One of the biggest lessons of working on stop-motion video games? Rolling up your sleeves â literally.
“It’s such a nightmare,” Talha & Jack Co developer Jack King-Spooner told me over a video call. “You spend maybe half an hour doing one of the cutscenes. The cutscenes are the most precarious things because you have to have everything in the scene exactly the same. And then your sleeve catches something and you’re like ah, Jesus, and I have to do everything again.”
King-Spooner worked with Talha Kaya on 2024’s Judero, an action-adventure game based on the folklore of the Scottish Borders. Now, the creative duo is running a Kickstarter campaign for its new project, Mashina, centered around a cute robot who has to drill. Itâs a stop-motion game again, but this time, the team is facing the laborious process with some hard-learned lessons.
The seemingly innocuous gesture of rolling up your sleeves is one of many considerations that studios need to keep in mind when experimenting with handmade characters, objects, and scenes for their games. Stop-motion games aren’t new â the likes of The Neverhood, The Dark Eye, and Skullmonkeys have been toying with this physical-meets-digi …