Cletus Clay - Clay Animation Platformer XBLA

[toythatkills]

A few videos, not of the actual final product or owt though...

[sillytuna]

Hello all! I just registered up to answer a few of the queries if that's ok.

toythatkills - it's definitely clay! Our office is full of plasticine, mostly all over the carpet. You can find models on twitpic and flickr, and soon we'll upload some videos showing the models being made.

Press Release - it was a mockup in that it wasn't frame grabbed. It was slightly too early for a real one but it was using the exact same assets & concepts as you can probably tell now. We didn't hide the fact that it was a mock-up, hence the name.

Family Fry - hopefully the videos show you more now.

spagmasterswify - we always wanted to do a decent Trapdoor game I seem to remember there was a Speccy title...

Dogg Thang - each item is individually modelled and photographed. Since we're not modelling entire scenes, you do suffer a bit when you piece items together when compared to sometihng like The Neverhood. However, this is an action game whereas The Neverhood contained a lot of pure video or video with very simple interaction. It looked great but that wouldn't work here.

I'd also add that there are still two or three further art/level passes to do in order to balance artwork and cover some model connections, e.g. between the hill sections on the lighting video. It's very tricky to do.

Thanks for the mix of comments - it all helps.

[randombs]

sillytuna, thanks a lot for posting on here.

What you lot are doing is really appreciated - finally, all those tiny details like the little fingernail nicks can actually be seen thanks to HD. It seems HD has become synonymous with 3D visuals when there is still plenty of progress to be made in the 2D world and I love the idea of taking HD and applying it to one of the most basic things we play with when we're babies - plasticine.

I'm wondering, though, about those two videos posted above, how close are they to the actual look and feel of the current build?

[sillytuna]

billy - the trailer is indicative of single player gameplay but the visuals were highly compressed and don't include any modern fx. The lighting video shows a level which is unpolished and has basic scenery only, but - crappy YouTube compression aside - it's actually what we're running now. We'll do an HD upload at some point.

[Family Fry]

Its always nice when a dev team sign up and answer questions direct, so thank you for doing this and taking time out to talk about it.
Saw the videos on the site other day when posted, still has me impressed and i'm still in
You guys have a ETA on when you would like to have the product out?
Also liked the Edge interview too, seeing all the models was cool, it was good to see the game get get some high profile attention too, Oh and good luck with the IGF in March, will keep an eye on that.

[rsbrowndog]

Wow! I was following Cletus back when it was being developed in Blitz over on the Blitz Basic forums and always thought it looked amazing. Was a massive surprise coming here to find (a) it's not dead and (b) it's coming to XBLA!

Really looking forward to it...

Cheers,

Ryan

[toythatkills]

Explosion looks ace

[EvilBoris]

The big news is that Cletus Clay is now not going to be on Xbox Live Arcade. At least, we won’t be self-publishing it on the platform because apparently we no longer fit in with Microsoft. Given the current state of Xbox Live Arcade and sales thereon, perhaps they are right!

We have plenty of interest from publishers on both Xbox and PlayStation 3 but at present we prefer to retain our independence. This does, however, mean that Cletus Clay is going to have another development change. Anthony and Alex will continue the project in due course and we will be funding it from our other projects unless one of you happens to be feeling very rich and generous!

Ah balls, there goes the neighbourhood

[randombs]

I propose an internet mail-attack on MS to change their minds

[Matt]

That's a shame. XBLA seems to be getting more franchise off-shoots and remakes lately, I'm hoping the original "small" dev it was aimed at isn't being dropped in favour of the bigger established sellers.