Avast ye Sea Rats!
With just 2 weeks to go until Curse of the Sea Rats launches on 6th April we’ve prepared another developer interview with some of the key staff from Petoons Studio! If you missed Part 1: 'Building the World' you can check it out HERE.
Today we'll be looking at Part 2: ‘Crafting the Characters’ where we shine the spotlight on character and boss design, animation techniques, and voice acting!
Character & Boss Design with Lead Game Designer, Yeray Toledano and Senior Game Designer, Alex Calvo.
Q: Can you tell us a bit about the process of designing the 4 playable heroes?
Yeray: David Douglas was the first character we developed. He was the first one we talked about and the first character to be created. He’s the most balanced character, both in offensive and defensive capabilities and is the ideal character to start with if you are not sure which combat style you like the most. Douglas is basically for everyone!
Alex: It was important to us from the beginning, that each character had to play differently and have a unique role in combat. Buffalo Calf is unique compared to the rest of the Sea Rats, since she has a lot of ranged abilities and is extremely fast and nimble.
Yeray: She can also become invisible, throw elemental projectiles, and execute multi-directional ariel attacks… In contrast, Douglas has only his mid-range pistol and fire attacks. Each of the characters is tied to an element, Douglas uses his firearms to channel his magic, while Buffalo harnesses electricity through her throwing knives and tomahawks.
Alex: Then, as a counterpoint, we have Bussa. He is the tankiest character by far, with more hit points than the other heroes. Instead of a parry ability, Bussa can hold his block and stay on guard for a while. We also think he’s the friendliest of the four characters (laughs).
Yeray: While his attacks are slow, they do quite a bit of damage! Bussa’s gameplay style embodies his inner element, which is Earth, so on the outside he’s hard like granite! But despite this he does have a softer and more sensitive side which you’ll hopefully see as the adventure progresses.
Then we have Akane, the youngest and also the smallest! But beware, as a warrior of the shogun she’s pretty fierce and has some of the strongest attacks in the game!
Akane is quite agile but has less physical resistance to damage and as a result loses health quickly. She ultimately puts everything into her attack and uses versatile water magic to overcome the enemy. You’ll notice that her movements and combos are really fluid, just like her inner element, Water!
Throughout the game, you will unlock different kinds of magical abilities for each character. For example, one of Akane’s skills adds a water projectile to her aeriel attacks, while another creates a water shield which protects her and simultaneously damages nearby enemies. She’s a really cool character and plays aggressively!
Q: Could you tell us more about the design of Flora Burn and her crewmates?
Yeray: We're not going to say too much about Flora Burn because she's an important character and we haven't seen much of her yet in previous trailers and demos, but suffice to say she uses A LOT of magic! We can’t forget that she was already a pirate witch before her encounter with the Eye of the Serpent, so she is extremely powerful in that sense and uses it to her advantage with premeditation and treachery.
Flora is cunning, like a snake, and uses the power of the serpent to her advantage. She’s charismatic, with a lot of personality and a peculiar way of interacting with her subordinates. She's also deceitful, tricky, mocking, and her magic and combat style reflect this, so don’t let her deceive you!
In a weird way Flora is almost like a parent figure amongst her crew. Not because she is affectionate, but because she has to put up with their nonsense and make sure they stay focused! She sees herself as being surrounded by incompetence, which isn’t entirely wrong!
Alex: Regarding Flora’s crew, there are personalities of all types in the mix. Some characters are mysterious like the vampiric Murat Reis and sinister Freddy Eightfingers, while others provide some comic relief, such as the uptight Short Fuse Jones and ponderous Fatso. We also have the sultry Rama Cinnamon and her companion Sharpie The Sharp, who share a close relationship. There are different dynamics amongst Flora’s crew, and you’ll witness a few bust-ups because of their clashing personalities.
Q: How are the boss battles presented to the player?
Yeray: They’re all really varied! One of the more unique boss battles is Rama Cinammon, who has two phases: During the first phase she’s really agile employing a mixture of close-range melee attacks with her whip, and long range attacks with her vines. And then, in the second phase she teams up with her pet toucan Banana, and begins to attack from above using air currents to sweep the heroes off the treetops of Eriu’s Forest!
Alex: On the island, there are not only the pirates, but also local inhabitants and fauna such as the Lighthouse Keeper, Krabawaki, La Chusa, Necromancer... (the coolest character of all!) And some other mysteries that you’ll have to discover. Each boss has a really different style of combat accompanied by some truly expressive hand-drawn animations!
Q: What can you tell is about the process of designing boss battles?
Yeray: Designing a Boss battle is actually one of the more complex processes, you always start with an idea, a concept or something you want to teach the player. Thinking about the main objective that you want to achieve with that boss: visually, the movement, the attack patterns... and that's how the central plan is designed.
For example, if I want to highlight the jump mechanic, the boss is going to be designed around this. The game’s first boss, Fatso was designed exactly for this purpose: we wanted to teach the player how to move, jump, and dodge... To get a little used to the enemies that were going to come later. And well, basically we started by making some attack ideas and thinking about which objective could be achieved by each individual attack.
Alex: When Fatso throws his barrels or propels himself forwards, the player must time their jumps differently. We always start with drawings or schematics with detailed descriptions of the attacks, then this passes into the hands of Concept Artists who make a first sketch of what the characters will look like during these moments.
