Artist Interview - Ponywolf
Award winning game creator, founder of Ponywolf Studio AND inventor - firstly we'd love to know how do you fit it all in?
- That "inventor" tag is classic advertising agency puffery. I'm really a "product person" where those products are gaming, entertainment and advertising related. Our "sister" company is an advertising agency here in Boise where during normal times we share an office and I plug-in as a CTO on certain clients that do digital advertising. The two industries (advertising and gaming) share many of the same skills, so moving between the two is pretty seamless. There are also a few special folks who team up with me Voltron-style to form Ponywolf to create our games--so I get plenty of help.
How did you find your groove - both with your art style and the games you enjoy making? Did you have a particular favourite video game to play as a child and do you have any heroes from this industry?
- I'm barely a pixel artist and most of my games come out of collaborations with more talented folks than me. RogueJack is based on a 1-bit asset pack by the great Kenney from Kenney.nl tweaked to fit what I needed and then became the inspiration for the UI, cards and animations that I created to round out the experience. If you've played Knights of the Card Table, it’s art from the amazing James WAR Lloyd who created the characters, items and the general feel. After that process I swooped in and built the maps and UI that does a passable job at holding things together.
Do you have a favourite game genre and art style you like to kick back and appreciate?
- I still love pixel art but I play more AAA Action RPGs than anything else. I'm just a sucker for Skyrim, Fallout, BioShock, OuterWorlds and the like.
What artwork hangs around your home?
- My youngest daughter is an incredible digital artist and I have a lot of her art in my home office. She's in her early teens and has more talent and drive than myself at that age for sure. She did our Apple Game of the Day feature artwork and killed it.
What are you working on now? (If you can spill)
- A poker based follow-up to RogueJack with 16-bit Zelda-like graphics.
Do you still find it satisfying and rewarding?
- I do. I find that I've had to scale down my vision of what a game is versus my early days in Game Development where publishers funded projects and you could focus multiple years on a single game and get it just right. Now, in the case of RogueJack, it's a smaller, tighter experience that took maybe six months to launch yet has improved every week via real-time feedback from players. Looking back now, I could say it launched too soon, but the feedback it got early on was a good driver to get it where it is today.
Did you enjoy bringing your game art into a playing card deck for Flick Solitaire?
- Ian and the team deserve most of the credit there. If anything I made it harder on them :)
Do you have time to play games!? If so, what are you playing right now?
- I either play a few hours of a game to see what all the fuss is about, like I did last week with Gato Roboto or I deep dive into a game I'm sure I'll love--which I most recently did with Outer Worlds.
Coffee or tea?
- Coffee in the morning, tea in the evening.
If you had any advice for aspiring game designers and artists - not that one piece of advice would suffice but a general caring cuddly word or two - what would it be?
- I think Game Jams are the best. Keep making small games until you find your tech, visuals or voice.
Thank you to Michael Wilson a.k.a Ponywolf! Check out RogueJack and Michael’s latest projects via Twitter.