a similar idea after we had already cancelled our own take on it. (By the way, I absolutely love that Prince of Persia game, definitely my favourite in the series! I think it's a very rare open-world platforming gem!)
The other unique mechanic of Snowball Earth are the Robodogs. These are little robots that run along with the player. When you shoot them with the right stick, they become physics balls and can be used as projectiles in combat, or to get them to spots where the player cannot go. The player can press the right trigger to pull them back. This allowed for some great combat and puzzles. For example, hitting enemies in the back does extra damage, so deliberately shooting your Robodogs past an enemy and then pulling them to hit him in the back is a great tactic, and a lot of fun to do.
The physics gameplay with the Robodogs turning into balls.
In terms of story, the premise was as weird as one would expect of a Ronimo game. In prehistoric times, a little alien robot on an orbiting spaceship accidentally pressed the wrong button and thus froze the entire earth! As punishment, he is sent down to fix his mistake. He goes looking for sources of heat, like volcanoes, to melt the snow. However, during his quest he finds strange fridges everywhere, and discovers that he has been deceived: a fridge manufacturing company has illegally sold all these fridges to the yetis, and this is what really froze the earth! On his epic quest, our little hero must battle the evil polar animals, close all the fridges, and prove his innocence!
With the two unique mechanics and all the hard work that went into Snowball Earth, why was the game cancelled? The answer is quite simple: no publisher was willing to fund the game, and it was too big to make ourselves. We pitched to all the big publishers: dozens of meetings at Gamescom 2007 and GDC 2008. Quite a few liked the game and kept communications with us going, and some even invited us to do internal pitches to the entire team in their offices, but in the end no one wanted to really go with this.
I think there were two main reasons why publishers didn't want to fund us. The most important was properly that we had no track record. Making a big 3D game with a team that has no console experience whatsoever is an extremely risky endeavour, and no publisher would want to fund that until we had proven that we could actually finish a game on console.
At the time I was totally convinced that we could make this game, but right now I am very happy that no one funded us. We wanted to make the game in only 1.5 years, and wanted to grow the team from 7 to 15 developers for that. Just finding 8 experienced developers is already a difficult challenge... Let alone finishing such a big game with such an inexperienced team!
Swords & Soldiers and Awesomenauts were both much more realistic plans than Snowball Earth, and they both took way longer than we expected. If we had actually started making Snowball Earth, it would probably have taken us at least 3 years to make it. In fact, with our current team (13 full-time developers plus a number of interns) and my current experience (two multi-platform console titles), we still wouldn't be able to make this in 1.5 years. Snowball Earth was just way too big for our team size and total lack of experience at the time...
Click for high resolution
The other reason publishers didn't want to fund the game, is that it was a difficult sell to their marketing departments. What similar games were out there, and had been a success? At that point 3D platforming had not been a big market for years (except for Mario Galaxy, of course), and our game also had all these original mechanics that could not be easily compared to other marketing campaigns.
Of course, I know now that making weird stuff is a good way to gain attention and thus great marketing for indie studios like us, so I don't necessarily agree with these marketing arguments. But there is another, deeper problem within Snowball Earth: the mechanics around the Robodogs were all pretty complex, and thus for a slightly more mature audience. The melting mechanics, however, were very kids-friendly, but didn't bring us any gameplay depth besides the simple fun of walking around melting everything. So our two innovative gameplay concepts just didn't mingle all that well. Now add that our main characters were robots, and that robots just don't work for mass audiences. Except in Wall-e, of course, but that's not enough to go by.
We tried addressing these issues by focussing more on the physics gameplay. So after we had graduated and had finished the main prototype, our game designers made a whole bunch of puzzle levels. They bundled those in a prototype level with hardly any graphics, but some really interesting gameplay. This level is much less polished, and the physics are not precise enough for such puzzles, but it does show the great potential of these mechanics. With more time, I think we could have turned that into a great 3rd person physics puzzler. These puzzles are pretty difficult with all their bugs and the lack of a tutorial, but I still think the ideas are great, so they have been included as a second level in the version of the game that we are releasing today.
Some gameplay from the puzzles level of Snowball Earth.
To react to the publisher critique on the robots, we also made tons of designs for non-robot characters. We have some absolutely ridiculous concept art of dogs in round spacesuits, so I will post those soon as well!
After a year of work on the game and no money and no publisher, we finally got access to Wii devkits. This allowed us to start developing Snowball Earth on console, so that we could finally prove to publishers that we could actually make this game. However, what if publishers still didn't want the game at that point? Then we would have wasted even more time on what already seemed like a failed project! So we decided to cancel Snowball Earth altogether, and start working on something smaller, something that we could actually finish ourselves, on those Wii devkits that we got. The became a little game called Swords & Soldiers...
