Barks and Bytes
“What if our pets drove mech spaceships?” Sara Pocock, Studio Art Lead for Tic Toc Games, says that was the inspiration for B.ARK, the Bio-Interstellar Ark. She joined Co-Director & Producer Abraham Morales and Qweerty Gamers President & CEO Ray Lancione for a brief interview on Wednesday, June 16th, about Tic Toc Games’ latest creation scheduled for release July 29th, 2021.
Morales says his key inspiration was the sidescrolling SCHMUPs he remembers from his youth. “It’s in the style of all those Konami titles like Gradius and Antarex,” he said. “I also played a lot of Zero Wing,” he continued, “Origin of the famous ‘all your base are belong to us’.”
Pocock was quick to clarify, “This isn’t just a tribute to SHMUPS, it’s also a call-back to those 80s and 90s game tie-in Saturday cartoons, all of [our] animation was traditional hand-drawn frame by frame.” That attention to detail stands out from other Unity Engine creations from the very first images of the introduction, all the way through to the bullet-hell combat players have come to expect from the genre.
Individual illustrations also swelled their fairly small primary team of 10 to somewhere between 30 and 50 people, once all the additional artists and playtesters were necessary. “Hand-drawn animation blew up the number of people we needed to get it right. It’s very challenging, and we had amazing artists and animators that guided it and reviewed every keyframe and character design up to the outsourcers who colored each frame by frame of the animation sequences,” Morales noted.
Make it stand out
But B.ARK isn’t just another pretty face, multi-player co-op also means players can get their friends in on the action. “We wanna encourage people to see each other in person again,” Pocock says laughing, “hook up the Switch and scream at the TV together!” Making it more interesting is each playable character from Bear to Rabbit has unique abilities bringing to mind ‘90s arcade multi-players like The Simpsons or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Diversity isn’t just for their games either. In September of 2020, Jola Bolaji, Product Manager at Tic Toc, participated in a Women in Games webinar, and the company has been upfront about their interest in maintaining that balance. “It’s definitely on our minds. Our studio is very inclusive, about half of the upper management team is women, and there are LGBT members of our studio as well,” Pocock noted.
Morales quickly added, “Like me!”
Pocock elaborated, “I’m bisexual myself, and definitely themes of overall justice are important to us. I don’t know that we have any overt LGBTQ+ themes in our games as of yet, but that’s definitely something to think about going forward.” When pressed on what that future might include, Pocock teased, “Well we can’t talk about details obviously, but I can definitely say RPG is on the table… But! That game in particular, I think will be just in terms of its visual style and overall feel, is definitely going to be extremely inclusive.”
That said, their latest product isn’t in their rearview mirrors just yet. “We’re excited that B.ARK is on its path for release,” Morales said. “We also plan on supporting it in the future. We’ve gotten a lot of positive reception during media week.” It’s attention they’ve certainly earned.
