Creating Newstalgia for 'Crash Bandicoot 4': Modernizing a Classic IP

[Music] and welcome to um this gdc session i'm going to be talking about the development behind crash bandicoot 4 it's about time this was a title that was released in the fall of 2020 for all major consoles and pc um and it's a new adventure in the series after a 12-year absence for the franchise i'm going gonna be sharing about our approach to developing this new original game for one of the biggest gaming icons of the 90s and how we took a classic ip that fans have a ton of nostalgia for made it relevant and fresh while maintaining its authenticity i'm going to share about the creative direction that led to how we uniquely balanced new and nostalgia now to get started if we haven't had the pleasure of meeting my name is paul i am the co-studio head at toys for bob

i lead the creative art and design teams there we are a core crew of 70 developers based out of the bay area in california and this is our extended team we um we're really blessed to have support from incredibly talented teams and individuals from all over the world from countries like germany france uh canada israel and china just to name a few uh believe it or not this is the this year marks the 25th anniversary of crash and so i think we're going to have some great things to celebrate further on down in the year but it's a timely place to talk about um the newest game in the series so before um diving in i think we should start and rewind all the way to the start just to give some context about where this franchise began and where we decided to take it to today so you're probably familiar with crash bandicoot you're probably um at least we're familiar or engaged

with him as he debuted on the playstation in 1996 but you may not have known that every single year after that there's been a brand new crash bandicoot game at least one um up until 2008 and that's the point at which the uh the ip went a little bit dormant and quiet and more recently activision has remastered the original games in the series and in 2017 vicarious visions did an amazing job remastering the first three games which they called the insane trilogy and followed in 2019 by bionx remastering crash team racing now i said toys for bob we played a support role in both these titles we also remastered another big gaming icon of the 90s and spyro in 2018 and this is the point in which we start to engage activision in conversation about a potential new title for 2020. now internally this was being described as a reboot which suggests a really drastic overhaul

and perhaps that was a term that was being used prematurely so one thing that we did in these early conversations was to step back for a second and um we wanted to tease out what the real goals of this before we started to embark on this development journey so one thing that i love to do as a as an exercise to do this and to put a little bit more precision on fuzzy topics or things that might be a little bit subjective is to use um this exercise of spectrums and spectrums are a great way of putting two extremes on both ends and then lining up ideas and trying to place them physically along those spectrums just to tease out where um you might align with other teammates or where you may disagree so in this case what we did was we put the term reboot on one end of the spectrum which suggests reinvention and then on the other end we explored this idea of a sequel which suggests an evolution of ideas or a continuation and we looked at a whole

slew of games that um we felt kind of existed along this spectrum there's examples of successful titles and not so successful titles on both ends of this spectrum there's nothing inherently right or wrong about where these land but this was a useful exercise for us to compare and contrast in terms of what are the goals that are unique for crash bandicoot and moving that series into the future into relevancy for today um as an observation of doing this exercise together we all saw that on the sql end of things the opportunity is um to be reverent to really appeal to the core fan base the risks may be that the titles may not stand out enough or um it may be perceived to be more of the same on the reboot side of things there's this huge opportunity for innovation and just wiping the canvas clear and starting fresh the risks there are that you may

alienate the core fan base or introduce something that is unrecognizable another lens that we applied is how um do these um extremes on the spectrum approach fans and where we kind of concluded on this was that sequels are great um positioning for titles that have a strong thriving and large existing fan base where reboots might be one where there's a very specific intention to go after a new audience or maybe the core fan base has grown out of that and is passing that on to a new generation so looking at fans for crash you know we had a great benefit of seeing very very recent results coming out of the recent remasters and it was actually a little bit surprising how many people showed up and how many people were really excited about these remasters and the profile of these players are people like myself mid 20s to early 40s

who were probably six to 10 years old when the playstation debuted they have a really strong inner child and they look fondly at the experiences from their youth we also looked at the catalog of the whole history of crash titles up until this point and one very striking observation was that both critically and commercially the high point was at the early part of that series and so another thing that may come out of this is that the memories and the associations and the fondness for this franchise probably all stack at the very front end of this time so with all these pieces together we aligned um and held hands to say what crash 2020 is going to be is a sequel to the original trilogy and it's going to be positioned primarily for the core crash audience now this is the first major guardrail

