A little over a year ago, Skullgirls set a new standard for independently-developed fighting games — especially with its gorgeous hand-animated characters and backgrounds. Unlike most other fighting games, though, Skullgirls’s launch was just the beginning; a successful crowdfunding campaign got the team back in action for several new DLC characters. I spoke with Lab Zero Games lead animator Mariel Cartwright about her work on the upcoming Skullgirls DLC, her background in animation, and her experience seeing Skullgirls on the big stage at Evo 2013.

Patrick Miller: First off, tell me a bit about your background — how’d you get started in animation? Have you always wanted to work on games?

Mariel Cartwright: I grew up surrounded by games and animation and always knew I wanted to do something art related, but it wasn’t until college that I realized I wanted to work in games. I went to CalArts for character animation and actually tried to switch my focus into 3D toward the end because I assumed that’s what would get me jobs, but somehow it’s worked out that I’ve been able to stick with 2D work and still work on awesome games. So far I’ve worked on Scott Pilgrim vs The World: The Game and a number of WayForward titles, and now I’m lucky enough to pour most of my time into Skullgirls.

PM: Tell me a bit about how you got started on Skullgirls. How’d you get hooked up with Lab Zero?

MC: Skullgirls as we know it now started as an indie project helmed by Alex Ahad and Mike Zaimont. I’ve been a friend of Alex’s for a few years now and he asked me to help animate on it in the beginning of 2010. By the end of that year, we had a working demo, a publisher, and a developer named Reverge Labs that hired our team, allowing us to work on Skullgirls full time. In the summer of 2012 though, we were all laid off from Reverge due to business nonsense completely out of our control. After a few months of floundering around, the SG team reformed as Lab Zero Games, had an amazing IndieGoGo campaign to continue working on the game, and here we are!

PM: Is there a specific aspect of the animation that you’re responsible for? Certain characters?

MC: I’m the lead animator, so my job is to animate and oversee our animation contractors. Our senior animator Jonathan “Persona” Kim and I split up most of the animation work evenly, and we both get to work roughly animating most of a character’s moves. Once we test them ingame and make sure they work, it’s then my job to assign out the roughs to our animation team and work with them to get finished animations back before passing it to cleanup. We all work on one character at a time though; it’d probably drive us a little nuts to keep track of more than one when each character has so many animations.

PM: How far are you in the Skullgirls DLC dev cycle? When is everything else set to come out?

MC: Right now we’re in the middle of Big Band, the second of four full DLC characters funded by our fans. We have two and a half more characters coming up: Eliza, Beowulf, and an edit of Ms. Fortune in the spirit of Guilty Gear’s Robo-Ky. Each character takes about three months to make, though to be honest we’re a little behind on Big Band due to summer conventions, EVO, console patches, etc. No matter how solid your schedule looks, there will always be something to trip you up! So far our fans have been understanding though, and we always have progress to show every week because there’s never a point at which we’re not working.

I think you can expect Big Band in a couple months (testing takes a while!), with Eliza afterward early next year.

PM: What’s your fighting game background like? Got any personal favorites?

MC: I’m horrible at fighting games! I played Street Fighter II on my Genesis like every other kid, though I rented Super SFII over and over just to play as Cammy because she was my favorite. I’ve always loved watching fighting games though, even when they go over my head, and since working on Skullgirls I’ve learned a ton even if I still suck at playing myself. I want to get better but when everyone around me is a tournament level player, it gets a little intimidating.

My favorites would probably be Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike and Darkstalkers, admittedly for the amazing animation. They’re what I look up to when it comes to the animation in Skullgirls.

PM: You went with the rest of the team to Evo to go see Skullgirls played on the big stage — what was that like? Have you ever seen your work showcased like that before? Take any side bets? (Find any cosplayers wearing your characters’ skins?)

MC: This year was my second year attending and I had a ton of fun. Obviously I’m still terrible at playing fighting games myself, but I can get into watching them regardless. This year I also helped run our tournament, so it was pretty cool to learn the names and faces of our best players. We also had a couple panels that I think went well; I’m normally pretty shy but seeing so many people come out to see and support us makes me really happy, so I’ve started enjoying interacting with our fans more.

Man, our finals on the big screen were so exciting! Definitely a huge highlight of working on Skullgirls overall for me. I found myself screaming with everyone else. I really hope we’re given that opportunity again. No side bets this year, but maybe after getting to know our players more, I might next year. Wait, I don’t think I’m allowed to do that.

And yes, we had cosplayers! Big Band busted into our panel and Broseidon Rex printed a bunch of Salty Umbrella masks, which MikeZ and Sanchez then wore on the finals stream. It was awesome.

PM: …What was the deal with the group hug at the end?



MC: Did we hug? We hugged?

PM: Well, Jonathan tweeted these…

Group hug for Duckator, the winner of Skullgirls EVO tourney for two years in a row! pic.twitter.com/viEQzeepMS — Persona (@personasama) July 14, 2013



And a group hug for Severin who lost but put on the most stylin show w/ his raw tag corner combo #skullgirls pic.twitter.com/tiBQNVhd5n — Persona (@personasama) July 14, 2013

MC: Ha! I definitely was not part of those hugs.

PM: I’ve noticed you occasionally stream some of your work sessions; what’s your work setup like? What tablet etc. do you prefer to work with? What do you get out of streaming the art process?

MC: I have a 17″ Macbook Pro that I use for everything. At home I have a Cintiq 12WX and at work I have an Intuos 4; I find drawing a bit easier on the Cintiq but overall it doesn’t make a huge difference to me. Generally though, I try to keep my setup portable because I’m usually jumping between a few places to work.

I haven’t streamed recently because my work lately has consisted of a lot of emailing and assigning, but when I get to I find that it helps me focus way better on my work. I mean, if I’m streaming, everyone’s going to see if I get distracted and start looking up photos of cats. Plus it’s cool to see everyone talking about the work as I do it, and on occasion they’ve actually caught mistakes I made and helped me fix them. An example of that was when I was animating Valentine’s taunt– I had her pulling out a lollipop to suck on and everyone reminded me that she doesn’t like candy. I’m dumb.

PM: I’ve seen some of the placeholder animations your team put in place for Squigly in the Evo build — any chance we could get them released as a placeholder DLC pack?

MC: We get so many requests for that! It’s kinda embarrassing for me because my scribbles are so terrible, but everyone seems to love how it looks. Unfortunately all the roughs are simply replaced in-game as we get final art, so it’d be way more labor-intensive than you’d think to release it on its own. Sorry!

PM: What’s your next project?

MC: Don’t know! Lab Zero has a few leads on potential projects, but we’d also love to continue working on Skullgirls for as long as possible because there is so much more to the SG world than what we’ve shown you guys. Maybe Skullgirls 2? We’ll see.