We're Making a Cartoon Series — Without a Video Editor

It started on a Friday evening. By Saturday afternoon there were six episodes of a cartoon series — about five minutes each, with drawn characters, voices, music and sound effects. A series set in our own game world, following the crew of a freighter called the Lifter 420. What happens to them, we're not telling yet. How something like this comes together over a weekend, we'll happily explain.

It began with a sheet of paper. The crew wasn't invented at a desk, it came from Justus: nine characters with names, jobs and quirks — a captain, a pilot, an engineer, a gunner, a cook, a doctor, and in the middle of it all the ship's AI VEGA, whose bedside manner leaves something to be desired. Plus a page of "directing notes to improvise from": places, goals, a few verbatim lines of dialogue, the rest left open. The scripts grew out of that.

No video editor — a web page. The most unusual part is the technology: an episode is an HTML file. Double-click it and it plays — with a timeline, subtitles, music that automatically ducks under the dialogue, and a player for skipping back and forth. No framework, no build, no cloud. The reason is entirely practical: when a line gets rewritten, we change a line of text instead of re-rendering for forty minutes. Only at the very end is the page filmed — and that becomes the video. Side effect: these episodes will still play off a USB stick ten years from now.

The places in the series are our places. Every backdrop is generated from real screenshots of the game used as reference. The rule: the series shows places, not cubes. You should recognise the bridge as a bridge, not count the blocks — while the shapes, the light and the colours stay the game's own.

The characters come from a sketchbook. The crew's drawing style comes from Verena Dütscher — the third part of JuMaVe Games, which takes its name from Justus, Marcel and Verena. Three pencil drawings on paper: a full figure, a head from the front with the mouth open, a head in profile. Those three sheets have been the binding standard ever since; every character and every new pose is drawn in her handwriting. That's why the credits of every episode read "Character design and drawing style: Verena Dütscher".

The sound mostly comes from the game. Around 85 sound effects, room tones and music pieces are taken straight from Blocks Beyond the Stars: doors, console beeps, the wind outside. We only generated what the game doesn't have — an alarm klaxon, a record scratch for a gag in the opening titles. The voices are generated, one per character plus a narrator, and the mouths don't flap on a timer: they follow the actual loudness curve of the recording. That's exactly the difference between "a mouth clattering" and "a character speaking".

And the detours? Plenty, even in one weekend. The first attempt was jointed puppets: cut the figures into parts and move them with a table of angles. Technically elegant, visually disappointing — a paper doll stays a paper doll. Today every pose is a complete drawing. The second lesson was geometry: characters must never stand in the landscape, always in front of it. Backdrops have perspective, characters are flat — on a block step a character visibly floats in mid-air. Neither was in any tutorial. Both are obvious the moment you get them wrong.

The episodes are finished but not yet approved. The house rule is strict: first we watch everything, then we render. After that the series goes up on YouTube — and the toughest reviewer is ten years old and knows the crew better than anyone else. He invented them, after all.