Pokemon series developer Game Freak has opened up on the changes to Pokemon over the years, as well as the processes involved in choosing viable Pokemon designs.
During an interview with Game Informer, Pokemon director and producer Junichi Musada explained that people from all aspects of development can have a hand in new Pokemon designs.
“The graphic designers are obviously going to be the ones finalizing the look, but it’s not just the graphic designers who come up with ideas or draw the Pokémon,”.
Masuda went on to clarify that ideas for new Pokemon can come from development teams wanting to utilize new battle moves, writers wanting to work something into the story, or a different source of real world inspiration for the design.
The director also talked about rules involved in creating a Pokemon.
“One thing we always really pay attention to is treating them like living creatures so you have to try and imagine where it would live in the environment and why it looks the way it does, what would it eat?" Masuda explained. “When designing Pokémon, and not just from a graphic design perspective, there must be a reason for why it looks the way it does and you have to think about why it might live in the Pokémon world.”
Masuda said that Pokemon evolutions also need to be rationalized. "We always want to make sure we think, ‘Why does that happen?’" he said. "So that’s just something we’re always trying to think of – what’s the reason for what changes and how it looks?”
These careful considerations mean that ideas for Pokemon that aren't going to work are usually shelved before they are too fleshed out, and it's uncommon for more complex designs to be canned.
“Once you’re in the middle of creating it and someone were to say, ‘No!, that’s not a Pokémon,’ and the design process gets killed? That doesn’t really happen that much,” Masuda said. “Usually, instead, maybe the person who is directing the game might say it won’t work in its current form, but maybe if you did this and adding ideas onto it might make it work better.”
When asked about the changes to Pokemon designs, specifically the new softer eye shapes we have seen in recent games, Masuda talked about changes in technology that facilitate more variation.
“It’s definitely conscious of the evolving design, but some of the reason behind that, for example, is in the beginning, the Game Boy had a really limited palette and a very small amount of pixels to express the designs,” Masuda said. “It was hard to make circles so that was one reason a lot of them had a similar look. As the technology evolved we had more options for expression with different shapes and more variety, so I think we’ve focused on trying to have a lot of variety in the eyes, for example.”
Examples of these new design techniques will no doubt be present in new Pokemon such as the new Dusk form Lycanroc featured in the upcoming Pokemon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon, which will be released on 3DS on November 17.
Hope Corrigan is an Australian freelance news writer for IGN.You can follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire