Play the game

The inciting incident for Pikku to start looking for someone to share his life with is an old and quite bad NES game, Extricate the Girl 2. Pikku beats the final boss, saves the girl, and when watching the ending he decides to start looking for love.

Since Pikku is going to play an old NES game, I have to paint and animate an old NES game. Just making the pixel art can take as long as, or longer than making the entire short film, so I decided to make it an earlier, simple black box game.

The Game

A girl has once again been kidnapped by the evil Mega Brain and you have to save her and restore peace to the galaxy. But look out, this time the Mega Brain has brought seven henchmen, one more evil than the next. Fight your way through eight worlds filled to the brim with enemies, lava filled chasms, and action. 1-2 players.

The Mega Brain

The end boss of the game is a living brain, The Mega Brain, who fires brain energy at the protagonist. I chose a brain because Mother Brain is, conceptually, one of my favorite bosses (a brain sitting in a jar, not doing much of anything!), but it’s also a way to show how Pikku’s way of thinking is getting in the way of him finding happiness. I made the sprites in Photoshop and put everything together in After Effects. Thank God that I found RoundPositionScale. Without it, I would have had to write, or at least copy, lots and lots of expressions.