It's been a little while since we did a memory lane post so we thought it was about time we did another. This time we would like to talk about Chick Flick one of Nitrome's earliest games (3rd to be exact). Chick Flick is noteworthy for a few reasons... Nitrome is known for working in pixel art and this is our only game made in vector art. More strangely, it was originally in pixels!?
First off, for those who don't know what the difference is between pixel art and vector art, pixel art is made up from squares of colour. Vector art is made of shapes of colour with the key advantages of vectors being that you can scale and rotate them as much as you like and the shapes still look crisp and correct. Ok lesson over let's move on.
Back when Nitrome started it was not the plan to make all of the games out of pixels. We weren't even really pixel artists having spent most of our time before that making client games in vector art. Hot Air, our first game, was in pixels but if you look at two other early games Sandman and Roly Poly they are not strictly pixel art either! Both of those games are not vector art either though so they seem less out of place.
So back to Chick Flick. The other interesting thing about this game is that it was originally supposed to be a mobile game... not for iPhone or smartphones as we have now... I mean back when Nokia was king and colour screens were just taking off on phones. We had a version running on devices and it just needed more levels adding. We gave up on it ultimately as we realised we did not have the funds we needed to market it.
When we gave up on the game we made Hot Air (yes it was before Hot Air!) so in a way this was the turning point for what became Nitrome as you know it today!
Back on devices at the time, games had to really be in pixel art to fit the restrictions of the devices and this was the reason we tried pixel art for the first time. When it got scrapped we had developed a love for pixel art so did our next game (Hot Air) using it.
Once Hot Air was out we didn't want to be pigeon holed into one style so Sandman the second game had a smoother digital look. When we came to the third game we thought we should bring Chick Flick back as a flash game and because we wanted to vary the styles and because the original art was too small we decided to redo it in vectors. In hind site we think it looked much better in pixels!
The flash version of the game was mostly the same as what we set out to make for mobile but there was one key difference: Multiplayer. The version you all know lets two players play together with the same aim. For the mobile version it was competitive played over Bluetooth. Each player played their own game and when you got a chick in the nest it would add one to your opponents screen. The idea was to overwhelm your opponent to lose his lives before you did. It was a fun mode that unfortunately didn't really work on a single screen and we weren't really up to making split screen at the time.
