Our friends at Mix Games asked us:
“Could you make a mockup for a Rugrats game?”
And that’s how this little-big Angry Metal adventure in Gameland began.
With this little animation…
Which eventually became this nostalgic game about collaboration and brotherhood.
Angry Metal’s work on this project was to produce all the animation assets for the game’s traditional 2D version: the animations for playable characters, enemies, bosses, and NPCs, as well as the background designs.
And maybe that was the most challenging part.
I had never directed a video game before, and I spent a sleepless night trying to figure out how to create enough contrast to guide the player through the environment without damaging the look of the artwork.
I worked on the backgrounds together with Spundman, Sergio Abalo and Guillermo Moreno. Spundman’s linework and attention to detail were essential in achieving that imaginative, childlike aesthetic that could blend naturally with the art style of the show.
The most exciting thing about animation is that, as a format, the sky is the limit.
And the most challenging thing is forcing yourself to mimic, with absolute precision, an art style you’ve never worked with before.
Coming from adult animated cinema, jumping into the story of a bunch of rebellious babies flying through the cosmos of their imagination might have seemed like an impossible leap.
But our team fit Paramount’s artistic guidelines like a glove.
In fact, we were huge admirers of the director behind the first intro of the legendary Rugrats series, and for the cutscenes we even tried to see if they would let us use the models from the early days of the show. In the end, we didn’t quite convince them, so we kept the current designs.
Of course, there was one non-negotiable requirement: if we were going to work with the Rugrats, we had to animate Reptar!
We completed the entire production in 6 months.
We drew it fast.
They programmed it fast.
We released it.
We sold it.
Everything you can ask from a top-level job.
And I swear I could never have pulled it off without the incredible team of talent I had around me:
Juanma Laguna and, of course, Marcos Bango on animation;
Spundman, an absolute beast behind the wheel of the background layouts;
Sergio Abalo and Guillermo Moreno as background artists;
Laura Rabanal as assistant and Bruno Suárez handling the documentation and the contracts.
And the co-director and co-producer
Enol Junquera.
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