James the Stolen Zebra

Hey, Dim here. The artist of The Super Flash Bros.

Thought I’d start off by shedding some light on the inner workings of my creative process – or rather, expose it for what it is!

The James the Zebra series has always been cute, simple, arcadey and fairly successful. But I’m noticing more and more that a lot of the elements I put into it visually are borrowed directly from other Video Games I’ve played. I’m not ashamed, I’m sure everyone does this! In fact – its nice to know I have all sorts of inspiration to draw from.

If you’ve played the games you’ll know that the Eponymous zebra is a simple 2D character with very little detail. Did you know his design was taken directly from another game, The Bounce , by monkokio and THEBBQ? Heres the proof!

Tom and I both really love The Bounce so we were proud to continue the giraffe’s legacy within James. The creators were kind enough to send us the vector art for the Giraffe when I asked them!

The next James game will be “James the Pirate Zebra” and its very nearly finished! Here’s a shot I did of a mockup of the game. Although the final game looks nothing like this you can see I had Mario Sunshine’s HUD in my head at the time…

And the clouds in the final design were very directly inspired by those of Monkey Island 3 (Which is one of the greatest games ever)

I guess I’m not always out to innovate…hehe. Anyway the final game is looking great, it has the best intro so far by a long way, you guys are gonna love it.

-Dim