Development Team of Crash: Mind Over Mutant
Author of this post: Beth A. Dillon | About Blog Authors »
With such stellar graphics for a handheld available on PSP, the latest Crash game Mind Over Mutant maintained a wide range of cinematic styles and free roaming environments seen in versions for Xbox360 and other platforms. In response to the interest in highlighting developers, Notes on Game Dev nabbed up an in-depth interview with Radical’s Mind Over Mutant team including Game Designers Bob Churchill and Kasan Wright, Art Director Yousuf Mapara, Lead Programmer Ian Gipson, and Producer Glenn Dphrepaulezz.
What was the structure of the design team (including aspects such as the number of people and the pipeline process)?
Bob Churchill, Game Designer: For Crash: Mind over Mutant we used the Agile process and divided our designers up into specialties such as Locomotion, Combat, Level design, Story, Prop Interaction, AI etc. We also assigned designers to mission scripting which includes object and enemy placement and level design support. Even though each member of the design team had a specific part of the game to look after there was plenty of crossover, not just from a feedback perspective but also from the actual building of the game.
Within Scrum, the designers focus on these specialties and attend morning Scrums with all the relevant coders and artists for that aspect of the game. The people in that scrum break down their objectives into smaller tasks and work for two weeks on that feature. At the end of every Sprint we have a full review where the entire team gets together to view and provide feedback on the work from all the Scrums combined. The beauty of this system is that we can adapt very quickly to changes in the design or any issues that pop up.
What was the inspiration for the cutscenes and their humor?
Yousuf Mapara, Art Director: When we made Crash of the Titans, we wanted an intro that was very playful and fun to watch, and that told the backstory quickly without a lot of spoken explanation. To that end, we used the shadow puppet cinematic. To work with 2D was such a refreshing change from a typical NIS with a lot of speaking, as it had different rules, felt more stylized and to the point. Above all it was so fun to see Crash drawn in a different style. This led to Mind Over Mutant, where we thought it would be so much fun to explore Crash in other styles that we decided to represent each cinematic with a different style from television.
Although it was a lot of work to redesign the characters and sets in 13 styles, it was exciting seeing it all come together. We wanted to leave the audience with a feeling of excitement about unlocking the next movie, anticipating “what will the next movie look like”. Ironically at the end of satisfying our curiosity, it left us more curious about other avenues, like what would Crash be like if we used clay-mation, or real puppets.
How did the level-based gameplay from former Crash games evolve into the mission-based gameplay in Mind Over Mutant?
Kasan Wright, Game Designer: It was a system developed from the desire to do more with less. We had a vision for a game where you could recirculate through levels with a different jacked monster each time so that gameplay would change depending on the powers and abilities of the mutant you had under your control. So we designed the mission structure to provide multiple scenarios that took advantage of pre-existing play spaces.
What was the inspiration for the free-roaming environment?
Wright: To make Wumpa island feel like one huge and wholly connected place, more circuitous and Escher-like than a series of unrelated stages.
What were some challenges working with a pre-existing IP?
Mapara: There is an enormous amount of creative flexibility working with a character like Crash. Some IP’s dictate a pre-defined world and look that must be adhered to, like a movie license for instance. But Crash has so many elements to innovate on. So we were able to introduce a feature like Jacking and build on that through two games. It made perfect sense for Crash to have these creatures behave as weapons and for him to collect an arsenal of them to use when he liked by upgrading them then storing them to carry forward with him. Plus we were able to write a fresh story each time, add tattoo’s to the character if they were required to show his affiliation with the mutants he jacked, and select an art style that suited the story and character.
How did Radical tackle development for multiple platforms and what were some of the design differences?
Ian Gipson, Lead Programmer: Designing for multiple platforms can be tricky, especially considering that the PS2, Wii and Xbox360 are very different platforms. We focused our attention first on the Wii, which we decided early on was to be the lead platform. We wanted to make use of the Wii remote’s motion sensing and pointing capabilities, to add variety to the player’s interaction with the game. At the same time, we wanted the PS2 and Xbox360 versions have excellent controls that were fun without the motion sensing capabilities.
The other area that shows a great difference across the three consoles is graphical quality. It’s no secret that the Xbox360 has superior graphical capabilities to the Wii, and that the PS2 lags behind both of them in terms of raw graphics power. We concentrated our feature set on the Wii, trying to push its rendering as far as we could take it with our specialized art style. We wanted to add as many features as we could to the Xbox360 version, without making it look drastically different from the other versions of the game. Some of those features just weren’t possible on the PS2, for example, reflections on the water are not present on the PS2. Using the 360’s extra bandwidth, we were able to spend some time adding features such as depth of field.
What was the process for getting Mind Over Mutant ported to PSP?
Glenn Dphrepaulezz, Producer: It is usually a straightforward development challenge to move a PS2 game over to the PSP, but in our case, since Wii was Mind Over Mutant’s lead sku, and therefore the platform that got the most love from coders (meaning we could rely on it to be stable and crash free), we chose to move the Wii code and content over to the PSP, which was a little more interesting.
Our process was to deliver Wii builds to Virtuos, our external developer and give them two months to integrate. The minute they finished, we’d review and send another batch of source. We did this in stages through development until they had to branch out on their own and fix the last remaining bugs. Then presto chango, a PSP game is born.
What is your favorite feature in the PSP version?
Dphrepaulezz: Well, aside from all the features in the console versions of Mind Over Mutant, like the Jacking of course, and getting to keep your Mutants with you, the thing I like most about the PSP version is how good it looks. Particularly the 2D cut scenes which are screamingly funny anyway, and work particularly well on the PSP since you’re usually in a waiting room somewhere when you’re playing your portable and you get to laugh out loud and make everyone wish they could join your party.
