Twisted Pixel Games

Comic Jumper is the third original IP console title from the award-winning independent studio Twisted Pixel, the creators of Splosion Man and The Maw. In Comic Jumper, a comedy action game that draws inspiration from games like Gunstar Heroes, you play as the loudmouth Captain, a half-witted comic book superhero who discovers that his fans are losing interest in his comic books. Along with Star, the Captain's back-talking and foul-mouthed chest symbol, he obtains the assistance from his creator, Twisted Pixel, in order to "jump" into other comic books franchises and earn the love and respect he needs to re-launch his own series. Star and the Captain battle villains and help other heroes across four different comic books, each with varying takes on gameplay and their own distinct art style inspired by recognizable real-world comic genres.

The third comic book is revealed here, where we walk you through the creation of the style starting with early concept art to finished screenshots. But first, here's the cover:

The idea for Comic Jumper was originally conceived by the game's director, and Twisted Pixel's Chief Creative Officer, Josh Bear. First, he answers some basic questions about the comic book that is being revealed: Nanoc The Obliviator.

How would you describe this comic? How is the content different from the first two styles of comics?

JB: This style is a homage to the 50's and 60's Silver Age of comic books. This was a great time for comics in general, and we wanted to get that art style and storyline absurdness across in our version of these comics, "The Improbable Paper Pals". The great artist Jack Kirby was a big inspiration for the look of our Silver Age comic levels.

The Captain and Star visit three different comic book worlds in addition to their own. Why was The Improbable Paper Pals chosen over some of the other genres not covered in the game?

JB: The Silver Age was just a genre we couldn't pass up. As far as the writing and characters go, there was some really goofy/awesome stuff from those old comics from the early 60's, so it made sense for the tone of the game to go in that direction. And the hard-lined shadow and flat color look was a style that we knew would differentiate itself from the other comic styles we have going on in the game. There are a lot of great genres we didn't have the time to do in this first game, but the Silver Age is something that you can't not represent in a game that is supposed to be about a variety of comic books

The Improbable Paper Pals introduces a lot of interesting characters, completely different from the types of characters we come across in the other comic styles. Josh talks about how these characters came to be:

Who are The Improbable Paper Pals?

JB: The Paper Pals are a duo of superheroes who use their powers to try to save the day. Paper Lad is a twelve year old boy who fell into a vat of printing ink and other chemicals at the local newspaper building. The chemicals changed his body composition, and now he has the power to turn himself into a piece of paper at any given time. The problem with that is that he pretty much becomes useless. That is where his crime fighting partner, Origami Kid comes in. Origami Kid is a sixteen year old circus performer who creates amazing origami for audiences around the world. When Origami Kid accidentally finds Paper Lad one day by a trash can, they immediately bond and decide to rid the world of all evil.

Who is Mistress Ropes and how is she involved with the Paper Pals?

JB: Mistress Ropes is the main villainess of "The Improbable Paper Pals" comic books. In the comic, she starts a feminist revolution and tries to destroy all men on the planet by using the power of her invisible ropes that emit from her wrists. The Paper Pals must do everything they can in their power to stop her, but it is difficult for Paper Lad since he has a huge crush on Mistress Ropes. Mistress Ropes is set on robbing the famed Sapphos Crystal from the Silvertown Museum, so she can take it back to her ship, the S.S. Susan B. Anthony and use it to transport all women off of the earth.

How must the Captain and Star help the Paper Pals?

JB: Paper Lad has contacted the Captain and Gerda back at his base to inform him that Origami Kid has gone missing. Without him, Paper Lad can't do much of anything, so he hires the Captain to come into the comic and help him find Origami Kid and stop Mistress Ropes from finalizing her evil plan.

What do you think the Captain and Star think about the Paper Pals comic book?

JB: The Captain and Star think the Silver Age is a huge joke and don't treat it very seriously. The Paper Pals comic also introduces the C.O.C which monitors all activity in Silver Age comics, and prohibits anything of bad taste. Star takes this as an opportunity to use inappropriate language any chance he gets, which upsets the Captain since every piece of bad language results in a hefty fine.

When Twisted Pixel began pre-production on Comic Jumper, the first order of business was to take what Josh has had in his head for the past 18 years and turn it into something we could use to make a game. This job fell on our lead concept artist, Brandon Ford, who answers some questions about designing the characters from The Improbable Paper Pals:

How did you come up with what the Captain would look like in the classic Silver Age of comics?

BF: Originally we tried to just take the Captain as he was and put a coat of "silver age" on him, his design was fairly simple and he fit pretty well as is, but after redesigning him for the other comics we decided he wasn't cutting it so I went back to the drawing board. I ended up looking at a lot of Jack Kirby's designs for characters, then tried some "space cowboy" stuff. It wasn't until I stumbled upon some Tales of the Unexpected featuring Space Ranger and his ridiculous half helmet thing that I found the sweet spot for his design.

How many iterations did it take before you landed on the final character design for The Paper Pals?

