An indie game based on Winsor McCay's groundbreaking comic strip.
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
Hello dear backers!
I realize that this is your second update of the evening after the Discord update (or if you're seeing this not as a backer - please consider becoming one for all the exclusive stuff like our Discord server and developer brainstorming podcast!), but there's an exciting update series that we wanted to introduce today: Artwork Wednesdays!
This is going to be where we show off new artwork for the game or deep dive into the game's look. For this introductory episode, I thought I'd share the elements of the game's art style, and where how it connects to the source material!
As we discussed both on the page and in a previous update, the game pulls from a lot of retro classics, but the heart and soul of our game lies in the original Little Nemo in Slumberland comics. These comics were created by comics and animation pioneer Winsor McCay starting in 1905. A self-trained artist, McCay's comic was known for not only its serialized storytelling (stories were told over the course of multiple strips), but also for its draftsmanship, 4th wall breaking, and inventive use of page layouts
McCay drew with a thick outer line, which he drew first when he drew his characters, and thin inner and background lines. This is consistent with the Art Nouveau style, a movement in the graphic and applied arts popular between 1890 and 1910. This connection led Winsor McCay biographer John Canemaker to refer to this technique as the "Art Nouveau" line, and it's a key element of our drawing. McCay's thin inner lines on many of his characters have an almost minimalist sketch-like quality - boosted to clarity by the carefully drafted outer line.
We recreate this in our own process via separate adjustment layers for outer and inner lines, in case we implement a character and find that their artwork needs to be adjusted.
We also try to keep details on the characters simple and not over-drawn so that the characters are economical to draw and animate.
McCay's character's faces have dot eyes with tiny eyebrows, the bottom lines of noses (unless the character has a particularly large or round nose), and mouths drawn only where their shadows occur (corners of the mouth only on smiles, single lines, or circles when surprised) We are adapting this style to be inclusive of techniques in comic art that have come in the intervening years between McCay's and our own times - for all of McCay's skill, he did not have the graphic language that we do today to create character expressions.
Likewise, cloth is drawn minimally. Modern cartooning minimizes clothing wrinkles since they are hard to animate and increase drawing time. McCay was not animating his drawings but was working on tight deadlines so he drew clothing wrinkles with quick, thin, pen lines to show at least some minimum draping.
Little Nemo in Slumberland was not colored by hand, but using the Ben Day Lithographic process. McCay would include detailed color notes with his pages on what colors things should be. While there are pages that include smooth gradients and other effects, art generally used 1-tone blocks of color encased in black lines, except in very occasional cases (Nemo's pajamas, which usually featured some shadowing to break up the white.) As I tell contributing artists in our style guide: "do not use shadows or shading on characters unless instructed."
To get the older comic look that's become a Hallmark of Little Nemo, we sample all of the colors we can from the comic itself, this gives characters a richness that otherwise wouldn't be there (if Nemo's pajamas were straightforward white instead of an aged-newsprint off-white.
Last is how we deal with the color black. If a character was wearing a dark suit or dress, or if there were very strong shadows, McCay would just black them out completely with his ink brush. This eliminates a lot of work for us on characters like Doctor Pill or the Nightmare Fiends, but it also means that we have to be creative with his animations so that we maintain a good silhouette, meaning that you can read his pose if you were to only look at him as a shadow. While this is normally just a theoretical animation guideline, we are literally animating as silhouettes with these characters.
As you can see, getting the look of Little Nemo and the Nightmare Fiends right is no small task! We think that the final product will be more than worth it though. We also hope you enjoyed this Artwork Wednesday look inside our art process and stay tuned for more updates and game development deep-dives.
Cheers,
Chris and Team Nemo
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
Dear backers,
Happy Monday!
After our Nintendo Switch announcement yesterday, we want to keep the momentum for the campaign going and we need your help!
Here's the deal: IF we can get to 50% funded ($35,000) by Saturday, March 13 at 11:59pm EST, all backers whose rewards include the game will receive:
Help us get this dream game funded (and beyond!!) by sharing the campaign far and wide (reddit, Discord servers, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, anywhere you can!)
We can do it everyone!
Team Nemo
Happy Sunday dear backers!
Usually I would do this on Sunday morning, but we had some other big announcements today, including bringing the game to Nintendo Switch! The positive response has been overwhelming, so we’re going to make sure we work extra hard to make it something awesome!
That being said! It’s time for some Sunday Funnies! What are these? Well, it’s our opportunity to talk about the history of Little Nemo, and some of the other comics that Winsor McCay created, which is the main topic for today. They also won't usually be this long, but since this is the first, we have to lay some historical groundwork.
