1. Industry Profile – Edmund McMillen
Half of “Team Meat”, the indie game company that he and Tommy Refenes set up so they
could develop games away from the constraints of big companies and publishers.
McMillen has made a dozen games in adobe flash from 2003 – 2009, creating all the art
assets himself. He has designed award-winning games: ‘Gish’ ‘Aether’ and ‘Coil’ and is
known for the indie hit ‘Super Meat Boy’, which he helped design and created the
graphics for, character designing the iconic and expressive ‘Meat Boy’ character.
McMillen started his graphic career by working on indie comics, and you can see how
that might of helped build his talent for very simply capturing movement and
expression. Given the size of a game sprite it’s important to be able to get across the
emotion of the character basically. In comics you have to sum up an emotion in one
panel, without movement or sound, so this background in comics could have helped
build up McMillens’ very successfully simple character designs.
McMillens’ belief is that as an artist you should take risks and experiment, try new
things, and try to go places others wouldn’t, which his reflected in his games and his
choice to stay away from big companies. His game ‘The Binding of Isaac’ deliberately
tackles dark and mature themes usually avoided in video games, like child abuse and
suicide. McMillen says that he will often make his art cuter to try and compensate for the
darkness in the themes and story, creating that odd contrast in his games.
His style is bizarre and the unorthodox,wacky and
offbeat, a little distorted, and a little disturbing, but also
somewhat child-like.The ‘Meat Boy’ character is chubby
and squat, giving him a child-ish innocence. However
his black eye and knocked out tooth push it somewhere
a bit unconventional for the child-like character he
initially looks like.
Video Interview on ‘The Binding of Isaac’:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ovgCLupH1o
Home Page: http://edmundm.com/
Wikipedia Page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_McMillen
Advise for Indie developers:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/26577/Opinion_Indie_Game_Design_Dos_and_
Donts_A_Manifesto.php