Toy Story 3 The Videogame Preview Part 3

A couple of weeks ago we brought you our hands-on report of the Toy Story 3 video game and now we have an exclusive interview with the producer of said game, Jon Warner.

What’s the first thing you see when you load up the game? How are you introduced?

If it’s a brand-new, fresh game, we put you into the first level of Story Mode, which is Train Rescue and that kind of serves as our tutorial. If you’ve completed the train level, you’re taken to the board game interface which serves as your launching point to either Story or Toy Box mode.

What was the day-to-day development of the game like? How did you go from seeing the storyboards at Pixar to coming up with the sandbox, Toy Box idea?

The movie prompted the idea: as you’ve probably seen from the trailers, in the movie the premise is that Andy is grown up and going off to college – what’s he going to do with his toys? The movie grapples with those issues and that sparked us to think ‘man, it’d be cool, as long Andy’s going off to college, if he gave his toys to me’. That’s where the idea came from.

How similar is the Story Mode’s plot to the movie?

It definitely follows the high points of the movie. We’re making the assumption that the majority of people who are playing the game have seen the movie, so we kind of tell it in a retrospective way, like a reminiscence. It’s narrated by Hamm and Rex. We picked eight levels that thought suited the game play and expanded those out.

Did Pixar have a great deal of involvement in the plotting and the story?

Absolutely. We came up with the idea as doing it as a reminiscence and they reviewed our scripts and picked and chose what felt right for their characters, they were very closely involved with all of that.

Previous video game adaptations of films have always been hit and miss. From what we’ve seen today, with both the linear Story Mode and the sandbox features, it seems like you’ve made a real conscious effort to defy the cliché of poor tie-in games – was that a goal from day one?

Absolutely. We wanted to make a game that we enjoyed playing and we play a lot of games and a lot of licensed games and movie-based games aren’t great, because they’re not given a budget or they’re not given the time or the design isn’t great or whatever. We definitely wanted to do something special with this, to raise the bar a little. Hopefully we’re in the right ball park here.

How does the Wii version differ from the Xbox and Playstation 3 iterations of the game?

The Wii’s really a different animal, right? We wanted to deliver the same calibre of experience with something the Wii hardware could handle. We customised the Story Mode to suit the Wii’s controls and for Toy Box mode we changed the experience a bit, we had to press it down and change the graphics to be Wii-friendly, but it’s the same basic premise and experience of coming into a western town, Woody’s Roundup, and being able to play with Andy’s toys. It’s still an open world. It’s got a comparable amount of collectables and such, but just the sheer horsepower of the Playstation and Xbox allow us to pack a lot more content in.

What can you tell us about the handheld iterations of the game?

They’re cool, we didn’t develop those at Avalanche, but they kind of follow the same spirit of the magic of play. In our Story Mode there are two types of levels, ones set in the real world and ones set in the imagination. Both of the handhelds embrace that same concept of being a six-inch toy getting around in the real world and in the imaginary worlds, being Buzz Lightyear and having a working jetpack and a laser – you’re awesome.

What kind of maps is used to navigate the game worlds?

There’s no mini-map but when you select a mission a compass pointer on screen will guide you to it.

What kind of age group were testing the game with?

We cast our net pretty wide. The Toy Story demographic is big. It’s you and me, it’s little kids. We tested sixty groups from as low as age six and to as high as age twenty. I think the sweet spot really are tweens, ten to twelve year olds just dig it, they go crazy, you have to pull them away from it. But hopefully we’ve made something that’s going to tap into a pretty wide group.

I guess that younger kids might be playing with their parents.

Exactly, in co-op mode if there’s younger sibling, older sibling situation you can help each other out, if you’re playing with friends, there’ll be horseplay.

What are your future projects after this? Are you looking at Microsoft’s Kinect and Playstation Move?

Absolutely. Sony asked us to do some Move content for Toy Story so we did. It’s a downloadable game that uses the new controller. We’re definitely interested in doing stuff with the motion control and with Kinect. We don’t want it to be a gimmick or anything tacked on, so when the design is right for it and it feels right and it serves the game, it’s definitely what we want to do.

What exactly does the being the producer on a video game involve?

