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July was special time for us as we brought Bulbie to Nintendo Switch in all regions (7/6 USA, 7/13 EU+Australia, 7/20 Japan). For a while we shifted from our usual routine to answering bunch of emails everyday. After all we are not only developer, but a publisher as well.  We tried to answer each and every message so if you got lost somewhere in the middle, please make sure to reach out to us again.

Thanks to you, we have managed to hit #4 in EU and #11 in US best selling charts. Nintendo wrote a news on BB and it was included in best games showcase, which is a big deal especially for a such small studio as ours.

We must say that the Press was very gentle with our delicate glassy child (74 Metascore). Here are some examples:

‘Characters are so expressive thanks to the charming animation which is reminiscent of Ren & Stimpy meets Courage the Cowardly Dog’
Destructoid 8/10

‘Its appeal comes in the form of its characters, craziness and toilet humour – a deadly combination that deserves to be played’
Nintendo Life 8/10

‘A surrealist monochromatic art style and the fever-dreams of someone who’s had far too much cheese before going to bed’
Game Spew 8/10

To not be so much on the PR side we must add that we had some reviews which were not so enthusiastic (but it’s minority so we will keep ignoring them -joke -we will try to take all constructive critic into account – joke?).

We’re all physical meat beings so it’s sometime fun to do this strange thing in analog world called… socializing (yuck!) so…. If you want to meet us in person we will be in Baden (near Zurich), Switzerland from 7th to 9th of September at Fantoche International Animation Film Festival. We’re supposed to say something about games there, however we will have plenty of time to hang around and speak about meaning of light bulbs or whatever crazy subject you prefer.

If you still want to do communication in natural human-to-computer-to-human-way, please note you can AMA (or rather AUA) on Reddit here.

On top of that we would like to add that Bulbware turned two this July and we’re getting really close to bringing glassy fella to other current-gens.

In the meantime we will be cooking up some new abominable offspring of ours at a secret location in Krakow….

Stay awesome! Arigato!
Artur, Bulb & Szymon

We our proud to announce that Bulb Boy will be released on Nintendo Switch in a few weeks. It is coming to all the regions worldwide.

It is no straight-forward port as with this version we decided to rework the interface making player available to control shining kiddo directly with the Left Stick. And we must say it feels great!

 

Various Nintendo Switch setups are supported – TV play, handheld, desktop gaming as well as pro controller. Switch version will be its first console release, with other current-gens arriving couple months later.

May light shine upon you!
Artur & Szymon, Bulbware

Hi there,
This is Szymon and I’m Art Guy at Bulbware. I am a person responsible for all the art and animations (except for the main promo art – credit goes to SpineBender). I decided on writing this post because <surprisingly> some people consider my gross disturbing art as interesting. Sooo here you go. Now I’m gonna spill my guts out!

Know how bad you really are
Let’s time travel a bit. During my time at university my idea was to make only 3D animation. I was overwhelmed by it and I thought it was the only way for my career.  Here you can see on of my short movies ‘Daddy’ made during that time (over 10 years ago).

This kind of production involves creating detailed models, various textures and shaders in software like 3DStudio Max, Zbrush, Body Paint 3d which is a very cumbersome process for me.

After graduation I started my own studio and decided to work on my animation debut as well – ‘Bluebeard’. What seemed to me as manageable 5-minute animation production turned to be very fatiguing process where me, my friend and co-workers stared to look to work as little as possible on this never-ending stream of re-renderings. It eventually lead me to abandoning it a few years ago.

At that point I understood that I was really bad at:
– creating realistic 3d art
– making  projects that need huge workload to see the final result
– creating 3d character rigs

So as a matter of fact a good thing. Knowledge is power.

Embracing minimalism
When Artur reached out to me with the idea to create a game (back in 2013) I knew it would be stupid to repeat Bluebeard’s fate so I decided to set up a bunch of restrictive rules for myself:
– only 2d art
– only simple shapes in photoshop
– NO COLOR (grayscale)
– no gradients or effects (except where they are absolutely needed)

Production pipeline
So taking off from that plan here are steps taken to bring it to reality:

1. Doodling in sketchbook
My aim was at creating really quick sketches usually with pencil to grasp the basic silhouette and shapes. That’s the fastest way I know that allows you to really see if the idea is worth the hassle.
Below you can see very first sketch (it dates back to 2013) of the Bulb Boy room that you can see in the game:

Here I do research considering facial expressions of the little fella :

2. Creating shapes in Photoshop
You may be surprised why I don’t use Illustrator for that. Thing is I prefer to do it this way because it’s faster and I don’t need any fancy features for such simple art. I only prefer Illustrator when I’m supposed to create printable art or clean scalable logo.

Here you can see that I prepared bunch of poses for our little hero. Please note that most of the expressions have completely different face & body shapes. (there is color added just for testing, original art is grayscale)

3. Animating in Spine
Spine is a very easy to learn tool. You might say that in comparison to 3dStudio max it is simplistic (no reactor, hair & cloth dynamics etc.), but for my minimalistic pipeline idea it proved to be perfect.

What a surprise – a farting frog:

Let’s look how Bulby conveys various emotions. They are (left to right) sleepy, scared, cuddly, concentrated. As I noted before – being able to create completely different poses is a thing I love about animation. It’s definitely not kind of re-posing that you get using a standard rig.

You can see more of stuff behind the scenes on Spine showcase site. BTW thanks Esoteric Software for crating showcase video!

4. Putting everything together in Unity
Artur was main responsible person here. Poor guy – I was hovering over him with discontentment on my face and asking him to fix some of the looks. So basically we just sat together and spent some time tweaking various effects.

Most important stuff here is:
– 2d volumetric shadows
– color tint
– glow effect
– noise

Numbers?!
So putting everything together it was a 13 months of work which involved creating:

– 3 positive characters (in different age variations)
– 16 monsters
– unidentified number of animated props
– 24 backgrounds
– ~1000 animations
– 10 simple ingame cutscenes
– drawings in speech bubbles (there is no dialogue in game)
– menus
– marketing materials (banners, flyers, stands etc.)

This post is dimming out
So I hope you liked this trepanation of artist skull. If you think I should add something here or you have some questions feel free to reach us out at contact@bulbware.com.

May light shine upon you!
S.