In episode 12 of TheGamer Podcast, myself and podcast host extraordinaire Eric Switzer sat down with Guardians of the Galaxy art director Bruno Gauthier Leblanc to discuss the upcoming game. If you’re allergic to the smooth tones of Eric’s perfect podcast voice, you can read the transcript of the interview below, which has been edited for clarity.
ES: First of all, can you describe what your role as art director on Guardians was, and the kind of things that fell into your purview?
BGL: The biggest role is to come up with the visual identity for the game. Even though it's a well established licence, we really wanted to make it ours, so it was important to come up with an identity that people could see at first and really say ‘oh that's Eidos-Montreal’s take on Guardians of the Galaxy.’ I also worked hand in hand with Marvel, I was the link to everything that was art for them.
ES: You've mentioned before in a dev diary that Rocket was the easiest character to settle on a design for. Who was the hardest character?
BGL: I think Gamora is definitely our hardest character to design, for a lot of reasons. Mainly, she's the only woman in the five Guardians, and it was really important that she hold her own design wise, but even narrative wise it was very important that she is a strong female character. We didn't want to oversexualize her at all, we wanted her to be one of the boys but still keep her fresh and almost scary to them. So it was really important for us to nail her design. We went through a lot of iterations with her, but in the end I’m really happy with what we came up with. There's an elegance to her, there's a fierceness in her design, even in little details in her fists and her feet - if you look closely there's claws and sharp daggers everywhere. She's always ready to pounce on the attack so she's always very dangerous, but throughout the story you get a softer side of her.
ES: Were all the characters motion-captured with actors?
BGL: Yes, they were all motion capture. Yeah, even the dog.
ES: Did you find that the performances informed the character designs in any way?
BGL: Actually, for this project we designed everything even before going into motion capture, and the reason is that even though we worked with 3D scans at the start of the modelling, I wanted to stay away from hyper realism. I find you can fall into the uncanny territory of video games and while some games in the past maybe two years have actually done it really well, when we started this project, no games had done it well.
SH: I think the environment was really interesting because they feel like alien worlds, which I know sounds like a bit of a silly thing to say about a game set in space. But a lot of games set in space just tend to be humans but in the future, whereas all of the planets that you go to in Guardians, they have that kind of space feel to them. How did you go about trying to create planets that had their own visual identity, instead of just being a futuristic mess?
BGL: It's hard. But the best way to create an environment, futuristic or non-futuristic, is by giving it a world and doing world building beforehand. In one of our environments, we have these, we call them salt flats, but they're not salt flats, and there are all these yellow trees that you walk on. We really like the idea of having these because it's part of our art direction to play with big shapes and have them in your face and repeat them. And then we were playing around with all these bigger half-sphere trees, and you're walking on them. But these things actually protect the flora from the storms that are always a constant on this planet. So when you go underneath these trees, then that's where the real lush environment is. So when you start actually building the world building, everything has a purpose and a function, then the worlds are credible. For every planet or city, we would approach it that way. There's a story element to all the visual things you see in the environments, we don't design things just because they look good. And I think that's what you were saying earlier, I think people just design things to look good, then you get in a mess, and there's no purpose, and then people just put everything on screen.
SH: Yeah, there's no neon lights and flashing colours and all those kinds of things that we associate with the future. But it's hard to imagine someone living in those worlds, so it's interesting that you guys at Guardians went in the opposite direction of ‘let's imagine people living there first and then create something’.
BGL: Who knows what [the future] will be like? We have planets that are very primitive. And then we have planets, or cities, or space stations that are super advanced. So it's a nice contrast that we have in the game.
ES: The worlds also have so much incredible scale to them. They feel like whole worlds when you're going through these levels. Was that always the design from the beginning?
BGL: Day one. You guys know we worked on Deus Ex and Deus Ex is amazing. But it's also very compact. It's not as epic in a grand scale of things when you're in the level. Epic was one of our keywords. You have to feel that, even though you're standing on a rock, you see the whole planet or see kilometres [into the distance]. Even though you won't go there, we have to sell the idea that these worlds are big and impressive. As soon as you’re on a planet you want that epic scale and the beauty of that, then you can sell your objective. On most of the planets you're on, you see your objective, even though you might not know what your objective is. If you're looking at a weird castle in the background, well, that's your objective. And then eventually you're going to go play there. So we're driving the player with visual cues that way too.
ES: I think one of the most interesting designs is Groot, and I know that you explained before that you kind of approach Groot as if he was a mech for Rocket. And I know I've seen some of your other mecha work through your artwork, too. And obviously Deus Ex has a cybernetic aesthetic. I'm wondering if all that background with mecha played into Guardians.
