WayForward and Warner Bros Interactive's Duck Amuck

It would be an exaggeration to say that we nearly died to bring you this Q&A on Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment's DS game Duck Amuck--but only slightly. It was the eve of the 2007 E3 Media and Business Summit in Los Angeles, and we were having dinner with our debating nemesis Stephen Totilo and WBIE PR mastermind Remi Sklar, who had brought along a copy of the company's smartly original interactive cartoon Duck Amuck to show off. Perhaps overly attuned to the rapid pace of the blogosphere, the Level Up staff began to eat a bit too quickly, and a choking fit shortly ensued--one that repeated trips to the restroom failed to solve. As stubborn pride gave way to mounting panic, we alerted our dinner companions to our unresolved distress; thankfully, before L.A.'s emergency services were forced to join us at the upscale eatery, a hearty spasm cleared the obstruction without even the slightest mess. Whereupon we sat down, regained our composure, and resumed our preview of Duck Amuck.

You might think the following Q&A would be anticlimactic after this introduction, but honestly, we're just getting started. Last month, we spoke over the phone with two members of Duck Amuck's development team--lead designer Rob Buchanan and producer Jeff Pomegranate--to discuss their intriguing DS title. The project was inspired by the classic 1953 Chuck Jones cartoon in which Daffy Duck is tormented by an unseen animator, and the game cleverly allows players to do the same with the DS stylus, causing Daffy to break the fourth wall and protest his fate directly to the player, much as he did to the invisible animator all those years ago. In our interview, Buchanan and Pomegranate explain how traditional animation processes informed their workflow for Duck Amuck; discuss the future prospects of interactive cartoons; and reveal why they had to scrap their plans to parody the famous Nintendo light gun game Duck Hunt.

How did you guys get involved with Duck Amuck?

Rob Buchanan: It actually went back quite a ways. We actually pitched it to Warner Brothers probably about a year and a half before they actually gave us the green light to go ahead with it. It just seemed like with, the edge was brand new out on the market, the Nintendo DS, and it just occurred to us that what a perfect system to have a game like Duck Amuck on.

So you came up with the idea? They didn't approach you?

Buchanan: Right, right.

There's a lot of things going on in the game. Players are manipulating and engaging with a character via touch, which is reminiscent of Nintendogs in some ways. But then there's the whole idea of breaking the fourth wall. What inspired you? Where did those ideas come from?

Buchanan: This is Rob. Basically we really wanted to treat it like a Daffy sim, similar to Nintendogs, I suppose. But we really wanted to make it as much like an interactive cartoon as possible. So we didn't want to have Daffy just running around and jumping on platforms. We wanted him to be alive and allow Daffy to be Daffy.

Jeff Pomegranate: Basically most of the inspiration came from the original cartoon.

Buchanan: We were trying to channel Chuck Jones the whole time.

What did you draw on from the cartoon?

Pomegranate: In the original cartoon he's being tormented by an unseen animator. So we really drew or tried to draw as much from the original as possible. For example, in the game, players get to erase his beak and draw a totally new beak on his face. And also we could actually erase his body and draw a new body and play a game with that body. Those are inspirations from Duck Amuck itself.

But Rob also went through pretty much all of the Daffy Duck Warner Bros cartoons and drew from a lot of them. A lot of the characters are represented, like Duck Dodgers and Robin Hood Daffy. So yeah, he did a lot of research. And actually we both grew up with Warner Brothers cartoons and the Looney Toons. So it was really close to us.

What were some of the things that worked pretty early on? What were some of the things that took a lot more time and what were some of the things that just didn't work?

Pomegranate: We started with the concept being almost just a bunch of mini games. Then it grew into more of an interactive cartoon. In retrospect, we wish we would have started on the idle state stuff earlier, because that really ties all of the mini games and everything together and it makes it more of an interactive entertainment thing instead of just a collection of mini games.

When you say idle state, what do you mean?

Pomegranate: It's kind of the menu system, how you launch the different menus. Poking him will eventually bring out the paint cans. Tearing backgrounds; he'll react to that and that's another menu system. So it's pretty much all of the cartoon parts in between the menus and the mini games.

Buchanan: Wherever Daffy appears alive; like if you poke him in the head, he'll get angry and actually scold you. We really wanted to take a very traditional approach to creating the content of the game. Back in the old days, they didn't just sit down and write a script for a cartoon. They would actually storyboard all the visual gags first and then write in the dialogue, because the dialogue really wasn't important. We took the same approach with this game. We storyboarded everything before any of the dialogue was written.

