Among the handcrafted aesthetics that we've been seeing in indie games, some developers have taken to emulating claymation, or in some cases actually building real clay models and scanning them into the game, as with last year's The Midnight Walk. On the surface, Kidbash: Super Legend could be considered in the same category, but speaking to Irfansyah Aryabima, the game's creative lead at Authentic Remixes, the inspiration and technique are much more retro in their roots.
(The game's also being published by Acclaim, recently resurrected after a two-decade hiatus to become an indie publisher).
Looking at Kidbash's chibi characters, inspired by both the character designs from the first PS1 version of Harvest Moon and the Japanese baseball game Power Pros, their models have a very professional, smooth presentation, just as you might expect if they were sold in a toy shop. It's a deliberate distinction from the clay-inspired games, where the developers double down on the aesthetic by including imperfections like fingerprints so it feels as if it were crafted by human hands.
"Those all look deliberately like it's done by a child, and that's the wonder part of it, but for us, we're not leaning towards kids' arts and crafts," Aryabima explains. "The Kidbash style comes from covers of Super Famicom games and Sega games, where they were doing clay, but it looked kind of professional in a sense."
Retro meets modern design
If these models weren't on the boxes themselves, they were also featured in richly designed instructional manuals, another lost art in physical games today. Another major visual influence on Aryabima also came from a Japanese publication called MSX Fan Magazine, well known for putting handmade clay models of game characters on its covers.
That said, it's still simply a style the team is emulating, while the 3D models are created in Blender. Yet while Kidbash's assets are made from 3D models, they aren't actually being imported directly into Unity, as this side-scrolling action-platformer isn't going for 2.5D but instead applies a very retro technique from the SNES era.
"We're doing the same workflow as the original Donkey Kong Country with pre-rendered graphics, but in HD!" says Aryabima. "It's absolutely not as labour-intensive as it was in the 90s. Back then they had to digitise it really meticulously because of the very limited colour palette of the Super Nintendo. We don't have that kind of limitation, and we have a lot of great tools to do it with, like Aseprite, which is actually for pixel art, but we do it for processing the sheets of animations and then processing the colours."
While digitised sprites come with their own challenges, notably the amount of memory they take up, these are mitigated by purposely limiting some of the colours, though not to the extent that players will notice the difference.
That said, Authentic Remixes is also making use of the 3D models as well for the game's pre-rendered cinematics animated in Blender. It's also not the only aesthetic you'll see, as the trailer teases other styles, such as a boss fight unfolding with shadow puppetry and even a dose of 8-bit Game Boy-inspired sprites. The latter is actually taken from a real 8-bit prototype that Aryabima showed me running on an Analogue Pocket. "It was actually our first game as Authentic Remixes to experiment and get our feet wet, so the [Game Boy] story is actually a prequel to this game."
The retro-inspired canvas is then a little wider than just the SNES era of Super Mario and Kirby that the opening level is most reminiscent of. "We have levels that look more like Atari games, and then there are some levels that are inspired by Game Boy Advance games as well," Aryabima teases. "Our goal for the character and game is to make it feel familiar but make it new. A lot of people have come to us saying, 'Oh, I've seen this before,' but I'm like, no, you haven't; I just made this! But if it looks familiar, people identify with it."
Kidbash: Super Legend is coming to PC and consoles in early 2027, and you can wishlist it now on Steam.
