Kid Koala
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This all started with a pile of drawings!?
🕑 Added 2021-04-16 16:39:35 +0000 UTCMany years ago, I was invited to work on some music for a short film by animator Lillian Chan. She had heard some music from the Some Of My Best Friends Are DJs album, and thought that style would be a good fit for a couple cues in her film. You, can see a short clip of her film Jaime Lo, Small and Shy on her vimeo channel. Lillian is one of my favorite people, she's an incredible artist and designer and just an awesome person in general. She is also working with me on developing a feature length film for Space Cadet (but that's a post for another day).
Anyhow, one day I met with her at the National Film Board and she said "Hey you should come up and meet my friend Jon who I share a studio with, I think you'll like his stuff"
I went upstairs to the animation studio where I met Jonathan Ng (aka JonJon). He was working on his own short film Asthma Tech, a delightful animated story about a child with asthma who uses his drawing skills and imagination to change the world (school)!
We all became fast friends as we all share a love of animation, music and snacks!
It turned out that Jon is a B-boy and whenever he wasn't drawing at his animation table, he would be going to various break jams in the city and practicing his break moves.
Jon showed me a stack of animation paper he was drawing. It was a several page animation cycle of one of his characters "B-boy Noogie" doing a six step. I loved the sketchy style and was blown away at the accuracy of the momentum in the moves. You could feel the inherent rhythm in the animation. I've seen/watched a lot of breakdancing from DJing at various breakdance battles and jams over the years, but to this day I've never seen anyone able to hand draw those moves except Jon. It really is something stunning!
A few months later, Jon animated a couple of short break battles with a few of his characters and I added scratches and sound design. You can check it out on Youtube
After that, we thought. "What should we do now?" and while I was bouncing some ideas around with my friend (and manager) Ryhna Thompson the idea of a video game (actually then it was App) came up!
But we don't know any Video Game studios?!
So I actually just made a cold call to the universe. I put a post out on social media something to the effect of:
"Hey, are there any indie game developers in Montreal that want to talk about making something?"
That week I met Mike Wozniewski (Hololabs) and Philippe Rostaing both of whom eventually became part of our main game dev/design team. And we began a several year journey expanding the team to build what would eventually become the Floor Kids Video Game.
It was a lot of new muscles for everyone as we were attempting to make a game that wasn't quite like anything we had seen or played before. I'll get into some more in-depth posts about the development process in some future posts. I'm trying to compile all the photos and WIP stuff I'd collected over the last several years.
But today, I'm so proud of the whole crew and all of their amazing work. Since we first launched we've been able to bring the game to Nintendo Switch, Playstation, Xbox, STEAM and as of this week STADIA!
It has been the most wonderful adventure. And to think it all started with a pile of drawings!?
We hope you have fun with the game!
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Comments
Kid Koala
Rad! One day we'll bring the travelling Floor Kids arcade to London!!!
David
I obviously love everything about this story!! :) You collaborate with all my absolute favourite people.
Kieran Wheeler
I love playing floorkids.
