All the characters in this adventure game were originally embroidered

Just by looking at her, you can’t tell that she’s Elise, the red-haired protagonist of the upcoming adventure game from Czech-based indie studio Attu Games. Scarlet Deer Inn—all made from real, tangible yarn.In fact, all character frames Scarlet Deer Inn They are made of thread, embroidered by machine, and animated to draw you into the digital world of the game.

Eva Navrátilová, half of Attu Games’ husband-and-wife duo, this painstaking process As of this writing, on April 29th, it has over 5 million views.

The character Elise was an ordinary mother until she was thrust into a “dark basement full of monsters and a medieval setting inspired by Slavic folklore”, but lived on only a torch. Scarlet Deer Inn‘s Steam description reads: In Navrátilová’s clip, she is running barefoot across a weather-beaten bridge. It honestly looks just as digital as the rest of the scene. But then her clip moves to a close-up of her embroidery machine, the Brother PR670E, sewing a black outline around her running Elise’s leg, and to the left of it, animating her other three on her trail. You will see one embroidery frame. To some extent, it is real.

Some viewers just couldn’t get it.do embroidery there is something to do In the story of the game, or in its gameplay? No, it’s not.

Hmm. Also, according to a clip shared by Navratilova, the character’s thread seems barely identifiable.it’s not embroidery A waste of time?

The animation process can be quite time consuming. The letters are first drawn and digitized using the software Hatch Embroidery 3. The letters are spit out of the embroidery machine, scanned, trimmed, and finally digitally shaded with black definition lines. To tell on TwitterWork on Ice Age slowed down as Navratilova and her husband Lukasz Navratil had to “do it all” in a small studio. [themselves]’, she told me via email, that she had to learn how to embroider in the first place.

“The whole machine embroidery process is amazingly complicated, and you have to learn a lot from your mistakes before the result is unusable trash,” she says. “The main problem is that no one asks how to do these things, so you have to learn all of them the hard way.”

A machine embroiders three cartoon girls.

And that’s all writing, programming, paintingplaying traditional Czech instruments such as wooden pipes and plucky Garizonathe soundtrack itself.

So is it all a waste of time? Is it futile to move patiently and carefully for your art? Maybe that’s true for those pissed off on Twitter, but not for Navratilova.

“It’s easy to create with some shaders or simply paint. [Photoshop]but where’s the fun in that? she answered Anyone encourage her to rationalize“The main reason we make games is to try different things and have fun.”

“There’s a lot of unnecessary extra work, but it’s really cool to work on something completely new and fresh,” she says. , and we’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback.If the animation didn’t use embroidery, you wouldn’t be doing this interview, right?”

I’m with Navratilova. What video games certainly struggle for your art is about small, unrealistic, unnecessary but in a special way, soulful human beings. Fast food, fashion, and entertainment may seem novel now, as they have always been away from phone screens and credit card PINs. But to really make art, “it takes tough determination,” said American novelist William H. Gass. bomb magazine Technology has an infinite amount of time, and we have much more, so we can’t rely entirely on software or AI to absorb our personal and artistic processes.

Scarlet Deer InnI hope that each time it’s finished, it feels like a rough little pearl molded by Attu Games’ time-consuming and very human work. No release date yet, but wishlist it on Steam You can register.

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