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Hey there! My name is Matt Pellicane and I’m the Lead Designer on Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter (TNC) for DS over at 5TH Cell.

I’m really happy to be writing this Developer Diary because our team is hard at work to bring the Raposa back to the DS. I'll share some behind the scenes information and give you a quick overview on the design process throughout this game's development.

When designing this game, we were given a direction from our creative director, Jeremiah Slazcka, which was summed up in three words.  "PLAY YOUR WAY."   With this concept in mind, we approached much of the challenge levels with this idea. While the programmers were building the tech for our physics system, we brainstormed ways to allow the player to have more freedom with their drawings and the game play.
This spawned the idea of adding/removing extra limbs and being able to resize them, allowing the player to make more complex creations, rather than just a basic two arm, two leg humanoid.  This system alone truly made the hero creation limited only by the extent of the player's imagination! 

Shortly after, we kept adding things to make the hero unique. We gave the player more weapons and the ability to change them out on the fly during challenge levels. This allowed a very customized way of dealing with certain situations. Following that, we thought it would be awesome if the hero could change out all together. But we weren't done there. We wanted these new heroes to have other abilities. This is how the different forms were added into the game. We chose twonew heroes or forms that play drastically different than the normal hero.

This is how the spider form and blob form were born. With these features in mind, our level designers worked hard to compliment these wide varieties of abilities to make the levels awesome!

The story of Drawn to Life: TNC takes place in an assortment of new locations.  These freeroams and cinematics were built by our Village design team, taking the backgrounds drawn by our Art Director, Edison Yan, and the sprites animated by Paul Robertson, and combining them together to really bring the game worlds to life. This is a very long process, as each sprite needs to be moved by hand and dialogue needs to be added, edited, and reworked throughout the project to be as seen in the final product. In the end, the moods range from dark and scary to highly comical and all keep with the vision that Creative Director Jeremiah Slaczka had for the series.

The village and challenge modes were very big systems and often times when all the tasks start piling up, it feels like we’re making two games. The full story played through in the cinematics shows the growth of the characters, while the platforming is more hands-on part of the game. Even though both these parts feel separate, they need to work together to make a truly wonderful and enjoyable experience.

In the end, with the beautiful environments, interesting story, great platforming and customizable art and gameplay, this game is a great deal bigger than the original.  I’m very proud of my team, the game has been fun to develop and I hope you have as much fun playing it when it comes out this fall.

Take care and have fun!

- Matt

You can check out an online version of the Drawn to LifeNintendo DS drawing tool over at drawyourhero.com - where you can also win the chance to see your hero up on a billboard near you!