I had a team of programmers and animators, artists and designers and I make sure everything happens and happens on time. It’s also my job to hold the ‘vision’ of the game and make sure the execution is going in the right direction.

Would you mind if I asked a question about you personally? I think our readers would be interested to find out how one gets into the video game industry, what was your route in?

I got into video games through a strange route; I was in the army first, for eight years, in intelligence. That’s not the direct route! I needed money for college. When I got out of the army I had technical skills, so I went back to school, got my degree in history and political science and I got a job as a software engineer, I was an interface designer. I was okay, but all of our jobs got outsourced to India so I found myself out of work. I had a friend who was a test manager at Microsoft and he said I’ve got a temporary job, why don’t you come and test games? I said sure, I’d love to – and that’s how I got in. Once I started working in games, I knew then: this was the job for me.

Finally, who is your favourite Toy Story character?

Oh it’s so hard! I really like Buzz, but I think Woody’s got to be my favourite. He’s great – he’s a good guy!

http://www.blogomatic3000.com/2010/07/05/exclusive-interview-with-jon-warner-producer-of-toy-story-3-the-videogame/

Toy Story 3 The Videogame Preview Part 2

Our attention now switches to the Xbox that has been waiting patiently on the table and the brightly coloured visuals it is producing on the attached TV. Jon explains how they rejected typical gaming menus in favour of a more toy-orientated approach: a board game interface selects modes and such, navigated with a neat Crayola crayon cursor. In Story Mode, players collect items to unlock new toys to play with in The Toy Box, though collecting every item isn’t necessary to finish the game, completists can check their progress until every secret has been discovered. But the meat of the game is the much-mentioned Toy Box mode, which Jon begins to load up. ‘Who would you like to play as?’ he asks us. Unanimously, we choose Buzz Lightyear.

‘Poor Woody and Jessie!’ a nearby assistant laments.

‘They never get any playtime, it’s just like in Andy’s house,’ Jon confirms. The mode loads and we find Buzz in a stylised western town, modelled after Woody’s Roundup. Graphically, the game is reasonably impressive, the bright, cartoony look of the films replicated satisfactorily on screen. Buzz trots around the town as if in some pre-teen friendly Grand Theft Auto game, chatting with townsfolk and tossing hapless Pizza Planet aliens with reckless abandon. Controlled by Jon, Buzz interacts with the town’s inhabitants, makes shops, rides Bullseye the horse and is given tasks to complete by other characters, such as Hamm, Rex and Slinky Dog. Jon explains that the tasks are there for players who enjoy structure. The Toy Box also accommodates for players who enjoy exploring, in its myriad of things to discover and for those who like to customise their game worlds, in the multitude of options that can be utilised to alter game features.

‘Once you’ve built up your town to a certain point and it’s prosperous enough, outlaws will come into it to rob your people, so if we have enough money, we can purchase a jail to hold your outlaws – if you don’t, the outlaws will take all your people’s money,’ says Jon, discussing the possibilities of the game. Buildings and characters are purchased in-game with money collected through completing tasks and collecting gold nuggets. ‘There are some characters you can buy that you can ride, like Bullseye. Riding around on Bullseye is great,’ he demonstrates as the horse capers around with Buzz on his back. There are numerous races to complete with Bullseye around the game world to partake in at the player’s leisure.

‘You can buy a car and it opens up the racing area, a kind of Skate Park with stunt-driven missions. If you enjoy racing games and playing with cars, and that’s all you want to do, that’s completely an option. There’s a bunch of preset missions and areas where you can just screw around doing stunts. You can customise your cars, you can change what type of car you drive…’ Eager to show us more of the possibilities of the game, Jon loads up a profile on with more features unlocked.

‘If you remember when you were kids playing with toys, you’d never seem to have a full set of toys that were all from the same set, it was always kind of a mish-mash of stuff, but it was okay because it made sense to you and that’s all that mattered, so we wanted to replicate that feeling. There’s toys that fit in the Woody’s Roundup set, and then there’s toys make absolutely no sense, but are fun to play with anyway,’ Jon says, explaining the eclectic aesthetic of the game.

