A visit to Krome Studios

Studio Tour from Yug - Wednesday, 19 July 2006 @ 12:00am

Now, my history with the Spyro games is spotty at best. I remember playing and enjoying the original on the PlayStation back in the late 90's, but after that my interest wasn't really held for that long, and the last few games from what I remember were decidedly average. Still the concept of playing a platforming game as a dragon is cool regardless, and the concept of a 'new beginning' couldn't be any more appropriate.

The game is a complete ro-boot of the Spyro franchise and starts off right from when Spyro cracks himself out of the egg, where he is then raised by dragonflies, and finds out he has to save the world from a massive dragon named Cynder. It's pretty straight forward, but then again, so is any Mario game, and even Mario didn't have the kind of celebrity voices that the new Spyro managed to get. Elijah Wood, Gary Oldman and David Spade to be precise, which is pretty cool. Unfortunately Cameron pointed out that none of the VO actors were able to make a trip out to the Studios in Brisbane, which is s shame.

Krome have been able to have complete creative control in designing all the new characters for the game, and designing the levels themselves.

First impressions: Cameron loaded up a level set in what looked like a Volcano, I have been spending so much time playing 360 games lately, I was preparing myself to be generally disappointed. So I was surprised to find that not only did the game look quite cool (it has an almost Zelda the Wind Waker style to it), but it pulled some awesome tricks that made the levels feel compelling and alive. Smoke trails followed hot molten rocks as they flew around everywhere, lava effects look suitably hot and burny (is that a real word?).

The coolest feature however is the fighting system. This game is definitely more geared for combat, allowing you to actually pull off multiple combo hits, and get up close and personal for melee attacks. They really wanted to emphasise the fighting, try to make it more of a brawler and have more enemies on screen at once than any other previous Sypro game. Of course, you can also sit back and breathe fire on your enemies, only now you have different types of ranged attacks from ice, fire ball grenade type things, homing missile fire balls, and an electricity attack which works in a similar way to the gravity gun from Half Life 2.

You're require to collect Magic in order to use these effects, and also to use what is called your 'fury attack', where you summon an almost Final Fantasy style epic attack, which is dependant on the type of ranged breath attack you have selected at the same time.

The other level we were able to play was a Star Fox style one where you are flying through the air in an 'on rails' environment. Although I think it would have been cool to allow free roaming, the smoothness and scope of that particular level floored me, I was officially impressed!


After the Spyro game demonstration, we were taken on an official tour to where the 'magic happens' so to speak. There are apparently many doors and areas that are strictly off limits to people like us, where if we went in we would never be allowed to come out. We avoided them, even though they apparently housed the Hellboy development team, but we headed upstairs to where the Spyro guys were situated.

The group was split up into obvious sections, such as the artists and coders, and each person seemed to have liberally customised their desk and computer to however they saw fit. Drawings and sketches littered the walls, along with movie posters and personal photos. For an I.T. office there seemed to be an unusual amount of sunlight trickling in through the windows, which gave the whole place a much less sterile feel than I would have expected. In short, the place had a glow about it.

We met up with John Welsh who is the Producer on Spyro, and Don Meadows, Assistant Producer. As we talked to John for a bit we noticed a big inflatable Spyro sitting behind him, and for reasons still unknown to us, John said we could have it. Don seemed slightly pained at the idea, as if he had become attached to the inflatable toy, but Erica did convince him that they had others that needed only to be inflated and they could fill the void.



As we started on our way out, Erica told us about the massive trip to Dreamworld to celebrate Krome Studios reaching 200 people and it occurring that night, it's certainly a pretty cool thing for a company to do for its staff.

We walked out, inflatable Spyro in one hand and notes in the other, and couldn't help but be extremely impressed by what we had seen, in regards to the quality of their games and the working environment. Hopefully we can come back again soon and get the behind the scenes scoop on their Next Gen game, Hellboy!