KINDA FUNNY GAMESCAST (2022)
Not long before the launch of Kinda Funny's new studio in October 2022, Andy Cortez reached out to me that they were working on a completely new intro for their main video game podcast. The concept he shared with me was a fighting game character select screen, with the four hosts represented as playable characters donning iconic outfits of characters from some of their favourite games.
The character artwork and titles were created by Andy, the music by Zachary Zizzo, and the character animations by Nick Wozniak (Yacht Club Games/Shovel Knight). My role was to bring everything together with the select screen layout, create backgrounds, animate the character selection, and animating the title entering the screen. I decided to go with pixel art smear frames wherever possible as I found it best helped give the impression of speed while not breaking the style that had been established.
The biggest obstacles I ran into were making sure everyone was large enough at the bottom of the screen but not colliding with one another (I ended up having to draw an extension of the rope for the Scorpion animation so it reaches off screen) and creating a backgrounds that felt fitting but not distracting.
Getting to be part of such an impressive group for this meant a lot and ultimately my biggest goal was to make sure nothing I did was to the detriment of their work. I'm quite happy with the end result.
SPIDER-MAN VARIANT (2023)
I love the opportunity to create variant versions of intros whenever I can, and any chance I get to work on something Spider-Man themed, I'm all in. So in the lead up to the release of Marvel's Spider-Man 2 in 2023, I decided to create a Spidey themed intro, swapping out the fighting game character select screen influence for the suit selection in the franchise. I luckily had a base to work with for all the new character art due to Andy Cortez's existing assets, giving me a base template for the 4 different body shapes. It was used for both the game's review and the Spoilercast with the game's director, Bryan Intihar.
