Tribute to a sensei

The team at French visual development and game studio Umeshu Lovers walk us through creating their Akira Toriyama-inspired April Fools' demo

April Fools’ Day is special for us at Umeshu Lovers. Every year, the team creates a set of visuals based on well-known characters and worlds, all independently of any of our other ongoing projects and for a little fun.

Well, not just for fun to be honest. It’s also proved a great opportunity for us to showcase what we can do, and what we can bring to other worlds and IPs. In the past this served us well. For example, after co-founder and art director Sylvain Sarrailh posted his take on Yoshi’s Island, Illumination reached out to us, which is how we ended up working on The Super Mario Bros. Movie.

A couple of months ago, the Umeshu leadership and the rest of our team gathered to discuss what we could do for this year’s April Fools’. We had several ideas, one of which was based on the manga series Go! Go! Ackman. Its creator Akira Toriyama is one of the main sources of inspiration for several of our team members, including the two founders of the studio. So when he passed away recently, it became obvious that we had to pay tribute to his genius.

Our project turned into something of a crossover between Go! Go! Ackman and Dr. Slump, another classic manga from Toriyama. At this point, we also decided that we wouldn’t only be creating visuals, but a full demo for a video game in the style of the classic side-scrolling platformer games based on Go! Go! Ackman, which were released in Japan on the SNES in the early 1990s. Because Umeshu Lovers isn’t your typical visual development studio, we also make games thanks to our in-house development team.

1. IDENTIFYING THE TOPIC