00:05I've always played videogames, I guess, and always liked videogames.
00:09You know, it's a very visual medium, and yet, visually, I think the world of videogames is quite conservative.
00:22I'm from a kind of graphic art illustration background.
00:25There were lots of videogames that I loved, but they didn't look much like the sort of visual art stuff
00:30that I love.
00:31And it was kind of a no-brainer, really, to want to get involved with making them.
00:35Dick sent me a picture as a possible start for a videogame.
00:40I think he said something like, hey, let's make a videogame, I've drawn you a picture.
00:42And if he'd had any sense, he would have said, no, no, I don't want to.
00:48But he said yes, unfortunately, and that thing was the initial seed that became Hohokum.
00:56Oh, this is a classic page of telephone doodle, isn't it?
00:59This is definitely either a meeting or a telephone doodle here.
01:02But it kind of spills out into a more formal character design thing.
01:05It's like there's a phase where you're drawing lots of repetitive, abstract things,
01:09which gradually morph into slightly more tangible things.
01:12Here's stuff that's really specific from when we were making the Kite Worlds bit of the game,
01:16where there's guys flying kites.
01:17It's just nothing, it's just a little scribble.
01:20But it's weird, isn't it? Maybe that's the first time.
01:22So a lot of people ask about why this game has this particular look to it and where the art
01:27style comes from.
01:28The honest answer is it's pretty much how I draw.
01:30It's vector art, which means it has a clean edge look to it.
01:34I do it in such a way that there's a slight wonkiness to everything.
01:37When you look closely at the art in Her Horkum, everything is a little bit wobbly.
01:41Because there are so many drawings, there's so much art and animation in Her Horkum,
01:44we've had to do a lot of work to ensure that we can fit all of those characters
01:48and all of those animations into memory,
01:49while still retaining that sense of it being really hand-drawn and alive.
01:54I remember when I first saw this,
01:55and I think this might have been the first thing you animated,
01:58I thought, oh god, that's weird.
02:00That's not how I would have imagined them being.
02:02I would have imagined them all being like seaweed under water.
02:05But the way you've done them, it's really like,
02:07it's got a real kind of like,
02:09it's a bit like out of control in a way that I really like.
02:12Animators have done things that we didn't expect them to do at all.
02:15Dick will draw something and a gameplay mechanic will come out of a drawing
02:17in a way that Dick didn't necessarily intend.
02:19Often I draw stuff and I have no idea what the gameplay would be.
02:22I quite like to surprise Ricky with that and go,
02:25I've drawn this thing, do you think this could be in the game?
02:27Have you got any kind of ideas for what might happen in this place?
02:29Or sometimes, you know, I will program a strange little toy made with circles
02:35and I'll send that to Dick and then he'll think about what that can be
02:38in a figurative sense and give it some sort of personality or make it a character.
02:41You know, because when you're making a game,
02:43you're making a piece of art and the visual art side of it
02:46should be, I think, inherently part of that, not just a finish.
02:50Dick never really worked on a video game, never an especially technical person
02:53and so there were certain practicalities about making a video game
02:56that he had to wrap his brain around.
02:58Initially, I'm the guy that draws and he's the guy that programs
03:00and between us we try and make a game together.
03:03But actually, as the relationships mature and as it's gone on,
03:06it's not so much about the things that we can and can't do.
03:10It's just about the friendship and the thing that we're making together.
03:13Having that person who is coming from outside
03:15and didn't bring all the kind of baggage and assumptions
03:18that people who work in video games all the time have
03:20kind of forced me to re-evaluate a lot of the things
03:23that I just accepted as being true.
03:24There's lots of things which I've got a real, almost like phobia of
03:28that are quite common within visual art
03:31and also very much within video games.
03:33Shininess and flares and things that glow.
03:37It's ubiquitous within video games and I will have none of that in my art.
03:41I see those things as being like the equivalent of sugar and salt in food.
03:45They're both things that taste nice
03:48but unfortunately we live in a world where people just,
03:51without really thinking about it too much,
03:52just put sugar and salt into all food.
03:54Maybe my art's a bit more like having some nice fresh vegetables.
04:17So let's start with an infinite container.
04:17Thank you, Peter.
04:17And this is the one that we're launching today.
04:18Grazie.
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