Here’s a slick piece of short film making from Steamroller Animation – a short film entitled Spice Frontier, a taster (on many levels!) or more to come next year from an inventive team of animators based out of Orlando, Florida.

There’s some fantastic world building inside this animation short, set over a century since the destruction of Earth. Without a home planet, humans now live among the thirty-eight known alien species.

Kentucky Williams, a struggling chef, alongside cyborg companion C-LA, leads a disparate band of adventurers aboard their ship, the Serrano, eager to discover the culinary secrets of his ancestors, traversing the cosmos in search of rare Earth spices…

If you like what you see, you’ll be pleased to hear there’s much more to come in 2025. Subscribe here on YouTube for updates.

Steamroller Animation, who have offices around the globe, worked on some of the most popular games on the planet including Fortnite, Mortal Kombat 11, Horizon Forbidden West, and created Curse of the Deadwood, a unique twin-stick zombie survival game where you control two unlikely friends to save the Kingdom of Knottington. They believe in touching the heart and soul of audiences by creating remarkable stories and breathtaking content.

Steamroller started to develop Spice Frontier back in 2017, a project that started with an idea from one of the company’s owners, Jalil, and then very quickly grew to a small pre-production team. Soon enough,, alongside ongoing work of sompanies such as BioWare and Epic Games, it turned into a huge project for the studio with production lasting over a year and resulting in Steamroller’s largest Intellectual Property investment to date. All of the short film’s development was completed in-house, and was a major milestone for the company.

The short has been shown at 35 film festivals upon its release and won several awards such as Best Animated Film at Dragon Con Independent Short Film Festival.

The success of the short has led to development of an episodic pilot for Spice Frontier, funded by an Epic MegaGrant in 2022 to support the Unreal-based production workflow.

Episode one of Spice Frontier is currently in production, and the company has released a number of production diaries on YouTube, teasing more about the project.

• Check out Steamroller Animation on YouTube

• Official web site: steamrolleranimation.com | Instagram | YouTube | LinkedIn

• Curse of Deadwood Game

John Freeman

The founder of downthetubes, which he established in 1998. John works as a comics and magazine editor, writer, and on promotional work for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He is currently editor of Star Trek Explorer, published by Titan – his third tour of duty on the title originally titled Star Trek Magazine.

Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine, Babylon 5 Magazine, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics. He has also edited several comic collections, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”.

He’s the writer of “Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies” for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs” with Dave Hailwood.

Categories: Animation, downthetubes News, Games, Other Worlds

Tags: Animation, downthetubes News, Games News, Spice Frontier, Steamroller Animation