https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3rk1x9/were_lab_zero_games_makers_of_skullgirls_ama
Lab Zero is a small indie company which was formed after Skullgirls publisher Autumn Games received a series of lawsuits and ultimately had the entire Skullgirls team laid off by Reverge Labs in June 2012 because these two companies allowed their contract to expire, prompting the team to reform under Lab Zero Games in order to continue working on Skullgirls. Despite Autumn Games owning the Skullgirls IP, they claimed they were "fully behind the new studio". Because all funding from Autumn Games had ceased due to the litigations, Lab Zero decided to set up an Indiegogo campaign to get their first DLC character Squigly completed, who's development stopped after they were laid off. This was funded within the first 24 hours, and by the end of the campaign, had received enough funding to create 4 other DLC characters and several other extras.
On 2nd June 2015, Lab Zero announced their new game Indivisible, and set up an Indiegogo campaign to fund the game. If the game got funded, then publisher 505 Games would contribute the remaining development budget. Despite the very slow start, to the point that it looked like the game would not get funded, it eventually reached the full funding and is now currently in development.
Company & Funding
It's interesting to note that Lab Zero have been noted for being incredibly open with their campaigns to fund their products. For example, with Indivisible, they released a playable demo, specifically stated with great detail what would be included in the game and what it will be about, and frequently released updates showing off new characters and concepts, as well as stating exactly is in each perk. However, despite being so open about their project, it took a long time to finally get funded, and this is likely because of influx of teams and companies twisting the wording they use or not delivering everything they promised, if anything at all. The screenshot below is from the Reddit Q&A, where one member of the team describes how some accuse them of "lying, inflating numbers, being shady, etc". This then obviously leads fans to not fund the game because of other projects being misleading or failing as stated previously.
They also stated at multiple points that if Indivisible did not get funded then they would be forced to go into freelance work and split from one another, essentially disbanding, as stated in the screenshots below. The entirety of Lab Zero was in the hands of this crowd raiser because if Indivisible was not a success, the game would most likely never be made nor will the team likely make anything together again due to publishers looking at the project flop and noting that there was not enough support from fans. At several points they stated that they actually managed to get a contract signed incredibly quickly for the industry even though it took 6 months, showing that the industry is constantly busy working on something, but it also shows how much 505 Games believe in Lab Zero games after their success with Skullgirls. This is further emphasised with one statement, where they said "it's worth nothing that publishers are absolutely terrified right now because games are getting so expensive to make and entertainment is such an unpredictable business" and only really want to make small games under $1m or huge games over $25m. Considering Lab Zero is also a small indie company with just one game to their name, it shows how much of an impression Lab Zero has had on companies with their success and how they go about creating their games, as well as showing people that indie companies can become successful.
Concept Designer
For Indivisible, Alex Ahad worked with almost his entire team to make the characters (for example, Mariel created Razmi), knocking around concepts between each other until they had ideas that they liked. They concepted them before gameplay ideas were about, and then adapting moves and play styles for them depending on their appearance or vice versa, as the team has also stated that characters constantly go through design changes right up until final moments, such as some of the characters for Indivisible being changed when their role is determined. Ahad also states that he likes his team being involved in the concepting because it throws around more ideas and allows them to do stuff they are more interested in, which could present ideas that Ahad hadn't previously thought of.
https://skullgirls.com/2011/05/character-design-big-shapes-vs-small-details/
This interview with Alex Ahad reveals that a lot of the Skullgirls characters were concepted when he was still at highschool and college, so have been around for several years now and have grown as his artistic skills have grown. He made a lot of his characters for a hypothetical fighting game roster, although he created characters outside of this too. For example, Ms. Fortune was a request from a forum years ago, as someone was curious what a cat girl would look like in his style, so she was made from that idea, but Ahad gave her a unique spin by making her head removable.
Alex Ahad also mentions he is in charge of pre-production materials and the character model sheets. He also concepted character's attacks and created a lot of the promotional and initial artwork for characters. As well as this, he oversees the animators and clean-up artists to ensure they are following the intended style and direction. He also creates the stories and character scripts so that they are consistent, and occasionally created some key frames for animations.
http://www.game-art-hq.com/interview-with-alex-ahad-creative-director-and-creator-of-the-skullgirls-ip/
Animating
The Lead Animator at Lab Zero is Mariel Cartwright, who has also worked on projects such as the Shantae franchise, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories and Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World: The Game. In the interview linked below, Mariel states that her job is to "animate and oversee our animation contractors", as well as splitting the animation work evenly between herself and the Senior Animator Jonathan "Persona" Kim. They work on roughly animating most of a character's moves and then test them in-game. Once this is done, Mariel states that her job is to "assign out the roughs to our animating team and work with them to get finished animations back before passing it to cleanup". She also mentions how they only work on one character at a time otherwise it gets too chaotic.
