The Making Of Cuphead

hey guys my name is Thomas brush from the creator of a game called pinstripe and I'm also working on a game called once upon a coma and I love talking about the creation of my games but today I want to talk about a game that blows my freaking mind and that's cuphead and we all know about cuphead and we're all impressed by cuphead but I want to open up the hood of cuphead and talk about the creation of this game and more specifically the creators of this game these people have incredible artistic integrity I have never been so inspired by developers they just they don't care they just want to make a great game and so let's open up the hood of cuphead in this episode of Deaf's play cuphead has convicted me as a game developer and I'm not just saying that I've really had a huge heart change this morning working on this video Cup heads team had artistic

integrity through and through they didn't care about the game game's performance they didn't do a triple-a industry does which is they think about bottleneck schedules they think about is the game commercially viable are we gonna recoup what we invested blah blah blah all those all those things can pervert a game and make a game not very special but what cuphead did is they made a very special game and they believed in their vision and ultimately guys they believed in you they believed that you were smart enough to understand their strange 1930s jazzy weird strange extremely difficult project they believed that you would you would get it that is artistic integrity so let's let's dive a bit deeper into the first fun fact and explore that artistic integrity the cuphead creators were making a game for them I mean that's really the best way that I can describe it sometimes I get caught in this dishonest rabbit hole in my mind where I tell myself that the only person who's gonna see a flaw in my

game is me and that the audience just isn't smart enough this is ultimately it's a lie and it's disrespectful to the audience the creators of cuphead treated the audience with a high level respect they treat you and I like we're geniuses both in our reception of the art style and also the ability to just play ridiculously challenging run and gun type bosses I mean the 1930s art style itself is so true to form that it's baffling just what makes a 1930s design so these are what I always keep in mind when designing I just kind of they're just broad general rules that I try to follow whenever I'm doing any kind of design for the game of course any rule can be broken but for the most part now if I had to choose an animation style for a game with a tight budget Cup heads is the last I would ever choose and this is because modern cartoons are using simplistic stylistic tricks to make up for a fast turnaround with a smaller budget even in 2d game animation you can save time using spine 2d unity

or even blender in Maya and we simply use tweening to quickly move bones to get the job done this economical style of 2d animation is not really trying to mimic a 3d object whereas cuphead and 30s cartoons in general they use something called rubber-hose animation basically everything is round everything is smooth and mimics a third dimension now the animator Jake Clarke obviously knows both budget-friendly animation styles and that's rigging and bones but he also understands traditional animation styles I mean the guy has a degree in 2d animation and has worked on mother up on Hulu he's worked on turbo fast on Netflix and breadwinners for Nickelodeon so he knows his stuff all of these cartoons appear to use both traditional animation combined with tweening and rigging so it's not like he couldn't have just done that for cuphead it's not like he couldn't have just used tweening and rigging and hoped we didn't see behind the curtain to see his tricks rather he was true to the traditional 30s form he was honest and it paid off

so really quick guys before we begin our next fun fact I want to talk about something that drives me a little bit crazy and that's the assumption by some in the gaming community that we don't really need to dress nice now I don't know about you but I want to dress nice but I want it to be easy and I want it to be comfy and that's possible with cuts clothing and I'm actually wearing a cuts t-shirt right now cuts makes premium basic Henley's and tees and they honestly they instantly upgrade your wardrobe I am super picky about my t-shirts so you could trust me when I say that cuts clothing is hands down my favorite brand of t-shirts I mean I was the one who reached out to them for this sponsorship so if you guys want 15% off your first order use the promo code at most that's 80 mos using the link in the description thanks so much guts for supporting this channel in this video the inspiration for cuphead is an endless supply of 1930s cartoons so that the studio at mdh are they got a ton of inspiration and that includes some animations like moth and the flame or even the Betty Boop

cartoon series and they seemingly spent as much time researching and studying these old cartoons as they did making the game and it wasn't just one dude doing all of this both the creative director Chad moldenhauer and the animator Jake Clark they worked together to illustrate and animate to ensure that the estai 'el is it was a symbiosis of modern and traditional minds all merging into one cohesive package now here's the thing about making a cohesive game it's often easiest to achieve this with one art director who is also the illustrator and the animator and in my case also the musician for the soundtrack of the game and I've seen this firsthand with both of my games Pinstripe in coma but somehow the cuphead team not only followed the creative direction of dead people for example the moth and the flame director Bert jala but also they followed each other most of whom were actually close friends and family members this is rare for an indie game and you certainly wouldn't guess this