Jon discusses the amount of time players can expect to have with the game. ‘The Story Mode lasts for about four solid hours for a good gamer, if you’re a completist, for younger gamers, it’ll take a bit longer. The Toy Box is really open ended; there’s no end, we never roll credits. You play there ‘til you’re done playing. That could be ten hours, it could be twenty. I’ve been playing my session for about twenty-two hours and there’s still stuff I’m not done with yet! What was amazing when we were play-testing the game, was that out of the sixty groups playing it, not one of the games ended up the same. Of course, they were doing the same missions, but their game worlds were all completely different.’

The new game loaded, we are confronted with a much bigger town with more denizens. One of the buildings is decorated like a clown fish from Finding Nemo and there is a NPC styled after Syndrome from The Incredibles. I asked whether there were a lot of nods to other Pixar films and Jon confirmed that in many of the customisation options, there were various tributes to Pixar’s repertoire, including Wall-E and Monsters Inc. too. Other new options in the game include a goo machine, which dispenses globules of pink and green sludge that can be used to grow and shrink characters and items, affecting how the player interacts with the in the game. For example, a shrunken Bullseye is quicker, whereas a giant Bullseye can crush obstacles. There are also bigger toys to purchase in the game that offer new challenges, customisation options and tools, such as Sid’s Haunted House, which unleashes monsters on your town for you to defeat.

Finally, it is our turn to have a go. We enter split-screen mode. The controls were intuitive enough and the game had a fluid feel to it. Players are under no obligation to play with or against each other whilst in multiplayer, but we decide to have a race on our horses. I’m pretty rubbish and lose the race, but it was pretty good fun nonetheless. I had a go on a monster truck too, which was also a hoot.

With that, my time was up and I was ushered out of the room. Though I only spent a short time with the game, it seemed like a lot of fun. I’d also barely scratched the surface of the number of options of features of play. I imagine that Toy Story 3: The Video Game will do a lot of good for the mediocre reputation of tie-in games, and will prove popular, especially among the franchise’s younger fans. If the rest of the development team at Avalanche are half as passionate and enthusiastic about the game and put those qualities into its production, Avalanche should be on to a winner.

http://www.blogomatic3000.com/2010/06/25/exclusive-toy-story-3-the-videogame-hands-on-report-pt-2/

Toy Story 3 The Videogame Preview Part 1

Say what you like about the corporate machine that is Disney: they have a lovely HQ. And lovely staff too. One such lovely member of staff is the gregarious and affable Jon Warner, producer at Avalanche Studios, the folks behind the new Toy Story video game to coincide with the cinematic release of the eagerly awaited third installation in the popular series.

Upon gratefully receiving an invitation to meet Jon and have a gander at his new game, I was escorted through the HQ, passing a life-size statue of Tony Stark’s first Iron Man suit, an office adorned with a six foot Lego model of Woody the toy cowboy and a High School Musical themed meeting room, complete with lockers. Eventually, we are led to a small office, where Jon awaits our arrival, Xbox at the ready. He grins and shakes us each by the hand cordially. Once he’s satisfied we’re comfortable, he begins to describe Toy Story 3: The Video Game, his pride and delight practically tangible.

‘Let’s start from the start then,’ Jon says. ‘We came up with the idea for the game in November 2007. Pixar had invited us down to have a look at a real early, preliminary screening – it was storyboards that they’d put together in kind of an animated reel. There was no dialogue in it or anything; it was just narrated by the director, Lee Unkrich. It was great, it was brilliant. We were there with a bunch of other licensers, like Mattel, in the theatre watching this presentation and man, it was good. By the end of the screening there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. The lights went up, you feel tears in your eyes, you’re like, “oh no, this is going to be embarrassing!” But the lights come up and everyone is choked up: it was that good, it was that powerful.

‘So when we left Pixar, we thought, “We can’t do an average game treatment for this one”, you know, “see the movie, play the game”, it just didn’t feel right. First of all, Pixar had done a great job on telling that story and I don’t think it was right for us to rehash it; we didn’t want to do that. We thought what would be really cool is if we could give Andy’s toys to everybody, the players: if you could take Andy’s toys and play with them any way you wanted to. So we hung onto that idea, it sounded right. We developed the idea and called it The Toy Box, where it’s a big sandbox environment and you get to play as Buzz, Woody or Jessie and it’s a big, open, free environment, where you get to play with Andy’s toys the way you want to, not the way we want you to.

