Claymation adventure Armikrog arrives on PS4 next week

Hello PlayStation Blog! Lance from Versus Evil here to share some awesome news with all of you about Armikrog! We’re proud to announce that we’ll be coming out on PlayStation 4 next week on 23rd August. Pencil Test Studios teamed up with Grip Digital to get the PlayStation 4 version of the game in your hands and we couldn’t be happier with the result. We’re bringing claymation back to PlayStation!

Armikrog is an old-school stop-motion clay animated game. What does that mean? Every single animation is made from stop motion capture, meaning that we had to take a still image of every single frame of the game using the puppets and sets that we had created from hand out of clay, wood, card, paint, wire – you name it, we used it!

Every single level, every single character, and all of the things you will see in Armikrog actually existed in our tiny studio where we had to basically run through the game frame by frame – it was a major production. With the help of some amazing voice over talent including Jon Heder (Napoleon Dynamite), Rob Paulsen (Pinky and the Brain) and Michael J. Nelson (Mystery Science Theater 3000), the creative genius of musician Terry Scott Taylor who produced the game’s soundtrack, plus a volunteers team of industry experts, we were able to bring this world and it’s incredible characters to life.

Although painstaking, it was worth it. Stop motion has been a passion of Pencil Test Studios for years. It’s an art form and we hope you’ll enjoy the experience as you play through this adventure with heroes Tommynaught and Beak Beak.

When we started working on the PlayStation 4 version we knew we wanted to incorporate the touchpad on the Dualshock controller as that enables so much more control than a standard controller. Along with help from Grip Digital we were able to make it so that you can use the touchpad in a couple of amazing ways. You can use it as a standard pointer if you wish allowing for a free range of motion and you can also use it to solve some of our puzzles rather than using the joysticks or the directional pad.

This sort of motion makes the puzzles and movement much more in the moment as it really feels like you a working on the puzzle or moving through the environment.

We’re all excited to get Armikrog in your hands next week, but in the meantime we’ll be around answering questions for the rest of the day! If you have any questions about the game or the process please ask and we’ll do our best to get them answered!