statement it's a really big stake in the sand for us and uh it really crisped up when we started to call this project crash four so at this point we were setting up the technical foundations for this new project we're starting to prototype we're starting to um do concept art um exploring different environments and characters and this is where another spectrum exercise is really useful for many of our different teams as we start to ask ourselves what are some things that we can presume um this game is and what are things that we can presume at this early point what this game isn't so as an example one thing we know is from our guardrail statement is that this game is going to be for 25 to 40 year olds we know that this is a sequel to the original trilogy and so there's certain elements like the antagonist neocortex and entropy are going to play a major part the idea of time travel and just time in general is going to be a strong theme that we want to continue we also knew on the other side of things

what the game isn't is it's not going to be open world it's not going to be a beat them up in the way that some of the latter sequels move game play and game design towards we know that it's not going to have mtx it just does not jive with what we're trying to do here and what this this series has been thus far um and then in the middle there's been there's a lot of ideas and open questions personal ambitions that we have for ourselves that we weren't sure it wasn't as clear in those early days and so we put them deliberately in the middle and it was ex it was really helpful for us to focus on that as decisions started to um solidify we could reevaluate and move these unknowns further over to the left or further to the right now our creative director took all of these different conversations across all the different teams all these debates all of these presumptions and boiled these down into three big statements that expressed what this game is about its tone its gameplay

and its world and i'm going to step through each of these and talk about how these influenced our ideas and the developments in our prototypes these statements um initially our goal was to try and get crisp on what are what exactly is the definition of the dna of this this um uh franchise but it ultimately served as the pillars for what this game is i'll start with tone now tone is wide reaching it affects how the game looks it affects how the game sounds it affects how the story is told um but before we go into these wider reaching aspects of the game we had to find the center the core the foundation in which we could grow everything out and that starts with crash as a character himself and the statement that we have for tone is that it's jackass meets looney tunes it's a game about just barreling into danger and it's um it's got the silliness and

the wackiness of looney tunes and this is their original inspiration for the series and going hearkening back towards that that original dna so starting with crash uh we looked at the series and you could in and you know crash over the years has actually evolved quite a bit he's retained some core elements about him like his color and the way he wears pants and his red shoes but he's actually made some pretty drastic changes over time now we know that the game is about a continuation of the originals trilogy and so we want to focus on that first three expressions and the insane trilogy the remasters did an amazing job of going back to that source and bringing it up to uh modern standards and to a whole new level of fidelity so it seemed like one thing that we were asking ourselves is why not just take that look and continue it now the reason why we did it was because one thing that we agreed on and aligned very early on is that we didn't want this new game to be perceived as a sequel to a

remaster or a dlc extension to a remaster there had to be an immediate just at a glance understanding that this is a new expression set itself apart from the remasters that this was a game for 2020. and so we were already early on on a path to presenting a new interpretation for crash and we've got this amazing team of artists and before we did put any pencil to paper we also looked at some of the surrounding media that influenced our impressions and our memories of who crash is there's obviously crash mascot guy in the commercials that we all love um you know there's internet memes more recently crashes has his own manga he's been a guest star on tv shows like skylanders um so all of these are different ingredients we want to make sure that we incorporate it because they're a part of the fabric of who we remember and how we remember what crash

is now our art director tasked our amazing and talented artists with going really really wide and pushing the envelope with the interpretation for crash starting from a safe interpretation to really really um pushed and uh and challenging convention and we gave them targets so we're looking for a cute version of crash bandicoot a more edgy version something that's a little bit more heroic um and we also gave freedom for personal interpretation to just go where your your heart takes you with how you remember crash as we got all these drawings together we could see a lot of the commonality of these drawings and that formed the center of who we believed he was and we selected a handful of of drawings and poses that represented the facets of crash's personality and ultimately asked a single artist to interpret this down into a single style now these poses

and this sheet ultimately served as the model sheet for the 3d sculpt that we see here today now another thing that we know um that this game is is that it's about it's it's a cartoon and we know from the original developers at naughty dog that their ambitions for the title was for it to be a living cartoon and harken back to looney tunes and so we looked at that source and we made sure that as we built out our designs and we built out our models and our rigs that our animators were equipped to really push this level of text every like deformation and to get that extreme movement to simulate that motion blur to get that silkiness and that clarity of interpolation into our aesthetic now physical humor is fantastic it's great it's universal but we also want to make sure that we are specifically speaking to our audience of 25 to 40 year olds and we do that in a number of ways