Pomegranate: Rob's background in animation made him a perfect fit for this project.

We'll come back to the game specifically in a second, but now that you've finished the project, what kind of possibilities do you see in the in the future of interactive cartoons as opposed to the mini games? Do you think that down the line that this could sustain an entire game, or do you think there has to be a balance between the interactive cartoon and the mini games?

Pomegranate: That's a great question. I'd love to see just a solid interactive cartoon. I don't know if the market would accept that; meaning, would the publishers be willing to publish something like that? I think we just kind of scratched the surface on the possibilities of using the Nintendo DS specifically and doing more of an interactive narrative. But as to whether or not anything further will ever see the shelves of stores, who knows?

Buchanan: The Nintendo DS and the Nintendo Wii really open up possibilities for that because of the different types of input; for example, the microphone and the stylus for the DS. I think that opens up a lot of possibilities and gets developers like us kind of thinking of new ways of creating games.

You said you scripted the gags first. Did some of the mini games themselves emerge from the gags?

Buchanan: We actually designed the mini games as separate things, only keeping in mind what ways we could stick it to Daffy. Like how many different ways can we blow him up or poke him or prod him or drop safes on his head, that sort of thing. And then we just allowed those to stand on their own and used Daffy's idle state to segue into those situations.

Pomegranate: Originally a lot of the mini games were more parodies of historical games that everybody grew up with. But we ran into a lot of problems with the property owners and they just didn't want us dealing with a lot of that stuff.

Buchanan: There's still a lot of parody in there. There are game that are references to other games. There's definitely a focus on like history of gaming. We sort of give a nod to the Atari 2600 at one point in the game.

Pomegranate: Even the ones that made it in had to be toned down quite a bit.

Buchanan: Yeah. We didn't want too much legal trouble.

What were some of the games that were giving you problems?

Buchanan: Oh, gosh. We originally were going to do a version of Duck Hunt, based really closely on the original Nintendo game. But we were too worried about that, like, "You know, Nintendo's probably going to come after us with that one," so we had to kind of back off.

Pomegranate: Some of the ones that made it in the game was Diamond Mine Mine, that was a little too close to Adventure. We went back and forth on that game, I don't know, three or four different iterations and look and gameplay before Warner Brothers was comfortable that it was different enough from the original Atari game

Right. Going back to Duck Hunt for a second, so you never even presented it to Nintendo to say, "Hey, here's what we're thinking about?"

Publicist: You know what guys, I wouldn't answer that one. [Laughs.] Sorry. They haven't done many interviews with me, so I'll feel free to interject there.

Okay.

Buchanan: Absolutely. I mean this is all new to us.

Pomegranate: We're just thrilled to be here.

One thing among many that separates this from Nintendogs is that in Nintendogs you're building a caring relationship with your pet whereas here it's antagonistic.

Pomegranate: Right.

How did you approach the relationship between the player and Daffy? Were there ever certain moments when you started feeling, We might be going a little too far here, we've got to dial it back?" or "We're not going far enough?"

Buchanan: We were given pretty much free reign as far as what we could do to Daffy. He's just that sort of character that the more you sort of stick it to him, the funnier and more entertaining he becomes. That's just his way. And that's a direct correlation from the original short, 'cause the whole cartoon was just tormenting him. So that kind of stayed through to the game development. We stayed true to the original in that respect.

Pomegranate: We never had to dial anything back as far as our interactions with Daffy.

Now when [Warner Bros Interactive PR director] Remi Sklar first showed me the game, I was really struck by how terrific the animation looked on the DS screen. Were you guys surprised by that, or did you know from work you'd done in the past that it would look pretty good?

Buchanan: Actually, we did something pretty different in our approach to the animation. We chose to do the animation in Adobe Flash. Originally we were going to do it just like traditional TV animation. But Flash actually turned out to be an excellent choice because it gave us a lot of flexibility as far as using the Daffy images as in-game assets. And I should mention that all the animation was done by Ghostbot. They pulled it out just brilliantly.

Pomegranate: Using Flash also made it easier on revisions, once we got things onto the DS screen. If we had done traditional animation, revisions would have been a complete nightmare. I really didn't have many expectations as to what the animation would look like on the screen. But Actimagine is the codec that the Nintendo uses and it did a pretty good job.

