Invincible VS brings the popular superheroes and villains from the pages of comic books and TV screens to the arena of video games. Given its comic roots, the art direction is a crucial component of the game’s presentation and gameplay. We spoke to the game’s art director at developer Quarter Up, Dan Eder, to learn how the team settled on its visual style, which Invincible character was the most challenging to bring to life, how designing original hero Ella Mental differed from working on the existing cast, and what it was like to collaborate with Invincible’s creators.
Game Informer: Before this, you have previously worked on MultiVersus as an artist, so you kind of already have experience working with established characters and art directions. Were there any lessons that you learned from working on that game’s art that you’ve carried over into Invincible VS?
Dan Eder: So many, so many. I think whenever you’re working with an existing IP, there’s always the question of how you’re going to translate and adapt, right? Because it’s not a one-to-one sort of interpretation. You have a lot of characters that you know are from different mediums, and then they have to work and feel cohesive next to the rest of the roster. With MultiVersus, [it] was even more extreme, because you get very different art styles; Bugs Bunny, but then you got to Aria Stark from Game of Thrones, right? So here, there was still the interpretive process, but they all came from the same universe, so it was a little bit easier. But it is a different medium, so you couldn’t exactly take the design from the comics or the show and do a one-to-one because it wouldn’t necessarily work in the context of what we’re doing, both because, visually, it’s a different art style, and B., it’s a different medium. So there were a lot of decisions that we had to make with certain characters, some design elements, how we want to portray materials, which have always been so flat for characters, for example, but now, with this being a more PBR or physically based sort of graphical style, how we’re going to interpret all of that. So that was a lot of our “foundational stage.” It’s really how to get the material library and how to kind of make sure that we’re creating something that’s authentic to the IP but still elevated and doesn’t feel like a copy-paste sort of process.
Can you elaborate on that point you mentioned about the existing art direction not working one-to-one in this context? Can you explain why it would be? Because I know there are probably fans who are like, “Why doesn’t it just look exactly like the show?”
Eder: Yeah, well, I think the show has a pretty simplified style for a good reason, right? It’s basically hand-drawn. You have to keep the details, I would say, to a minimum, or at least not overwhelming. And a lot of it comes down to cheating. There’s a lot of stuff you can do in 2D that you can’t necessarily do in 3D. We’re working with actual 3D models versus a painted illustration, where you can do whatever you want, in essence. So there were a lot of characters initially, where we kind of looked at how they’re designed – I think Battle Beast was one example – and we figured out pretty early on that it just wouldn’t make a lot of sense in terms of how it’s going to bend, for example, like the metals. And that’s when we had to take some creative liberties, and that’s always in cooperation with the creators. So Robert [Kirkman], Cory [Walker], and Ryan [Ottley] are basically explaining why certain things have to be adjusted, but also without deviating too much from the design. We don’t want to create our own design for these characters; we are using the show primarily as a reference point. But we have had to adjust certain things.
Another example, I think, is Ella Mental. The initial version that we got did have a very simplified design that I think, if you kind of look from the gateway camera, the sort of three-quarters we have, you’d get a lot of very flat colored surfaces. I think for the show, that would be totally fine, right? Because it’s a 2D cartoonish aesthetic. For us, it just wouldn’t hold up compared to some of the other characters or the overall level of detail that we want to have in the game. So it’s on a case-by-case basis. It’s always about, “Is this good to go, as is?” Some characters were. Or “Are we going to have to add some elements to make it feel as high-fidelity as we’re kind of showing for.”
How closely are you working with Robert and Cory on this? Are they pretty hands-on, or are they giving you, like you said, the creative license to do what you want? Are there any specific pieces of feedback that you’ve gotten from them that have helped with the art direction?
Eder: They’re heavily involved in every decision we make. That’s not to say that they make all the decisions. I think, luckily, we have a very healthy, trusting relationship. Pretty early on, we kind of gave them the reassurances that we get the IP and that we love it. We’re all huge, massive fans of Invincible, and any decision that we make has to have a good reason. We’re not just haphazardly changing things just to mess up the characters of the world. But it is very important for us to involve them in everything, from new characters to new environments to certain decisions that we make that might be original. You don’t have source material for everything that you have in the game, right? So in those cases, we make a lot of pitches to Robert, saying, “Hey, we need to change this and that, this is the reason why, here’s roughly what it’s going to look like; what do you think?” And then 9 times out of 10, it’s going to be like, “Hell yeah, do your thing,” which is, again, I think the best case scenario, because I think there’s a trusting relationship, but we make sure not to exploit it. Just because we can doesn’t mean that we want to mess [with] things too much. If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it, right?
And I think a lot of the charm of Invincible is in its characters, in its simplicity, and that’s something we really want to preserve, but we also don’t want to be held back by certain restrictions that maybe do not apply to us, right? Because, again, it’s a different medium. So we swing big. That’s my general philosophy: “Hey, let’s swing big.” Let’s make it as cool as possible without going too hard to a point of sort of jeopardizing what made the original so special. But we always look at this game as sort of an extension of the IP, not like a spin-off. We want this to be a leveled-up, elevated version of something that a lot of people know and love, but we have to get the creators on board. We can’t just do our own thing. And luckily, they’ve been insanely supportive. So that’s been a real privilege.
For Ella Mental, was her visual design more or less finalized by the time you guys got to see it? Or did you guys get to chip in on that creative process as well to kind of get us where she needed to be?
Eder: More or less. Yeah, I think she was about 90 percent of the way there. She looked like she does now, but we definitely added a few bells and whistles again, for the sake of making her look interesting in the context of the game, right? So the overall character, the backstory, the shape language, the facial features were pretty much the same. But yeah, as far as the costume goes, there was definitely a little bit of back and forth to make sure that she feels complete from a conceptual standpoint.
Was it trickier with Ella Mental because she doesn’t have any existing animation references? She’s not in the show, so you’re kind of only working with drawings.
Eder: I thought it was liberating, actually, because we could do our own thing. I think with a lot of other characters, we didn’t want to deviate too much. Because, look at Rex, for example; people know Rex, and they love him. We weren’t going to change anything significantly. I think with Ella, because she’s new, we had a bit more wiggle room there, so we could chime in on certain visual elements that have evolved over time, from how we portray her elements, for example, through certain facial features that have evolved; when we took it from concept to 3d there’s always a little bit of an evolution. The same goes for all of our other characters, but I think with Ella, even more so, because you have never seen her in 3d form, you’ve never had other angles other than the ones that we got from Cory, which was just a sketch. And again, luckily, we did change certain things, but I think “refined” is the word. Not necessarily changed, but we refined a lot of things that were a little bit ambiguous in the concept. And luckily, Cory was fully on board. He loved it. He even embraced it. When he did his own variant, which he recently posted, he actually used the updated design that we did for the game. So as you can see, there’s a lot of back and forth, right? It’s not like, “Hey, you did this. I’m going to do my own thing.” It’s “How can we learn from each other and adopt certain elements, no pun intended, that are gonna work for both of us.”
Was there anything that you had to teach Robert and Cory about the game design process that maybe they weren’t aware of going into this?
Eder: Yeah. They’re not game devs, and I think there’s a lot that they taught us that we didn’t know about these characters in this world, but there’s a lot that we had to explain, because it is a different workflow. I think one example is when you send them poses for approval, which is something that we do. We have those really beautiful character key art pieces that we post on our website, and then all the promotional material. And a lot of times we start with a lot of different poses, and sometimes you get what I call 3D-isms, which is weird stretching, or weird deformations that happen because of the rig. You can’t clean that up as easily as you can in 2D because you got a whole joint system dictating how things are going to behave. And then I love the responses, because [they’ll ask,] “Why is this so weird? Why is this stretching?” So we always have to explain that’s part of the process, it will get cleaned up, but we always give them the context because we are aware that they don’t come from game dev. We don’t hold that against them. I think it’s actually a good thing because they’re not just sort of critiquing this with the game dev goggles. It’s like a blank slate for them. So it allows us to not be limited by what game devs would see as clear boundaries, where they don’t have those boundaries. And we actually appreciate it, because it allows us to think outside the box a lot of the time, and overall, I think it’s a very healthy relationship.
I’m an Invincible fan, too, and I also appreciate how relatively simple a lot of the character designs are, because I think it lets their personalities shine through more. But that said, was there any character that you found the most challenging to translate to this fighting game style?
Eder: I think every character introduced a new challenge because you don’t have typical archetypes. They’re not like all those classic bodysuit superhero figures. They’re different. So you have a character like Mark and Omni-Man, who are those superhero archetypes, but then you have Monster Girl, which is weird because it’s a little girl, but it’s also a huge monster. And I think that’s one example of a character that kind of took me back to the MultiVersus days with Iron Giant, where you have a really big character, and then [ask,] “How do we make it work without obscuring all the gameplay and all the action?” So it’s always about running those tests as early as possible before fully committing. We do a lot of prototyping with very ugly models by design just to validate everything. We have to validate scale, we have to validate silhouette and overall readability. You can have the most beautiful game in the world, but if it’s not clear and readable, then it’s not good. If the player gets confused, then it doesn’t matter how beautiful it is. So we put a huge emphasis on gameplay clarity and readability. So each character that’s a little bigger than the average or smaller, it always initiates that conversation of, “How do we make them feel balanced and dominate the entire playing field?”
Speaking from a purely artistic standpoint, who have been some of your favorite characters to work on?
Eder: Oh, man. Wow, so many. So I think Cecil was a really interesting one because you had to take the most generic-looking character – just an old guy in a suit – and make him interesting. I think a lot of other characters, they’re just cool from the get-go, like freaking Battle Beast; how can you not make him cool? But with Cecil, you had to put a lot of that coolness factor into his animation; his poses, his shape language, his facial expressions, his color palette. If you look at his gameplay, the way that he sort of behaves with the teleportation is a lot of those little flares that we had to add to make him feel non-pedestrian. He had to feel like he’s not a lame version of everyone else on the roster, and I think because of his kit, because of how well rounded is, we got there. And I think he’s on par with everyone else in terms of how unique and cool it is. But it took a whole lot of time for us to nail it, because initially, when we were looking at the model, we’re like, “How are we going to make this guy cool? He’s just so slender and dull.” But I think he has such an expressive face, and again, his animation, his poses, the VFX, the sort of weapon switching that he does, where he basically summons a whole bunch of different projectiles and weapons. It lends itself to a very complete feeling gameplay experience, and I’m really glad we managed to solve that, because for the longest time, I was a little bit skeptical of whether or not we’re going to actually make it work.
