Game Art and Machinima Research: Croc: Legend of the Gobbos

By Meg Sugden
The next game that I wanted to look at is Croc: Legend of the Gobbos, a game released for PlayStation in 1997. Its an interesting game that follows Croc, a baby crocodile who is found in a basket in the lake by Gobbo King Rufus who takes him and trains him to be one of their own, but Croc grows and becomes a lot bigger. One day the Gobbo Island is invaded by Baron Dante and imprisons many of the Gobbos until finally the King. It is then up to Croc to save the day and defeat Baron Dante and save all the Gobbos in the kingdom.

The basic character of Croc is based off a small, perhaps still a baby crocodile, but once again is set to have human qualities as he stands up on his back legs and also has a backpack that he carries everywhere with him. He is a very simple design and there isn't much to him, but this really works as there doesn't need to be. He is designed to be placed in a very simple, but still well detailed world that suits the character and the models around it. The design of the character is very similar to what we want to produce for our project as we want to create something simple but that has character in it at the same time, which I feel this one does.

Now for an early PlayStation game the amount of levels that are included are not of a huge amount but they do have variety and there are five main areas to explore which all have sub levels in that as well. The levels are based around a volcano, snow, desert, castle and then finally a crystal world extra level. The uniqueness of the levels do vary which is nice and they each have their own different platforming elements which are nice. The level design is very simple and sticks with the cartoony nature of the rest of it, linking the characters well to the environment; creating good consistency throughout the entire game.

Lastly the cut scenes that are in place in the game are very basic again and feature rarely which is good as they can distract from the game play. The quality of the cut scenes are much like the rest of the game, and although that the graphics are not exceptional they do work and have a very cartoony feel to them which works nicely throughout. The fact that there is no dialog in the cut scene, apart from the odd noise from the character and the rest of the sound effects, works really well, creating a nice atmosphere that again feels very cartoony and animated; a look that we want to go for in our own project. This is definitely something helpful to look at for our cut scene that were going to be making as we too do not want any dialog and just have sound effects, the only difference is that we are going to have a voice over instead that will do the explaining and the character will almost break the forth wall to reply to the voice in movement.