http://shoryuken.com/2013/10/09/interview-with-mariel-cartwright-skullgirls-lead-animator/
They mention a couple of times that they use Photoshop for animating but then regard it as being a poor choice for animating, which is interesting for them to state and initially one would think to just use a different program. However, it makes sense when you remember they are an indie company with not a lot of money, so they cannot afford better programs for animating, as well as giving up the time to learn a new program; they are used to Photoshop and find it adequate enough to get the job done at a high quality (which it evidently does from the in-game animations. Mariel states at one point that she struggles with subtlety in her animations because has to limit her frames, suggesting that she constantly has to work within a time frame to get things finished, but also because she wants to just get the point across.
In the video below, Alex Ahad, Creator and Art Director of Skullgirls and Lead Concept Designer for Indivisible, talks about how his team goes about animating and creating the characters to their final state. It follows this process:
-Ahad starts of creating the character concepts.
-Ahad, the animation team and Mike Z, work on creating the moves and brainstorming ideas for each character, all being drawn on paper.
-Artists and animators are given model sheets as guides to keep consistency.
-Reference sheets include lines, shading, colour mapping, scaling to other characters. Shading layer shows the shading for characters. False colour map are not the characters colour scheme, but rather designated areas for colour, so colour changes can easily be made for palette swaps/alternate colour palettes in-game.
-Once concept is complete, keyframe animations are made based off the rough sketches to determine basic timing.
-Frames added in between these as seen necessary by the animators.
-Once fully animated, it's sent to the clean up team, who clean up the lines and the false colour map and shading layers added.
Alex Ahad also states that each character is entirely hand drawn and has between 1200 - 1500 frames, which is a huge feat since every frame has to be drawn individually.
In the link below, Mariel describes how they combined western and eastern styles of animation to create Skullgirls. A lot of the animators have backgrounds in TV and film, so there approaches and styles will be vastly different to those of specifically games animators. Despite a lot of them being raised with Japanese games and animations, they are actually more influenced by how Disney animators are taught, creating a different look to Japanese styles. Mariel then goes on to explain the character Peacock, a character they created who is heavily inspired by, and blatantly looks like, something from a classic 1920s or 1930s American cartoon. These are some interesting ideas, as despite a obvious Anime-like style, there are some very heavy western inspirations and techniques brought into the animations, which makes this game stand out from the crowd.
This blog post describes some of the steps needed to create their animations. Life drawing is key and the animators are required to draw from any angle and any pose; they need a strong understanding of the human anatomy, despite the heavy stylisation to the game. They also say how important it is to understand some basic techniques like squash and stretch. They don't take any shortcuts, such as cloning or rotating as they feel it can look odd and lifeless, as well as disproportionate, although they do occasionally use it for very very small changes. Another thing is that they really want to capture a level of "oomph" to an attack by giving it a good amount of detail and motion, such as finding the best way to convey a strong attack is to "simply snap to the active, attacking pose, and then having the character's hair and clothes flow afterwards to really sell the motion". Something they do differently to other studios is that the animators do not animate the shading, with the clean up artists doing so instead. The clean up artists need to include shadows that understand the masses of the body and how the light plays off of it, but also keeps within the game's style.
Part of Brian Jun's job as Clean-Up Assistant is to create the colour palettes within the game. Whilst most people will think of this as pretty low in the list of priorities, it is both important and non-important in the sense that whilst it doesn't add to anything in terms of gameplay, it can add to someone's experience with the game as colour palettes can add a lot to a player's enjoyment of the game, and can even be memorable if done correctly. Some people settle with specific colour palettes which then allows them to get more attached to that character, and some competitive players can even become known for specific colour schemes. The original colour palette "can speak volumes about a character's personality, such as Cerebella's bright and vibrant orange to Parasoul's moody blacks. The alternate colour palettes can be used to push a character's personality to an extreme, or even show a different side to the character. In addition to this, the Lab Zero team want homages that people could recognise, so some characters will have colour schemes to make them resemble others, such as Painwheel getting one to resemble Jason Voorhees, Robo-Fortune receiving a colour palette to look like Samus, and Eliza getting one to represent Raven (Teen Titans).
