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 fourth 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 one of the covers:

The company's CEO and producer on Comic Jumper answers some basic questions about the comic book that is being revealed: Cutie Cutie Kid Cupids.

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

MW: All of the game's comic styles are meant to invoke an era of comic history that even casual audiences who have only caught glimpses of comics here and there over the years can recognize and appreciate because they are so iconic. When thinking of the eras we should pay tribute to, it became immediately clear that we could have a lot of fun with Japanese manga. It's pretty much different in every way. It's all black and white, you run from right-to-left instead of left-to-right, and the characters are about the furthest thing from what the Captain and Star are used to dealing with.

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

MW: Manga is so iconic and recognizable to everyone, even non-comic book fans, that it worked perfectly in the game. Plus we've been looking for an excuse to do something in a cool black and white art style.

Cutie Cutie Kid Cupids introduces a lot of interesting characters, completely different from the types of characters we come across in the other comic styles. Mike talks about how these characters came to be:

Who are the Kid Cupids?

MW: The Kid Cupids are teenaged super-powered sisters named CoCo and NaNa that go to a Japanese high school called Hent High. Given their crazy powers, they solve a lot of their high school problems with excessive force, which makes for a bad place for our heroes to find themselves.

Who is LoLo and how is she involved with the Paper Pals?

MW: LoLo is also one of the sisters, but she has become evil. The three sisters are an unfortunate union between Cupid, the god of love, and Delores Tidyman, a fifty-two year old divorced bipolar Cleveland woman that was brought on after Cupid accidentally shot himself with his own arrow. LoLo has far more "bad days" than her sisters, and became their sworn enemy after going off her medication.

What must the Captain and Star do in the manga comics?

MW: In a bizarre twist, it turns out the Captain's arch nemesis Brad gets kidnapped by the sisters, who think he's absolutely hunky, and Star forces the Captain to rescue him. It's a good thing too, because they arrive just in time...

What do you think the Captain and Star think about the Kid Cupids comic book?

MW: When the Captain and Star are dumped into the Manga comic, they scramble to toggle their translators because they can't understand a single word that is being spoken. They are completely flumoxed and have no idea what the hell is going on until it's too late. Gerda has to explain to them that the characters are actually speaking in the same language, it's just in the style of Manga. Basically the Captain and Star freak out and try to get out of the comic just as fast as they possibly can.

When Twisted Pixel began pre-production on Comic Jumper, the first order of business was to take what the designers had in their heads 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 Cutie Cutie Kid Cupids:

How did you come up with what the Captain would look like in the manga style of comics?

BF: I tried to take all of the cliched aspects of what people THINK manga is and combine them into one amazing super hero, a few hair spikes, some arm belts, a weird little cape scarf thing, oh and a giant sword, you can't have a manga character without a giant sword, it's in the rules or something.

How many iterations did it take before you landed on the final character design for the Kid Cupids?

BF: The kid cupids really didn't take very long to get down. I knew I wanted them to have that chibi look, they needed to be smaller than the other girls in the book so they would stand out easily. Choosing their hair styles was really what their designs boiled down to, they wear uniforms and their faces are about the same so it's all about the hair with them.

What references did you use when you were doing early concepts for what the Kid Cupids would look like?

BF: I looked at so much manga when we started this that I still see dot patterns when I close my eyes. There are a few that I read on my own Like Naruto, Full Metal Alchemist and Bleach (although I don't READ Bleach, I just look at the pictures), but I can't really claim I took much inspiration from those. Our comic's premise is so completely different so I turned to the Internet and found inspiration in books like Fairy Tail and... some other books I can't remember the name of... there is a lot of manga out there, it's hard to keep track of it all, but trust me I looked at waaaaaaaay more than I ever thought exsisted.

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

BF: HeHe went through a bunch of iterations in my sketchbooks, he was a seal unicorn thing, a wierd turtle worm, kind of a squid fish, a plant flowery sort of deal. But in the end we wanted him to be fairly cute and simple, so we went with the six armed floating chipmunkoon.

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

BF: For the manga minions we really just needed something "EVIL" to act as LoLo's henchmen, and we needed them to be visible on screen, since our manga levels are all black and white, we couldn't fall back on the old gaming standby and make them red, or give them glowing damage spots, so I figured high contrast was the way to go, their solid black inky bodies makes them easier to see, plus I have this thing about ghosts, but not ghosts with legs, ghosts don't have legs, if you see a ghost with legs it's probably not a ghost, just ignore it.

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 Cutie Cutie Kid Cupids:

Have you ever had to animate a gay unicorn before?

DL: Actually this is the third gay unicorn I've animated...well maybe the second? Does bisexual count as gay?

How do you animate the Kid Cupids, what makes them different from other characters you animate?

DL: After listening to the dialogue of the Cutie Cupids, I wanted to punch them right in the face. So for each cupid animation I would attempt to make it look as annoying as they sounded. Wanting to punch them in the face while reviewing each animation was my litmus test for success.

Were there any challenges or unique aspects to animating characters that are supposed to be from old manga comics?

DL: The main challenge of animating the Manga style was not over animating it. I looked at Manga as well as some Anime for influence. I tried to keep it very posed for a lot of it, the characters jumping from still pose to still pose as well as making the poses pretty exaggerated. Kind of goes against my very nature as an animator, but I think the result gives Manga its own animated feel compared to the other genres.

Since each comic book needs to have its own distinct style, the team 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 Manga comics, the composer is none other than Mr. Matt "Chainsaw" Chaney.

