Roll Film: Episode 1 of Our Cartoon Series Is Out

Today at 10:30 it finally happened. Our YouTube channel premiered "Die Suche nach der Crew" ("The Search for the Crew"), the first episode of our cartoon series based on the game. The Lifter 420 is only supposed to haul cargo from station to station. Then an asteroid field shows up, and pilot Frick flies a zigzag. Unfortunately, the asteroid field doesn't zigzag with him.

👉 Watch episode 1: Die Suche nach der Crew

A week ago we told you here how the series is made. That post ended like this: the episodes are finished but not yet approved. Today is about the time in between, and it took longer than we expected.

Approving is more work than making. Our rule: first every episode is watched from start to finish, then it gets rendered. Watching shows you what nobody notices while building. A cooking pot floating through the air. Guardian robots gliding in without moving their legs (they walk properly now). An engineer who had three pupils in some shots. That wasn't a drawing mistake, by the way, but a bug in how the images were layered on top of each other. And a line that was suddenly spoken in the wrong voice. In the end we re-rendered the whole first season and replaced it on YouTube.

A joke you have to explain doesn't work. The most instructive note was a question: "Why does that one have a bucket on his head???" In the script the gag was perfectly clear. The film, though, was missing the moment where you see how the bucket got there. Since then our rule is: every punchline needs its set-up on screen. If you know the script, you won't notice when it's missing.

The screenwriter is ten. The credits of every episode read "Text and dialogue: Justus Dütscher", and that's not just being nice. The second season comes almost entirely from his pen: a radio-play script with more than seventy spoken lines, plus a finished screenplay with twelve scenes and stage directions. The second screenplay alone was longer than the whole first season. So we cut it down together and learned something along the way: a radio play has to say everything, a cartoon shows half of it. His screenplay also came with a pencil drawing: a guardian warship, from the side and from the front, seven metres long, eleven metres wide. In the second season it flies exactly like that, with a big red eye at the front and an antenna with a ball on top. And the crew receives a crate labelled NICHT ÖFFNEN!!! (DO NOT OPEN!!!). That's all we're saying.

Open about AI. Every episode opens with a line from the narrator: "This video was generated with AI. The ideas weren't." Pictures, voices and the title music are made with AI. The story, the characters, the jokes and the drawing style come from us. Without these tools, a family could never draw and voice a series like this. We show the full notice at the end of every episode.

The schedule. From today there's a new episode every Wednesday and Saturday at 10:30 (German time), with a YouTube Short in between on Tuesdays and Fridays. Season 1 runs until October 14, season 2 starts on October 31. Twelve episodes are already finished. The series is in German, with German subtitles. You'll find every episode on our "The Series" page and on the channel @blocksbeyondthestars. And season 3? It's already in the works, because Justus has been writing again.

The series is set in the world of our game, but you don't need to know the game to laugh along. And if it leaves you in the mood for space: Blocks Beyond the Stars is free, for Windows, Linux and in the browser. 🎬