I failed pretty badly...

... now I have to redo the work of 2 full days of my current job.

Dear Reader,

today is not an ordinary newsletter day, mainly because Simone is extremely busy this week, so I (Jojo, her husband) took over (it’s an exception, I promise).
Since I’m not half as good an artist as Simone, I’d better talk about stuff I actually know something about and that is interactive art, aka video games.
But don’t worry, this newsletter still has a lot to do with Simone’s art.

On Friday, we could finally share a new trailer for our game Under the Island. And it wasn’t just any Trailer, it was the release date trailer (release is February 17th on Switch, Steam, PlayStation 4 & 5, and Xbox One & Series), a very important milestone during game development.
I’ve worked on this game for more than seven years (five years as a side project + 2.5 years full time), with a LOT of help from Simone, and now it’s almost out.
Just to put this into perspective: Our son just turned nine a month ago (3rd grade), and he can’t remember a time when I wasn’t working on this game.
Whether it will ever pay off financially, I don’t know but it was worth it anyway.

But before you get bored by me talking too much, check out the trailer:

The video game market is highly competitive. You don’t only compete with the latest games, but also (and mainly) with older ones since old games are often still great and easily accessible digitally.
This makes it very important to look professional, and thanks to Simone’s artwork, Under the Island really does. Especially the key art took her weeks to make and was revised several times.
Enjoy the final version:

We both learned a lot from this piece. First of all, every storefront needs many different versions of this image with different aspect ratios, so in the end you prepare something like 20–30 versions of the same artwork.
I asked her to create a very rich and detailed world, which turned out to be a mistake since it made the artwork less flexible for different aspect ratios, and we had to add or remove elements for different thumbnails.

However, if you are still reading, you are awesome! thank you!

If you want to support us, you can wishlist the game on all systems now. The easiest way is on Steam via this link.

I wish you a great week, and next time Simone will be back.
Jojo

PS: Psst it’s me Simone, I will show off the the #schmoescosyartclub sketches (mine and yours next time, but till then let’s draw some horses!