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Source: fastcodedesign.com
Video game design sometimes seems like an impossibility. How does it even happen? It’s thousands of hours of incredibly detailed work done by about a kazillion people, all working together to create something that tells a story, that’s visually compelling, that’s interactive, that’s fun, and on and on. Tough, right?
Now imagine doing all of that stuff, while at the same time staying true to 90 years of entertainment magic (not to mention 90 years of strict brand management) and personally pleasing Walt Disney’s unfrozen corpse. Are imagining? Or rather, imagineering? If you are, you have some idea of what Jeff Bunker went through as art director of Disney Infinity, the new platformer from Disney Interactive Studios and Avalanche Software.
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Source: tchnobuffalo.com
Fast Code Design has an interesting article up about the many challenges Bunker faced in adapting Disney’s most recognizable characters into one video game, both big (“He needed to design something that was neither original nor replicated: Characters that were recognizable from their movies, but as toy versions of themselves.”) and small (“Johnny Depp, for instance, requested that all rings on his Pirates of the Caribbeancharacter Jack Sparrow be true to those in the movie.”)
The article touches on common difficulties that video game designers have, especially in adapting ideas from real life or popular culture.
Tapping into as much talent as he could, Bunker soon commissioned more than 100 ideas from artists. Results fell somewhere along a spectrum between making characters true to a consistent form factor–the way bothStar Wars and Lord of the Rings Legos have the same shape–and true to their movie counterparts. Some artists accidentally created an uncanny valley, making the characters just different enough from their originals to come off as creepy. Others distorted them into geometric shapes that looked too much like toys for toddlers (Infinity targets ages six and up).
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Source: fastcodedesign.com
Bunker and Disney Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter eventually landed on making each character resemble a toy figurine, thus putting them all in the same visual world while also allowing them to tap into that sweet, sweet merchandising cash by selling real-life action figures of the characters in the game. (Side note: How do Disney execs keep track of all this stuff? Movie to toy to video game toy to real toy of video game toy… my head is spinning. I’m just going to go ride Small World and call it a day.)
Long story short, games – especially games this big – require a whole lot of work and a whole lot of planning. From character conception to design to execution, the Disney guys spent years working to make sure their game hit all the right marks. Aspiring video game designers take note, or else deal with Walt Disney’s unfrozen wrath down the road.
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