"I think a lot of people new to game developing are disheartened because they are overly ambitious. This advertisement is meant to say to them: your first efforts might not be AAA standard, but everyone has to start somewhere!"
- Scirra cofounder Tom Gullen on why the studio's billboard advertising Construct 2 was done in MS Paint.
The barriers to getting into game development have dropped precipitously in recent years, and the makers of the Construct 2 engine are trying to get the word out with a giant London billboard done up in Microsoft Paint.
It's a charming bit of self-promotion by Scirra, whose engine drives recent releases like The Next Penelope, and it's also a nice show of support for amateur game developers (and developers-to-be) who are just starting out in the game industry.
"The most difficult part was drawing it to the billboard company's specification, as they want everything super high resolution, high DPI, etc.," Scirra co-founder Tom Gullen told Ars Technica UK, who discovered the billboard along a London road. "They thought I was joking with them at first until we paid for it."
You can see a few images of the billboard, which is reportedly 36 square meters in size, over on the Ars Technica UK website.