Hey Floor Kids Crew!



Greetings! We are hard at work animating, coding, recording, coding, testing, coding and playing. Right now the crew is in Victoria, BC. We’re having a lot of fun putting all the finishing touches on the game before it is released this holiday season.

We will be sharing stories and information about the different features in the game in these posts leading up to the launch. This week, we wanted to share a little history about the Floor Kids. It all started over 10 years ago…





In the beginning

Jon (a.k.a. JonJon, animator, filmmaker, bboy) and Eric (a.k.a. Kid Koala, DJ, turntablist, film music composer) first met back in 2006. “I remember walking into one of the film board studios and Jon was working on his film called Asthma Tech. It was a short film about a kid with health issues, who turns his situation around through drawing. I thought it was brilliant, both funny and compelling. I loved the characters and style of his animation.”

Jon was already a big fan of Kid Koala’s music and videos. “I remember first hearing about Kid Koala through the animated videos for Fender Bender and Basin Street Blues. Those Videos introduced me to his Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and Some of My Best Friends are DJs albums. I also dug his work with Deltron 3030 and Gorillaz. Back then, I was always listening to music while I drew. Those records were on heavy rotation in my studio.”

There was a mutual interest to collaborate on a project of some sort. They just didn’t know what that was yet.

Meanwhile, every day after work, Jon would go to break practices with friends. On the weekends he would check out bboy events and battles and learn from the crews he would meet. At night, after break practice, he started animating a new character, Noogie, doing the Six Step:

One of the early animation tests of Noogie doing a Six Step (and other moves)

Jon kept working on the character and animated more moves. He decided to expand the animation cycles into a battle between two dancers.

The characters of O-Live (left) and Noogie (right) as they appeared in Jon’s original animated short films





From Sketches to Short Films

In the summer of 2006, Jon brought a stack of around 50 animated drawings on paper to Eric’s house just to see share what he’d been working on. Eric recalls that day vividly, “Jon brought this pile of paper over and started flipping through it like a flipbook. I was thinking how insane it all was. He actually understood these moves well enough to break it down into single hand drawn animation frames. The momentum, gravity, torque etc. was all on point. Also, beyond the technical side of it, the different characters had their own style, flow and attitude. Jon’s probably the only person crazy enough to do this. I think it’s because he’s a bboy himself. He’s like a method animator!”

When describing his animation process for Floor Kids, Jon explains “I just like to show up at practice, throw down, and learn from people and figure it out. Then when I get home I try to translate the essence of the moves into drawings.”

The two collaborated on the original Floor Kids short films, which went on to be featured in many of Kid Koala’s live concerts in the following years.





From Film to Game

Eric and Jon presented the films to Ryhna Thompson, a long time Kid Koala collaborator and producer on many his projects, tours and events. They chatted about what they could do with these characters and animations. Perhaps there was a way to take it to a new space outside of just film and music.

Interested in the world of scoring music for video games, Eric put out a call to the Montreal gaming scene and met a lot of people at local video game development events. Among them was a small indie studio named Hololabs. “We showed them a bunch of stuff we had created over the years and talked about the possibilities of working together.” Eric says, “Of all the projects we showed them, they were most excited about creating something from Jon’s Floor Kids videos. They really loved the style of his animations and proposed the idea of building a game engine that could integrate the tens of thousands of hand drawn animations into a freestyle dance battle game. It was going to be quite a complex process to figure out how it could work, but they were up for the challenge and had many rad ideas.”

Eric introduced Hololabs to Jon and Ryhna and everyone hit it off immediately! They began to develop the idea which would eventually become Floor Kids the video game!

Next post: how the development team grew and how we went from a mobile game to being on the Nintendo Switch!

Stay tuned!

Floor Kids HQ