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SteamPoweredMikeJ — Reboot - Bakkup V3
Published: 2013-03-20 05:12:32 +0000 UTC; Views: 1080; Favourites: 16; Downloads: 33
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Guess what the ONLY note I got on the previous version for this character was? That's right: "NO! More like Pinnochio!" At this point I had NO idea what to do. I asked for clarification, and they just repeated "Pinnochio". So I just made him look as much like a little wooden puppet as I could. They still didn't like it, and asked the other artist to work on him, so he did the Backup design that made it into the show. This was the ONLY time I felt there was a real failure of communication with me on the show, but I think the lesson of it was one for the ages - If someone doesn't understand your note, repeating it over and over again probably won't help.Related content
Comments: 18
What really ticks me off about this is the fact that the version in the show looks NOTHING like Pinnochio. I thought he looked more like a caramel covered beetle or something. Like... have they ever seen the movies/books? Seriously.
Here he looks perfect, I think he looks just like what one would expect, when requesting that.
Wish I could pat past you on the back and just tell you that you dun good and they're irrational sometimes.
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I certainly thought I'd nailed it on this one myself... but the producer disagreed. I think it was more just a failure of communication - He had something specific in mind, and the closest words he could think of to describe it were "like Pinnochio". But he was really picturing something very different from what I was, and he couldn't get it across.
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Whatever he had in mind, it definitely wasn't Pinnochio. And that's rly no fault of yer own.
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Pinnochio?
Well, he looks pretty Pinnochiesque to me.
I wonder what they were thinking of....
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I know what that's like, asking for clarification and only getting repetition. How do they think that will help the situation? Sheesh.
Heh, I noticed Bakkup|Backup's resemblence to Pinnocchio the first time I saw that episode. I was a little puzzled as to why they'd reference that character, but I did like the design. He looked like a primitive Sprite, sort of a link between bots and Sprites. (I like to think of Phong in the same way. he's so old that he really could be the missing link!)
BTW, did you notice his icon in the episode? I wondered about the odd design until I realized that the little triangles were pointing back and up.
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Yeah, it's an interesting design, and very different from where I was taking it - The 'earlier stage of development' thing you describe seems to be the mystery ingredient I wasn't thinking of at the time. In fact, I think the Pinnochio note was actually distracting me and sent me off on the wrong track. If I'd thought of him as 'primitive', I might've gotten closer to what they wanted.
Never noticed the icon. Very interesting!
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I wonder how they came up with the idea of designing the icon after his name. I picture it being doodled on a barroom napkin after someone realized, "Bakkup...back, up!"
Here's the only shot in my transcript that shows the icon . You can just barely make out the icon. Sorry I don't have a better shot.
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Cool. And yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if that's how it came up. We'd usually come in Monday morning to a host of new ideas for whatever episode we were working on, so I assume the weekend lubricated the creative motors
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...THANK YOU. I never caught onto that!
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I didn't catch onto it until I was taking screengrabs for my website and got a good shot of Bakkup.
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Annnd this has led to one of those tangential trains of thought and I just realized that for sprites the Konami Code must be a dance. (Not sure what you do for B, A, Select, but Start is probably tapping your icon.)
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In DDR X, there is a song called 30 Lives which incorporates the Konami Caode. The steps match the words, and B and A are the left + top and right + top arrows respectively. And the code appears in the steps of several DDR songs, including Make a Jam. So, yeah, people have been dancing the Konami Code for years, most of 'em without knowing it.
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Ooh! And maybe Select is a pointing gesture! So if Start is the icon, then, for Select Start, you point and click!
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I imagine that the code would be used in a game. So, you'd do game moves to enter the code. So, for a fighting games the A and B buttons might be punch and kick; in a platformer they might be jump and shoot, and in Fix-It Felix Jr. they would be jump and fix.
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That last one would be a particularly interesting dance.
(They might also adopt it as an actual dance outside of Games, though, in which case jump and punch might suffice for A and B. It'd be kind of like the digital Macarena.)
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Yeah I LOVE when people do that.
He's got no strings to hold him down
To make him fret, or make him frown...
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Yeah, it's the same philosophy as we unfortunately see when people don't speak each other's language - Just say it again, slower and louder.
The higher-ups definitely had something specific in mind, that I just wasn't delivering... but I only had one keyword
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