What makes video games the ultimate canvas for artists?

Art director Fred Hoffman has joined the cohort of this year's BAFTA Breakthrough, which includes some of the brightest new artists, directors and creatives working today. Along with his brother Henry, Fred co-founded the Norwich-based studio Newfangled Games, which released the delightful puzzler Paper Trail in May this year for all the best games consoles, including Nintendo Switch.

Like his fellow BAFTA Breakthrough Sophie Knowles, Fred studied at the University of the Arts London, but he didn’t think about going into video games at first. “I was very, very focused on illustration,” he says. “I didn't know that I was going to become a game designer.”

I was struggling with this realisation that it's very hard to make people look at your art for more than five secondsFred Hoffman, art director, Newfangled Games

But things changed after he helped his brother with the indie platformer Hue. “I was struggling with this realisation that it's very hard to make people look at your art for more than five seconds,” Fred recalls. “The illustration pipeline was very much, 'you spend hours working on something, you post it on Instagram, it gets scrolled past, you get a few likes, and that's your currency'."

He adds: "But when I worked on Hue with Henry, I saw people spending hours and hours and hours playing the game, face pressed up against my artwork. There's no other medium where you can do that, where you can force people to sit and live in your drawings for hours at a time. So it was very hard to go back to regular drawing after that.”

Fred says that considering it’s “quite a niche game”, he’s been surprised by how warmly Paper Trail has been received, and this success has spurred on the studio while it works on a secret new project. “We can't talk about it, but the idea is to cautiously grow in scope and try and tell bigger, more ambitious stories with more ambitious mechanics,” he says. “Think like Paper Trail, but more.”

He adds that it’s “surreal” to be chosen as a BAFTA Breakthrough. Growing up, he remembers watching the “big, glittering establishment” of the BAFTA awards on TV and thinking it was very far removed from his life in a small, rural town in Suffolk. “And now to be a part of the Breakthrough programme, it feels like an acceptance into a world which I only ever had one foot in.”

Historically, the UK arts world has been heavily London-centric, although from his perch in Norwich, Fred thinks that this is becoming less and less the case. “London is very expensive to live in,” he says, “but a lot of genuinely very creative people aren't necessarily hugely wealthy, and therefore we've seen – especially after COVID – a really big exodus of talent from London. That's why there's so many great games hubs that aren't based in London, like Dundee and Aberystwyth and Glasgow and Newcastle and Leeds – and now Norwich as well.”

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Visit the BAFTA Breakthrough 2024 website for more information, and Paper Trail website to discover more on this innovative new indie game.