#Cuphead drawings full#
#Cuphead drawings series#

From its elaborate, scenic backdrops to its wonderfully expressive characters, Cuphead contains 50,000 frames of painstakingly hand-drawn and -inked animation. If you’ve ever wondered how many frames of animation goes into a masterpiece like Studio MDHR’s Cuphead, you’ve got your answer. “We didn’t want to let anything change or persuade that.You Won’t Believe How Many Hand-Drawn Frames of Animation Went into Cuphead Staff – Jat 10:20 AMĥ0,000. “We wanted to make the game that we always dreamed of,” Moldenhauer says. The final product took a lot longer than anticipated - and required a lot more paper - but for the team the time and effort was worth it. Instead, those demos were scaled-down from what the team ultimately wanted to create. It’s not that the final version of Cuphead is an expanded version of those original E3 demos that created so much excitement. We just got so lucky that everyone is so passionate about what they’re doing, they’re passionate about this game, and we haven’t endured many conflicts.”ĭespite all of the changes, the resulting game actually resembles the original concept for Cuphead from back in 2010. “But aside from that - I don’t know if it’s luck, karma, or a combination of the craziest synergies. There was a lot of explaining things to newcomers, instead of “just being able to just put pencil to paper and doing it yourself,” as she explains. In addition to her role as producer on the game, Moldenhauer was the sole clean-up and inking artist on the game, meaning she had a hand in every frame of animation featured in the title. That includes a total of five artists, handling everything from concept art to animation. What started out as a trio is now a team 19-people strong, spanning multiple cities, from Toronto to Los Angeles. Since 2015, the studio has grown dramatically. It also required a lot more people - and a lot more time.

That meant more bosses, properly designed platforming levels, and an overworld that connected them together. At the time, the studio consisted of just three people, making it a challenge to create anything larger than that, especially considering the time-consuming nature of the art style.īut after some very positive showings at trade shows like E3, the studio realized that the game needed to be more expansive in order to satisfy the ever-growing audience interested in its unique style.

#Cuphead drawings series#

In order to be realistic about what they could actually create, the team at Studio MDHR scaled back their vision to an experience that would consist entirely of a series of eight Mega Man-style boss battles. At that point it was a considerably smaller game. “But we’ve just been really picky.”ĭevelopment on Cuphead started in 2010, and it was first revealed back in 2014. “We’ve been fine-tuning things that probably the majority of the general public won’t even notice,” says Moldenhauer.

#Cuphead drawings full#

But it’s also because of the fact that the team at Studio MDHR is full of perfectionists, who would toss out designs for characters and levels many times, until they landed on exactly what they wanted. One of the reasons was the game’s scope, which dramatically expanded midway through development, resulting in multiple delays and a lot more animation. Instead, that huge stack of paper only lasted about a third of the way through Cuphead’s creation. Moldenhauer, who served as an artist and producer on the game, thought that her initial paper order would be big enough to get the team through the development of Cuphead, and then get started on whatever the studio’s follow-up project ended up being. Since the game was to be completely hand-drawn, in an attempt to emulate the process from the time, the paper was an integral tool. When work first started on Cuphead, a new game that marries side-scrolling gameplay with 1930s-style American animation, Maja Moldenhauer went ahead and ordered a whole bunch of animation paper.