First of all, the man himself. Winsor McCay was born Zenas Winsor McCay in either modern-day Ontario, Canada or Spring Lake, Michigan. Records of his birth have been lost, and McCay himself gave different dates of his birth, ranging from 1869 to 1871. From an early age, McCay was a talented artist, but his parents wanted him to have productive work and sent him to business school in Ypsilanti, Michigan. He would skip classes to take a train to Detroit to draw patrons in a local dime museum, and received drawing lessons from a professor at another nearby college. Becoming an artist was never not an option.
McCay eventually moved to Chicago, then to Cincinnati, Ohio where he did more dime museum work while doing freelance cartoon work for various magazines. In 1900 he got an illustrator and cartoonist position at the Cincinnati Enquirer, where he first worked in comic strips. Content warning if you look these up: some of this early work and even episodes of Little Nemo itself contain horrible racist caricatures common at that time. McCay was exceptional in many ways, but unfortunately not in this one.
McCay would eventually be lured away from the Enquirer and Ohio for a job at the New York Herald, where he worked alongside and built a rivalry with Richard F. Outcault, another comics pioneer. There he began a flurry of comic strips before arriving at arguably his most important work, Little Nemo in Slumberland. These other New York comics though, are our other topic today.
First is a comic called Little Sammy Sneeze, first drawn in 1903. Sammy Sneeze was not McCay’s first strip for the Herald, these included earlier strips like Mister Goodenough or Phurious Phinish of Phoolish Philipe's Phunny Phrolics, but Sammy Sneeze was the first to really take off. Each strip featured 6 panels, where a young boy would be standing in some quiet or delicately-positioned place such as next to a tall department store display or at a chess game. The first 4 panels would display him beginning to sneeze and increase in intensity until he lets loose in frame 5, often completely destroying the place he is with a powerful gust of wind. The 6th frame always featured Sammy being literally kicked out by an adult.
Sammy Sneeze would demonstrate themes prominent in McCay’s other work, such as sequential art (Sammy’s sneeze occurs over 5 frames showing the passage of time), repeated motifs (Sammy destroying the adults’ world and being kicked out), and sometimes even meta-narrative. The final Sammy Sneeze strip sees him sneeze his own comic into oblivion.
The next comic we’ll look at is Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, a hugely popular comic that McCay would draw from 1904-1911 until he left the Herald to sign with William Randolph Hearst’s New York American newspaper. Like many of McCay’s other comics, Rarebit Fiend always followed the same plot structure: a person finds themselves in an increasingly bizarre and at times horrifying situation which would reach a climax right before the person woke up. Every time, the dreamer would express regret at eating Welsh Rarebit, a dish made of a rich cheese sauce served over toast.
Rarebit Fiend and Little Nemo form interesting mirrors of one another: one is a mature and sometimes terrifying look at latent anxieties, while the other is a whimsical childhood fantasy. Each ends with the dreamer waking up and, at least in Nemo’s early strips, blaming the dream on food. Given the tonal difference between Rarebit Fiend and McCay’s other strips, his editor asked him to use a pseudonym when drawing it. He chose “Silas” after the trash collector that worked in Herald Square. At times, it seems like Rarebit Fiend infringes on Nemo, with some episodes having the former’s darker tone (an idea that’s inspiring our approach to Little Nemo and the Nightmare Fiends’ villains.)
The last comic we’ll look at is A Pilgrim’s Progress by Mister Bunion, which depicts the adventures of an everyman trying to rid himself of a valise labeled “Dull Care.” This comic closely mirrors the premise of John Bunyan's 1678 Christian Allegory A Pilgrim's Progress, that tells a similar story (albeit far less humorously) of a man seeking relief from the burden of his own sin. McCay's comic version ran from June of 1905 until 1909. The briefcase is understood to be Mister Bunion’s mundane cares and worries of his everyday life. Bunion tries again and again to get rid of the case, whether by pawning it off on another unfortunate soul, selling it, or flat out abandoning it. In all cases though, he is inevitably reunited with it, furthering his suffering.
While not McCay’s full catalog of non-Nemo comics, these ones show common elements of McCay’s work such as sequential art, dreams, or wry social humor. They also hold up compared to many comics of the era, with themes that resonate with modern readers. That's all for today's Sunday Funnies, we hope you liked it!
Be well dear backers, and we'll see you in the funny papers!
Chris and Team Nemo