![]() "They come in two-disc blind packs, so you don't know which discs you're getting. "The Power Discs don't come with the figures," Blackburn said. These are stacked under your character's base, and can include upgrades like jetpacks, vehicles, and special powers. "It's a special case."Īnother type of piece that can interact with the base unit are circular pieces called Power Discs. "For initial starter pack, containing Sully, Jack Sparrow, and Mr Incredible, we made that one Playset piece work for all three worlds," he said. Blackburn explained that a new franchise being added to the game would typically be launched with a starter kit, such as two characters and an appropriate Playset piece. Only the appropriate characters can enter these Playsets, but playing through these stand-alone games will unlock new items for your Toybox. ![]() Instead of a character, these will unlock an entire game world. There are also plastic tiles called Playset pieces, which are also placed on the base unit. On its own, this will give the player control of that character in Toybox Mode, and you can place two figurines to play two characters in split-screen, as well as up to four players online. Again, like Skylanders, you play with a character by placing it on the base unit. The figurines are then re-created in digital form inside the game, identical to their physical counterparts. You can easily imagine them sitting on a collector's shelves, never going near a game console. They are also, and I am sure Disney is counting on this, very attractive in their own right, and sure to be a hit even with collectors who don't play video games. It's a remarkable achievement in art and design. The three characters in the starter kit are Sully from Monsters Inc, Captain Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean, and Mr Incredible from The Incredibles, and when they are lined up they really go together well. The figures are sleek, drawn from smooth, simple lines, but also look distinctly like the characters they are meant to be. "On the later characters we just started phoning it in, because we could see how they would fit into the existing style." "We probably went through 20 iterations on those early characters, back and forth with the production designers, until we nailed a style we liked," he said. Start with a strong V from the chest to the waist, exaggerate the feet because they're meant to be toys, and exaggerate the hands."īlackburn explained that initially it was an extremely time consuming process. We'd then go through a process where we'd go through and try to reduce the amount of detail in each character, and try to describe that character with as few lines as possible. "Every once in a while we'd just get a character right - we'd say, yes, that! That's what these things should look like! I think Mr incredible was the first one where we said, yeah, that's it, that's how they should look. We settled on wanting about 60% toward the character side of that continuum - more true to character than to form." "Like, if you imagine something like the Vinylmation range of collectible figures, where the form really overpowers the character, all the way to the other end of the scale where it looks very close to the original character with little stylisation. "We started off with a huge exploration, hundreds of different styles," Blackburn recalled. Rather than being a mish-mash of styles, Blackburn and his team worked closely with Pixar and Disney to develop a unique visual style across the whole range. Like Skylanders, Infinity is built around real-world toys, figurines of many well-loved Disney characters. "The only way this could work is if the characters were unified, and looked designed to be together." "We decided to think big and make a whole platform, which could fit with any new film that we decided to make a game for," Blackburn explained. This building trust led to Disney's John Lasseter giving Blackburn and his team the go-ahead to develop a new game, which was originally going to be a Toy Story game sequel featuring only Buzz Lightyear. "When the guys at Pixar played it with their kids, they all said, we really get it, and they started to develop a sense of trust in what you can do in a video game and still be respectful of the characters." "With Toy Story 3 Toybox Mode, the idea was the emulate the way that a child plays with toys and tells a story," he said. ![]() An impressively large cast of characters is planned.īlackburn explained that it grew out of the free-form toybox mode in the Toy Story 3 tie-in game.
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