Interview with GameSquid, a SFW Digital and Pixel Giant Girl Artist

GameSquid (a.k.a. Jack Lok and formerly called GamefreakDX) is an artist who draws giant girls and crafts pixel art based on anime and video games. The majority of that artwork is non-explicit or safe for work (SFW). In addition to static depictions, GameSquid recently animated a scene involving the Amana character created by MoralGear. This delightful animation consisted of a nearly half-minute long growth sequence! GameSquid is also frequently available for commissions and has done some great giantess renditions of personalities from diverse media such as “Fire Emblem,” “Melty Blood,” “Persona,” and many more! Furthermore, short stories were also created to go along with the art such as with Hifumi’s Move. GameSquid also wrote a few reviews of games like “Layton vs Phoenix” and “Persona Q2” which can be read on DeviantArt. Fans can follow this artist via social media. (NOTE: GameSquid is most active on Twitter followed by DeviantArt and lastly Pixiv.)

#1) Can you tell the readers a little about yourself?

Heya, everyone. Nice to meet you!

I’m a British person born into a Hong Kong family. I live somewhere within London and I used to do some local delivery work before certain requirements changed. While I search for a new job, I’ve been talking to some of my friends about designing and creating a game, continue to self-teach myself about video game history, art and animation, and of course, working on my art.

Most of my art is for self-satisfaction, but I also like to use it to try out some new scenarios or new perspectives. Combined with my rather recent introduction of the occasional pixel art pieces, I can make slightly more unique scenarios that may or may not be closer to the original source material.

The only thing I’ve ever dropped over the course of figuring out what I should do, is music. I don’t think many people know, but I used to do a tiny bit of music. The most popular piece was a remix of ‘Column Dive’ from ‘Columns III‘. That… has 51K views on YouTube, I have no idea how. And I still occasionally get comments on it! (EDITOR’S NOTE: I recommend folks give the remix a listen. I found it rather enjoyable.)

All of the above is practically self-taught since believe it or not, school made me dislike art for a short bit, but I did come back to it and I’m glad I did because it lets me put my ideas on paper and if I don’t have time for it right now, I’ll write the idea in a notepad and come back to it later, if I do at all.

As for me myself, I’m very quiet, but rather polite, I can sound quite aggressive at points from tone alone, more noticeable in calls. For the most part, I’m quite straight forward and sometimes no-nonsense, but I don’t really have a sense of humour, though I do try to apply them in some pictures when possible. My online and real life persona aren’t too different, I’m quite true to myself.

In case it wasn’t super clear from my art and the introduction, my life has been mostly based around video games, but more on the casual side. I enjoy playing Platformers and RPGs the most, but I enjoy watching some intermediate-to-pro Fighting Game action, and I listen basically exclusively to video game music. This includes some 8-Bit stuff at times.

#2) How did you first become interested in size fetish?

I remember this one somewhat fondly. It was a mix of ‘Attack of the 50ft Veronica’ from Archie’s Weird Mysteries and ‘Too Tall Tails’ from the Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon. I can’t really tell you how I felt back then, but um, I think enamoured? Interested? is a good word to go by. A few years down the line, I’d find some video game giantess videos based on ‘World of Warcraft’ I think, and ‘Super Smash Bros. Melee’, but that’s where it stopped for numerous years. During most of my secondary school time, I just kinda forgot about it until I got back into art at the latter end of school to which I started doing some giantess doodles, and it snowballed into what I do now.

I can’t say I was particularly creative with any of my usernames I’ve used. I recall I used ‘supermariofan360’ on MFGG where I did lots of Mario-themed pixel art, but later on, I switched to ‘GamefreakDX’ (which I also used in some of my college projects), and finally to ‘GameSquid’ (though you might find me as ‘ゲームイカ’ which means exactly what you think it means) because I thoroughly enjoyed Splatoon 2 even though I suck at it. All of these usernames accentuating my video game side rather than the size artist side since I believe video games describe me a bit more accurately.

