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The Man Who Made a Video Game Out of Wool - IGN
Take one sheep. Shear him. Poke the wool with a needle. Congratulations! You’re on your way to making a video game.
Well, kinda.
Ken Amarit is an artist-programmer living in New York City. He’s really, really into wool, and he’s also into video games. So he decided to combine the two. The result is Voyager, a cute iOS space-rocket tilt game with extremely unusual visuals. Take a look.
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/BBBsf00e_k0?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
So, really, how do you go about making a space-game using wool? Best person to describe the process is Ken. Here’s what he has to say...
“You take raw wool from sheep, and you poke it with a needle. It slowly starts to form a shape. You sculpt with the wool until you make it into what you want. So I did that with a bunch of different things. Whatever you see in the game.
“Then I took a bunch of pictures of those things in front of a green screen like you would do with a stop-motion animated movie. Pose it, change the frame, and then repeat until you have the animation.
“Then I took those photos, brought them into a computer with Photoshop, and adjusted the cropping and editing. I put them into a sprite sheet, like pretty much any other 2D game would be made. I guess that first process is what gives it the look that it has.”
It’s definitely an unusual, artistic look. The game itself only takes a few minutes to complete, but, at 99 cents, that’s not an issue. It’s a whimsical musical experience too, with soundtrack gleaned from the early 20th Century, an age of technological discovery. Ken says he was inspired by the idea of the Voyager spacecraft, which celebrated its 35th birthday yesterday, when the game launched.
“Voyager perfectly encapsulated everything I thought I was trying to do with this. This idea of going into space without ever coming back. Just going deeper and deeper into the unknown."
But enough of intergalactic flights of fancy. Let’s get back to those sheep.
Ken says anyone who wants to follow in his footsteps needs to understand that this is not the same wool that rocking-chaired old ladies in cartoons use to knit mittens, or that fascinates playful kittens. He explains, “The process of taking wool from the sheep goes, you take it, you shear the sheep, and you clean it and card it. That's kind of like pulling all the fibers together. At this point, if you spun the wool on a wheel, it would become yarn. That's probably what you'd see your grandmother using to knit. But if you don't do that, you can also felt that, either with water or a needle, which is what I used. Then you can make other things with it, other than knitted sweaters and stuff.”
While this may be the first time a game has been made with wool, there have been a few intersections between Ovis Aries and video games. A Lemmings-style game called Sheep was released by Mind's Eye in 2000. Naturally, there's also been a Shaun the Sheep game and, inevitably, Zombies vs Sheep.
So what’s next from the merging of wool and video game? Ken, whose studio is called Oh My! Me, says, “I have a few ideas for trying something with this kind of style, but a completely different kind of gameplay. I'd absolutely love to try something more complex with this visual style. It depends on how well this game goes.”
Well, kinda.
Ken Amarit is an artist-programmer living in New York City. He’s really, really into wool, and he’s also into video games. So he decided to combine the two. The result is Voyager, a cute iOS space-rocket tilt game with extremely unusual visuals. Take a look.
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/BBBsf00e_k0?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
So, really, how do you go about making a space-game using wool? Best person to describe the process is Ken. Here’s what he has to say...
“You take raw wool from sheep, and you poke it with a needle. It slowly starts to form a shape. You sculpt with the wool until you make it into what you want. So I did that with a bunch of different things. Whatever you see in the game.
“Then I took a bunch of pictures of those things in front of a green screen like you would do with a stop-motion animated movie. Pose it, change the frame, and then repeat until you have the animation.
“Then I took those photos, brought them into a computer with Photoshop, and adjusted the cropping and editing. I put them into a sprite sheet, like pretty much any other 2D game would be made. I guess that first process is what gives it the look that it has.”
It’s definitely an unusual, artistic look. The game itself only takes a few minutes to complete, but, at 99 cents, that’s not an issue. It’s a whimsical musical experience too, with soundtrack gleaned from the early 20th Century, an age of technological discovery. Ken says he was inspired by the idea of the Voyager spacecraft, which celebrated its 35th birthday yesterday, when the game launched.
“Voyager perfectly encapsulated everything I thought I was trying to do with this. This idea of going into space without ever coming back. Just going deeper and deeper into the unknown."
But enough of intergalactic flights of fancy. Let’s get back to those sheep.
Ken says anyone who wants to follow in his footsteps needs to understand that this is not the same wool that rocking-chaired old ladies in cartoons use to knit mittens, or that fascinates playful kittens. He explains, “The process of taking wool from the sheep goes, you take it, you shear the sheep, and you clean it and card it. That's kind of like pulling all the fibers together. At this point, if you spun the wool on a wheel, it would become yarn. That's probably what you'd see your grandmother using to knit. But if you don't do that, you can also felt that, either with water or a needle, which is what I used. Then you can make other things with it, other than knitted sweaters and stuff.”
While this may be the first time a game has been made with wool, there have been a few intersections between Ovis Aries and video games. A Lemmings-style game called Sheep was released by Mind's Eye in 2000. Naturally, there's also been a Shaun the Sheep game and, inevitably, Zombies vs Sheep.
So what’s next from the merging of wool and video game? Ken, whose studio is called Oh My! Me, says, “I have a few ideas for trying something with this kind of style, but a completely different kind of gameplay. I'd absolutely love to try something more complex with this visual style. It depends on how well this game goes.”
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