BF: I did a dozen or so doodles, then a half dozen or so designs with color treatments before landing on the final design.

What references did you use when you were doing early concepts for what The Paper Pals would look like?

BF: For the Origami Kid I looked more at sidekick characters than classic heroes, characters like Robin (of course) and the wonder twins, and mixed in a bit of the terribly insensitive stereotypical Asians from the time period. For paper lad I just looked at all my failed drawings crumpled on the floor, he was pretty easy, soooo much reference.

How many iterations did it take before you landed on the final character design above for Mistress Ropes?

BF: She took a couple drawings to get down, I think the hardest part was simplifying everything, not adding details or patterns to anything. Going from The Nanoc designs where I spent hours painting in details to the silver age designs that are just simple line work and flat colors required a bit of adjustment.

What references did you use when you were doing early concepts for what Mistress Ropes would look like?

BF: I looked to classic characters like Invisible Woman and Wonder Woman, as well as lots of random ladies from comics like the Green Lantern and Tales of the Unexpected. I chose her color pallet by trying to think of what her least favorite colors would be, we didn't want her to be too happy with our choices.

Can you explain what you were trying to do with some of these character designs?

BF: These were all designs for random enemies for the different silver age levels, some of them made the cut and some didn't. For all of them I just wanted them to feel like they belonged in the silver age, simple shapes for the robots, lots of colored lights and gauges with classic tube arms and such with lots of bright and sometimes odd color choices.

After Brandon designs the characters and worlds, it's up to Art Director, Dave Leung, to take those amazing illustrations and turn them into 3D playable assets. He answers some questions about doing this with the characters from Nanoc:

Have you ever had to animate a character that was basically just a piece of paper before?

DL: No, this was first for me and has turned out to be my finest piece of work. The world will be in awe of the master craftsmanship with which I animated Paper Lad.

What are some ways that you show through animation that characters are being controlled by the invisible ropes?

DL: Well mainly those characters have a giant stylized ropes extending from their bodies. But if that wasn't enough, some characters are struggling against them and screaming that they are sorry about attacking you because they are being controlled by the ropes. When animating I just pretty much made the point at which they were attached the driving factor. For example, with the security guards, the rope is attached to their upper spine, so their heads are hunched down and they kinda move like zombies, their arms flopping around and legs dragging.

Were there any challenges or unique aspects to animating characters that are supposed to originate from the 1950's?

DL: I guess the challenge was dumbing down the animation somewhat in order for it to feel silly and cheesy enough. Not adding a lot of secondary, keeping a lot of the motions together by not offsetting body part key frames and holding poses also added to the feel of that era.

Since each comic book needs to have its own distinct style, Josh decided to use a different composer for each comic book to increase that feeling that they're each made by different creators in different eras. For the Silver Age comics, the composer is John DeBorde.

What were some choices you made in the music design in the Silver Age comics?

JD: Mostly what choice of instruments would best convey a sense of the era of the 50's & 60's while still carrying the energy necessary to support the gameplay. And what stylistic conventions I could employ to accurately capture the cheeky nature of the Captain and his domain. Also what sort of musical structures would work for the different cues so that they could maintain energy, drive and a sense of dynamics while looping repeatedly - hopefully without becoming too annoying!

Are there any themes for the comic style or the characters?

JD: Yes, there are themes for the 'Outer Space' sections, and Mistress Ropes has her own thematic material. There are also a few melodic fragments that reappear in several of the tracks which hopefully help glue the score together thematically, but I tried to stay away from too much obvious melodic material out of concern that the player would get sick of hearing it over and over.

What references did you use?

JD: Primarily the old live action Batman TV show, and John Barry's work on the Bond films as filtered through Michael Giacchino for The Incredibles.

What instruments did you use?

JD: Well everything is sample based, but I used kind of a hybrid big-band/film orchestra as the basis of my palette, so there are the traditional saxes, trumpets, and trombones supported by a rhythm section of bass and drums, augmented with strings, french horns and occasionally percussion or an oddball instrument like the Theremin for that classic 50's Sci-Fi feel.

Chainsaw is a bearded genius who handles the sound work in all of Twisted Pixel's games, including Comic Jumper. He answers some questions about his sound duties:

How does the Silver Age comic style impact your sound design choices?

MC: For the sound design in the Silver Age comics, I decided to go with a Sci Fu theme. When I think of this time period I think of awesome, high action kung fu movies, and space adventures. I recorded clean, quick rope swishes for all of the Captain's melee attacks to give them that authentic kung fu sound. And then for all the space age, robotic stuff present in this comic style I went with analog synth and theremin based sound design to provide the Sci-Fi half of the Sci Fu formula.

What sounds are specific to The Improbable Paper Pals and how did you create them?

