Probably one of the most influential games that I wanted to look at was Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus as one of the characters in our games is a raccoon. This is the first game in the original trilogy and could be seen as the best due to the unique film noir style that it created, but it was also very criticised as the game was very short. The game follows thief Sly Cooper and his friends Bentley the Turtle and Murray the Hippo as they seek out the Fiendish Five to recover his family's 'Thievius Raccoonus', which is a book with the combined list of Sly's ancestor's thieving moves.
It's an interesting concept for a game and works well due to the fact that the star of it is a raccoon, an animal known for stealing, if not mainly food. What works well about the character is once again, like many other games I have looked at is that he uses anthropomorphism and stands, walks and talks like a human. He also wears a jumper, hat and mask, making him slightly more unique. Due to the fact that he is a black and off-white character it makes sense for him to be given this slight flash of colour on his jumper and the rich royal blue works well, especially for a thief if he is wandering the streets at night as this will help him blend in. Sly also carries around a kind of scepter that he uses in aid to get around the world he's in, which again adds to his unique look and adds yet another flash of colour, this time gold, which goes well with the blue.
All of the environments that are featured in the game are lovely looking and offer the player room for exploration. What I really like about them is that they stick well with the look of Sly himself, and the rest of the characters, and create a really nice atmosphere, especially the outside streets of Paris in the opening levels as these are gorgeous and really show an essence of the location bringing them to life with a weird effect. The effect that they used throughout is a rendering style referred to as 'Toon-Shading' and really works throughout the entire game creating film noir lighting and effects. The reason that this works so well is down to Sly being quite a mysterious character himself and this only adds to it by creating harsher lighting than would normally be present.
The cut scenes that are used in the game are quite different to normal ones. Firstly there are the cut scenes that are used at the beginning of the game and at some chapter beginnings as well which are very illustrated and have a very animated feel to them, which is a nice effect but not something I want to look at in a cut scenes. But the second type is more towards what I'm looking to achieve. They are set up using an in-game engine, which is what we are going to be producing, but then looking closer the Sly game probably isn't the best to look at for cut scenes as they aren't really that informative. They are scenes that occur when the player zooms in on a certain point that triggers it, but it is just the player looking round the scene while Bentley comes up in the bottom corner to talk to you. Aside from this there are little cut scenes which again are created in-game, but these are only short and lack imagination.
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