We’ve spent months and months defining the style of the characters, and I’m really happy with the results. You need someone like that for indie games, and to have somebody this talented in all of those areas is amazing…I am incredibly lucky to have him, and so are you, since he’s going to help make the game the kind of “perfect jewel” that is the reason I’m indie in the first place. While most of the industry is following movies and specializing roles to the point where an individual artist might only rig, or do textures, or animate, John can do it all. John’s the perfect artist for SpyParty, because he’s amazing at all the artistic disciplines, from concept through modeling, texturing, and animating.
SPYPARTY LIST OF CHARACTERS FULL
After six years of that, I figured our working relationship had been battle tested, and so when I started working on SpyParty full time, I also started working on John full time, to try to get him to come work on the game. I would develop some crazy mostly-broken system for skinning or painting or animating the creatures, and John would do amazing and beautiful things with it, and not hate me afterwards. This rate of growth simply cannot be sustained.
So, it’s true, I have doubled the team size. It’s been hard to keep this quiet over the past year, and when somebody would ask me if I was making the game by myself, I’d answer “yes” and rationalize it on a technicality, since we haven’t actually put anything John’s done into the game itself yet! Full disclosure: John has actually been working full time on SpyParty since September of 2011, we’ve just kept it a secret until we could reveal the new art style with a cool selection of characters representing some of the diversity we’re trying to achieve.