Buchanan: Don't praise them too much. That was probably the biggest obstacle on this game because it's essentially over a hundred movies that we're playing over and over. We're stopping a movie and starting a new movie, loading and unloading all these movies assets and it was just really a tedious, nightmarish ordeal to get it to all work. Our lead programmer, David Wright, just did a magnificent job of beating it into submission. [Laughs.] It's more of a cut scene then a game, I guess, with mini games filtered throughout.

So when you the animations were loading and unloading and playing over and over, can you just explain that a little more. Are you saying that it wasn't stuff that was being played sequentially?

Buchanan: No. Each time that a player will interact with Daffy, it stops his current movie and starts the reaction movie. All that loading and unloading is done behind the scenes, but it's throughout the game and it's at the player's whim. Movie assets on the DS are huge, so they take up a lot of memory. And just loading and unloading them was a tightrope walk for the programmers. Because it needed a perfect balance between the amount of compression on a movie and how it looks on the screen. It was quite an ordeal.

So back to the Flash animation for a second, was there any concern about how well Flash could handle the job or was it pretty well understood that it could work?

Buchanan: No. We were actually very concerned in the beginning, just because we wanted it to look as much like the original short as possible. We were worried that Flash would either be too smooth or too choppy. A lot of people, when they think Flash they think low-end web graphics. But we did see what Ghostbot could pull off in Flash--they're the ones behind those cool Esurance commercials that you see on TV. Seeing what they did with Flash for those Esurance commercials, we really looked to them to bring Daffy to life on the DS screen and it couldn't have worked out better, really.

Pomegranate: I had worked with them on a Batman title for the Leapster a while back. That was just Flash cutscenes and they were just magnificent.

Buchanan: Interestingly, we actually used a Daffy model sheet from the 1953 original Duck Amuck cartoon. Daffy has sort of evolved over the years. He looks a little different today than he did in 1953 and we really wanted it to have the flavor of the original cartoon. So we used the model sheets from that era. That was a concession that Warner Brothers made on our behalf, because you see on the box art, that is the new Daffy, while our Daffy is the traditional classic Daffy.

How many mini games ended up in the finished product? Did you have to cut mini games that weren't working?

Buchanan: We did a bunch of mini games. I think there's something like twenty-seven in the final product. We had anticipated cutting more. We figured that some wouldn't work out but actually a lot of them did, almost all of them did. I know we only cut a few and only one of those was from outside pressure. So pretty much almost everything we designed for the game is in the game. There were two or three that just weren't working out and we started running out of time before we could fix them, so we had to abandon them.

Have you been surprised at the response from the enthusiast press? So far it's been pretty strongly positive.

Pomegranate: I've been surprised, absolutely. I just hope it lives up to everybody's expectations now and I think it will. It's really an entertaining product and I'm just proud to have been associated with it.

I'm sure you guys and Warner Bros are waiting to see how it does in the marketplace. But do you have any pitches in the works, whether at Warner Bros or at other companies, that are go down the interactive cartoon route? Or are you just waiting to see how the market responds?

Pomegranate: WayForward is predominantly a work for hire place. So we're getting started on our next projects as soon as the last ones end. I personally have not put anything together as far as an interactive cartoon, though it is something that I'm always thinking about and just trying to formulate ideas in my head. I'm sure Rob is the same way. We have a lot of writers around here that I think would love to try to push that part of the Nintendo DS and see what they can do with it.

Buchanan: Yeah. I personally would love to see a Rabbit Rampage game, which is the follow up to Duck Amuck, the original cartoon. Rabbit Rampage was released a couple of years after Duck Amuck but it's sort of the same concept where Bugs Bunny gets tormented by an unseen animator. I think it'd be really cool to see classic Bugs Bunny put in a similar situation.

Pomegranate: I think there are some new ways we could take a similar game like Duck Amuck and actually improve upon some of the technical things that we had done. Even into different genres. I would love to see not just us, but other developers and publishers start looking down that route. Looking into more interactive media and not just it being a game console therefore only games can be played on it.

Thanks very much for you time. I really appreciate it.

Pomegranate: Thank you.

Buchanan: Thank you. And feel free to improve on our vast vocabulary throughout the interview. I know yours is stellar.

Oh, stop, stop, guys. You were eloquent. Thanks again for your time.

Pomegranate: Thank you.

Buchanan: Thank you.