and once in uh in one sense what we did was in some of the namings and uh for the skins or the titles for the levels we added in some suggestions of innuendo to make sure that we've got things that might steal over a kid's head but it's a little wink at our audience for 25 to 40 year olds we introduced situations that were a little bit more um edgy in nature but it didn't push it too far but like the fact that entropy takes his his level of narcissism to a whole new level by with this creepy incestuous love for his multiverse self and we also wrote dialogue in the way to make sure that this game was very self-aware and was making reference to its own past the fact that it is a game that it has a history like this joke that's kind of acknowledging the fact that it's ignoring some of the other sequels that are coming after this in its chronological timeline

now our statement for game play is tense precise execution and just like with tone before we built out and made sure that this affected all aspects of game design we needed to find a home base and that was in crash himself ultimately with crash as game we want to make sure that the core verbs of jump spin slide slam is really really satisfying to pull off it feels familiar um one of the original appeals of this set is that it's super super approachable and yet the title is very challenging and very demanding and it really asks um a lot of skill that you and it really asks you to master the game through skill at its at its best it is hard but fair and one thing is we started to block out certain levels we found that it's just inherently difficult to land some to just understand depth as you

jump into and from perspective and so one thing that we did pretty early on was to try to figure out how can we preserve the level of difficulty but add make sure that the the player has all the tools and information at hand to land these really very difficult precision asks and so we actually added a very overt indicator underneath crash so that anytime you know precisely where you're going to land and we had a ton of ideas and prototypes in terms of new mechanics and new abilities for crash new vehicles new playable heroes but there's some blurriness in terms of how an ability depending on how it's framed it could easily have been a vehicle it could have easily been a new hero so it was important for our design team to make sure that there's a separation in function not just in theme between all these different ideas they all had very

specific individual lanes that they occupied for example with new abilities this was we isolated these to the new quantum masks and these abilities were always going to be triggered on a button and they always added on top of the core verbs of run jump spin slim slide slam on the other hand of things there's new vehicles it was almost like a subtraction of control and then you've got new things like wall running and grind railing and completely new heroes like dingodile or neocortex that is just a completely different approach to interacting with these core elements like wompa or crates um or even just the feel of how you crash is a character that just barrels through danger but neocortex is more cerebral and so those levels presented an opportunity to introduce more puzzly elements that you would have to think through before you executed on so this gave us a um once we understood and identified these

individual lanes we knew what the ingredients were for the game and we started to lay them out on this essentially is a road map of the entire game level by level and we often we put this giant physical board um in the office it was very unavoidable on your way to um your desk everyone was constantly having conversation around this and we were playing with the sequencing of levels how they would flow into each other it influenced how we told the story influence as well we did breakdowns of the different sequences and sections within a level as well so we could see of the ingredients that were sprinkling in how we could be strategic and deliberate about inserting novelty and new mechanics so one thing that was really important is that we're sh that we're expecting that if you're going to play a game that's called crash bandicoot the vast majority of the time is going to be about how satisfying it is to play crash and we didn't want this to be over saturated with new experiences or new heroes that might not be as interesting to you so this was a

really great way as a high level approach to make sure that we could see them very deliberately that we built up on the difficulty in a way that stacked on each other and just everything fit together in a way that always went back to complementing the core crash gameplay this also influenced some ideas that we had some presumptions that we had about the game like we presumed that there was going to be um a warp room structure for the game and if you're not familiar with workrooms workrooms are essentially little hubs where there are maybe five or six different level nodes that you could approach in any order that you choose and once you've completed the majority of those you could move on to the next warp room now we presumed that we were going to inherit this coming from crash three but as we started to lay out some of our other goals like wanting this to be very challenging but fair and we also wanted to tell linear story and as we start to sequence things on the um our campaign roadmap it became very

difficult by um allowing the player to access different levels at different times without introducing a lot of complex things that would be tuning the experiences in a variable way on the other levels so we actually went back on this and said you know this game is actually going to go back to a very linear structure and it benefits us so that we could be tighter and the experiences that the player just completed we could be more reliable so we could build on those so that also influenced our approach to difficulty tense precise execution it says hard right it says difficult and one of our presumptions was that we were going to introduce a difficulty selection that you could start this game and say if you wanted to play really difficult you could choose hard if you wanted it easier you could play that but it turns out platformer is a little bit more difficult to on tune in that way like for an example as a combat game

