Ty the Tasmanian Tiger's third adventure, Night of the Quinkan, was released for the GameCube, the PlayStation 2, and the Xbox last month. In this exclusive designer diary, Krome Studios cofounder and creative director Steve Stamatiadis discusses the development process, character design, and much more.

The Father of Ty

By Steve Stamatiadis
Creative Director & Cofounder

Meet Ty, star of three games and child of Steve Stamatiadis.

Welcome, stay a while... Stay for... Oops, wrong line. Welcome to this little chat about the art side of the development of Ty the Tasmanian Tiger 3: Night of the Quinkan. I'll be your host for this reading; my name is Steve Stamatiadis. I'm the creative director at Krome Studios to the business world, but to gamers I'm the lead designer and art director on the Ty the Tasmanian Tiger series of games (actually, that's way more fun than the business side of things). I've been working on the Ty the Tasmanian Tiger games since we started work on the first one five years ago. I guess you can call me the "Father of Ty"--at least, that's what my PR person keeps introducing me as when I meet people. But seriously, I admit to being a major force behind our little yellow furry mate, as I created the look and style of all things Ty, including Ty himself. So, needless to say, I know a little about the art and storyline of the series, which we'll touch upon in this diary installment. That said, let me go ahead and fill you in a bit on our latest game, Ty the Tasmanian Tiger 3: Night of the Quinkan.

The Story Starts Here
With previous Ty the Tasmanian Tiger games, the story was something we wrapped around the gameplay to hold it all tighter. We'd always have way more story than would really fit in the games without it getting in the way, so much of it had to sit on the sidelines. Besides, Ty the Tasmanian Tiger is an action platformer--so who really wants to see endless cutscenes of people blabbering away? That said, the story, even in a kid-friendly game, is an important way to drive the player onward toward a final goal. It also helps give a sense of achievement after the completion of missions, because the player can see where it's all leading to, instead of a mission just being a bunch of things to do.

We took a slightly different approach to the story in Night of the Quinkan than we did in the previous Ty the Tasmanian Tiger games. Whereas we had concentrated solely on Ty's story arc on the first two games, with NOTQ, we set out from the start to develop several different arcs for Ty and the major supporting characters like Shazza, Sly, and Fluffy. Any time we ever start working on a Ty story there are usually a bunch of "it would be cool if" or "it would be fun if" points that serve as the basis for the game. For instance, in NOTQ there was the whole issue of a Ty, Shazza, and Sly love triangle. It surfaced on its own in the second game. Ironically, it was originally planned that Ty should have a rival for Shazza's affections back in the first game--a character called Red the Blue Healer was going to play that part. Sadly, he was cut from the first game, so we added him in the second but he never really worked out in that capacity. It wasn't until the final few cutscenes in Bush Rescue that we realized that Sly had come to fit that role much better.

Shazza and Red the Blue Healer were destined never to hook up.

Similar to how kid relationships are in real life, we wanted to have Ty finally realize that he may have romantic feelings for Shazza as his girlfriend, not just as his buddy. With the major plot points and story beats for the main arc worked out, we went back in and added the secondary plot points to fill out the rest of the story. This also gave Night of the Quinkan the feel that a much larger story than in the previous games was taking place, mostly because there actually was a much larger story in progress.

Characters
My favorite part of the game development process. Our approach to designing the characters is very different to just about every other studio out there. Most of the Ty characters start out as drawings first, then we work out how they fit into things. While this process is pretty much backward to the rest of the world--maybe "down under" is a better term--the method has worked really well for us in the past and we'll continue to use it for future projects. After we have the visual cue of a character's design, it really defines most of their character down the line--from dialogue to animation.