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

MC: For the music in the Manga levels I collaborated with Chris Sabat (the multi talented voice of both the Captain and Star). Chris has had a long standing appreciation for the work of the Japanese musician Cornelius, so that was our jumping off point. We both like his skewed take on pop music, and thought tracks that referenced his style would work well in these levels. We knew that we needed to keep the music upbeat and energetic, and decided to use a wide array of quirky synth sounds and highly processed samples. And in order to have the music complement the zany, non sequitur nature of Manga itself, we decided to compose and implement the music in such at way that it's always changing as you play through the levels. Very rarely will you hear a groove that lasts more than 8 bars.

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

MC: For the Manga music, we worked on a variety of thematic tracks to match the different gameplay types. So as the game jumps from one gameplay mechanic to another, the music follows suit. And we also created some music themes to accompany the boss battles. For those we basically took the zaniness of the regular gameplay music and ratcheted it up to 11 to help play up the bizarre nature of those encounters.

What references did you use?

MC: As I mentioned earlier, the music of Cornelius was a big reference for the Manga music, as well as other electronic artists known for their hyper active music stylings, such as Kid 606 and Bogdan Racynski. But we also took inspiration from anime music in general. Chris and I have both done extensive work with english language versions of anime in the past, so we were very familiar with a lot of the drum and bass style energy the exemplifies a lot of anime music. So we tried to match our music to the energy level found in anime fight scenes.

What instruments did you use?

MC: The music in the rest of the game is driven mainly by live instrumentation, so in order to help set up the Manga music as something completely different, we decided to remove any readily recognizable instrument sounds, and instead created a musical soundscape from very disparate sources, ranging from processed drum sounds to little bits of voice over recording outtakes, which we then pitched and processed to create tweaked out vocal melodies.

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 Manga comic style impact your sound design choices?

MC: For the sound design in the Manga levels, I decided to take a more abstract approach to the creation and implementation of the sounds. So, for example, melee impact sounds are represented by atonal synthentic, percussive elements, and the bullet impact sounds were created by tweaking quick, clean "smooching" sounds. I thought I could add another layer of absurdity to the proceedings if, instead of hearing gruesome, bloody sounds for the bullet impacts, you hear cutesy, happy sounds, which hopefully match the overall theme of the "shojo" manga.

What sounds are specific to Cutie Cutie Kid Cupids and how did you create them?

MC: Almost all sounds in the Cutie Cutie Kid Cupids levels are level specific and not heard anywhere else in game. The only sounds that carry over from the other comic styles are the global UI sounds and the like. To build the soundscape for these levels, I created a lot of synthesizer patches to use as sound design source. And that carries through all the way down to the Captain's footstep sounds, which were not created in the standard "foley recording" style, but rather built from an FM synthesizer patch I created. I also recorded a bunch of various wind chimes to use as source for the sounds in these levels. I felt like camera movements were matched perfectly by the "sparkly" sounds I was able to achieve from effecting the chimes. For some reason, whenever I think of high school romance Mangas, I think of sparkling, magical sounds, so I tried to incorporate those as much as possible.

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

MC: The biggest challenge to sound designing the Manga comic world was to ground all these abstract, bizzare sounds and make them feel "real", and like they truly belonged in and emanated from this world. With representational sounds design, what you hear is what you're expecting to hear. But in these levels, I think a lot of what you're going to hear will be unexpected, and so it was a challenge to make sure that the player will associate the abstract sounds with their source.

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 Manga comics been made to look so much different than the others?

MH: For Manga, we created all the textures and shaders in completely black-and-white, with hard-line toon shading done on all the edges. We even added some dot grids and hatching on a lot of the background stuff, just like you'd see if you accidentally went too far down in the graphic novel aisle of a bookstore.

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

MH: Mostly it's the time required to get your artists in the right state of mind to achieve such a close approximation of the real thing. We sent our whole art department to live over in Japan for a couple of years during preproduction, and as you can see, the investment paid off big time. Now the artists are more involved than ever in our early project planning cycle, and preproduction on our next game, which involves sitting on the Beach in Cancun Drinking Mai Tais, is coming along nicely.

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

MH: With the first issue, we grappled with was how much awesome people are able to handle at once. After extensive focus testing, we found our sweet spot and tried to maintain that level on average throughout the genre. The other major issue we had to tackle was, of course, acid or shrooms? (Just kidding kids, don't do drugs!)

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 other comics - do you approach level design for the Manga comics differently?

SC: Overall I took the same approach the same approach as I did with the other comics. Research, write a story and temporary dialogue for each comic, have meetings to determine what we wanted to cut or add, and then make the levels.

Where are you drawing inspiration from for these level designs?

SC: I have never read Manga or watched any Anime from start to finish before starting this project. During research, I came across an Anime series called "Bottle Fairies" that I forced myself to watch from the opening song to the very last episode, and funny feeling came over me. I wanted to kill myself. This show was exactly what I was looking for! This was the exact feeling that I wanted the Captain and the other outside characters involved in the Manga levels to feel as they were stuck in each comic: Despair.

Shortly after watching the show I came up with Cutie Cutie Kid Cupids. Bottle Fairies inspired me to incorporate ridiculous things like unicorns, suicide attempts, sickening songs, and way too happy characters in the levels. Thank you Bottle Fairies...may you rot in HELL!!!!

Gameplay-wise Contra, Gunstar Heroes, Gradius, and Forgotten Worlds were big influences.

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

SC: The biggest challenge for these levels was that they are all in black-and-white, so we had to work extra hard to make sure the player's eyes are focusing in on the right parts of the screen when we want them to. I had to work with the artists more than usual in order to make sure there was enough hints for the player.

What's your favorite gameplay moment from Cutie Cutie Kid Cupids so far?

SC: When Pling Pling the unicorn first takes flight. It is a magical feeling.

Thanks for tuning in to check out all four comic styles that you can expect to JUMP into soon in Comic Jumper! Stay tuned for release details!

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