you know we have you have options um numeric options to tune up your hit points or your combat effectiveness but platformer you've got a gap in the in the ground um and it's the levels the world that's built very specifically to specific metrics tuning the difficulty of that gap in the ground that you have fall to death is uh it's difficult to do and we were exploring different ideas of layering on things that would make things easier so that you could undo a death or maybe you could fly over certain things or had some currency that gave you some ability to bypass some of these challenges but we found that it was going against our original intention of preserving the game's difficulty but being fair so after lots and lots of exploration and prototyping we ultimately landed on a place in which we split out the play style into two different things not difficulty but play style so that players could choose a modern mode which had unlimited lives

but you could always reset to the last checkpoint the difficulty and the challenge of the levels were preserved but you could always try again and in retro we had the classic behavior of introducing limited lives um and if you if all your life is expired we would start you as a hard reset at the beginning of the level so again challenge is preserved across both options but in this way the player was able to choose the level of punishment or masochism for this game respecting both a modern approach to things and what was nostalgic for their experience finally on world our statement here is that this game is a colorful dangerous universe this is probably the most straightforward of all the pillars because what crash um and the classic games were already

started at such a high point and we just looked for opportunities in which we could tap into that and dial it to 11. so one of um many people's memories myself included about the original games was that they were surprisingly lush and detailed and packed with just a detail that that we weren't seeing in other platforms of that time now obviously we were not constrained by hardware in the same way we wanted to make sure that we tapped into that same memory and same feeling and so we very deliberately built out opportunities that exploited this or highlighted the fact that we had we built out these new environments that were way more detailed had way more storytelling involved that compelled you on this journey towards the very end the um classic games this is probably one of the most iconic moments of the crash series is this boulder chase that's running towards the camera and we

wanted to make sure that we tapped into that nostalgia but again dial it up to 11 on this so how do you take something that's exciting like this and take it to the next level well you take that ball and you turn it into a live ghost character a spirit monster that's chasing after you we make sure that every single beat that he's interacting and smashing with the environment that we're tuning the rubber banding so that it is so precise in such a way that it always guarantees a very very narrow escape in that experience in the bosses what was formerly a hopscotch um exercise that was over in a matter of minutes we dialed this up to be larger than life into a multi-phase escalation of ultimate tests that you that really asked um challenging questions of all the skills that you picked up and mastered along the way now with all of this novelty and these new worlds we've made one thing that we did to ground these new environments and experiences was to make sure that we

sprinkled in a bunch of easter eggs throughout the game made sure that there's enough detailed for eagle-eyed fans but also to tap into the richness of the ip that didn't get an opportunity in the main storyline or just it would have been too crammed if we tried to pull in all of the interesting characters and then tell a compelling story through there we even took this to a point of integrating this um uh the the wall meme that's um taken over the internet in the past and making a beat out of this to really highlight and again wink to um the core fan base so that takes me to the end of um this talk um you know out of these three pillars and statements about dna these did not change from the very beginning to the end and they were very very um useful for us to always go back to as

a measurement of are we is this is this are we aligned in the things that we're adding to this game um underneath all of these um statements though i would say that it was really really important for us to listen to the fans this is ultimately a love letter to fans and so it's really important that we spend a lot of time listening in on the community boards on reddit um on discord just to hear people's nostalgia their fondness for these classic games and also their wishes for what a new game was um we also i think it was really really important for us and uh really helpful for us to also hire fans as well um we had representation of really really hardcore fans in each of the teams and that was incredibly useful to have as we introduced new ideas to always have a gut check someone we could just walk on over to or call up um to check and see if we were straying off or being off brand or inauthentic in in our decisions

so that takes me um to this little plug here is that at toys for about we are hiring the fans and and developers or if you're a developer and a fan of titles like crash four and um call of duty war zone if you're looking for more information um please take a look at this website at careers.toysforbob.com um especially as we're looking towards celebrating more in this 25th anniversary of crash bandicoot this year and if you've got any questions about these roles or about this talk this is me uh please feel free to contact me and uh thanks if you made it this far thanks for listening in and i hope you learned a little bit more about the development of crash bandicoot 4. [Music] you