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POCKET GOD
Role: Co-creator, Illustrator, Animator, Marketing Text, Videos and Graphics, etc.
Pocket God is an mobile game created by Dave Castelnovo and myself and has sold 7 million copies across iOS, iPod iPad, Android and Windows Phones. We released it in January 2009, and immediately started to update the app often. By March, it became number one in the App Store for 4 weeks...and generated an enthusiastic fanbase! Because of this, it spawned a 26 issue comic series, a Facebook game, toys and more.
Pocket God is a humor-based interactive sandbox game starring 6 pygmies where the player acts as the island god, helping or hindering the hapless natives. It started as a simple iPhone game but evolved over 47 updates into an extensive world with a huge variety in game play mechanics and a growing mythology.
As part of our collaboration, I was responsible for all the visuals, text and sound while Dave, among other things, masterfully handled all the programming and technical aspects. He set up ways for me to build out game animations using xml, flash and imported bitmaps, so I did have to dive into xml files often.
For the characters, I decided to come up with a very simple and cute design that would be easy to animate and make people feel slightly bad for the abuse they were supposed to inflict. I focused on funny facial expressions and slapstick animation to convey the humor. For the environments, I started with sparse and simplistic backgrounds that fit within a strict graphic space budget. As we went, devices became more powerful and Dave worked on optimizing the graphics engine, so I was able to step up the background detail. Here are screens we designed that represent the various characters, environments and game-play...
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I also was responsible for marketing posters, which we often gave out as free swag. I often hired another artist to create them but here are a few of my favorites that I designed...
Links:
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/02/11/meet-the-guys-behind-pocket-god/
http://kotaku.com/5451731/pocket-god-micro+review-heaven-or-hell
http://www.macworld.com/article/1139418/pocketgod.html
http://www.technologytell.com/apple/53924/pocket-god-wins-best-app-ever-award-for-2009-anyway/