My mascot is a female Inkling… and actually that’s it, heh. It’s not because I view myself as female as a male or anything like that, it’s more so a ‘why not’ sort of deal. But still, I do deem her as an extension of me, which includes not liking to be giant. That said, it’s sort of a joke with some of my friends where she’s huge. I even decided to honour that by having a pixellated version of Earth and a broken Moon in my banner.

#3) Are any of your everyday acquaintances aware of your interest?

At least 2.
    My best friend from secondary school knows because I practically told him once. I don’t know if that was a good or bad idea, but either way, he respected my request to basically never bring it up around me. Same with another person who was my best friend’s friend. He found out through my Pyra picture I did when Xenoblade 2 was first announced where I did a size-less version, but he found the size version quite easily. This did lead to a rather funny off-call moment, where his mum actually saw the giant Pyra version with his response being something along the lines of “it’s just an effect.” I thought that was funny.

I do think there’s a few other people I personally know who know of my kink. One of my Japanese tutors did take a look at my Twitter (to her request) which was painless, but one that got me quite angry was my dad’s friend.

I should preface this bit by saying that the woman I’ll be bringing up is a massive airhead. But basically, while I was out and she was teaching Mandarin to a minor, she for whatever reason without my permission, decided to go in my room which was closed, to look through my art pad… WITH A MINOR. There was nothing NSFW in there, but there were some rather large breasts. She did apologise, but to this day, I’m still thinking “what in the world were you thinking!?” I would’ve said that to her face honestly if I could competently speak Cantonese. Funny to look back on though.

Because most of what I do is SFW, it shouldn’t really be an issue, but I do still get a bit embarrassed when a ‘normie’ finds my art. Especially funny when they actually react by comment though and I will respond with a “Yeah?”.

#4) What are a few of your favorite creations from other artists?

Some of my major inspirations came from someone on 4Chan who we just refer to as ‘MMDAnon’ because the dude’s a phantom. They made ‘Growblue Fantasy’ and an unnamed Cordelia growth animation, and those two inspired some of my pieces.
    People who can actually be named, I definitely enjoyed a good majority of AZMaybe9’s animations. The ‘Giantess Samus’ and ‘Pool Remix’ ones are my favourites.
    Raps’ pictures, especially the ones with his angel OCs are too cute to exist.
    ZenKisu’s Yukine Chris sequence and general art is stellar.
    MoralGear is one I usually come back to for his lovely OCs (see Amana recently).
    I’ve always enjoyed MagnaProspect’s more gentle pictures and his OCs.
    ROROrenRO does some pretty great growth animations.
    ThunderAfterDark’s soft-coloured pictures are ones I enjoy.
    I’ve basically been jealous of Seo Tatsuya’s city-drawing skills.
    Similarly, I bow down to AlloyRabbit’s perspective skills.

These are a few people I’ve followed and rather consistently enjoyed and been inspirations to me, mostly just found on a whim or from word of mouth. MoralGear was one of the first artists I found when I came back into the giantess scene, and thus, I hold his art and characters a bit more closely.

But there are quite a number of other works out there that influenced me that aren’t even size-related, but did rather heavily influence I do my art. These include Street Fighter III, Persona 5 and what I think is still the best thing I’ve ever seen: Super Mario Bros. Z.

#5) How would you describe your art?

I typically describe my art as either true to the source, to the point, simple or a mix of the above. Also a bit secretive

Every now and then, I’ll just draw a girl being big, maybe destroys stuff and that’s all she wrote, but for a good chunk of them, I do like to think about the character’s character, the scenario, their home series, etc. For example, when I doodled Haru Okumura from Persona 5, I wanted to add a zoom in, but in that moment, decided to make the zoom in something akin to the face zoom ins seen in P5 and I think it looks good without distracting from what the picture wants to tell.

Similar effects were used in the Aoko Aozaki picture where Melty Blood HUD occupied the lower left of the canvas. I like doing these since it makes the illustration feel closer to the source while being somewhat silly (in concept) and dramatic depending.

This idea of being a bit more true to the source was more extreme with Anna Graem from VA-11 HALL-A since it was all in pixel art, the colours are basically 1-to-1, I applied the glitchy text onto her body, and I topped it off with scan lines when the picture is magnified. Making it look close to the game itself was my task and I’d say I succeeded. It even got an audience with non-size fans (but then again, so did the Alma picture which was more lewd).