(Of course, the history from then on was paved with a lot more success: Swords & Soldiers came out on Wii, PS3, PC, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android, and got great reviews and won several awards. Awesomenauts was recently released on PS3, 360 and PC, again to great reviews. Seeing Snowball Earth fail because it was too big, was exactly the lesson we needed to learn to keep it smaller and more doable in our next games!)
Wednesday, 26 September 2012
Cancelled game Snowball Earth playable at Indigo
In 2007, after we had made De Blob, we worked on a big game that was intended to be the first real commercial game by Ronimo Games. It was called: Snowball Earth. However, we couldn't find a publisher for it and the game was cancelled. After that, we went on to make Swords & Soldiers.
Since the game was cancelled, we never showed it to anyone after that. However, this weekend at Indigo, the prototype we made at the time will be playable! It is a 30 minute completely playable demo that shows the visual style and gameplay we were aiming for.
We will soon release a lot more information on what this game was all about, and even the complete playable prototype! I think it has some great original and unique gameplay ideas, so I am actually looking forward to showing those to the world! However, for the moment, enjoy these two screenshots!
To play Snowball Earth this weekend, visit Indigo! Indigo is a yearly exhibition by Dutch Game Garden that shows the best new work by Dutch game developers. This year it is held in Utrecht's town hall, at Korte Minrebroederstraat 2. On September 28 it is open mainly for press and business people, while on September 29 it is open to the general public. Entrance to Indigo is free, so be sure to visit and give Snowball Earth a try! Awesomenauts and my new project Cello Fortress will also be playable at Indigo!
Visit Indigo if you want to give Snowball Earth a try, or follow this blog for more info soon!
Since the game was cancelled, we never showed it to anyone after that. However, this weekend at Indigo, the prototype we made at the time will be playable! It is a 30 minute completely playable demo that shows the visual style and gameplay we were aiming for.
We will soon release a lot more information on what this game was all about, and even the complete playable prototype! I think it has some great original and unique gameplay ideas, so I am actually looking forward to showing those to the world! However, for the moment, enjoy these two screenshots!
To play Snowball Earth this weekend, visit Indigo! Indigo is a yearly exhibition by Dutch Game Garden that shows the best new work by Dutch game developers. This year it is held in Utrecht's town hall, at Korte Minrebroederstraat 2. On September 28 it is open mainly for press and business people, while on September 29 it is open to the general public. Entrance to Indigo is free, so be sure to visit and give Snowball Earth a try! Awesomenauts and my new project Cello Fortress will also be playable at Indigo!
Visit Indigo if you want to give Snowball Earth a try, or follow this blog for more info soon!
Sunday, 27 November 2011
Monster Truck VS Zombies - A cancelled Ronimo project
At Ronimo Games we make lots of stuff that is never released or shown outside our office. Kind of a pity, really, because quite a lot of that is really cool! So I am really happy that today I can show one of the cancelled projects that I personally like most: the insane mockup trailer we made in May 2009 for Monster Truck VS Zombies!
This is a pitch video we did for a big mobile publisher (can't say who, since that's confidential). They wanted fresh games for something, and in a couple of days we came up with a concept, made concept art and produced a pitch video to show all of that.
This was to be a really small game, so we came up with a slightly simpler concept than what you usually see from Ronimo. The idea was to make a side-scrolling stunt-driving game, much like Excite Bike and Trials. You drive a giant monster truck and the goal is to kill zombies through stunt kills. After each level you can buy upgrades and weapons for your truck and driver. But really, the video says at all, so just have a look:
The music is Sad Man's Tonque by Volbeat. Since this is just a pitch video and not an actual product, we used an existing song that fits the game.
The art in this video was of course made by our art team, but I got lucky and could animate the gameplay sequence in the middle (the part with the stick figures ;) ) and do the video montage. Since I am lead programmer at Ronimo, it rarely works to let me do art things: it is impractical for our planning and our artists are way better at it than I am. However, I really enjoy the rare moments when there is an opportunity for me to do some 3D art, animation or lighting! :)
As far as pitch-videos for new concepts go, I think this is a pretty good one. I think it communicates both the style and the actual gameplay pretty well. Through the choice of music and the logo and concept art, it gives a good feel for how the player will experience it.
The gameplay mock-up video in the middle shows what the actual gameplay will be. We deliberately made this with stick figures, so that it is absolutely clear that this is not the graphical style the game would have. Since we wanted to make this video in only a couple of days, trying to show what the real graphics would look like in the final game during gameplay would not have worked: it is simply too much work to make that on a high enough quality level. In practice, it is always difficult for a viewer to look beyond mediocre graphics and realise that the real game is going to look better. So I think if you want to pitch something, it is a good idea to make things either look/play absolutely fantastic, or make it super clear that only parts of what you are seeing represent the final product.
