Brad: At first glance, Cuphead looks like it could be a 2D platformer, but it’s actually a series of intense boss fights without the pre-encounter fluff, right? I mean, there’s clearly heavy emphasis on platforming during the encounters, but was there ever any consideration in the early development process where Cuphead was going to be a full-on platformer? Or has this always been the game’s core design?
Chad: Cuphead started out as a much smaller game. We were going to create 10-12 bosses and call it a night. Within that original scope, we wouldn’t have the time to create traditional platform levels and we really wanted to focus everything on large, over-the-top boss encounters for a few reasons:
Our favorite moments from other games of the ‘run and gun’ genre were bosses.
The background art/assets wouldn’t take as long as full fledged levels.
And, we really liked the idea of massive, hand-drawn sprites on the screen (with the animation running @24FPS).
But that has changed since E3 2014 (Cuphead received much more attention than we could have ever imagined – especially since we had only shown three seconds of footage). The scope of the game has been increased:
Over double the amount of bosses.
Platforming style levels (that scroll like traditional levels!).
And a few more surprises that we aren’t going to reveal just yet.
http://whatsyourtagblog.com/2015/07/03/ ... animation/