level of cohesion was possible by looking at the amount of inspiration in the amount of Minds involved and cuphead [Music] now when I looked into the recording of the cuphead soundtrack I was honestly blown away and I was jealous and its creation is honestly the complete opposite of my work now don't get me wrong I love my music style but I use software instruments I use a MIDI keyboard and Logic Pro almost none of my work is composed on paper and recorded live with dozens of musicians but this is true for most ending titles and many films and triple-a games on the opposite end of the spectrum the pets soundtrack is made up completely of original jazz recordings composed by Chris Madigan and recorded live in studio there are over two and a half hours of fully composed music written specifically for cuphead they used a 13 piece big-band 10-piece ragtime ensemble and a solo pianist and they also have a singer now how does a small studio

overcome such a seemingly big budget hurdle that's a live jazz ensemble well I guess it's important to know the right people and know that they have integrity and that they're passionate about what they do this kind of ensured the project vision was not perverted and the budget wasn't blown out of the water this was certainly true for the team as well as the composer Chris Madigan the musician like he grew up five or six blocks down so we played games together our whole life he went on to be a jazz master yeah classically trained percussion trained it was just an easy mix because we knew we want a jazz soundtrack we need somebody who we know we can trust who also understands what video games sound like so we gave him the reins it was baby steps for him to because originally the game was gonna be eight bosses yeah we said we just need eight tracks and he said that's manageable but it kind of ballooned into over 50 tracks now Chris Madigan is one of those humble artists

who doesn't really like to call himself a professional seems like he's always trying to become the best musician he can be and never really settles for less I think I was the only musician that they do and it's a cool thing when a musicians artistic integrity matches the rest of the teams he didn't just go with his gut when writing this 30s style of music and write music that he thought sounded like dirties music he actually spent a lot of time scouring YouTube videos and listening to 30s music and he also read Gary Lindsay's jazz a range of techniques book to ensure he was staying true to form by the way this jazz technique stuff looks super boring and technical so props to Chris for that now as most of you know cuphead kind of blew up at e3 in 2000 14 it did what few indie games did right the art style was so beautiful breathtaking so unique it really couldn't be ignored but it failed in the

gameplay arena so the demo was kind of a letdown and the game basically only contained bosses and there really wasn't any platforming or levels now you and I probably know the feeling right where our forte we try and use our forte to mask any issues with gameplay so in my case i I really lean heavily on my art and my music because those are the things I feel like I'm talented at but my gameplay kind of suffers and I've actually launched games where I knew the gameplay suffered but I just sort of trusted that the things were that were good about the game would mask the bad things but what studio mvhr did and again it comes back to artistic integrity what they decided to do was take the project back to the drawing board this is an especially risky move considering the creator's mortgaged their homes to pay for the game while also knowing full well that reworking hand-drawn frame-by-frame art was infinitely more challenging than just re skinning and reworking raped models and then here's the final animation it's 32

drawings on 32 pieces of paper which would then I would then scan them I would send them off and then they would be inked by hand on a 32 more pieces of paper and that is why we're not done the game yet believe it or not in putting together this video I had a whole section discussing how you could tell Cup head was made by individuals who knew what they were doing I think I even used the word veteran but I was definitely wrong here the two brothers Chad and Jared they had never made a game before I'm sitting here thinking how crazy my family and my friends would have thought I was if I mortgaged my house creating a game especially when I've never made a game before and that just shows how much bravery this team had

creating this game now considering the game sold over 1 million copies in the first month I'm thinking I need to start making more stupid decisions we weren't too nervous because there was a chance that maybe people didn't like that type of game or didn't really love the style and we knew that going in so we were it was more of just an let's release this and see what happens and yeah sit back even if people said this is not a game I ever want to see being created we still believe we still believed in it so much that we were gonna finish it so there was no there was definitely no anxiety or nervousness that there was just curiosity I think it's more curiosity it's one just of what people would say this experience this freedom of thought if you will is I think what ultimately made this game a marketing machine one of the biggest takeaways of looking into Cup heads creation is my realization that Cup heads uniqueness came completely out of left field and essentially forced every press outlet every youtuber to share it with their

audience the art style itself begs for attention and ultimately everything about the art style everything about the soundtrack everything about the gameplay it was a gamble part of me feels like a gamble like this can really only be made from individuals who really don't care about the financial outcome of the game essentially outsiders with an insatiable curiosity and ultimately unwavering integrity [Music]