The artwork in the game is stunning. How do you guys come up with it?
Are you inspired by any particular schools of design? Any movies or art play into your design visions? (The lead character is surely owes something to Chucky from Child´s Play!). Are you familiar with Tim Burtons work?
Yes, we are crazy about Tim´s work !! He is clearly a strong source of inspiration for our artists (especially "The Nightmare Before Christmas”).
The graphics team is coached by Stephan Bachelet (Artistic Director) who brought up this unique style, sometimes inspired by "cult” movies (all of Tim Burton´s movies, "The City of Lost Children” or older ones like "The wizard of Oz” or "the 5000 fingers of Doctor T”...), or European & American comic books (especially Bill « Elektra » Sienckiewicz).
As far as Cyprien is concerned, there wasn´t any conscious "model” as such that lead to the character design. For instance, the initial look of the character was closer to a crazy skinny drag-queen than to the little boy we know now !! We noticed afterwards similarities with other heroes such as Calvin (from Calvin & Hobbes), Little Nemo or even the infamous Chucky… But again, that wasn´t conscious.
Maybe the strongest influence all the way through has been Charles Dickens, with his fine descriptions of tough young orphans living in the London streets at the end of the last century.
One of the strong points of the game is also probably the fact there is not a single texture re-use from one island to another… This means that an entirely new set of textures has been drawn for each islands (for a total of about 1 Gb of uncompressed textures!!). This is a luxury for sure, but it allowed us to give totally distinct atmospheres to each island. There is for instance a "Nature” island, with dark forests and colourful plants, there is a "School” island with a terrifying schoolyard where trees have metallic branches and where nurses carry loooong needles, there are also a baroque "Food” world, a horrific "prison” island, a "flying boat” level, all with their own ambiences.
We noticed that the main character can enter a latrine... anything interesting happening there?
Not yet, but there is room for a surprise. If you have a cool idea, please let me know !
