Gadgetory

hey this is andrew with the verge we're here at the game developers conference taking a look at disney infinity it's a new platform from disney it's part game it sparked toy sounds an awful lot like Skylanders disney infinity features a line of physical toys that you can bring into the digital world via these collectible interactive game pieces these figures actually store because they have memory on them all of your experiences inside the game so one of the things is that we wanted to make sure that we were always writing to the memory of the toy and that actually adds value to consumers that consumer can go and then take that toy to different platforms in the world where consumers have so many different choices of consoles and mobile devices what we wanted to do is make it so that players could take any character that they purchased from infinity and bring it to another platform it's the first time ever that we're bringing all of the disney characters together under one roof and so probably one of the most interesting challenges that we had was coming up with an art style that all the characters could live in when you look at a character like Sully and his fiction and monsters University he's an 11 foot tall monster and when you put him next to you know Lightning McQueen he's a car so we had to come up with this really unique art style where it felt like all the characters could live inside of the same universe together so the game is divided in two parts there's a sort of standard action game where you play through worlds starting the monsters inc and the incredibles but more interestingly there's a creation element that has sort of a minecraft by the toy box is really where we allow players to just be as creative as they want to be we equip them with a number of different items and things that they can use to you know build anything from you know castle in the sky to a villains cave and everything in between we start teaching kids right off the bat about you know how does driving work and how do melee mechanics work and how to sword combat work and how does range the tax work so we we teach those through a series of what we call master emissions and then as time progresses we actually layer on more and more advanced techniques the hope is that with some of the you know game design techniques and tools that we've actually put inside of infinity at some of the same tools we use to create the game that were actually get you know consumers thinking more about game design and thinking more about building their own skill set what they could do there's tutorials to teach you how to build within the toy box because it essentially is you know kind of like a level editor or some basic programming so the trick there is to do it in the right degree in each step the other thing is that what we're planning on doing is running a series of contests those contests will come at launch and then also post launch there are going to ask players and encourage players to submit content to Disney to be ranked and curated by us and then push back down to the community so we're talking about having contests like build the coolest version of Disneyland that you can or build the most ultimate roller coaster that you can or build your favorite 80s arcade game are there also these neat little chips that add new game elements into the world like objects based on other Disney properties or new abilities for your characters or you can reskin the entire world plus more importantly there's Tron the other day I actually went through and created the stadium actually I put down the the sky and the ground to theme the entire toy box to be the grid then I took Stadium pieces and actually recreated that scene the battle scene inside of the stadium on the grid you know greetings programs right when clue is up addressing and when we see Sam for the first time I think I've got kind of a reputation for making elaborate roller coasters around the office I sometimes get a little carried away I've got three kids of my own and I'm really excited to be working on a game that I just want to you know end up playing with them you know just so much they want to play