Blog Posts

  • Grimm Buildings – DynoBait

    So far all the Grimm concept images I’ve posted have focused on characters. But as I’ve mentioned before, everything in the game is built in twos – light and dark: Characters, vehicles, props, and buildings. Here you see an example of a building from the game. This structure is taken from the episode based on…

  • Burnt Blacksmith

    Today I’m working on the script and “scene listing” for a Grimm episode based on “The Boy Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was”. So I thought I’d post a bit of artwork related to that episode. Here you see the light/dark version of a blacksmith worker from the opening scene of the episode.…

  • Headless Bunny

    One key rule we’ve learned while building assets for Grimm is to push for more interesting transformations. People playing the game tell us “greater contrast between light and dark = more interesting.” Early on, “light/dark” was communicated with distinctly different textures, but somewhat similar geometry. These days we’re trying to build assets that reflect equal…

  • Rainy Taxi Ride

    My friends gave me a Canon TX1 video camera for my birthday. So nice of them! And maybe for you… because now I can record and post videos. My hope is to capture some of what’s going on inside the studio, in Shanghai, and with my adventures around China. Here’s the first (crappy) test: [youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kR5IOqt1lkE…

  • Dirty Baby

    Since yesterday was my birthday, I figured it would be appropriate the post a baby today. Human characters like this baby often get re-used between episodes in Grimm. Unless the character is visually or narratively unique – like a Red Riding Hood or Cinderella – we don’t see much point in wasting effort on modeling…

  • My What a Big Mouth You Have

    When writing design scripts for Grimm episodes we’re constantly challenging ourselves to present the most interesting characters, items, and locations. It’s sometimes frustrating how many generic “castles” appear in fairy tale stories. But we’re excited when a tale offers us the chance to explore a truly unique location, as is the case with this image:…

  • Sad Cat

    Concept art is awesome. Over the past few months the Spicy Horse concept artists have generated nearly a thousand unique bits of artwork to drive asset production for Grimm. As a general rule, nothing in Grimm gets built without first being represented in concept. Up until today we were unable to show much of this…

  • Roger Jackson – The Voice of Grimm

    At the start of the Grimm project I had the idea that we’d manage to record 99% of our voice over work in-studio. Our office has a dedicated sound guy, a beautiful sound recording room, and everything else necessary for the task – except one thing: voice talent. The team tried a few times to…

  • Rocking Horses

    It’s official. We love Rock Band. Despite it not being available in Shanghai, EA’s insistence on region locking their games, and other obstacles – we managed to get our hands on a setup. To say we’re happy would be an understatement. We just *really* hope the drums don’t break too fast. Here you see (left…

  • Fast Fiber!

    Since moving to our new offices back in September Spicy Horse has been limping along on a REALLY SLOW Internet connection. It’s felt sorta like a tin can connected to a guy in Mongolia who’s using smoke signals to relay packets to a shoddy Russian satellite. That’s on the days that it worked. But those…