There are more general challenges I like to put on myself with mixed results. It can be as simple as POV, especially top-down, or the weirdest challenge: not always showing the entire character on the canvas. Since I’m quite interested in character design and most of my character choices are because I like them, I have a habit of drawing as much of their body as I can, but sometimes, zooming into a part of the body can emphasise their size. I still think I have yet to do that.

More extreme challenges are basically my more long-scale animations. Comparing my Yoshizawa growth animation to the Amana one I did recently is interesting because the latter wasn’t really planned at all. In fact, I was going to just make a short doodle and leave it at that.

Considering that I don’t have a proper animation software, I had a lot of trouble and I basically drew all my frames on my pad, not on top of each other like traditional animators do and with limited programs, I basically Street Fighter 2ed it with mostly key frames.

If it’s not a main picture, I’m normally hush about what I’m going to draw next or soon.

#6) Can you briefly outline the process required to create pixel art such as “BB Ruins Dig Dug”?

After the freakishly short run of the BB in Dig Dug crossover game aaand getting a good dose of nostalgia, I just recall remembering that BB having an actual giantess attack in Fate. Grand Order, I think? I don’t actually play the series. After confirming my memory, I decided to plan on a short growth sequence.

The first thing I did was make sure I got the canvas size to be the same as the arcade game it’s based on and get assets for the original Dig Dug which wasn’t too hard to find, then taking a screen shot of the BB Dig Dug game to get the colours. Getting the assets however wasn’t a walk in the park and it’s all because of BB herself. Not because I had to make new sprites for her- um, well, actually I did for when she got bigger of course, but the sprite used in the game is about double the size of Dig Dug’s (the original character that is) sprite. So I basically never used BB’s sprite from the game beyond her colour palette, except for her eyes; they were used on the third panel when she first starts to grow. Every other BB frame I did was original. This did give me an opportunity to Dig Dug-ify BB more though when she’s at her smallest.

Each panel had other alterations like enemy positions, HUD changes and the most difficult part of moving the ground around. That was only difficult because I had to move a ton of pieces to basically make way for BB. Furthermore, the dirt has patterns on it that I tried to replicate for the most part, and the little dots in the soil would sometimes move unnaturally close together as I shifted them, so I would erase and put new dots in the dirt.

The last frame is the most unique and the most original aspects to it. The ground was redrawn to be tilted, debri flying in the air, but I still tried to make it still look like Dig Dug assets. The enemies, now being at different altitudes, I made them smaller or even changed their expression or direction to fit where they were on her body, and then there was BB herself.

Considering the limitations of colour of BB’s body (it was a measly 2 per body part), it can look a bit weird when seeing her from afar, but I assure you, she’s not wide, just got a lot of black clothing on her. After that, I made all 5 images together and even made a GIF version which was painless compared to my other animations, and there we got a big pixel art BB in Dig Dug.

This is just an example of something small giving me a pretty big inspiration. Likely won’t be the last time you see Namco arcade games be the basis for size art (stares at Valkyrie).

#7) Do you have any upcoming projects that you’d like to mention?

Checking my list, quickly, I do have a numerous amount of pictures left to do alongside some smaller or special occasion pictures. On my main list, I’m currently working on Vice Director (Mia) from Shrink High, that one’s been a long time coming. After that, the remaining main pictures I have include Sakuya (Touhou), Morag (Xenoblade), Belfast (Azur Lane) and Kurisu (Steins Gate). Sprinkled in are around 3 more commissions.

After that, I plan to do another marathon of pictures based on the Puyo Puyo series, but that could be subject to change. Of course because I always find other characters to draw, expect some more doodles, especially of Sophia (Persona 5 Strikers) since I recently started that with my best friend- I hope none of you are sick of me drawing Persona girls. And next month, I plan to get some special drawings done for some people. I hope I can continue to please people with my art whether it’s drawing, pixel art or my amateur-tier animations.

Thank you very much for this interview!

All Rights Reserved.