> SEPTEMBER 2009

At the beginning of September, Swing Swing Submarine starts to work in the dining room of an appartment in Montpellier : this is also the beginning of the development of Seasons. Guillaume will program the game and manage technical parts of the project, I will take care of the game and level design, and concerning the graphics… Well, concerning the graphics we thought we could find another captain, a graphist captain, to join the team. Or maybe we could collaborate with another tiny studio ?

We didn’t have the answer at this moment, but Gaël, a friend of a friend, proposed his help and sent us the result of his first researches, including this artwork you may know already :

A fox in the middle of a living nature : this artwork perfectly illustrates our first intention of the project.
Gaël continued his researches, working on the character design of the fox and testing different art styles : realistic, magical, cute, cartoon…

The magical style didn’t match our intentions. But we really liked the cute little fox you can see in the first picture and we wanted to know how it could be if it was more adult.

Thanks to Gaël, we found the character we were looking for : fox 8/9 seemed to be a good compromise between cartoon and realism. Gaël was not really confortable with 2D animation and was already involved in other projects, so he didn’t join us. We still needed to find someone to work with at long term.

> OCTOBER 2009

It could have been Samuel : this 2D artist we met in June in Paris helped us too, making researches around seasons’ colors and a potential comics look.

Or it could have been Caroline, a more experienced 2D animator who already worked on animation movies.

Yes, it could have been Gaël, Samuel, Caroline, or somebody else, but we couldn’t afford their services cause we didn’t (and still don’t) have any money. One month after the project began, we had the confirmation that we will have to manage the project with a team of 2 : Guillaume and I. And the cat.

Next time, the conclusion : you’ll discover the solutions we found to solve this graphical issue, and you’ll also see the (almost) final graphical style of Seasons!