Toonstruck
Toonstruck is a graphic adventure video game developed by Burst Studios, published by Virgin Interactive Entertainment and released in 1996 for DOS. The game uses hand-drawn imagery and animated characters, but the protagonist Drew Blanc is represented as a video-captured live action character interacting with the cartoon world around him. In the game, Blanc is transported into the cartoon world he created while suffering from a creative block. Blanc is accompanied by his animated sidekick Flux Wildly.
Conceived in 1993 as a game geared towards children, Toonstruck was later re-written to be more adult-oriented. Virgin Interactive invested huge amounts of money into the game, which ended up costing in excess of US$8 million. In addition to Lloyd, the cast includes several well-known actors and voice actors such as Dan Castellaneta, Tim Curry, David Ogden Stiers and Dom DeLuise. Toonstruck features scan-line compressed FMV that is composited with hand-drawn animated sequences produced by Burst, Nelvana and Rainbow Animation.
Toonstruck was well received by gaming critics, who mostly praised the quality of the animation and the design of the puzzles, but it was a financial disappointment for Virgin. It has since been included in several lists of the best adventure games of all time.
Gameplay
Toonstruck is a point-and-click adventure game where the player controls Drew Blanc, accompanied by his cartoon sidekick Flux. The game uses a "Bottomless Bag" as an inventory icon, and the mouse pointer, represented by an animated white-gloved hand, is context-sensitive, changing its icon depending on what it is rolled over. Dialogue options with characters are displayed as graphical icons that represent the topic of conversation. One of the standard icons is a cube of ice ; as dialogue options are exhausted, the cube melts into a puddle of water. According to Joystick, there are 52 original characters to interact with, as well as 80 puzzles to solve and 120 objects to retrieve.The main objective of the game is to locate and collect several items to build a machine that has an opposite effect to that of the antagonist, Count Nefarious. These components are spread throughout the three kingdoms of Cutopia, Zanydu and the Malevolands. Many of the puzzles are based on object manipulation, although there are also some logic and arcade-style puzzles. For certain parts, the player must use the abilities of Flux as a cartoon character to advance. This is done by selecting Flux and using him much like an item.Toonstruck presents a non-linear structure. Puzzles often require using objects from one location in the others; therefore, players must travel back-and-forth through the three lands throughout the first part of the game. The second part of Toonstruck sees Drew being imprisoned in Count Nefarious's castle; this section takes place entirely within the castle, and unlike the first, Flux is not present. Similarly to the LucasArts adventure games, it is not possible to die in the game, and there are no dead-ends that require the player to start over or load an earlier save file.
Plot
Animator Drew Blanc is the original creator of the Fluffy Fluffy Bun Bun Show, which has been a ten-year success for his company. In reality, the many cute talking rabbits that star in the show sicken him. His self-revered creation Flux Wildly, a wise-talking small purple character, has been denied the chance of starring in his own show. Drew's boss Sam Schmaltz sets him the task of designing more bunnies to co-star in the show by the next morning. However, the depressed animator nods off, suffering from acute artist's block. He wakes in the night to find his television switched on, announcing the Fluffy Fluffy Bun Bun Show. Drew is mysteriously drawn into the TV screen and transported to a cartoon world populated by his own creations, among many other cartoon characters. He befriends Flux Wildly and discovers that this fictional paradise is being ravaged by a ruthless new character named Count Nefarious with a weapon of evil called the Malevolator, a flying saucer which mutates the idyllic landscape and its inhabitants into dark and twisted counterparts.Upon meeting with King Hugh, the king of Cutopia, Drew is given the task of hunting down and stopping Nefarious, thereby restoring peace and harmony to the land, in return for safe passage back to three-dimensional reality. Drew and Flux go on a scavenger hunt through the lands of Cutopia, Zanydu and the Malevolands to collect the parts needed to complete the Cutifier, a counter-weapon to Nefarious's Malevolator. After Nefarious's feline assistant Ms. Fortune informs him that Drew is working against him, the villain sends his henchmen after Drew and Flux, who find several ways to hide from the clumsy stooges. As Drew and Flux carry on with their quest, Nefarious continues his attacks on Cutopia, destroying Fluffy Fluffy Bun Bun's meadow; turning the kingdom's Carecrow, a friendly mannequin, into a creepy scarecrow; and turning Polly and Marge, a sheep and a cow who produce butter in a barn, into a dominatrix and a submissive in bondage.
