GZ Interview
10/1/02

Warthog’s Tim Heaton takes us inside the world of Loons
By Michael Lafferty

Madcap movie-set mayhem awaits you; the only question that needs to be asked is how ‘Loon’ey can you be?

Loons is a romp through the world of the Looney Tunes characters vying for roles in Hollywood’s next big blockbuster movie. The Xbox release features favorite cartoon characters, such as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Taz and Sylvester, armed with an arsenal of classic props, each out to sabotage the other hopefuls.

From disrupting the acting of other characters, to creating havoc through a variety of movie sets, this is a game about foiling the efforts of others, enhancing your own star power and doing it all with the style and aplomb of classic cartoon characters.

Game features include 15 movie sets, hundreds of props and gadgets to use, parodies of classic and contemporary films, cartoon-inspired graphics and multiplayer action.

Tim Heaton, Warthog’s vice president of production, took GameZone on a tour of this zany world.

Question: Does this game involve any particular movie, or movie parody, or does it pick on a combination of films as the Looney Tunes characters battle it out?
 
Tim: “It doesn't use a single movie, we picked a combination of film genres, and then tried to pick some of our favorite films to mess about with.”

Q: What movie sets are used? Are they recognizable?
 
Tim: “We took inspiration from many films. It would be giving away too much to say which - see how many references you can find. There are some obvious ones, and some fairly oblique ones!”

Q: With up to four players able to participate in a multiplayer game, that must make for a very confusing screen? How is the game configured to allow four players to compete simultaneously? Does the mapboard remain the same size or get bigger if fewer players are participating?
 
Tim: “We designed the game very clearly from day one as a four-player game. You can do it if your arenas (film sets) are reasonably sized – you simply pan back to keep all four characters in shot at once. When they're close together you can get the camera quite close in, and at maximum zoom out the characters are still large enough to play fine. On top of this we've added some horizontal and vertical movement, to allow for 'filmic' camera angles, and to avoid obstacles. It moves smoothly, and is a lot more sophisticated than we first planned, and we're very happy with the results.”

Q: Is this game two- or three-dimensional? Does it emulate the Chuck Jones' style of animation? What graphics engine did you use and how did it aid in creating the visual style of this game?
 
Tim: “It's fully 3D, and we certainly tried to put as much of the 'golden age' of Looney Tunes into the game as possible. We built an on-line library of cartoon clips and studied walk and run animation cycles, as well as the way the characters undergo extreme deformations (squashed flat et cetera).

“In 2D the character drawing often 'cheats' - they're different looking characters from the front and the side. In 3D you can't get away with that. We used a proprietary engine that allowed us to morph characters, and mix layers of animation on different areas of the character. This meant we could do a great walk cycle, and still have the character using a prop without needing to re-animate the whole thing.”

Q: Can you tell us a little bit about the sound of the game? Does it use vocal characterizations or is this more of a silent, slapstick kind of game?
 
Tim: “There are obviously three elements to the sound in a game. Firstly, music. If you listen to the orchestrations for the original cartoons they are hugely dynamic, and contain many pastiches from the popular music of the day.

“The music was scored partly as sound effects as well - it's all context sensitive with the action on the screen. We wanted to emulate some of that so we produced very short orchestral stabs of music, which could be used both as music and sound effects, which when played sequentially in any order form a single musical score.

“Secondly, we added some sound effects. Everyone knows what cartoon sound effects should sound like, and in fact there are classic libraries of sounds, so we used some of those as well as some new ones.

“Finally, there are voice-overs. A lot of the humor of Looney Tunes is in their dialogue, so we have quite a lot of banter. Voice-overs are used to both let the player know information, and also just to let the characters set up jokes amongst themselves. The voices were recorded at Warner Bros. by official voice-over artists.”

Q: Who is your favorite Looney Tunes character and why?
 
Tim: “Daffy - he's slightly deranged, over optimistic and always suffers for his wild ideas. I think we can all relate to that.”

Q: What elements do you think will first snag game players' attention? What was the hardest part of the game to design?
 
Tim: “The immediate frenetic action will grab players attention. We wanted as few preliminaries as possible; it's a quick play action game. The graphic look of the game is pretty strong, and we have some lovely effects in there, so there's plenty of eye candy.

“The hardest part of the game to design was the balance, and the learning curve on the game. As it always is! We added challenges to the game reasonably late on, but they work very well.”

Q: When you do a game like this, when everything depends of the farcical comedic style of the cartoon, how much time goes into scripting the action? Is there anyone that has to approve the script?
 
Tim: “Every part of the game need to be approved by Warner Bros. including dialogue scripts et cetera. However, the 'action' vs. the comedic timing is an interesting question. Looney Tunes jokes obviously depend a huge amount of timing (that three-stage split second between a character running off a cliff, realizing it, and then falling). That's very difficult to do in a game, as the character really needs to be under player control all the time. So, it's a trade-off between letting the animators go to town on a long, finely timed comic sequence, and the game designers, who are interested in the feel of play.”

Q: What elements of the Looney Tunes cartoons do you think contributed to the lasting appeal of the genre, and how were you able to translate that to the game?
 
Tim: “Looney Tunes characters all have fairly flawed personalities. They're irreverent, cheeky, greedy et cetera, et cetera, but they always have redeeming qualities too. They mess about with the popular culture of the day and they mess about with their media (the classic jumping off the page, or off the sprockets of the film they're in). Hopefully we've used these elements from the level design of the film genre pastiches, through to the little in-jokes in the dialogue, to make a game that's both a great action game and funny as well.”

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