What went into designing the stages themselves? Are they as referential as the characters and the moves? Are there any original stages in the game, or are they all pulled from either the comic or the show?
Eder: They’re entirely referential. Luckily, Invincible has such a wide array of environments to pick from that we had to narrow it down to the ones that we have in the game, but we had hundreds of environments that we were talking about initially. So many different biomes and even planets. And it’s all about, “How can we make the experience unique from one environment to another? We don’t want to copy-paste that environment. We didn’t want to have one Chicago and then another Chicago slums environment, or whatever. So we wanted them to feel completely different from each other. So you have Chicago, and then after that, you have the Himalayas, and then you have the Moon. So it’s not just the environment itself, it’s the atmosphere, it’s the feel, it’s the color palette, it’s the environmental reaction.
For Chicago, for example, whenever we have what we call a round reset, where one character dies and then the other one swoops in and they do the clash, everything around you crumbles and gets destroyed. So it’s always about giving the player a different experience from one environment to another, be it indoor or outdoor, but also never at the expense of the characters. Characters, in being that sort of organic life, have always been our focal point. We don’t want the environment to distract from the foreground or the fight planes, we call it. We wanted to just kind of make it feel more grounded to an extent. We were very mindful about stuff like saturation levels or contrast or creating the sort of focal point right towards the center.
So I think initially we had a lot of elements in the background that started competing with the actual gameplay to the point of distraction. That’s when we had to take a couple of steps back and say, “Hey, how do we still keep the environments looking amazing, but not at the expense of the character?” So with the Moon, for example, we will notice that it’s very monochromatic, right, as you would expect the Moon to be. And there’s never too much going on in the background. You will never have anything major happen, creating a huge earthquake or something, because we don’t want people to confuse that as a gameplay thing. But I think ultimately, and you haven’t seen all the environments yet, there’s a few that we haven’t shown, but I think ultimately they’re incredibly unique, from one environment to another, different color palettes, different fields, different environmental reaction that I think it’s going to be a lot of fun for players to jump from one to another and get a completely different experience every time.
The show is still ongoing, but the comic has been finished for years. Is there any consideration to exclude art references for anything that has not yet happened in the show? Or is that comic content fair game? How do you balance catering to fans of the show versus the comic fans?
Eder: We definitely don’t spoil anything for show fans because a lot of people are only familiar with the show. They’re diehard Invincible fans, but they’re just not into comics, and that’s totally fine. So we don’t want to have a character that you’re not going to see anywhere near Season 4 [Editor’s Note: Quarter Up recently revealed one of the Year 1 DLC fighters will be Universa, who debuts in Season 4]. Having said that, we do look at the comics a lot, both for reference and in terms of just future planning, for future characters, or anything that we might end up doing. But what would be a cool idea of something that’s completely different from what we have in our roster? So we never just look at the show. We look at both. We try to kind of mix and match and find the best of both worlds and how we can create something that’s unique, but again, that’s not going to jump too far ahead to a point of players looking at the character and saying, “Who the hell is that?” And then that’s a little bit of a spoiler. But we do talk about that stuff a lot, because we don’t want to only be working with Season 1, Season 2 materials. We want to have a very complete and full roster of characters. So we’ll look at the entirety of the invincible IP characters, and that includes the comics.
What are you most excited for fans to notice or appreciate about Invincible VS’ art direction, whether it’s the work you guys have done with the characters or the stages?
Eder: I think as massive Invincible fans ourselves, we put a lot of little easter eggs and a lot of small touches that might kind of fly over the head of a lot of people, but if you’re an Invincible fan, you’re gonna be like, “Oh s—, I know where that’s from.” So from the VO lines in the intros to some of the little texture details that I think most people are going to miss, but they sort of go back to certain moments from the show or the comics, there’s a lot of small bits of personality. I think Invincible is all about personalities, not this generic cookie-cutter superhero show. It has a lot of heart. It has a lot of depth in its characters and its world, and we wanted to inject as much of that as possible into our game, and we used every opportunity to do that. And that’s already started with our gameplay trailers, where they spout a few lines and [fans] say, “Oh s—, I know exactly where that’s from.” Like, Cecil [saying] teleportation costing taxpayers billions of dollars every day he teleports. So stuff like that, I love to see the discussion behind that in the comments. And as an Invincible fan, making a game for Invincible fans, this is just a joy, an absolute privilege, because you’re doing it for them, but you’re also doing it for you. It’s awesome.
To learn more about Invincible VS, be sure to subscribe to read our digital cover story. You can also check out these online features detailing gameplay for Dupli-Kate, the game’s cinematic story mode, and the history of Invincible in video games.