‘We took that idea back to Pixar and said, “Hey, we want to make this Toy Story 3 game that has nothing to do with Toy Story 3, how do you like it?” That was a little intimidating, so we also pitched a kind of a more traditional approach and asked them which one they wanted us to do. They kind of looked at each other and said, “We like both ideas – could you do both?” So we did – if Pixar ask you to do both, you do both!’

‘That was a pretty big challenge. The we approached it was to have The Toy Box be the core experience, the bulk of it and have Story Mode be a briefer, almost a bonus experience, for players who want to relive and replay the moments of the film that they really loved, they’ll be there, but we don’t have to try to make that into eight hours of gameplay, which, I don’t know about you but often in film tie-in games, sometime feels kind of forced. We didn’t want to do that.’

http://www.blogomatic3000.com/2010/06/24/exclusive-toy-story-3-the-videogame-hands-on-report-pt-1/

Toy Story 3 Review

It’s been eleven years since the last Toy Story movie and fifteen since the first. As Disney’s representative at the jam-packed preview screening I attended pointed out, that’s older than a great deal of this third instalment’s audience is. Not that that appears to be any impediment to either the film’s success or the youngster’s enjoyment of it – Toy Story 3 (directed by Lee Unkrich) is every bit as masterful as its predecessors.

While the plot is perhaps a little familiar – Andy’s toys become separated from him and each other and must find their way home – a twist is added in that Andy is now seventeen and imminently leaving for college. What do you do when the person you’re trying to get back to doesn’t want you anymore? The air of melancholia that pervaded Toy Story 2’s best part – Jesse’s When She Loved Me montage – is writ large in this excellent film that studies separation, the acceptance of loss and maturity. It’s also a cracking film for children and oozes quality and likability.

As we have come to expect from Pixar, the CGI animation is simply stunning. The 3D effects have also been implemented with admirable restraint. The opening sequence, a train robbery that takes place within Andy’s imagination, is spectacular. Even the far-flung girders of an exploding railway bridge are things of beauty. This fun intro escalates wildly, like a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip and provides a nice reminder of all the characters you didn’t know you’d missed. Happily, more of the supporting players – Rex, Slinky Dog, Hamm, etc – are given much more to do this time around, especially Mr Potato Head, whose role becomes increasingly amusing as the film progresses. Andy and the other human characters are also given more time on screen than they have previously been given, which provides interesting new angles on the events of film.

There are also new characters to enjoy and Michael Keaton as the Ken doll absolutely steals the show in perhaps the funniest screen role this year. Other honourable mentions should go to the ever-excellent Timothy Dalton as Mr Pricklepants, the thespian hedgehog and character designer Bud Luckey’s turn as Chuckles, the grumpy clown. It probably goes without saying that the film is properly hilarious and not just in a ‘fart jokes for the kids, awkward double entendre/popular culture reference for the parents’ way (Shrek, I’m looking at you); the humour is pitched perfectly for everyone.

Perhaps the best thing about the film is the creativity and inventive spirit displayed. For the characters, a metal basket becomes a prison cell, a spinning toy a roulette wheel and a landfill site something akin to Dante’s vision of hell. Watching six inch toys navigate their way through our world is a tireless joy and I found myself urging the toys to find themselves in more and more scrapes, just to see how they would escape.

Toy Story 3 is not quite flawless – the increased roles of the supporting characters means there isn’t quite enough time to dwell on everyone and the aforementioned Pricklepants, Chuckles and even, to a certain extent, Buzz Lightyear are not given quite as much time to shine as I would have liked. And whilst generally tightly structured and quickly paced, the plot could have been trimmed of a little – though very little – excess meandering. Even if the film lacks the emotional heft of Up or the expressionist tendencies of Wall E, Toy Story 3 stands as one of the best in Pixar’s ever-increasingly excellent canon and is a more than worthy (final?) instalment in the Toy Story saga. Best trilogy ever?

http://www.blogomatic3000.com/2010/06/20/review-toy-story-3/