The colour palettes are not created in a traditional sense, as character's are given false colour maps so that the colour schemes can be edited quickly within the depth map engine. This allows him to change the colours to almost anything he wants, and can also allow him to alter the lighting on the characters to create the look of a matte, metallic or glossy surface. The false colour maps, created by Alex Ahad, can also allow for small details like leggings and glasses to a character to bring out a bit more personality should the team want to include them. Combinations of shadows and highlights can also be edited within the engine, but Brian always tries to keep a strong contrast between the colours and the character in general so the character is easily readable, something that is important in a fighting game so you do not lose sight of your character.
Brian states that "once all the colours are settled in, Alex and I go over the colours once more for some final tweaking and testing, pass it around the office for a quick approval, and then the palettes are imported into the game". This process for creating this palettes is both incredibly interesting and unique, as 3D games would have an entirely different way of going about this, and most 2D games would likely just fill areas a certain colour and leave it at that.
Richard Suh, Lead Clean-Up Artist at Lab Zero, describes what the role of Clean-Up is in the blog post linked below. A clean-up artist is someone who cleans the frames drawn by the animators. In fact, all of the animators are capable of clean-up, but the reason clean-up is a more specialist role is so that the animators have more time to work on other animations given the time constraints. Clean-up artists can tidy frames both efficiently and quickly. The clean-up artists are also required to add the shading and fill in the colours. This looks to be a very effective role both for the development of the game and for the animators, as it allows the animators to work on other animations without having to stop to do these roles.
2D Vs. 3D
The art style in Skullgirls is beautifully executed and the animation is very fluid and smooth. However, 2D is often dismissed in favour of 3D when it comes to video games because it is quicker to make and easier to animate, requiring less time to work on in most cases and therefore requires less money going towards employees. In the screenshots below, Lab Zero explain why they prefer 2D and why their games are made in 2D as opposed to 3D. Most of their artist's specialise in 2D or work entirely in 2D with no experience in 3D, and they cannot afford to hire a team of 3D specialists, as well as their tools catering to 2D. Although 2D is expensive, Lab Zero prefer the look of 2D, feel that the outcome is definitely worth it and are not able to hire 3D specialists due to their small budgets. They also state multiple times that 2D often ages better then 3D does, which stands correct when looking at a lot of games from the 1990s that use 3D haven't aged too well (such as Final Fantasy 7), where as something like Super Mario World still holds up to this day, yet is older then FF7. They also state how 2D allows you to control all aspects, so bad angles aren't a thing and model clipping does not exist. They say 2D holds more personality then 3D which is something I agree with, it allows everything to be stylised a lot more and things can be exaggerated or expressed easier and in more unique ways.
One major struggle that 2D art has over 3D is that you cannot really give characters completely different costume designs, as then you would have to be almost forced into redrawing most of the frames, where as in 3D it's simpler to add or change.
In addition to having limited amounts of skins or costume designs, 2D art also forces the artists and animators to completely reuse animations and redraw parts of them if you create a clone character, or have to start from scratch if the character is similar but not quite the same. In 3D, this is easily solved by just reusing the animations or skeletons. More specifically aimed at fighting games like Skullgirls. This also applies to throwing reactions as stated in the screenshot below.
Going back to their use of Photoshop, an FAQ on their website clarifies that 3 members of the team (Mariel, Jon and Alex) primarily use Photoshop because Skullgirls frames are exported as raster images, and that other programs are used by other members of the team such as SAI and OpenCanvas.
http://labzerogames.com/faq/#what-programs
Tips from Lab Zero
At a couple of points Lab Zero was asked about any tips for upcoming artists, and they strongly suggested life drawing and figure drawing because of how important it is. They also said to keep a folder of inspirational images to go back to at any point which is a pretty good but sensible idea that I will have to go to doing at some point. They also point out that you should study animation frames and art, as well as various artistic geniuses, as no matter what they have something interesting to teach you. This is pretty sound advice and it's evident that the team have done this, both with the designs, animations and Alex Ahad's own personal inspirations.
Mariel suggested heavily that freelance work and doing your own projects is something that you should do, as well as putting artwork online because that's how you get noticed and that is how she got to do freelance work for the various games that she has worked on.
http://superbestfriendsplay.com/podcast/sbfc-115-drop-everything-and-play-crash-bandicoot-ds-feat-mike-z/
https://skullgirls.com/2011/04/skullgirls-artistic-origins/
http://www.nerd-age.com/skullgirls-interview-mike-z-alex-ahad/
https://skullgirls.com/2011/07/fetching-coffee-making-copies-writing-blogs/
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