MC: As with the other comic styles, The Improbable Paper Pals gets an entire new set of sounds to match the new art style. I used my theremin a lot as source for sounds in these levels, because I thought it would be time period appropriate, and also because it's such an amazingly expressive instrument. I would record myself spazzing out on the instrument and then take that source into Protools and edit and manipulate it until it turned into something cool that worked well in game. Some of my favorite sound effects in the game are in these levels, so I hope people enjoy playing through them as much as I enjoyed sound designing them.

Were there any other challenges to approaching the sounds of the Silver Age comic world?

MC: As we moved further into development of the game, and I began to delve deeper into this comic style, it was difficult to make sure that the sound of these levels stood out as being unique and separate from the rest of the game, but still stayed true to the overall theme. And I suppose another challenge was just creating sounds for the incredible amount of content in this game. The Silver Age is now the third comic style we've announced, and so it was also the third set of levels that needed completely new sounds from the footsteps and melee impacts all the way up to the weapons and voices.

Once the 3D assets are made by Dave, it's up to our programmer Mike Henry to hook them up in the game and make sure things keep looking pretty.

How have the Silver Age comics been made to look so much different than the Captain's comic and the Nanoc comics?

MH: We went with a much more flat-shaded look than the other styles, with an "inker" shader providing outlines around the characters, and completely black hard-line shadows. The Silver Age palette is made up of a smaller number of much brighter colors, as well.

What are some of the harder aspects of achieving such a unique look?

MH: You definitely want to stay true to the source material that you're trying to emulate, but you also don't want to end up with a hard-to-read 4-color soup, either, so we ended up using more colors than you would have found in a real Silver Age comic. The character costumes and models still do a great job of keeping the art firmly grounded in that era, though.

What were some decisions that were made to come up with these effects?

MH: In addition to the number of colors we wanted to use, we also had to decide if we were going to emulate the Silver Age's dithered look. We eventually decided that, while it would look pretty spiffy on high-def screens, it would end up extremely noisy and seizure-inducing on a standard-def TV. Fortunately, cheating on the number of colors obviated the need to dither colors together.

The game's Level Designer, Sean Conway, is responsible for building out the levels using all the content and gameplay pieces that are being dumped into the game every day:

You talked before about creating levels for the Nanoc comics - do you approach level design for the Silver Age comics differently?

SC: Pretty much. First I worked with the team to create the high-level characters and story for the levels. Next I wrote a first draft script for each level, then Josh Bear, Sean Riley and I met to determine what direction to take the game in, and lastly I made the levels.

During the story creation phase, I ended up doing a ton of research on the Silver Age and came up with common staples, cliches, and themes of the Silver Age: robot duplicates, the Comics Code Authority, museums, space, crystals, adding new rules to the story on the fly, the lingo, ads, and letters to the hero of the comic, were some of the things that I thought would be interesting and funny to add into the story and levels.

Creating interesting villains and super heroes was also a high priority. I made a list of the dumbest heroes and villains that I could think of. The first character that was created for The Improbable Paper Pals was Paper Lad, whose personality is loosley based on Jimmy Olsen. I ended up reading a lot of the super cheesy "Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen" that had a lot of amazing dialog, like when Jimmy calls himself Superman's "boy pal" with a big cheesy smile on his face as Superman has his arm around him. I fell in love with how cheesy the guy was and wanted to capture some of that between the Captain and Paper Lad.

The villain of the comic, Mistress Ropes, was originally a male character named Master Ropes, based off of a Kiai Master that I saw on the Internet. This guy was throwing his students around with what seemed to be invisible ropes so I gave him the name "Master Ropes." He ends up fighting an MMA fighter and his invisible ropes power is rendered useless by a few punches to the face. Nevertheless he is still a legend in my book and inspired Mistress Ropes so he will always have a special place in my heart.

Where are you drawing inspiration from for these level designs?

SC: The inspiration for these levels were Silver Age comics (especially Jimmy Olsen), the Kia Master (Master Ropes), the CCA, Benny from Total Recall, Contra, Gunstar Heroes, Gradius, and Forgotten Worlds.

What are some of the challenges you face with designing the Silver Age levels?

SC: The biggest challenge of the Silver Age came because of the space level. We were trying to make a flying level like Gradius and Forgotten Worlds and the tool wasn't set up to do this yet. It was decided that the level would slowly scroll and that the Captain would actually move through the level on a path. This caused a lot of problems including enemy timing and how enemy shots worked. It wasn't working out and there was no way that it could without a ton of extra work, so we decided to move the environment instead of the Captain to give the illusion of travelling through space, which eliminated the problems that we were having. I ended up having to start over and set up hundreds of enemies and objects in a single screen sized area in a short amount of time, which made life interesting for me for a while.

What's your favorite gameplay moment from The Improbable Paper Pals so far?

SC: I actually really like the boss fight at the end of the museum. Dave Leung did a really great job of making it look awesome with some cool animations and our lead designer Sean Riley did a great job implementing it.

That's it for today's episode kiddies, but be sure to tune in next month for another exciting look behind the scenes of the epic development for Twisted Pixel's biggest and most amazing XBLA action title ever...

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