Game Art and Machinima Research: Crash Bandicoot

By Meg Sugden
For this module as a team we have decided to go down a very cartoony look to our project, taking inspiration for older games that were brought out for the PlayStation or PlayStation2 as well. We choose to take a lot of inspiration from this era of gaming in particular as a lot of games and genres were so new, exciting and fresh but most importantly cartoony looking. 

The first game that I wanted to look at was the original Crash Bandicoot game. As one that was brought out in the late 90s we did not yet have the technology to produce photorealism; in any fact we still yet have not got to that stage now, so creating weird and wonderful creatures was the path to follow at this early stage in game development and Crash Bandicoot is an excellent example of this.

Crash himself is obviously based off a bandicoot. What I really like about him is that they didn't just stick with the animal but they gave him human qualities and clothing, along with a strange mumbled way of talking, but this really helped to bring the character to life. Along with this he also had facial expressions, movement, different moods and was joyful to play as. As a team we want to be able to create a colourful character that has bags of expressions and interesting qualities to them which can definitely be influenced by Crash's character and the quality and humorous nature that he oozes. 

In terms of the environment they are again very simple but work well for the old PlayStation console as they won't have been able to handle much in terms of realism and quality in the models. But having said that they are very nicely designed, contain very simple but lots of detail and these vary from level to level to give the audience more to look at. For the environment that we are wanting to create we again want to it be very simple and set in just a small place as to not make it too confusing to create. A good example for these kind of levels are the boss fights that take place in the Crash game, as they are all very unique but at the same time still small. Due to the fact that we are creating a cut scene and not an actual game level, keeping the environment small is definitely going to be the best way to create it. 

Finally I wanted to look at the cut scenes that are used, as this is what we are actually going to be creating in the end. The cut scenes during this scene are all kept simple and to a minimum, offering entertaining and humorous content; which is something that is important to our group as well. Due to the fact that the characters are all very simple and cartoony shapes definitely adds to the comedy and also makes it easier to animate body movements therefore adding more comedy value as they not have to be exactly realistic and can use animation principles to over-exaggerate them.