Luckily the game had started catching on with YouTubers and some of the bigger channels were starting to play episode one. In November, I raised over $13,000 for Sally Face via crowdfunding. We were going to attend couples therapy and try to work through things. So I decided to run a crowdfunding campaign, hoping to kill two birds with one stone (funding and attention).ĭuring that fall, I moved back to Pittsburgh, with my wife. I tried my best to promote it but I just couldn’t gain enough attention. During that time, I was able to finish up development on Sally Face, Episode One: Strange Neighbors. That summer, I moved out and stayed with my parents while we figured out what we were going to do. This torn a giant hole in our relationship. It turned out that she didn’t support my dreams and refused to even meet me on any middle ground. My wife at the time fought me tooth and nail over this decision. I had enough money saved plus unemployment coming in, that I could be more casual about looking for other work for a while. That’s when I decided to focus on finishing episode one of Sally Face. Finding a new job afterwards was turning out to be difficult. In February 2016, I was unexpectedly laid off from my job, during a company wide downsizing. Redesigning Sally Face Characters (third time’s the charm?) It was a slow process, as I was working a full time job and still working with Wither Studios too. So in 2015, building from the original concepts, I rewrote the story arc to fit a five episode narrative and began working on episode one in my free time. I thought it would be nice to finally do something with that idea and that it would transition pretty well into an adventure game, rather than a cartoon. There were a few ideas I was tinkering with but Sally Face came back around into my mind. I wasn’t sure if the team would make it through that rough patch but I also needed a creative outlet. The chaos that Wither had fallen into is what ignited my desire to work on my own project. It really sucked because they were not only good artists but good friends as well. Eventually, at the end of 2014, we lost two of our team members over that conflict. A year later, our team was still struggling with what direction to take our next game. This had me pretty bummed for a while because I had some awesome ideas for the direction of that game that I was really excited about at the time. Because of this, the team voted to abandon development on the planned expansions to the game. Despite all of that, we still struggled to make money off of C&W. The game got great reviews from media and users and was downloaded over 600,000 times. We developed a game called Crowman & Wolfboy that released in 2013 on mobile platforms. In 2010 I started a small indie game team, Wither Studios, with some friends. Sally Face sat in the back of my mind for seven years, as I moved on to other projects. However, between work and school schedules, no one could commit enough time and things quickly fell apart. Everyone got into the idea at first and we were all excited to start this project. I got together with a few friends that were good artists and animators, as I attempted to assemble a team to make Sally Face into an internet cartoon series. Sally Face version 2.0 (young Steve had just started learning 3D modeling) At the heart of everything, I really wanted to create something that had the look and feel reminiscent of a 90’s Nicktoon (like Doug, Ren and Stimpy, Hey Arnold, Rock’s Modern Life) but with darker themes and more mature stories/content. 01Ī few months after those initial ideas began to form, I had already created a backstory for Sal (that’s when I ditched the sewn on face in favor of the prosthetic mask), a world that he lives in, a cast of characters and different stories I could tell within that universe. Here are the original sketches from that time: Sally Face and Larry (aka “Lazy Kid”) version. His best friend would be a lazy stoner who wore a cape and lived in the basement. I imagined him living in an apartment building filled with odd tenants. Over the next few weeks, I began to imagine this character and what his life would be like. So I thought that topic would make a good starting point for this blog.Īround 2006 / 2007, I sketched a creepy character (as per usual) and the name “ Sally Face” just popped into my head. I also went through a lot of personal struggles while creating the first two episodes. I get asked all the time where the idea for Sally Face came from and what inspired me to make the game.
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