The Tale of Despereaux Feature: From Tiny to Human-Sized

Scale differences in games are a really difficult challenge to accommodate. Implementing a camera and art style that felt good and natural for gameplay while making large objects readable was tricky. A large part of The Tale of Despereaux DS takes place in the human world. This is a big deal when a one foot of distance between human shelves becomes a chasm for a tiny mouse.

Our talented tech team implemented a versatile camera system that anticipated where the player wanted to go. Additionally, the art team did a fantastic job in making any part of an object communicate what the object is as a whole. Late in the development we discovered issues with conveying really large enemies. For instance, a particularly large cat put our game to the test. With a few tweaks our camera system was up for the challenge.

There haven’t been a ton of games that properly deal with the differences in scale from the world to character. I feel like we made a good pass at this and got a lot of high flying, breath-taking moments. The unlockable bonus levels exploit our success in this area as those levels were created later in production, when we had a handle on things. They are also outside the scope of the story and Dave Shramek, the Level Designer and Writer on the project, went nuts with launching Despereaux across levels.

In the end, we give an experience fresh to the Nintendo DS. The team and I genuinely hope you have a great time discovering the world on Despereaux’s level. Thanks for reading and hopefully playing when the game is released next week.

~ by patrickmoran on November 29, 2008.