Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures Interview

[keithlewis]

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[keithlewis]

http://www.gbase.ch/Global/specials/0/769__p4.html

Would you like to introduce yourself to our readers?

Peter Tsaykel: I'm an Art Director at Telltale Games, currently working on Wallace & Gromit. I also worked on Season One of Sam & Max and, like many folks at TTG, my roots go back to the old days of LucasArts.

Emily Morganti: I handle press and community relations at Telltale.

Please share some details with us on the engine technology on which the game episodes are based. We would especially be interested in the design process of the awesome character models and animations.

PT: We spent a lot of time and effort designing new original characters for the series, as well as making sure the game versions of Wallace & Gromit felt authentic and familiar to their fans. It was definitely a challenge to construct Aardman-style models (especially faces) for our game engine, but we tried to mind details like shiny eyes, pliable mouths, and plasticine-style textures to get as close to the real thing as we could.

Does the team have any personal experience with plasticine? How close is the cooperation with Nick Park and his Aardman Animations team?

PT: It was vital to us, and to Aardman, that Wallace and Gromit be able to act and emote in a way that felt true to their characters. Aardman consulted us on everything from character design and construction to animation posing and style. Working with actual models wasn't a requirement, but we did study the films a lot and tried our best to work in a way that mimicked the unmistakable Aardman look. I'm pretty sure all the animators on the team learned a lot from that exercise. (I know I certainly did!)

Why did you make the decision to walk away from a classical adventure mouse control scheme?

EM: Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures is coming out for Xbox Live Arcade in addition to the PC, so from the beginning we knew we'd have to do something different with the controls. Point and click works great with a mouse but it's not ideal on the Xbox. So we started working on a new direct control system that could be used for both versions. What we found, as we developed it, is that the direct control actually allows us to make the games much more cinematic and immersive than point and click. When the player is pointing and clicking to move the character around, we have to be very careful to show the floor at all times, so you always have something to click on. This means we're limited in what we can do with our cameras, the way we frame of shots, and even in some gameplay mechanics. With direct control, showing the floor all the time isn't necessary, so we suddenly have a lot more freedom to make the game look like a movie, and with Wallace & Gromit that was a very big goal of ours.

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