Q: As far as the characters were concerned, what main principles emerged straight away?

Stanislas:
From the very beginning, we set out to highlight the combats and the enemies in this project. So our aim was to create opponents capable of lots of movements and behavior patterns to support the combat system developed by the game designers.

The other major idea, from the outset, was to make the universe more lively, so the player could really get immersed in it. Now, it it's liveliness you want, then you need lots of living beings! So our ambition was to create a whole population of tiny creatures and secondary characters to fill out the Rayman world.

In short, right from the start we knew that we had to create tons of characters!

Q: At the start of the project, did you try to find a style for the characters that differed from the other Rayman episodes?

Stéphane:
As it turned out, we preferred to deepen and enrich the style we'd always used in the Rayman games - a slightly absurd, cartoonish style.

We tried to create folk with characters you could identify immediately, then we worked up their graphic appearance and animations according to their characters!

If you want charismatic characters, the trick is to push their personalities to the maximum. In a game like Rayman, which is highly action-based, you've got very little time to flesh out a character and develop his or her psychological depth, unlike in an adventure game. If the player is to get attached to the characters, they have to have instant charisma which can be spotted straight away from their appearance, style and animations. So their features are pretty much "overdone", in the pure traditional cartoon style ...

Stanislas:
Yes, we tried to stick as closely as possible to a cartoon style by working on all the characters' expressions and animations. The idea was to give them real attitude and make the player laugh at their exaggeration.

If you take the example of Globox, he's a jolly character with good-natured attitudes. Then, when he drinks, he starts stretching and distorting in every direction. He staggers and he even crawls along on the ground. By making his attitudes as zany as possible, we turn him into a really wacky fellow traveler.

Q: Let's go back to the enemies. Where did you get the idea for the Hoodlums?

Stéphane:
We were looking for a fairly simple principle that would be easy to offer in a variety of forms for several characters, without repeating exactly the same thing.

The idea for the Hoodlums came from one of my sketches. It was a sort of Mexican holding a fat rifle and wearing a big sombrero and a kind of poncho covering his whole body. He was a blend of Darkman from Rayman 1 - a mysterious character rolled up in his cloak, for those who don't know him - and the hunter, also in Rayman 1. Then came the idea to make characters out of cloth. This was easy for the player to recognize, and very simple for us to vary. What's more, rendering the flexibility of different fabrics was a graphic challenge that was interesting to take up.

Once we'd found the basic principle, we worked on the basic psychologies to create a whole heap of characters. For example, using a slightly mannered and mysterious profile, we created "Hoodoo", an elongated sorcerer. For "Slapdash", we wanted to create a fat moron. So we made him a nice bright strawberry color and gave him a vacant look and a fairly oafish physique.

page 1 | page 2