Talk:Disney Crossy Road/@comment-30119529-20161118031042

Hey guys, on the behalf of the MG team, I want to apologize for how the Moana update panned out. This was really caused by a lack of communication with Disney.

The World

From the start of our development of the Moana world, something was off. We had a prototype with some cool island hopping and using Moana's raft to travel between them. (No models were actually made for the trees, the boat, etc, just the general mechanics and landscape). We sent the prototype over to Disney and they told us to scrap it completely. This happened in about July. We work with multiple worlds and characters in production at once, so to keep our update cadence going, we had to change to the current world you saw, which is a little less heavy on tech innovation.

Lack of Characters

This one is a personal annoyance of mine. Some characters (like "The Ocean") had to be scrapped when our prototype was scrapped. No water is in the new world, so it just wouldn't make sense. (Although I believe the guys are trying to find a way to get it back in...). Others just weren't finished in time. We sent over the final models for all the characters we created for Moana, and Disney sent back over half of them with notes to redo them. We didn't have time to redo them before the release date Disney gave us. :/ So yeah, because of that, the character count is much shorter than we would have liked. We will release more of them as TWO weekend challenges over time, and a few secret characters interspersed as well.

The Bugs/Early Release Date

To make matters worse, Disney completely neglected to tell us that they were doing a worldwide launch of Moana products today, namely video games. We didn't know about it until this Monday. As a result, we had to rush with our QA process and now there's quite a few bugs in the game. Many more than we would have had if they let us release next week like they originally told us we would. Keep an eye out for a few bug fix updates after Thanksgiving to help the crashes.

Star Wars!!!!!!

Oh this I'm so excited for. We're really not supposed to talk about it, but this is anonymous and I just can't keep it to myself! OUR STAR WARS PROTOTYPE GOT APPROVED! We're starting early development on "Star Wars Crossy Road". Development is gonna be slow, cuz we gotta maintain DCR, CR, and Shooty Skies as well. The latter two have taken a back-burner to DCR, but they still get updates when we can.

We wanna do some big stuff with SWCR, add some cool new mechanics. We're currently just outlining what we wanna do, but the big thing is gonna be a character creator. We'll have a prize machine that will unlock hair, clothing, skin colors, light sabers, etc. You can then name your character and it'll show up in your character roster.

Disney wants us to have the game ready to coincide with the release of Episode 8 next year.

The plan is to have worlds for movies 4-8, Rogue One, Rebels, and another animated TV show they have in the works to be available at launch. We won't know anything about Episode 8 or the new TV show until we get closer to release.

Again, let me reiterate that this is FAAAR off in the future. December 2017. We're gonna be working very slowly on it and this being Disney, they could pull the plug on it at any minute.

Smaller Updates Going Forward

So, some of you aren't gonna be too happy about this, but a FEW (not all) of our updates next year will be smaller in scope. We need to divert energy to new products and other updates that provide new game mechanics in addition to new characters.

As a result, we will have THREE updates next year that will not have any new worlds. Each update will have more or less 10-15 characters added and nothing else. These updates will be for Pirates of the Caribbean, to add characters from Dead Men Tell No Tales; Tangled, to add new characters from the TV show; and Big Hero Six, to also add characters from the TV show.

Tidbits

A really really CUTE thing is that Baby Moana in this update has audio pulled directly from Design Director Andy Sum's little girl. It's soooo sweet.

And yes, Mulan, Beauty and the Beast, DuckTales, Cars, Coco, and Frozen will all have new worlds next year.

If you have any other questions, please let me know!