BGL: 100 percent. From day one, when we saw all the iterations of Groot done in the past, we really wanted to give him our flavour and I mean, I love Japanese mecha. I've loved it since I was a kid. This was a really good way to define shapes that you wouldn't find normally in Groot’s design. We did some versions of Groot that are completely off the hook. But eventually, he became way too bulky and couldn't move. You couldn’t do what the gameplay needed, and then another negative side of it, he became almost evil looking. When we were doing the story, we realised that Groot’s a sweetheart, he's the nicest one in the group. You can't visually create something that looks like a mecha monster with one that is a sweet soul. So we tamed it down. We kept a lot of other elements that we found, but just compacted it a little more. Like on the side of his shoulders, he's kind of got these shoulder pads that are completely mecha inspired. On his chest and his abdomen we took the wood like they were plates of armour that you would find on robots and mechas.
ES: Considering that the audience for the most part is only familiar with these characters from the movies, did you find that you were designing against the movies to try to make something very different? Or did you find you were more leaning into what people are familiar with?
BGL: No, we went against the grain. I think a big motto in the studio is to break expectations. We brought that to Marvel early on. And we're like, ‘Listen, we're not making the movie. We're not even making the comic books’. Our team looked at the comic books early on, maybe in the first few months. And then we put everything aside. Because to me, even if you don't want to, sometimes your brain and your creative mind can get these ideas attached to things you saw. So my idea with all the characters was ‘let's go get inspiration from everything else’. We weren't gonna make the characters completely different. But I mean, we had a version of Drax where he was just obese, you know, a big fat version of Drax. We showed Marvel and it shocked them, but not in a bad sense. Eventually we came up with a realisation that it didn't even fit our story either, even though it was cool looking. I mean, Drax is supposed to have beaten Thanos? And how will that guy who can barely walk because he's too fat beat Thanos? I tell all my artists to crank the dial - if it's a one-to-ten dial on your sound system, I say crank it to 12. And then it will bring it back to eight or nine. Right off the bat, we go crazy. And then we bring it back. Sometimes you grab one little idea that could make your own design. And that is what breaks expectations. We had a human-sized version of Rocket at some point. It was great. It was just odd, but we tried it. Until you have it in front of you, you don't know if it's going to be a good idea or not.
SH: Eric and I have both played a little bit of the game, and one of the things that was really interesting in terms of the costume design is how much respect you guys seem to have for the comics. Even when you guys produce your own original costumes, a lot of the ones that you unlock are taken from comics and the creators are credited. There are full details, the issue number they were in, there's a lot of respect for the history of these characters, where they come from other people who've had interpretations of them before. How far along into the process did you guys decide that was going to be something you were going to focus on?
BGL: I don't think we had a conversation. I think it's just when the idea came like, we have to do this. I mean, we're all artists ourselves. And if we don't get credited with something we do, we get mad. So we just wanted to pay respects to them. Having alternate costumes to me was just a no-brainer. The only issue is how many can we produce, because we produced so many, but there's still a few left on the table that we just didn't have time [for]. And I wish we could have done them all. But the Guardians have existed for a lot longer and there are a lot of alternate costumes and stuff like that. So I think we got the major ones in there that are the cool ones. We got some little funny ones and some original ones, too.
ES: I know you said the comics were something you looked at a lot early, and then put to the side. But is there anything specifically from the comics you can point to as an inspiration, or where people can go after they've played the game if they want more of this kind of thing?
BGL: It's hard to say because the comics to us, were just to understand. I'm not talking about the narrative team. I'm talking more about the art team. What are the key features on every character? Like, you can boil Star-Lord down to his jacket, I think. If you look at a lot of his versions, the red on his jacket has become more iconic. I did a yellow version of Star-Lord and we love that, but then we were like, this is not Star-Lord. And when we just turn the jacket red, we're like, oh, it's Star-Lord, so it's weird how these things work. Drax was the tattoos. You know, you can't have Drax without the tattoos, and with Gamora, the face paint. Every version of her has a version of face paint. So we made ours but we knew she had to have it. We couldn't have a bare face version of Gamora.
ES: Other developers that have worked with Marvel in the past have always described how open they are with the developer team and how much they share resources back and forth. What was your experience like working with Marvel?
BGL: Amazing. I was a little worried at first because I've been in the industry for a long time and I was in the industry when licenced games were horrible. You heard horror stories of studios making them, and Marvel was just a joy to work with. They gave us so much freedom. And they gave us so much extra knowledge of what the Guardians were. They gave us a huge catalogue of characters we could use, they would suggest characters. We would make our art - let's say we would make our own monster for our game or one of the enemies, and it was an original take. But when we'd go in our weekly meetings with Marvel, we would show them and they'd be like, ‘Oh, this kind of looks like this monster from this issue of X-Men’ in like, 1972 because they've got it all in their heads. And then you'd be like, ‘Yeah, let's call it that’. Now we have credibility. Now we have a monster that is actually a Marvel monster. And some they would let us just make our own, and they were so happy with it that they now use it in their lore for other things. It's all in their database. So it was a really nice, cooperative thing. They're the key holders to all the Marvel characters and it's important that we pay respect to them. I think we did it with respect on our own and they appreciated the way we did.
