Sunday, 23 February 2014

Game Art and Machinima Research: Rayman 2 The Great Escape

By Meg Sugden
The next game that I wanted to look at was Rayman 2: The Great Escape. This is a fantastic little game brought out in 1999 for the PlayStation. The reason that I wanted to look at this was it was one of the first games that I played and it is good to look at for this project due to the cartoon nature of the characters and how good the environment design was. The game follows Rayman adventure as Admiral Razorbeard invades the Glade of Dreans, where the game is set, along with his robot pirates from outer space. In order to fix the world Rayman must defeat the robot pirates and collect 1000 pieces of the world's core and reunite the four magical masks which will awaken the world's spirit Polokus.


Rayman as a character is a very interesting design being of slight human characteristics but them having a strange face and body shape and hands, feet and head that aren't actually attached to his body. Rayman is quite a strange creature but is quite close to a human despite having detached limbs. He also wears clothing, shoes and gloves which give him more human characteristics but plays on the fact that because his hands aren't attached to his body he can punch enemies from afar. Rayman is a very interesting design for a character and it really works as it gives him all kinds of abilities, but he is probably not going to be too helpful when it comes to designing our character as we are basing ours off an animal.

When it comes to the environments of this game they are all very beautiful even though this game came out in 1999. They are all very well designed and vary from level to level offering the player new areas to explore like the beautiful nature of the Fairy Glades down to the deep and dark caves. The whole environments are really nicely designs including just the right amount of detail that relates well to the character and the theme of the game as a whole.



The cut scenes that feature are most likely created using an in-game engine as they usually feature a static camera, words appearing at the bottom and then the characters moving around slightly and interacting with each other in just a minimal way. The fact that they look like there created in-game is actually good for us, despite the fact that these are quite low quality and don't really explain a lot or give much towards story development, as we are going to be creating a cut scene using an in-game engine on Unity. This gives us a little insight as to what they used to be like in the early era of gaming and how minimal they had to be, although there is still background detail and multiple characters in each scene and also some that are humourous. 


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