So since the gameplay animation didn't show the graphical style of the game, our artists instead made two concept art pieces for that. One is the 'standard' concept art image. It features the main elements of the game and looks as cool as possible:
However, this kind of concept art is not very useful for anything but setting the mood and character. At no point in the game will you play anything that looks even remotely like this. After all, the game itself is side-scrolling and shows the monster truck from quite a distance.
This is a pitfall that lots of concept artists seem to fall for. How often does a concept artist design a character specifically to look good from the front, even though the game is third person, so you look at his back all the time? So at Ronimo our artists mostly make concept art from exactly the perspective of the actual game. So when we decide on a style or design, we decide based on what things will actually look like in the game. So for Monster Truck VS Zombies, our artists also drew an image of what the actual game would look like in the end:
Monster Truck VS Zombies was cancelled and nothing was ever made for it besides this trailer. So what went wrong with this game? A couple of things. First: the publisher didn't like it, so there was no financing. Then there was the platform: we had never worked with that mobile device before, so doing a new device was going to make the coding team too much of a bottleneck. Especially since I was still the only programmer at the time.
Finally, and this killed a lot of the enthusiasm in our team for this project: we discovered a Flash game that was almost exactly the same. A side-scrolling stunt-racer where you kill zombies with a monster truck. That Flash game was so badly made that it was no fun at all, but still, seeing something so literally the same is far from inspiring. We always try to make something that is at least slightly original and innovative, and this wasn't that any more after we saw that video.
Anyway, I still really like this little over-the-top pitch video for Monster Truck VS Zombies, so it is really nice to finally show it here! :)
This is a pitch video we did for a big mobile publisher (can't say who, since that's confidential). They wanted fresh games for something, and in a couple of days we came up with a concept, made concept art and produced a pitch video to show all of that.
This was to be a really small game, so we came up with a slightly simpler concept than what you usually see from Ronimo. The idea was to make a side-scrolling stunt-driving game, much like Excite Bike and Trials. You drive a giant monster truck and the goal is to kill zombies through stunt kills. After each level you can buy upgrades and weapons for your truck and driver. But really, the video says at all, so just have a look:
The music is Sad Man's Tonque by Volbeat. Since this is just a pitch video and not an actual product, we used an existing song that fits the game.
The art in this video was of course made by our art team, but I got lucky and could animate the gameplay sequence in the middle (the part with the stick figures ;) ) and do the video montage. Since I am lead programmer at Ronimo, it rarely works to let me do art things: it is impractical for our planning and our artists are way better at it than I am. However, I really enjoy the rare moments when there is an opportunity for me to do some 3D art, animation or lighting! :)
As far as pitch-videos for new concepts go, I think this is a pretty good one. I think it communicates both the style and the actual gameplay pretty well. Through the choice of music and the logo and concept art, it gives a good feel for how the player will experience it.
The gameplay mock-up video in the middle shows what the actual gameplay will be. We deliberately made this with stick figures, so that it is absolutely clear that this is not the graphical style the game would have. Since we wanted to make this video in only a couple of days, trying to show what the real graphics would look like in the final game during gameplay would not have worked: it is simply too much work to make that on a high enough quality level. In practice, it is always difficult for a viewer to look beyond mediocre graphics and realise that the real game is going to look better. So I think if you want to pitch something, it is a good idea to make things either look/play absolutely fantastic, or make it super clear that only parts of what you are seeing represent the final product.
So since the gameplay animation didn't show the graphical style of the game, our artists instead made two concept art pieces for that. One is the 'standard' concept art image. It features the main elements of the game and looks as cool as possible:
However, this kind of concept art is not very useful for anything but setting the mood and character. At no point in the game will you play anything that looks even remotely like this. After all, the game itself is side-scrolling and shows the monster truck from quite a distance.
This is a pitfall that lots of concept artists seem to fall for. How often does a concept artist design a character specifically to look good from the front, even though the game is third person, so you look at his back all the time? So at Ronimo our artists mostly make concept art from exactly the perspective of the actual game. So when we decide on a style or design, we decide based on what things will actually look like in the game. So for Monster Truck VS Zombies, our artists also drew an image of what the actual game would look like in the end:
Monster Truck VS Zombies was cancelled and nothing was ever made for it besides this trailer. So what went wrong with this game? A couple of things. First: the publisher didn't like it, so there was no financing. Then there was the platform: we had never worked with that mobile device before, so doing a new device was going to make the coding team too much of a bottleneck. Especially since I was still the only programmer at the time.
Finally, and this killed a lot of the enthusiasm in our team for this project: we discovered a Flash game that was almost exactly the same. A side-scrolling stunt-racer where you kill zombies with a monster truck. That Flash game was so badly made that it was no fun at all, but still, seeing something so literally the same is far from inspiring. We always try to make something that is at least slightly original and innovative, and this wasn't that any more after we saw that video.
Anyway, I still really like this little over-the-top pitch video for Monster Truck VS Zombies, so it is really nice to finally show it here! :)
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