Top oâ the blog post to you. My name is Cassie Murphy. Iâm an illustrator based in Seattle, and the lead artist for Trundl.buddy and the Ghostly Wifi-lactery. I draw every glowing, drippy, spindly, nubby, blocky, undulating, craggy, Non-Newtonian Thing in this game.
Though this is my first game studio experience, this isnât my first video game. That distinction goes to a one-button game called Dinglefling, wherein you must release a family of dingleberries from a catâs sit-upon to land on items in a room. It was a vague realization that I wanted to do 2D game art. When I moved to Seattle, I met some folks that dug my art style, and the amorphous dream that spurred me to move here began to take shape at Spite House.
During life in Virginia, my art developed a one-note style and subject matter: Cute. Fat. Cats. My cat paintings got me featured on Animal Planetâs âCATS 101â, Amy Poehlerâs Smart Girls, HBOâs Game of Thrones Compendium, the Criticsâ Choice Awards, E! Online, BuzzFeed, Nerdist, Tor.com, Threadless, TeeFury, Geek and Sundry and Cat Fancy, to name a lot. I painted hundreds of client cat commissions and slung prints at conventions across the Eastern seaboard.
After 8 years of pun-based feline success it began to feel like work (in a bad way) and I gave up the ghost. Er, the cats. To draw ghosts instead.
Working on a team like this is a creativeâs fever dream. Our SoDo warehouse workspace buzzes with the urgent energy of invention and/or the trillest (only) trap in the building.
It is also the most challenged Iâve ever felt in my professional life. Iâve never needed to work on a team to create cartoons before, let alone whilst meticulously ensuring the art fits not only the lore weâre weaving, but also within the technical bounds of Spine and Unity. The re-work process is a hard reality of team-based art-making; something Iâm mitigating through simpler sketches and real-time concepting. Learning, when done right, is never comfortable.
Being the lead artist affords me a surprising measure of creative control over the project as a whole. It feels like pressure, but also gives the satisfying illusion of power in this monster of a process. My favorite thing to do is slip things into my art that inspire a change in the story or gameplay: faces in the canyon walls, ghost expressions conveying their motivations, lava lamp-like innards of massive Wi-Fi towers. Sometimes a design goes over like a lead balloon (R.I.P. wispy skeleton-robot concept). Other times I design a character or environment that elicits rare, sweet guffaws from the lovable gruffians I work with.
Weâre in the final stretch of developing the canyon, which sets the template for future biomes, so Iâm hoping we worked out all the kinks. The main kink = my making the dimensions and format of each asset work correctly in-game (see Rayâs post). Â Itâs a continual learning process between the dev and myself to make the pieces of our cartoon world fit together. For example, the canyon walls shouldnât follow one-point perspective as I would like to draw it, but rather need a flat bottom so as not to float off the ground. Unity takes care of the perspective. Or breaks it. Unity takes care of and breaks a lot (visually), Iâm learning.
I love a challenge. Needless to say â and saying it anyway â Iâm pouring my heart into this game, and I canât wait to show you more. Stay tuned.
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