The watercolor backgrounds, stacked one on top of another to achieve a parallax scrolling effect as you journey from left to right, could go as many as 10 layers deep.Įvery frame and every painting is drawn and inked by hand. There's a lot of work involved even in just drawing and then inking the worlds, characters, attacks, items, and bosses of Cuphead.Ī typical boss could have anywhere from 1,300 to 1,500 frames of animation.Ī typical boss could have anywhere from 1,300 to 1,500 frames of animation. It's important to understand the scale of things here. "We didn't notice the difference, so we said, 'OK, let's take the easy road here rather than painting each cel.'" "Visually, there was no difference between hand-painting each cel and doing it digitally," Ms. There's an obvious question here: if Studio MDHR is so committed to authenticity in its art design, why relegate the final part of that process - adding color - to the digital realm? "I'll go through and ink it, and then we re-scan and it gets colored digitally, then cut out and inserted into the game." I align the pictures digitally to make sure that we maximize our paper space - we could have anywhere from one to six frames per page," she explained. "Once the animations are tied down and complete, it then gets sent over to me. That more laborious process only happens after an animation is approved. These key frames, as they're called, give a sense of what the final animation will look like without the artists having to spend the time drawing every single frame. He hatches an idea for something - say an enemy, or a boss - and then a group of artists plots out a rough set of moments that capture different animations: attacks, idle states, intros. It starts with a concept, most of which come from Cuphead art director Chad Moldenhauer. "From the design right through to inking, it's all done as authentic as possible to the '30s ," Cuphead inking artist and producer Maja Moldenhauer said during my preview. The secret to Cuphead's visual success is the unusual development process: everything except the colors is drawn out by hand. It's exactly the kind of precision challenge that speedrunners and fans of SNES-era classics love to devour.īut let's not mince words here: the art is what will bring in mainstream gamers. It's exactly the kind of precision challenge that speedrunners and fans of SNES-era classics love to devour. He's got two main weapons - a straight-shooting long-range attack and a shotgun-style short-range spread attack - that you can switch between with the press of a button.Īt the end of a stage your performance is graded, so there's always a new bar to reach for. Your little hero, Cuphead, can run, jump, dash, shoot, and - with the right timing - parry certain types of attacks. There are also standalone boss stages that typically involve taking on a single, more elaborate threat across multiple phases. Each non-boss stage involves running (or, in at least one case, flying) from left to right, shooting an assortment of enemies and collecting the occasional coin. A bunch of cool indie games are coming to the super-powerful Xbox One XĪfter playing Cuphead, I can tell you: it feels just like what it's trying to be.
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