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They were seven...and they ran away like seven hundred!

(TV-14 - some adult dialogue and violence)

#super science friends #tinman creative #web series

Super Science Friends is the animated show you wished you watched on Cartoon Network as a kid, but couldn’t because it was only made in November 2015. Well, it’s not exactly PG, so it’s more Adult Swim material than CN. In reality it’s neither, as it’s an independent production by Tinman Creative, funded on Kickstarter in 2014. The show is just as brilliant as big name titles though, perhaps more so, with its style of humor that works better if you’re a science geek a.k.a. nerd.

To be fair, it’s much more heavy on humor than science, the latter part being represented from a historical perspective of the show’s protagonists (Einstein, Darwin, Curie, Tesla, Freud, Taputti). If you know your science heroes well, you will have a good time with this satire. You can also go deeper on the Super Science Friends’ YouTube channel with additional videos that explain all the facts behind the references. For example, TIL Hitler was named Time’s Man of the Year!

After the first episode aired two years ago, the authors launched a new Kickstarter campaign to fund episodes 2–4. Even though it got even more support than first time around, it came quite short of its loftier goal (CA$150k). Lucky for us, the KS funds would only represent a part of the production budget, so with the rest covered from other sources (I’m guessing profits from Tinman’s commercial projects) the new episodes still got produced over the last two years (E04 just came out last week). Even a cool comic with Ada Lovelace happened. All of this free.

On another timeline, 1 year ago, the guys from Gorlami (a Brazilian game development studio and fans of the show) met with the Canadian animators and discovered they were all thinking the same thing: the time-traveling cartoon-comic universe is missing a video game! Long story short, after a year of hard work, a prototype is now ready to play and Super Science Friends: The Video Game is on Kickstarter too.

I call it a prototype (they call it a bug demo edition), because it’s not a true vertical slice (short polished piece that matches the final quality). The art and humor and cinematics are there at 100%, but the gameplay clearly needs more depth. It’s essentially Streets of Rage 2 with just the basic button mashing and none of the combos/enemy patterns—a tech/flavor demo with a lot of potential, but not necessarily tons of fun yet.

Unlike the smooth animated curves of the show, the game is done in lovely pixel art, transformed into pixels in big part by Gabriel Fernandes a.k.a. @gabefern. Gabe was on the project as a freelancer with Bruno Atanásio of Gorlami covering the rest of the workload.

With half of the time in the campaign left, but just one third of the CA$50k goal reached, the fate of the Kickstarter really is up to every new fan the show can get. After watching the episodes, I easily became one, and if the gameplay manages to come closer to Sega’s classic, I’ll be thoroughly impressed. Plus, if the game makes it, I’ll get to show everyone a new example of the cabinet/Frankenstein graphical projection.