Development studio WayForward Technologies, best known for the acclaimed Game Boy Color title Shantae, Contra 4 for DS and Lit for WiiWare, has teamed with Majesco to recreate a classic franchise for Nintendo's console: A Boy and His Blob. The title will be playable for the first time at E3 2009, but director Sean Velasco dropped by the IGN offices to give us (and you) an early look at the game. We sat down with Sean to talk about the ambitious re-imagining of the franchise, its gorgeous 2D presentation and fun gameplay mechanics in our exclusive interview below.
IGN: First of all, when's the game coming out?
Sean: The game'll be coming out fall of 2009, so later this year.
IGN: Tell us about the concept and how you came to make A Boy and His Blob to begin with.
Sean: Well, you know, the original A Boy and His Blob is 1989 on NES, David Crane (who was the original developer) and Absolute Entertainment. Later on, those rights went to Majesco. So, honestly, I don't know where the inspiration even came from for me to go and try to pitch this game. But we just starting discussing after Contra 4, you know, how we could improve the game and make it so much better. And I was playing A Boy and His Blob one day and thought, man, this is such a great premise, and we could execute so excellently on it with all of WayForward's proprietary animation, with all of our awesome 2D platformer experience. We already had a pretty good existing relationship with Majesco so we threw together a really nice pitch with this new idea of having a very heartwarming Boy and Blob, and having a very friendly game, and then really improving the usability and doing this awesome 2D hand-drawn animation that's very reminiscent of animated movies from the 80s, and really going to town with it, and they loved every bit of it. So last E3 we had a really great meeting about the pitch and the rest is history.
IGN: Seems everybody wants to make 3D games these days, but you guys are clinging to 2D, which we think is awesome. Explain why you're doing that.
Sean: I guess, my question is, why is everyone necessarily having to be with 3D when we could just be doing really great stuff with 2D? It's an alternate art form that I see as being just as legitimate as 3D. There are some things that you can pull off, some looks that you can get -- like for A Boy and His Blob we've gone with this very hand-drawn look and if we went with a cel-shaded character or something like that I don't think we'd have the same sort of earthy feel. The same thing goes for the backgrounds. With 3D backgrounds you're just not going to get the painterly look that we've got. That being said, we've embraced some 3D technology, so that's what those moving threes, moving foliage and programatic water in the game are. The tech powering the whole game is 3D. It's just all in a 2D display.
IGN: Tell us about the proprietary tools you're using to make the game.
Sean: Well, I'm not the tech guy so I can't go into detail about it, but we've gone in and hand drawn every frame and it's all imported, processed and gone through by hand. I think a lot of people will think, oh, the reason you do 2D is because it's easier. But in a lot of ways 2D is much more work-intensive than 3D. For instance, if we wanted to change a model -- say, the boy's hair -- we couldn't just go in and adjust it. Or if this was a game where you were wearing battle armor or something, we couldn't just go in and put shoulder pads on him, that just wouldn't work. It's pretty laborious, but we have a proprietary lighting system. You'll see the fireflies and you'll go under something and it'll be light and dark. All of that is really cool. The Wii allows for a lot of different effects so we're trying to maximize everything we can to get a really awesome looking game. And of course it's all 480p and widescreen.
IGN: A lot of WayForward's background is centered on traditional animation. You're in close proximity to CalArts, one of the biggest animation schools in America. How did that influence the creation process and also, how much animation really went into this game? For instance, how might you compare to a traditional cartoon on TV?
Sean: I can't really speak to a standard TV show, but I think those typically go for about 20 minutes and I think the animations run 12 frames per second, so it's not really comparable, especially because we're doing a lot of cycles but also have an absolute ton of animation -- it's ridiculous. We started out planning this game and said we were going to have 2,000 frames of animation, but I think at this point we've probably doubled that. We probably have about 4,000 unique frames of animation. As far as art goes, Mark Gomez is our art director, he's extremely talented, and most of the look of the game, the inspiration behind that can be attributed to him. He wanted to do something very soft, very Miyazaki-esque. The design of the boy, making him much younger and rounder, having the blob be his faithful companion like a dog, that was all in his head when he did it. He's a CalArts grad. A lot of our animators -- the lead animator who animated the boy is a CalArts grad. So a lot of that talent has been very useful for making the game.
IGN: For people who don't know, how do the boy and blob meet and what tis the relationship between the two in the game?
Sean: Originally, the boy is just asleep in his treehouse / hideout / hangout. This huge four-bedroom treehouse that I guess his dad built for him [laughs]. We never see his parents, so, anyway. A comet crashes down and shakes everything. He sees it out the window and gets up to go investigate and he sees the blob. They're friends at first sight. The story is that the blob crashed landed from Blobolonia and he's looking for someone to help him save Blobolonia, his home planet, from an evil emperor that's taken over. From then on the boy and the blob go on this adventure to get back to Blobolonia and then to try to overthrow the emperor himself.