Dispatch directors chose their animators because they'd made a 'really cool apple juice commercial'

One of Dispatch's most praised aspects is its impeccable style. Even more so than something like the Invincible TV show, Dispatch truly feels like a proper superhero cartoon of yesteryear. At least in vibes anyway—ignore the profanity, violence, and raunchiness.

In a GDC talk with Dispatch creative directors and Adhoc Studio cofounders Nick Herman and Dennis Lenart, they revealed that this style almost didn't happen. Early on, the issue they ran into was that they had no artist in-house, so they worked with "a bunch of talented artists" in a "shotgun approach", as Herman explains it, to find the style that felt right, balancing the drama and comedy of the script.

Unable to find the perfect fit, "we did what every artistically challenged indie developer did in 2022—we went to Art Station," Herman joked, saying the team just wanted to find a temporary solution to get through the pitching phase with publishers and investors. It's here they found inspiration, artist Lap Pun Cheung, who would go on to create concepts that would serve as the basis for the game's style, not just pitch materials.

"We wanted our game to look like a premium animated television show. So instead of trying to do that as game developers, we decided it was important to find an animation studio," Herman explains. As he puts it, most of the well-known studios they pitched to either weren't interested or couldn't accommodate the game development aspects. 3D characters with 2D backgrounds was ambitious, but AdHoc had already settled on this style.

They eventually came across a small animation studio in Thailand called Igloo Studios, "who made these really cool apple juice commercials," of all things: "We could kind of squint and start to see Dispatch for the first time," Lenart said.

"We knew working with them would be a risk, because they weren't a large established studio, and this would also be the biggest project they'd ever undertaken, but we felt like we'd be in it together, so we hired them to do a test."

AdHoc's design approach was vastly different to the developer's work under Telltale Games, since they were essentially making an animated TV show, but it worked out after a lot of trial and error. Frankly, I couldn't imagine Dispatch looking any other way. Now I just need a second season to reunite me with my superhero crew.