We get a lot of feedback from the Concept Artists: we propose things to them and then they respond, and so a boss character is built collaboratively between the two teams.
The Animation department are actually amazing, and they have some super crazy and fun ideas. Once we have the description of the attacks from the Game Designers, and the visuals of the boss from the Concept Artists, the Animators begin work on the animations for all of the attacks!
After this stage the Programmers work on the Boss AI. This way, we can test it and give our feedback to see if things like timings need to be changed. Most importantly we get a feel for the boss’s movement speed and how many frames have to be drawn for each attack.
Yeray: As we test and tweak, we can soon see which attacks have to do more damage. We also played around a lot with the level of the characters, that is, scaling boss difficulty to the level where the characters are, and the skills that are likely to be unlocked at the point of encounter.
2D Animation techniques with Lead Animator, Al Díaz and Senior Animator, Guillem Vallhonrat
Q: Could you tell us about your approach to animation?
Al: The style of the characters in Curse of the Sea Rats is quite cartoonish, and stylized, therefore the animations needed to match accordingly. We also took into account that this is a video game and not a film, so tiny details needed to look good and the character movements had to stand out and be easily understood by the player.
Guillem: Once the Concept Artists finish designing the characters, the Game Designers define the movesets and give us a completed animation concept. First, we make an initial sketch, where you can only see a bit of the silhouette of the character, and we test it in the game to see how it looks and how the timings feel. Does it go too fast, too slow, or look does it look small? Once we get this feeling right, we go through the rough phase adding in the facial features, the actions and the details of the character’s clothing which we'll later clean up!
Q: Was there a character that you really enjoyed working on?
Al: The Lighthouse Keeper was the first boss I animated and I'm fond of him because I had to think about all his different attacks. I really focused on varying his movements and animations in the later phases of the fight to really ramp up the tension and let the player know that things were getting serious!
Q: Did you face any challenges?
Guillem: For some attacks and movements that were particularly difficult to animate we used video references as a guide. Thankfully, the fact that the game has such a cartoony style, meant that we were able to exaggerate everything and add lots of additional colour. This gave us the freedom to do deformations and things that a more realistic art-style just wouldn’t have allowed.
Recording the voiceover with Game Director, Dani del Amor & Lead Game Designer, Yeray Toledano
Q: Tell us about the voiceover recording process?
Dani: For the voice dubbing we hired a professional UK-based studio called Charactoons, who previously worked on Disco Elysium, a game that we loved! It has honestly been such a pleasure working with them.
Studio Owner Mikee has been a real star throughout the project, and was instrumental in finding all the actors and actresses. He’s also really fun to work with!
Yeray: Importantly, Charactoons helped us find diverse actors from a wide variety of backgrounds. Since we have characters representing different nationalities, genres, and ages the voice actors had to be authentic to their on-screen counterparts.
To begin with, we looked for reference actors to link with each character. We passed these references to Charactoons to see if they could find similar voices and match the appropriate nationalities.
They then gave us different tests with different actors, all of them are talented and cool, so it was really hard picking our favorites! After that we started the dubbing.
Dani: In Curse of the Sea Rats there are characters representing all sorts of nationalities (e.g. Spanish, Japanese, American English etc...). Given the game’s setting we had to take great care with all of the regional accents for British and Irish characters in particular! You’ll discover characters who are clearly Irish, Scottish, and Welsh, but you’ll also hear specific regional accents being represented. It really breathes life and a sense of authenticity into the game!
Yeray: During the dubbing process, Dani was present in the studio. It was a cool experience! We had previously done some recording for other games but never at this scale. It was enriching because there were people here working in Barcelona alongside the team in the UK and everyone was collaborating to make sure that we didn't miss any lines of dialogue, and that everything was shot in the right context... When you're recording, you do takes with each individual character separately and some context can be lost against the conversation that actually takes place in the game. Different characters are interacting with one another depending on the context, so the actors had to be careful to preserve the tone of the conversation! In the final cut, we felt that they were all coherent and fun, transmitting the emotion that was originally intended.
Dani: Some alterations to the script were also made in the studio because when the actor or actress gets into character, they naturally make contributions. So, maybe a phrase that worked well in the script, doesn’t work in practice and then the actor makes a better suggestion during the performance. If it fits, then you write it down and make the appropriate amendments in-game!
Q: How did you pick the best takes and do you have any favourite performances?
Dani: (Laughs) It’s really difficult to choose a favourite take because everyone did great and I think that every reading offers something interesting and unique. It’s true that when there are actors or actresses who have lots of experience, when they do four takes, all four sound good.
I also preferred interpretations that surprised me, Mikee Goodman’s rendition of the Serpent was amazing as you can hear a snake’s hiss within his voice! I honestly didn't think it was possible for a human being to make these sounds...
Yeray: Another favourite of mine was Flora, the dubbing actress added a lot to the character. It gave her so much personality, a bit like Cruella de Vil: evil but elegant at the same time.
Dani: I found it interesting to see that some voice actors were able to perform as multiple characters. In some cases, the same actor plays two characters that are going to interact in the same conversation and makes them sound totally different. When you hear these two characters talking to each other in-game they sound like two separate people. It's awesome!
That's all for today and remember, Curse of the Sea Rats launches on 6th April 2023!
Petoons Studio
