Q&A with Natalie Jasmin About Teen Titan's Conceptualization and Finalization.

GamePro.com got the chance to catch up with Natalie Jasmin, Game Director of Artificial Mind & Movement (A2M), about her experiences working on the upcoming Teen Titans game.

GamePro.com got the chance to catch up with Natalie Jasmin, Game Director of Artificial Mind & Movement (A2M), about her experiences working on the upcoming Teen Titans videogame .

GamePro: Why create a videogame incarnation of the Teen Titans?
Natalie Jasmin: When we heard we were doing Teen Titans, we watched the show and found that watching the show was like playing a videogame. In the show, they play videogames and the team is very combat oriented. So it was really easy to port the TV series to the video game. We had tons of ideas. It was really easy.

GP: How difficult was it to craft the Teen Titans world? You had to stay true to the Titans universe while making certain creative decisions to enhance gameplay. Was there any conflict in that?
NJ: I'd say that Beast Boy was a quite challenge because he turns into so many animals in an episode. He was one of our main constraints. We really had to think about how to us him. Because of the main constraints, we couldn't have him turn into twenty different animals during a single level. Also, from a gameplay point of view, we talked about the concepts of making sure that the game would be pick-up and play for all kids.

In order to do that, we wanted the characters to feel the same as the cartoon, but also give that variation. It's something that was very important to DC and Warner. How can we have the player play as Robin and switch to Raven and still feel like they were playing the same game. Raven is still Raven; she's very dark, while Robin is really fast. That was the challenge.

But Beast Boy was a character who could transform into animals. We needed Beast Boy, as an animal, to deliver his attacks. He was quite a challenge. So what we ended up doing is including a total of 15 playable animals in the game. We decided to have Beast Boy transform into an animal to deliver a specific attack, but we didn't allow the player to just walk around as any animal because of collision restraints.

GP: Right, like a ram would be smaller than a T-Rex.
NJ: Right, there you go. So the ram would be used to charge enemy characters for about three seconds. We also used the animals to ramp up and upgrade characters. Every time you finish a level, you'll be able to unlock different moves and upgrade certain moves to make them more powerful and cause more damage.

With Beast Boy, instead of giving him a new punch, he would be able to transform from a ram to a bull, and increase his abilities by using different animals. The system tends to work pretty well, but it was quite a headache at the beginning of development. We said, "Oh my god, how are we going to portray the Beast Boy in the show without disappointing the players?"

Early on, we did a user test with Majesco and it was really amazing to see the kids playing as Beast Boy and shouting, "Oh, I can transform into an elephant. Give me Beast Boy. I want to play Beast Boy. What's this new animal"? The kid's were really into it. I said, "Wow, we really achieved what we wanted to do."

GP: What process did you go through to select the boss characters in the game? There's so many different characters, so many archenemies. How did you guys narrow the selection to a handful of them?
NJ: The process obviously had to do with DC and Warner. We had to make sure we could use some of the characters from a legal and story point of view. We started working on the story with John Zuur Platten and Flint Dille who had prior written Batman in a few games. It was really important to make sure that the enemies were integrated in the storyline.

The Titans fans would expect to see a lot of character development-focused plotlines in the game. Was it intentional to focus on the action aspect and not focus on character development aspects in the game?

That was intentional because we didn't want to create a game were it was always stopped by cinematics. We really wanted the rhythm to be boom, boom, boom. We didn't want to have any down time. We do have a little bit of cut scenes, but we decided to focus on the videogame theme aspects of the story because that was something that could be told without being too cinematic heavy.

GP: Are there any options to continuing with a sequel to this game? The cartoon series is rumored to be on hiatus after season five. The game may be the only venue for diehard Titans fans to be able to still visit the Titans universe.
NJ: Umm, that would be more a DC and Majesco question. But we'd be all for it.

GP: So you would be all for tackling a sequel to this game and revisiting the Titans world?
NJ: Oh yeah, there's so many possibilities. Making another Titans game would be fun. There are so many enemies that we didn't get to use. Some of them we used in the arena mode, but they could have been used in the story mode. That would be a blast to make.

GP: Thank you for your time.
NJ: You're very welcome.

To check out our interview with Teen Titans theme song performers Puffy Amiyumi, go here:
http://gamepro.com/sony/ps2/games/features/51943.shtml

To check out our feature on Teen Titans, go here:
http://gamepro.com/sony/ps2/games/features/51940.shtml

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