![]() ![]() How did you come up with the idea of a yo-yo being the focal point of the gameplay? It’s been a really great opportunity to create a range of original characters and be able to highlight their expressiveness. We’ve definitely had to invest a lot in our animation pipeline, but I think the results have certainly paid off you’ll see in the game there’s a lot of Penny making cute and funny faces with a lot of exaggerated facial expressions. One big motivation that Tom Fry had when designing the characters was for them to have a very big sense of style and personality while also being very expressive. Hunter: Another set of challenges we ran into was regarding the characters and rigs. ![]() So we made a bunch of stuff where the engine is able to export 3D shape information into Maya (3D computer graphics application), then the assets that the 3D artists make can get procedurally applied to those shapes, and then the level gets exported out automatically. ![]() With the Star Engine, the challenge was “How can we update the level design and the art that doesn’t require a person to manually alter it constantly?”. We didn’t really want to work that way we enjoyed the way that you could continually iterate or tweak the design of 2D games to get the best flow for the characters for the level. With 3D games, you have what’s commonly referred to as a ‘White Box’ or ‘Grey Box’ phase where the levels are basically blocked out, then an environment artist goes in later and makes a pretty version of the level, so at that point, you’re pretty much locked into the design. We created a toolset that’s efficient and designed around those goals. For us, we’re interested in non-photorealistic visuals with heavy art styles and bold colours. Having said that, it still adheres to our principles we value minimalism, while many other modern engines place heavy emphasis on "AAA" realism and fidelity. Star Engine’s purpose is to create modern 3D games it’s been designed from the ground up. There’s a bit of pseudo-3D stuff in the Retro Engine, like the Special Stages we did in Sonic Mania they look 3D, but they work completely differently from how a modern 3D game would be authored. The Retro Engine was very much geared towards 2D pixel art games, targeting a range of fidelity from 8-bit games all the way up to 32-bit. Can you talk about the differences between this and the Retro Engine?Ĭhristian Whitehead: We’d describe the Star Engine as a companion piece to the Retro Engine. Penny’s Big Breakaway is being created with a new engine called the Star Engine. So we worked on engine tech for a while and ultimately decided to create a brand new IP that would eventually become Penny’s Big Breakaway. We spent a couple of years working on our engine tech when we started the company, we wanted to get into 3D. With Sonic Mania, there were a lot of different entities working together to create that title, so when we started Evening Star, we really wanted to create a solid new brand that would retain the spirit that went into Sonic Mania and channel it to create more new things for the future. We all worked together on Sonic Mania and Sonic Mania Plus after we finished that project we started looking at our prospects for the future and felt that many doors would open if we were to team up and formally start a studio of our own. It was Christian, Tom Fry (Art Director), Brad Flick (Design Director), Dave Padilla (CEO & Lead Producer), and myself. Hunter Bridges: Evening Star was founded in late 2018 - November if we’re being exact. ![]() Nintendo Life: Can you start with an overview of how Evening Star started out? To find out more about how the game came to fruition and what it has in store for players, we sat down to speak with Evening Star's Chief Technology Officer & Game Director Hunter Bridges and Creative Director Christian Whitehead. In fact, it may come as a surprise to learn that Penny's Big Breakaway is the studio's first major foray into the world of 3D. ![]()
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