(Insert stupid Blog name here) - Getting Squished

RSS Bot · January 25, 2008

When coming up with a label for Bob's port of Squish 'Em, I ran into the artist's equivalent of writer's block.

Y'see, I thought it would be funny to send Bob this for a label design:

Just as a joke, of course.

Unfortunately - that idea stuck in my head, and I couldn't get it out! But what I wanted, was something that implied some of the ideas in the classic Popeye cartoon A Dream Walking.

So, as is often the case, I pestered Dave Dries for some ideas. We'd been planning to collaborate on another project, and this seemed like a good candidate. He sent back a bunch of really cool photos, including this one:

And that seemed immediately like what we should go after. Trying to capture the look of those old iron worker photos. We also decided to stick with a very limited color palette. Not quite black and white, but hinting at it.

He also sent along a rough sketch of a wrap-around cover for the manual, which became the basis for the rest of the work we did. This really helped immeasurably, since it broke me away from the layout idea I had gotten stuck with. Dave created the background buildings using a plug-in for Cinema 4-D... at first.

From there, I began developing the characters, while Dave worked on the cityscape:

At some point, the plug-in just became too limiting, so Dave started building the city - from the ground up. This took a lot of work, but allowed him absolute control of what went into the city:

There is a ton of detail in there. Especially when you consider how small the final label will be. Fortunately, the manual cover gets printed at a good size.

We went through quite a few sets of foreground girders, before Dave came up with these. We wanted something that felt unsafe, hence the bent beams and skewed angles. I also wanted to make sure the guy was hanging out there only by his hand - without touching anything else - to further add to that sense of danger:

After the layout was set, I finished painting the characters in Photoshop, and touched up the foreground girders to match. Also, the background was lightened and blurred a bit to give the scene some atmosphere. This is the final wrap-around cover (without text):

Can you spot the AA logo?

We re-used the main background, with other characters, for the interior spread (again shown without text):

The background was further lightened and blurred so it wouldn't interfere with the text.

And finally, once the illustrations for the manual cover were complete, I adjusted the layout to fit on the cart label:

The key to being able to do that, is to keep everything on separate layers in Photoshop. Then it's easy to move things around as needed.

In an earlier entry, I mentioned the importance of listening to music while I work. For this game, nothing seemed to fit quite so well as Raymond Scott.

In the end, it was a lot of fun creating the artwork for Squish 'Em, and I think it's mine and Dave's best collaboration so far. It's a far better piece than anything I could have come up with on my own, and the infighting and backbiting was kept pretty-much to a minimum.

Oh yeah - and the game is really, really good, too! Go buy it!

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?a...;showentry=4445