Origin of Woolfe
January 10th, 2014
The story I am about to tell may sound like a fairy tale, and although for us is sometimes still seems surreal, it is a true story. One that has changed our lives. This is the story of how “Woolfe – The Red Hood Diaries” came to be…
It all started about one year ago…
At that time we were a team of 3, just starting production of a series of games for preschoolers (www.forestpals.com) of which the first two season inspired games have already been released and two more will be released later this year. To help make these games we were looking for a 3D artist. Quite a lot of people applied for the job but we narrowed down the list and invited only a hand full of people for a personal meeting… one of which was Davy.
Davy was not suited for the job. Why? Simple, he already had a job and would have to give a 3 month notice, so he could not start right away. Also, he had no experience with 3D Studio MAX, the software we were using to build the models. For the ForestPals games this turned out to be a good thing. We found someone else… Steven. He has the amazing gift to turn our 2D art into 3D models and truly keep the spirit of the concepts alive. He is a passionate technical 3D artist who just needs a few words and a sketch to create magic… I’ll talk more about Steven later, because that’s not what this story is about.
This story continues with Davy and although he decided not to work work with him for our preschool games he had one thing in his portfolio that facinated us deeply. A 30 second video with a Red Riding Hood character in the lead, platforming through a dark forest, ambushed by evil trees…
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The dream had begon, we just needed a way to make it come true… The only way we could think of was to apply for funding. The year before a new government funding had seen the light. The Flemish Audiovisual Fund. If we could make a dossier that portrayed our dream, it would be a way to create this amasing fairy tale.
Together with Davy, the scenario writer Yasmin and art director Bart we had less than one month before the funding call. Apart from the original 30 second video we had to create everything from scratch. The pressure was on, but we were loving it! Using the original Red Riding Hood stories as inspiration, we created a new story in 3 chapters, filled with dark twists. Story, moodboards, concept art and game mechanics all came together beautifully. We submitted our work… it was out of our hands…3 months later we recieved the joyful news.
Our game was selected as one of the most promising submissions to date. Davy quit his other job… and we’ve been developing ever since.