Wreck-It Ralph

So D23 was last weekend in Anaheim. I didn't get a chance to go, but to my surprise, Disney Feature had created an amazing display with work of mine for the upcoming feature, "Wreck-It Ralph". I figured since images and footage has now been leaking, I can share with you a few things. Before moving onto "Gravity Falls" last year, I had an amazing opportunity to help develop the world, look and game-play surrounding the main characters of "Wreck-It Ralph". It was an incredibly unique challenge that pushed me away from animation and into pseudo game developing. It was an incredibly fun challenge to create the gameplay and look of an 8-bit game that could easily fit right into 1982-83 arcade games like "Donkey Kong", "Pacman", and "Galaga". I did lots of research that I won't bore you with, but really tried to stay true to the technological limitations in color palate, pixel count and dimension to those of it's predecessors. While working on it, I developed a huge respect for the designers of classic limited games. It made me want to take classic 8-bit Mario and hang him next to a Michelangelo. Shigeru Miyamoto is a true master of design and made me really re-think design in terms of how little you need to show to communicate an idea, but also how each individual pixel's placement could make a huge difference in clarity. It was also fun to do some development for the graphics for the arcade cabinet itself. I really wanted to stay true to the slightly wonky Japanese graphics like the ones on the classic Donkey Kong Cabinet and have the character designs intentionally off-model as though the art direction was communicated over a long distance call to a Japanese artist. It looks like they did a really great job with the graphics used on the machine and I was stoked to see this a real tangible game. Kudos to the Ralph crew! I can't post much yet, but will post all of my development work once the movie is released. In the mean time, here's a pic of the exterior cabinet and video footage of the game play.