Disney Infinity devs 'always looking for way to expand on characters'
We talk to Jeff Bunker, VP of art direction for Avalanche Software, on the new Marvel Disney Infinity figures.
Disney Infinity is continuing to support the 3.0 platform by releasing more playsets throughout 2016. The latest, Marvel Battlegrounds, features four-person brawler action and is compatible with all your Marvel Disney Infinity figures. The Battlegrounds play set includes a Captain America: The First Avenger figure. With figures based on Ant-Man, Black Panther, Vision, and Black Suit Spider-Man also released, we spoke with Jeff Bunker, VP of art direction for Avalanche Software, about the new figures and what we can expect moving forward.
GameSpot: We have four new figures plus Black Suit Spider-Man coming. How was that number determined?
Jeff Bunker: It was mainly by what we felt was most relevant. That's obviously currently driven by the films. We knew Vision, Ant-Man and Black Panther were going to be very relevant during this time period.
We know we're getting other figures from the other franchises. Will we still see more Marvel figures this year?
I'm not sure what we've announced yet, so I don't dare say.
Since Ant-Man can change size, was there any challenges in figuring out his design?
All the characters like Ant-Man or Tinker Bell, their relative size to the other characters is just tiny. When you make a figure out of them, you obviously don't want to make them tiny. You want to show them off as well as possible. It's always kind of a challenge to figure how we'll handle those characters. With Ant-Man, we went over and over about what kind of thing we could put with him to indicate what his scale was. The thing I was really happy about was we were able to put him in the same environment as the other characters coming out with him, but we made him feel he's at a much smaller scale by having him sitting on top of a screw head. That turned out pretty good.
Was having a really small Ant-Man on a regular-size base ever considered?
From this group, which character has been your favorite to work on?
I get asked that quite often. I have to say, quite honestly, I'm not saying this as a PR thing, my favorite is always the character I'm working on right at the time. Each one had challenges that made it hard and made it fun. Ant-Man is a very busy character. Although he's very dark overall, there's a lot of different things going on with his costume -- the piping, the red and the black, and so forth. He was challenging, but he was fun to figure out.
With the release of Black Suit Spider-Man, even though we have discs that offer costume changes, what are the chances of seeing other character variants like this?
I think we're always looking for ways to expand on the characters. If you're a fan of a character, we want to be able to give you as much value as we can.
For the Star Wars figures, we saw light-up lightsabers. Are you exploring other options like this?
Do you guys work on each brand one at a time or are they all being worked on in various stages?