Valenka: Tell me about Studio MDHR; I know Cuphead is your introductory game, but are you and your brother Jared the only two people involved?
Chad: We started out as just us brothers. After we established the initial (small) scope we expanded the team to about five. Now we have over 14 amazing and talented people working with us. Without them, we could have never made Cuphead what it is today. A big shout out to everyone!
Valenka: What are your goals as an indie developer?
Chad: Our goals as a developer are to focus on games that:
• are gameplay focused (zero bloat!)
• keep the retro/arcade style of games alive; leaning a bit towards the fast-twitch genres
• blend our ideas and nuances in a way that make our games unique
• keep 2D animation alive
Valenka: Let’s talk about Cuphead; how did you get the idea for a 1930’s-esque run-and-gun adventure? I’m noting a lot of Mickey Mouse and Popeye elements here and I’m loving it.
Chad: The reason we merged these two things is simple: we have a huge love and appreciation for both of them. We grew up watching a ton of old cartoons because that’s what our parents gave us.
We also grew up surrounded by arcades (we wish they still existed as a real thing), and the style of games from about 1988-1999. We grew to love run-and-gun games (Contra III, Gunstar Heroes) and have always wanted to make one of our own. Once we realized that current hardware would let us do as much full frame animation as we want, melding the two seemed like the perfect union in our minds.
Another answer (and maybe the REAL one) would be: One day, while we played outside in the winter, we saw a weird looking tree. It was frozen, so we decided to hold a torch close to it. As it melted, some special tree nuts were revealed. We knew that these type of nuts could be fed to our cat, so we did that. After our cat ate them, he grew wings and took us up to a castle in the sky. We made our way through the castle dungeon and found the book that taught us everything: “How to merge 1930s cartoons & Run-and-Gun games” – By Ub Iwerks.
http://i.imgur.com/yl3kr5l....
Valenka: What’s the development process been like for Cuphead?
Chad: ART PROCESS: Extremely creative and fun.
We try to use the “fly by the seat of our pants” mentality like the studios used in the 1930s (due to extreme time constraints) and because of this weird ideas are born: things like the frog bosses morphing into a slot machine, or the birdhouse boss beginning the fight as a cuckoo clock. At the same time, we are pretty strict on following unwritten rules for how cartoons looked in the era, to ensure we are extremely close to our source material.
GAME DESIGN PROCESS: Iterative, iterative, and iterative.
To us, this is the best way to learn from our mistakes as we go. It also means our framework allows for a quick changes too; which is perfect, because we need to be able to refine all areas of the game until they are perfect. We make many passes on the same thing until it is nearly flawless – but there is always room for fine tuning!
Valenka: Congratulations on winning IGN’s Best Xbox One Game award at E3 2015. How has the attention garnered from E3 2014 and 2015 affected the development?
Chad: Thank you so much! The awards and the attention has been equally amazing and unimaginable. We are all deeply grateful that there are people who are excited about what we are doing. It’s an indescribable feeling! It makes us want to work harder and longer hours to cram as much as we possibly can intro our debut game. And again, we couldn’t have done it without our amazing team and without the mind-blowing people over at ID@Xbox (High five for Alexis!).
The attention from E3 2014 is when we really decided to increase the scope of the game. The current Cuphead is a much different game than what we had originally planned. We’ve added levels, more bosses, more secrets and a bunch of other stuff that we haven’t talked about yet.
http://i.imgur.com/rDV1WdF....
Valenka: Were there any noteworthy sacrifices you had to make during development?
Chad: I think the majority of the sacrifices that we had to make was the same as any game developer; we had to make cuts to our scope because our initial plans would only be feasible with a $50 million budget.
The great news is that we’ve never had to sacrifice gameplay or our visual style at all. We’ve praised Unity many times, and we will praise it again: everything we throw at it “just works”, and cross-platform ports are seamless – it took us just over a week to have the game running perfectly on Xbox One. To us, that’s how the technology should be, it doesn’t get in the way of our creativity…it also doesn’t hurt that our lead developer, Tony, is a sorcerer.
Valenka: How far along is Cuphead in development?
Chad: We aren’t going to put a number on how far along we are; we tried that in the past and failed. What we can say is that all the major elements for the game are in but we are playing a bit of catch up with the art!
Valenka: What are the plans for Cuphead after launch? I heard something about expansion packs.
Chad: This was mentioned back when the initial scope was going to be 8-10 bosses and not much else.
Now that we have a much larger scope, expansion packs aren’t in the current roadmap. Our only current goal is to make Cuphead the best possible game it can be.
http://i.imgur.com/nJu5s6X....
Valenka: What’s next for Studio MDHR?
Chad: We will definitely stay with hand drawn and animated visuals. There are a ton of awesome styles/eras that we would love to take inspiration from and we even have some video game genres in mind, but the reality is that 99% of our attention is focused on Cuphead. We’ll have a better idea once we are closer to the end of development!
Thank you for letting us be a part of this – it was extremely fun to answer all the questions. Now we must get back to work!
Day 25 | StudioMDHR
Come check out who took the major prizes at this year’s BIG Festival, hosted by gamescom latam 2025.
Days Gone Remastered doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it gives this once-overlooked open-world adventure the upgrade it’s always deserved.
Darren writes: "Out of Moves is a bright little puzzle game inspired by some classics of the genre; you could do a lot worse."
The style is great. I'm sure this game will do very well. Lots of eyes on it. Would like to see what they come up with next.
"keep 2D animation alive"
Thank you, I absolutely love animation, and would hate to see it die.
I LOVE the style of this game.
i really... and i mean, *really* cannot wait to play this game. it looks ******* phenomenal.
From videos of people playing it at E3 it looks like it's pretty far along in development. Can't wait to play it, it's dated for 2016, so hopefully it's released early 2016(or earlier).