Yet another amazing game coming to the Xbox console, along with PC. It looks like they have broadened the scope tremendously, much bigger than they anticipated. The attention to detail just looking at the framerate discussions is amazing. Looks like another hit for 2016 following the success of QB. Awwwwwww yeahhhhhhhh. Day one my friends.
http://time.com/4123150/cuphead-preview/
Here are some choice quotes:
Why go PC and Xbox One exclusive with Cuphead?
Cuphead is lifetime exclusive on Xbox for the console space, but in the PC space it’s going to be on every platform we can. So we’ll launch on PC and look into Mac and Linux thereafter.
But without Microsoft’s help and support, it would be hard to get to where we’re at today. For my brother and I to dump so much into this game and remortgage our houses and just put everything possible in to make this, it would’ve probably never happened, because it would have never reached the audience without the tons of marketing push that Microsoft’s been doing.
Our original idea was much smaller scope, eight to 10 bosses, nothing really crazy, and it would have just been a small indie game. But the current scope, thanks to Microsoft, is exactly what we dreamed of. So it’s a double-edge sword. Sure, Sony fans aren’t going to be able to buy Cuphead on their system. But at the same time, the people who do get to play Cuphead will get the full experience and not the smaller portion a three-man team was trying to pull off.
Any games in particular that influenced Cuphead from a gameplay standpoint?
From a strictly gameplay perspective, we grew up playing the classic run-and-gun game like the Contra series, especially Contra III: The Alien Warson Super Nintendo or Gunstar Heroes on Sega Genesis or spaceship shooters like the Thunder Force series. We’ve had this style of game in mind since we were teenagers.
It’s a little like the historical cinematic 24 frames per second ceiling, where that’s how slow you could go before the audio started to stutter, all to save money on the cost of film.
We’re also of the belief that 24 frames per second adds to the surrealism and the fantasy of movies. It feels more cinematic to watch 24 frames per second, like the picture’s removed from the world. As you approach the higher frame rates and it looks closer to real life, in our minds it takes away that magic. It starts to look like you and your friends got together and made a movie in your backyard with your home video camera.
I’m completely with you. I guess I prefer the distance?
That totally makes sense, and that’s why we purposely run all of the animation at 24 frames per second. But our gameplay is at 60 frames per second. So it’s technically the most responsive gameplay, except you don’t have to look at visuals that are too smooth.
There’s a lot of sequence looping in these older animated shorts. Was it a budgetary thing? I notice you’re doing it in Cuphead, where it’s synchronized with the music and the gameplay.
We didn’t 100% think of looping when we began preproduction on visuals, but as we studied the cartoons, we saw it kind of synced up with how video games work. Almost every game has looping animation, and modern games try to hide it by having multiple paths to choose different loops and animations, so it seems much more natural. But it just happens to coincide that the style of retro game that we want and 1930s cartoons, the looping lends itself beautifully and fits the era perfectly. The reason they had a ton of loops was just as you said, budget and time. It was only in later Disney years that they didn’t reuse as many things.
I always find it funny when I think that the art director on The Little Mermaid demanded that all of the bubbles had to be hand-drawn, and they didn’t use digital techniques to replicate them. That’s the heyday of having way too much money for hand-drawn projects.
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