South Park: The Fractured But Whole – Matt Stone, Trey Parker, and Animation
Twinfinite: How involved were Matt and Trey in the gameplay design of Fractured But Whole? They wrote the story of course, but how involved are they in the nitty and gritty of gameplay design?
Schroeder: Well, in some ways they’re kind of like our game’s creative directors. They don’t necessarily get involved with the data itself, but when we proposed that we want to do something with all of this looting, and really crafting is kind of the base thing when you’re gathering resources like that, crafting becomes the next logical step. And so again they’re like ‘okay that’s cool,’ but then we start talking about different ways you can execute that, and then we ended up going with something that is, you know, you just open up your phone menu and you can craft from there. So we don’t need to always fast travel back to some crafting station or something like that, just keeping it light.
Twinfinite: Working with the humor of South Park, are there any times where you have not cross a line, you just kind of have to evaluate, in terms of how video games are rated, are there things you have to say “We can’t do that” with Matt and Trey.
Schroeder: [Laughs] When you work in games I guess you start to become a worry wart about that kind of stuff, but I shut all that off. The biggest thing was trying to make something authentic to what they want to do. They know their series at this point, they know how to get away with so much more now than they did at the beginning. With their feature film they tested what it means to get across the movie ratings board. And when they made their musical, I think they realized that there’s no one reading musicals and they went crazy with it. I think that they’ve learned to walk that line, and for me it was just really trying to make sure that Ubisoft would never be responsible for having censored them. We just put it all in [laugh].
Twinfinite: The way you animate the game, was there anything that changed about it when you made the jump to Xbox One and PS4?
Schroeder: When we were setting out, we wanted to create a process that was going to capture the iteration style that Matt and Trey were used to. So South Park Studios; they work in a program called Maya, for all of their characters, animation, and backgrounds. We decided to adopt the same tech, so that basically the South Park Studios team became an arm of the development team, they were part of our art team essentially. Even though they were making characters, animating cutscenes, and making backgrounds, we were able to then take those and with a bit of processing ingest them into Ubisoft’s Snowdrop engine. That’s an entirely different engine, an entirely different pipeline to create Fractured. That really did enable us to create I think a game that looks perfectly like the show, without any sort of barrier, because it’s literally the show assets running within the game.
Twinfinite: When you look back, was there anything you wanted to fix or to work on from the first game?
Schroeder: For me, I mean I was a fan on the first one, I didn’t contribute to it in any major way. What South Park learned from it was that early on they knew that they needed to be involved in the process and be responsible for the writing, but also be responsible for reviewing those gameplay ideas, and be responsible for how is the story going to really interact with the gameplay and acknowledge that. I think they embraced it, and they also embraced that their studio isn’t going to just be the cutscene house, it became a co-development instead of a licensing partnership.
