That program is used to this kind of art

#1 Photoshop and a gifted digital artist.

Looks to me like hand drawn art, i'm sure you could 'emulate' it a little by using cell shading and a modified outlining shader before running your model through something like the sprite maker from envy games

#2 Looks a lot like a vectorized drawing, possibly flash or fireworks. Take a look at Samurai Jack. Same deal, this just has a more comic flavor to it. Though looks really great, but there is a wealth of programs that you can use to create this look. :D The artist is where is lies in that though.

#3 Smally,

While my art's not at the level of the Shank artist(s), I'm curious about the programs that can help create this look.

Reason I ask now, my 5-yr-old Mac just died on me, and that's pretty much the excuse I needed to buy a new one. (Trying to look at bright side.) But Flash and Fireworks are on the dead Mac, and as for any original discs... those were lost at some point when I moved from USA to Hong Kong and back to USA.

So most likely, I'll need new software as well.

Was thinking of going with PhotoShop (before today), and will see if Aperture 3 would be a decent cheap replacement for PhotoShop. That's $200. If there's something in that price range or cheaper that you'd recommend, I'm all ears.

Here's a sketch of my protagonists... I think a vector art program would make animation easier for me. I'm certainly willing to learn!

#4 According to wikipedia they at least did concept on paper (possibly some final game assets too), then scanned it in and traced over it (they don't say if it was vectorized). For the animation they had a custom flash pipeline... so they most likely split limbs up to individual graphics and then used flash to move the indvidual parts around. After it was animated in Flash I'm guessing they had some custom export tool or used something like gameswf to read it into the game.

#5 A large amount of the animations were custom illustrations as well. They had key animators draw out the various poses which is why it appears so stylistic. I imagine the actual tweening was done in a flash based program.

#6 Dead thread but here goes...

Ok, I have worked out a lot of the secret sauce in how to do things like this. But my second job just ended, and thats the amount of time I would need to spend on this type of stuff.

But if you want these sorts of things in your game, I will give you a couple hours a day of email support, art and animation time and unlimited talk time over skype, plus watch me work in goto meeting (in the hours I am not at my day job) for $10 american per hour paid via paypal on a 1099 schedule paid as we go.

So if you want... I can give you the secret sauce for about $20, thats how long it will take me to show you how to set this up and rig it... And even make it all work in Torque 3d.

I will be using free software for everything (gimp, blender, inkscape), but the techniques will be easily transferable to commercial software.

Sorry if the merc nature of my post is a violation of TOS

Here is a little video I did showing the technique. If there is any interest send me your profile picture And I will map it on there and tweak it. This would import directly into the normal Torque 3d pipline... I don't know about torque 2d.