Pokoko Studio
By André & Philipp
Players on Dino Bash
15M+
Glif use case
Ad creative
Studio founded
2014
Can you tell us a bit about yourself?
We are André and Philipp, the founders of Pokoko Studio.
Pokoko Studio is a Berlin-based games studio founded in 2014. We build free-to-play casual/mid-core mobile games with remarkable vibrant worlds and iconic characters. Our most successful title is Dino Bash, which has now reached more than 15 million players. We use AI tools in all kinds of ways at Pokoko, for example for art creation, copywriting, localisation, coding and prototyping.
What is the project you are working on with Glif?
We use Glif to create creatives for a lot of our games. Primarily we've been using it for our new game Archer Heroes. Archer Heroes is a hybrid action roguelite and tower defense game that combines the fast-paced, skill-based combat of games like Archero with the strategic planning of traditional tower defense games. Instead of simply placing defenses and watching them fight, in Archer Heroes players actively participate in every battle by controlling a hero who shoots, dodges enemy attacks, and fights alongside their towers. We use Glif to create videos for creatives and trailers for the game.
What are your intentions in making your projects?
As a small indie studio, we have to produce a lot of marketing content with very limited resources. Creating high-quality video ads for mobile games usually requires artists, animators and video editors, making it both expensive and time-consuming. We were looking for a way to dramatically speed up this process without sacrificing creativity.
Glif allows us to quickly turn ideas into dozens of different video concepts that we can test with players. Instead of spending days producing a single creative, we can experiment with many different visual styles, hooks and concepts in just a few hours. This lets us validate ideas much earlier and focus our production efforts on the concepts that actually perform.
Your work has a very rich style. Where does that come from — how did you develop it or what are your influences?
We've always been naturally drawn to worlds that are warm, welcoming, and a little bit silly — universes that don't take themselves too seriously. Our philosophy is that if players are going to spend hours immersing themselves in a game, that world should be genuinely charming and inviting.
Whether we are working with classic illustrations or 3D rendering, we always strive to inject something fresh into the genre. We love to twist expectations, whether that's through unusual character designs, a vibrant color palette, or an unconventional setting altogether.
That style feeds directly into building the identity of your characters. Can you tell us a little about your character development and how you go about designing them?
For us, the absolute priority is that players can instantly connect and sympathize with the heroes of our stories. Take the dinosaurs in Dino Bash, for example: they are all either a bit goofy, perpetually grumpy, wonderfully lazy, or total badasses — but crucially, they are all completely lovable.
The same rule applies to the antagonists. They need to be clearly recognizable as enemies, which we achieve through a distinct contrast in shape language and color palette against our heroes. Yet, even our villains have a touch of lovability to them.
Can you tell us a bit about your process for creating your videos?
At first we create an idea, often inspired by other ads or dialogs that match our story. Then we capture gameplay footage that matches the concept. This footage we give to Glif along with images of the characters, backgrounds or other elements of our games. We let Glif create a precise storyboard and then follow a workflow that we fine-tuned:
- Creation of stills for start frames
- Creation of voice overs
- Creation of videos using the VO and start frames
- Creation of an ender that shows the game logo and a download button
- Then Glif edits the video with ffmpeg
- It adds music on top
- Adds captions for the VO
- And in some cases elements like buttons or clicking hands that should invite the viewer to click the ad
To fine-tune the workflow, we created our own skills in Glif so the agent doesn't make the same mistakes twice.
How does the Glif agent play a role in shaping your project?
Before we used Glif we did a similar workflow, but we used to do all the different steps in different tools and then combined the elements by editing on our own. AI could already help us a lot, but doing the stills in one tool, then uploading them to another tool, transferring all the videos from one person to another took a lot of time. Now with Glif and the right skills we can create a new creative in 10 minutes, as Glif creates all the stills at the same time and the agent helps us streamline the process.
More creator spotlights
See how other creators are using Glif to build their projects.