Everything in Cuphead is hand-drawn by animators, lengthening the game's creation process.
Everything in Cuphead is hand-drawn by animators, lengthening the game's creation process.
Video game animators are usually locked in a battle of graphical grunt, trying to outdo each other with superior styles and stunning scenery.
Not in Cuphead.
For the long-awaited Xbox One game, animators at StudioMDHR looked back. Way back. Decades back.
How far back? We're talking about the 1930s.
"Webasically dissected cartoons as part of our research. We wanted the visual inconsistencies and subtle variance," says Cuphead's producer and inking artist Maja Moldenhauer.
She cites Fleischer Studios' Swing you Sinners as their main source of inspiration for Cuphead, an old-school platformer that comes complete with a soundtrack full of authentic big band jazz.
"We looked at how they would loop animations, how many frames they'd use for certain movements. We also studied backgrounds in great detail ... all the way down to studying pupil style and the frequency of the blinks."
Recently released on Xbox One, Cuphead has been praised for its graphical style, gameplay and music, with GameSpot saying: "It's beautiful to look at, and with a pitch-perfect soundtrack."
Work first started on Cuphead in 2010, and while it was unveiled at E3 in 2014, it was only about 40 per cent complete.
The last three years have been spent finessing - and Moldenhauer says they were okay with taking their time to get things right.
"We never compromised vision in the interest of time ... we would take however long it needed to finalise a great look before moving forward," explains Moldenhauer.
"We also spent an obscene amount of time fine-tuning gameplay to ensure it was precise and responsive."
A scene from Xbox One game Cuphead.
Despite the long wait, Moldenhauer says StudioMDHR is proud of their results - and Cuphead's reviews seem to prove it, with IGN calling every scene "a masterwork".
