Cuphead is a run-and-gun game with a world that includes branching pathways and bosses, as well as weapons and power-ups.
Inspired by cartoons of the 1930's, the visuals and audio were painstakingly created with the same techniques of the era, i.e. traditional cel animation (hand drawn & hand inked!), watercolor backgrounds and live jazz recordings.
Play as Cuphead or Mugman (single or co-op!) as you traverse the islands to find new challengers, rank up, and eventually compete in the grand tournament. You must become acquainted with the boundless variety of weapons, supers and secrets to stand a chance against all 30+ battles. Cuphead features co-op or single-player features, as well as visuals and audio inspired by old cartoons such as Mickey Mouse, Betty Boop and Popeye.
StudioMDHR, which consists of brothers Jared and Chad Moldenhauer, said Cuphead is a "retro game" at its core, "meaning it leans heavier on gameplay and not as much on story." The game's basic premise surrounds our hero Cuphead gambling with the devil, losing, then having to find a way to pay the devil back.
"We wanted to avoid the classic save the world/princess and make the story/theme feel more comparable to 1930s cartoons," "This is why it is about Cuphead's deep-seated inability to stay out of trouble versus a hero destined to overcome a pre-existing obstacle. Even though he creates his own problems you can't help but root for his success."
"With Cuphead, we aim to evolve the genre by adding new features such as: super arts, infinite lives, a playable world map and hidden secrets. In addition to that, we will have refined controls, additional boss patterns on harder modes and balanced weapons to equip (that you don’t lose!). We plan to release 10-15 bosses per episode and end up with over 30 bosses. If all goes as planned, we will defeat the current “Guinness World Record for Most Boss Battles in a Run and Gun Game”[25 total])."
Cuphead is confirmed for PC and StudioMDHR said it is "pursuing a console release."
No idea if this will be any good or not, but that visual style I'm digging ALOT. This got me thinking about all the other styles that have not been explored in video games.
No idea if this will be any good or not, but that visual style I'm digging ALOT.
this ^^
It looks great
ragnarus wrote:
I saw things like that in here and in other "woman problems" topics so...... Am I the only one that thinks some authorities needs to be alerted about Saner and him possibly being a rapist and/or kidnapper ?
Saner is not being serious. Unless its the subject of Santa!
Regarding design, StudioMDHR emphasised that they wanted several layers of uniqueness to every sequence and character, using the example of one of the game's numerous boss battles.
"Everything is like the '30s, and we wanted to have that - not just that it's a bird in the sky, but that it's a bird in a bird-house. We want that secondary level of uniqueness to each visual. This is part of the first form."
The game is side scrolling by nature, and to ram that vintage authenticity home, the team at StudioMDHR went to great lengths to layer the game world.
"The reason we separated them like that is there's almost never a time on screen where you're seeing the same layers of noise and grain interacting with each other. So it never feels like you're watching a loop of effects."
"When we first started we noticed that when you have certain cigarette burns or other things on the screen that keep repeating, you eventually started thinking, 'Oh, look, it's at the top right every seven seconds.' So we've put in a lot of work extensively with those effects especially to eliminate that and still keep the old-timey feel. I'm pretty sure if you tallied up all the time we spent discussing or researching and actually testing out effects, we're probably at about a three-and-a-half full-time months with three people, because we were experimenting with this before any real development on the game started just to pull off the old-time film look."
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On gameplay, StudioMDHR isn't shy to draw comparisons to Contra and other twitch-era side scrolling arcade shooters. The old school approach to gameplay permeates the game's story as well, which, like the old school, is present primarily for context as opposed to the enrapturing of your emotions.
Cuphead and player 2's Mugman have become indebted to the devil (due to a poor choice of gambling buddies), and the devil now owns their heads. In a make or break deal, the devil tasks Cuphead and Mugman to traverse the game's vintage world to recover an item, to eliminate the debt. Chad explains why this is all the story the game needs: "Because we both grew up in the fast-twitch arcade era, that's what we homed in on. We love the idea of not including too many cutscenes or too much story."
The relaxed attitude to story is consistent with old-school animated cartoons, if you've ever seen any 1920s Disney shorts, you know what these guys are on to.
Returning to gameplay, Moldenhauer's Chad and Jared grew up on Contra and Treasure games although, rather than drive the player through sequences of trash mobs, Cuphead skips right to the main course - boss battles.
These battles won't just be gigantic bullet sponges however, StudioMDHR are intent on building lots of variety between each boss sequence.
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All of Cuphead's backgrounds are hand painted water-colour scenes, owing to the labour intensive construction of this unique title.
"This stage is a crazy idea because it's all new character assets, and we're limiting the player to only shoot up, so it's old arcade-style. It's definitely off the path of the main game, but we feel like the games we always played - like Treasure's - had a lot of love put into them, and they'd be just out-side of the boundaries of what the rules were. They would always have unique gameplay ideas, so we're hoping this stage creates the same feeling for others."
Chad emphasised that they aren't planning to over-do it with gameplay sequences that change up the core of the game, but that for now, it's one of the ways they can "keep the game exciting".
The art looks spot on although the images in the above scans look a bit blurry, perhaps the developers are using some small amount of chromatic aberration to make the image look a bit "worn" or how to say. (Not full sepia or black & white but a bit aged compared to modern cameras and the like.)
EDIT: 1960's and 1970's animated movies could make for some interesting games too come to think of it.
TWIN PEAKS is "something of a miracle."
"...like nothing else on television."
"a phenomenon."
"A tangled tale of sex, violence, power, junk food..."
"Like Nothing On Earth"
Any games in particular that influenced Cuphead from a gameplay standpoint?
From a strictly gameplay perspective, we grew up playing the classic run-and-gun game like the Contra series, especially Contra III: The Alien Wars on Super Nintendo or Gunstar Heroes on Sega Genesis or spaceship shooters like the Thunder Force series. We’ve had this style of game in mind since we were teenagers.
Why go PC and Xbox One exclusive with Cuphead?
Cuphead is lifetime exclusive on Xbox for the console space, but in the PC space it’s going to be on every platform we can. So we’ll launch on PC and look into Mac and Linux thereafter.
Epic Mickey game designer Warren Spector asked you why you didn’t make Cuphead a 3D game, and you pushed back on his assumption that 3D’s a progressive development.
In the grand scheme, I hope people eventually realize that either 3D or 2D isn’t the reason why things are better or worse. You know, it’s the underlying story, the gameplay. That being said, real 2D animation on paper isn’t as easy. And it isn’t being taught in a ton of schools like it was 20 or 30 years ago. So it’s a dying art, and there needs to be a resurgence before you’re going to see a lot more of it.
What changed (about the game)?
The focus of the game is still the boss fights. But let’s go back. The original scope was eight to 10 boss fights, and almost set up like Mega Man, where you just select the boss you want to play and when you beat him you move on to the next one. But we had a wish list of things we wanted to do. So as the game caught on, we expanded the scope to include a bunch of different world maps, and there are now side scrolling platforms levels separate from boss levels.
So you can think something like Super Mario Bros. 3, but instead of a bunch of levels, you have bosses, and in-between those bosses there are these small platforming levels. And we’ve added many more weapons and secrets and more story. It’s just fleshed out to be much more of a final polished product than our original scope which was like a small demo of what our dream would be.
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