scholastic new media: huggly’s sleepover cd-rom game

Mindsai Productions, an extraordinary boutique game developer in Seattle, tapped me for a quick pitch on a big children’s gaming title with Scholastic New Media. Scholastic’s flagship children’s book illustrator Tedd Arnold needed proof that we could faithfully translate his beloved Huggly book series into the digital realm. I created some careful renderings that honored his magical style of water-color and colored pencil, and also created a short animation test. The quality surprised everyone, Scholastic got Tedd’s blessing and Mindsai got Scholastic’s budget and go ahead.

All the characters, scenes and narrative were straight from Tedd — we literally worked off scans of his pencil art. What a gracious and trusting collaborator he was!

As Art Director I conceived and created all of the navigation and interactivity, the ink + color + texture art rendering techniques, the sprite animation production process, as well as much of the game design. I was in charge of training a corral of illustrators and animators to mimic my rendering and animation techniques, to convert countless libraries of legs and eyes and mouths to 8-bit index palettes, and catalog them in a database for the programmers to access and render to screen.

On a CD-rom game, every kilobyte is precious. Not a pixel was wasted.