After collecting all the parts and inserting them in the Cutifier, Drew and Flux revert the damage caused by Nefarious. After reuniting with King Hugh, Drew considers his mission finished and asks the king to be sent back to the real world. However, Hugh tells Drew that the deal was not only to save Cutopia, but to cutify Zanydu and the Malevolands as well. Hugh reveals himself to actually be Fluffy Fluffy Bun Bun in disguise, with a plan to rule over all kingdoms and become a god. Before Drew and Flux can escape, Fluffy strikes Flux with the Cutifier, turning him into her minion, and commands him to execute her evil plan. Although Drew flees, he ends up captured and taken to Count Nefarious, who injects him with a serum that will eventually turn him into a cartoon. Ms. Fortune hypnotizes Drew and he reveals the location of Flux and the Cutifier. Nefarious then goes after Flux, while Drew is imprisoned in Nefarious's castle.
Drew manages to set himself free and navigates through the castle to find the Malevolator and a gadget that can warp him to reality. As soon as he hops in the Malevolator, Nefarious appears on the saucer's screen attempting to bargain with Drew and convince him to drop his plans and in return get sent home. Drew refuses, and uses the Malevolator to destroy Fluffy, Nefarious and the Cutifier. In the process Flux is transformed back and gives Drew a transdimensional communicator so they can keep in touch. Drew activates the warp gadget and returns to the real world, thinking his adventure was just a dream. In the morning, he pitches to Sam a new series called The Flux & Fluffy Show, only for it to get shot down. As Drew resigns himself to his soulless job, Flux calls him through the communicator to warn that Fluffy and Nefarious are still alive, and Drew happily teleports back to Cutopia as he is turned to a cartoon.
Development
Toonstruck was published by Virgin Interactive Entertainment and developed by Virgin's internal development studio Burst, based in Irvine, California and headlined by Chris Yates, a veteran of Westwood Studios, and Neil Young, who worked at Probe. After David Perry and his associates left Virgin in 1993, the company struggled with internal development and hired Yates and Young to lead this division. In an interview by Edge, Yates stated that all senior producers at Burst had between "eight and ten years of experience", and that the studio was focused on having quality tools and technology to develop products with high production values.Development of the game began in October 1993, and finished in November 1996. Virgin Interactive invested much money in the project, and aimed at impressing audiences with high production values. "So much of the game was handled like a full-scale movie production", said artist John Pimpiano, who was originally tasked with doing background art for the game, but became involved with other realms of production such as character development, storyboarding, color styling and marketing promos, among others. The studio was inspired to take CD-ROM technology "even further" after the success of Virgin's The 7th Guest, and to make the game "as cinematic as possible". Overall, 230 people worked in the game. In 1994 Burst switched its early engine to that of The Legend of Kyrandia: Malcolm's Revenge, offered to them by Westwood. Since the programmers had to re-code much of the game, only about 5% of the original source code remained in the final game.
By the end of development, Toonstruck had a high budget of over $8 million. According to Next Generation, Virgin Interactive always acknowledged that Toonstruck would be expensive. Virgin Interactive insiders suggested that the animation was of an unnecessarily high level of sophistication. Furthermore, the development team spent 18 months debugging the code written for the Kyrandia engine, further delaying the release and adding to the already high production budget.
Writing
Toonstruck depicts a live-action character entering a fully-animated cartoon world. Executive producer David Bishop conceptualized the game as a children's game "where a villain was draining the colour out of the world, turning it black and white". According to lead designer Richard Hare, Bishop's original concept was titled Trouble in Toonland and had as its protagonist a young boy named Daniel. However, once Bishop's concept was passed on to co-writer and designer Jennifer McWilliams, it went through several revisions to make it more adult-oriented, with comic violence and touches of parody and cynicism. According to Le Monde, Richard Hare wanted all players to be shocked at some point with the game's sense of humor.The final screenplay was credited to McWilliams, Richard Hare and Mark Drop. McWilliams wrote the second part of the game to be more psychological, with Drew facing his fears, living out his fantasies and eventually restoring his creativity. The character of Flux Wildly was created after that of Drew Blanc, as a companion and "fun-loving" sidekick, because he gave a window "into the 'real' Drew". To McWilliams, Flux was also "a great addition" for the puzzles and humor. Developers aimed at creating a world that felt as though it was "living" and that evolved as the story events progressed. To accomplish that in writing, the NPC dialogue was programmed to change as critical events happened in the game so that characters commented on these events instead of just repeating dialogue from earlier.
With the delays to the game's production and the release date getting closer, Virgin executives decided to split the game's content in two and expected to have the unreleased half be included in a potential sequel. Due to Virgin's decision to divide the game in two, the writers had to come up with an ending that properly concluded the game "halfway through, with a cliffhanger that would, ideally, introduce part two." Since the entire story arc was carefully thought-out, McWilliams felt Virgin's decision "definitely disrupted that", but nonetheless believed the studio did well under the circumstances. In the later half of the story that was cut from the final game, Drew and Flux took a train ride to an island in the sky, where Drew faced off his fears in a carnival setting; scenes included a Wild West shootout, an encounter with Drew's idol Vincent van Gogh and a visit to a mad dentist.