Sunday Funnies - Critters and Creatures!
almost 3 years ago
– Mon, May 31, 2021 at 01:11:56 AM
Happy Sunday Backers!
If you've been following our Saturday Night Development Streams (Saturday nights at 9 PM EDT on PxlPlz's Twitch channel), you'll know that the past few weeks have been busy developing enemies and combat (including building Peony's bomb attack and Nemo's sword swing!)
With that in mind, we wanted to share some of the origins of the creatures that you'll be encountering in the game, particularly the ones that will appear in our Mushroom Forest vertical slice level.
Winsor McCay's fantastic beasts
As we've discussed in the past, Winsor McCay was obsessed with drawing fantastic creatures and often incorporated them in his comics and animation work. Working in the early decades of the 20th century, McCay felt that drawing was the ultimate imaginative medium with limitless possibilities. McCay's early artistic jobs included working at dime museums, where working class audiences could take in Vaudeville acts and side show curiosities, so surreal spectacle found its way into his comics.
This character in-particular inspired one of our own missing-link creature, who sleeps until the player is nearby, then charges toward the player!
Another reason that McCay included imaginary or surreal creatures in his comics was to deter critics doubtful of his abilities. He was occasionally accused of tracing for his comics (with doubters thinking that no one could draw as realistically or accurately as he could without tracing), so he would incorporate imaginary animals and later, dinosaurs (animals that didn't exist anymore), into his work.
Some of these creatures, along with some from other public domain works (especially Lewis Carroll's poem Jabberwocky) inspired creatures that we're putting into the game, such as the Mome Rath and Slithy Tove.
Of course, Little Nemo in Slumberland comes with a variety of monsters as well. One that we were particularly taken with was the Potato Bug from the June 10, 1906 episode that also features the first appearance of Doctor Pill.
Of course, what would a Winsor McCay game be without his famous mosquito character? This creepy crawly featured prominently in Dream of the Rarebit Fiend and the 1912 animated short based on it, How a Mosquito Operates. The mosquito appeared briefly in our game's trailer and made frequent appearances in McCay's other works, including in Little Nemo.
Speaking of Winsor McCay's drawings...
One more thing! We recently stumbled across (and backed!) this awesome-looking project creating flip books of work by film and animation pioneers, The Pioneers Flipbook Collection by Flipboku, and thought we'd share the info with all of you!
The project looks pretty cool, plus one of the books centers on the work of Winsor McCay! As animators studying McCay's characters, this is definitely in our wheelhouse! This will definitely come in handy as we continue the kind of research we've been doing for the project so far.
That's it for now! We'll be offering other looks into the game's villains in the near future, so we hope you enjoy this look into the research we're doing for the game's artwork. Stay tuned as we continue to work on the game and add new elements from McCay's catalogue!
See you in the funny papers!
Chris and Team Nemo