ES: As an artist, do you think that there were opportunities you had with the game, and with these characters, that the films either haven't done or just can't do because of the medium?
BGL: I think what the films do really well is character building. I think that's what a movie is about. But what we do is, like I said earlier, world building. In the movies, they go on these planets, but these planets are rarely explained. They're rarely shown in size, and what we had time to do is show and tell stories with these environments, and understand more of the lore of the Guardians of the Galaxy. It could be by visual world building, it could be by narrative world building by little codexes here, and stuff like that. I think you have a lot more time in a game to spend in these worlds and understand. If you want to learn more about it, the narrative team does a great job in the menus to explain all of these things.
ES: What about the characters that aren't the Guardians? Who are some of your favourite characters?
BGL: My favourite character by far is Mantis. Not even just from a visual standpoint, I'm just talking about acting wise. She's amazing. I think she's hilarious, I've never laughed out loud so much at a game as I did during this game. Even replaying sections, Mantis is always making me laugh. I love the character. And visually, I love what we did with it. And we even pushed some things with her that you rarely see in the game, but I thought were cool like how her eyes came out of her and actually clicked, creating a Mantis-like eye like a hand. I think we showed it once in the game, but that was weeks of research for a concept artist. So there are a lot of little cool ideas like that. But yeah, Mantis is number one, for sure. I think one we created on our own is Kammy, our space alpaca. She kicks off our game, it's a really cool creature that shows emotion in weird ways and is there throughout the game just for funny bits. I was really happy. There is a big, big one towards the end that I love. I won't say what it is. But it's green. And it's awesome.
ES: That’s a good tease. I'm also curious about the music just because Guardians is really unique in that the soundtrack is tied to Star-Lord so specifically and because so much of the music is diegetic. Is there anything about marrying the design in the music and the art that was unique?
BGL: Yeah, there are a lot of things the music inspired. The artists inspire the music, in the sense that when we came up with the idea of Star-Lord being a band that Peter liked, then he took the Star-Lord name to be his cosmic name. That came from the art team in the early days, and then we pitched it to the creative director. He loved it. And then as soon as our audio director heard, he's like, ‘Oh man, we can make a full album’. And then he rolled with it and came back to us with all these ‘80s influences that influenced how Star-Lord dresses in our game. I mean, this is a big ‘80s metal influence. You play him as a kid in the first five minutes of the game. All the ‘80s influences in creating his room was a blast to me, to be 40 having grown up in the ‘80s.
ES: What's a Marvel character or a team that you'd like to tackle for another video game?
BGL: If I had my choice, I think it'd be for nostalgia’s sake because I was a big X-Men fan. So I think I'd love to make an X-Men game. A nice full ensemble X-Men game. There hasn't been one, they're never pure X-Men games.
SH: Mainly just Wolverine.
BGL: Yeah, there's the Insomniac announced Wolverine, but I do like a full on original five members, not Wolverine. I love Wolverine, but the original five members, I would love that. They'd be great. They're all so different, they have different powers. We'll see.
SH: Watch this space. And just following on from the thing with the music, because that was one of the most interesting things for me in the game. It's not just that it uses music so well. It's that it's so self aware, it knows it's being silly. It doesn't pick big epic songs, it picks Wake Me Up Before You Go Go in the middle of boss battles. As an art team, knowing that when you have this big epic fight against Lady Hellbender, George Michael’s going to start playing, that must allow you to have a lot of fun with designing the scenes. There must be a bit of leeway to push limits a bit more than you would on a more serious game like Deus Ex.
BGL: Yeah, for sure. I mean, the quirkiness, the fun aspect - we call it more of a Marvel aspect - liberated us a lot from old franchises that were a little more serious. We all had to adjust now that we all came from Deus Ex, we were all veterans of the brand [who] were given a Marvel title that’s like ‘the keyword is fun’. Maybe some Marvel licences are a little more serious, but the Guardians of the Galaxy do not take themselves seriously at all. Playing around with that in every aspect meant we could put some of these elements in our designs, like we were talking about Kammy. That's cool, that's weird. Also for alien designs I think when we're talking about just quirky and weird and fun, that was another big thing because you can have alien games or movies that take their designs very seriously and try to make them as realistic as possible. I was telling our concept artists to think out of the box, and then he comes up with a man in a spacesuit, but his head is a bunch of eels like swimming around in it. What else? Oh yeah, we have a big dwarf-looking alien that just has one eyeball. He has no mouth. We have no idea how he eats. We had so much fun with creating the aliens and I think it definitely comes from the quirkiness of the brand.
SH: Oh, absolutely. When you do the X-Men game that will be more serious.
BGL: Yeah, that would be a little more going back to Deus Ex, I guess, haha.
You can listen to the interview you just read, but with more ‘um’s and ‘ah’s, on episode 12 of TheGamer Podcast.