Cuphead: creating a game that looks like a 1930s cartoon

When work first started on Cuphead, a new game that marries side-scrolling gameplay with 1930s-style American animation, Maja Moldenhauer went ahead and ordered a whole bunch of animation paper. Since the game was to be completely hand-drawn, in an attempt to emulate the process from the time, the paper was an integral tool. Moldenhauer, who served as an artist and producer on the game, thought that her initial paper order would be big enough to get the team through the development of Cuphead, and then get started on whatever the studio’s follow-up project ended up being.

That didn’t happen. Instead, that huge stack of paper only lasted about a third of the way through Cuphead’s creation. One of the reasons was the game’s scope, which dramatically expanded midway through development, resulting in multiple delays and a lot more animation. But it’s also because of the fact that the team at Studio MDHR is full of perfectionists, who would toss out designs for characters and levels many times, until they landed on exactly what they wanted. That meant a lot of wasted paper.

“We’ve been fine-tuning things that probably the majority of the general public won’t even notice,” says Moldenhauer. “But we’ve just been really picky.”

Cuphead launches this Friday on both Xbox One and PC, and it’s a game that combines two particularly old-school inspirations. On one hand, it’s a run-and-gun action game, one that attempts to emulate the hard-as-nails nature of genre icons like Mega Man and Gunstar Heroes. There are giant bosses that require pattern memorization and quick reflexes to defeat, and you’ll come across waves of enemies that include everything from fireflies to angry flowers.

But the most striking thing about the game is how it looks. It’s a game that tries to capture the surreality inherent in cartoons from the ‘30s, like Betty Boop or Steamboat Willie. Enemies in the game include a towering cigar with a sinister grin, and a giant carrot with psychic powers. There are also plenty of sight gags, like a fish going fishing, or a coin who doesn’t trust banks. And, of course, the main character in Cuphead is, well, a guy a with a cup for a head.

Capturing that style — and doing it in a way that both looked and felt authentic — required a lot of work. It meant utilizing most of the same techniques that gave early Disney and Fleischer Studios cartoons their distinct look. The backgrounds in the game consist of watercolor paintings, while every frame of animation was hand-drawn on paper, before being inked and ultimately inserted into the game. The only part of the process that was digital was the coloring. “When we did our tests at the beginning, we hand-painted each cell and then we colored it digitally, and we did a comparison,” explains Moldenhauer. “There really was no difference. So that’s why we took the easy path.”

Development on Cuphead started in 2010, and it was first revealed back in 2014. At that point it was a considerably smaller game. In order to be realistic about what they could actually create, the team at Studio MDHR scaled back their vision to an experience that would consist entirely of a series of eight Mega Man-style boss battles. At the time, the studio consisted of just three people, making it a challenge to create anything larger than that, especially considering the time-consuming nature of the art style.

But after some very positive showings at trade shows like E3, the studio realized that the game needed to be more expansive in order to satisfy the ever-growing audience interested in its unique style. That meant more bosses, properly designed platforming levels, and an overworld that connected them together. It also required a lot more people — and a lot more time.

Since 2015, the studio has grown dramatically. What started out as a trio is now a team 19-people strong, spanning multiple cities, from Toronto to Los Angeles. That includes a total of five artists, handling everything from concept art to animation. In addition to her role as producer on the game, Moldenhauer was the sole clean-up and inking artist on the game, meaning she had a hand in every frame of animation featured in the title.

Given Cuphead’s distinctive look, scaling up wasn’t necessarily an easy process for the studio. Most budding artists don’t have character designs that look like Oswald the Lucky Rabbit on their resumes. Moldenhauer says that the hiring process was time-consuming, largely because there’s a lot of onboarding required for something like Cuphead, where the development process is very different compared to other games.

There was a lot of explaining things to newcomers, instead of “just being able to just put pencil to paper and doing it yourself,” as she explains. “But aside from that — I don’t know if it’s luck, karma, or a combination of the craziest synergies. We just got so lucky that everyone is so passionate about what they’re doing, they’re passionate about this game, and we haven’t endured many conflicts.”

Despite all of the changes, the resulting game actually resembles the original concept for Cuphead from back in 2010. It’s not that the final version of Cuphead is an expanded version of those original E3 demos that created so much excitement. Instead, those demos were scaled-down from what the team ultimately wanted to create. The final product took a lot longer than anticipated — and required a lot more paper — but for the team the time and effort was worth it.

“We wanted to make the game that we always dreamed of,” Moldenhauer says. “We didn’t want to let anything change or persuade that.”