Rayman himself

[DinksMacglumpher]

Huzzah

[Krith99z]

Huzzah

My most esteemed DinksMacglumpher, while the sheer elegance of your one-word exclamation has left us all in awe, the mods around here might uncharitably classify such brevity as spam.

I kindly invite you to grace our humble forum with a slightly more robust discourse! To get the conversational wheels turning, perhaps you would be so exceedingly gracious as to enlighten us all on your favorite iteration of our beloved Weird Purple Eggplant Man?

[DinksMacglumpher]

I suppose, my favourite iteration of the Purple Eggplant Man, it would be the one from the third one of the original trilogy. I believe it might be nostalgia from playing Raving Rabbids 1 & 2 as a wee child. (Which was when I first heard of our lord and saviour).

P.S : And I do apologise for the error in judgement.

[Hunchman801]

Anyways, this is what i was talking about :
SPOILER_image-1.png

Oh yeah, I think I remember hearing about this Gestapo reference a while ago. Not the brightest joke out there.

And welcome to this place, DinksMacglumpher! You're welcome to introduce yourself here if you like.

[RayGamer99]

Not sure where else to put this, but Ubisoft put out a video on their social media accounts a couple days ago celebrating their 40th anniversary this year. I particularly love how Rayman is featured front-and-center throughout the entire video; it feels like Ubisoft has finally realized how important this character is to their identity and their legacy.

[AnonymousToad]

That video was beautiful and I very much appreciated that they finally put Rayman in the spotlight again as their mascot. I do feel a twinge of hypocrisy coming from Ubisoft seeing how they treated him up until now and how they're hyping him all up like "oh look at our favourite lad, he's always been the best for us we always loved him " when that wasn't the case at all in the past. Still, very happy to see him full of life and energy and being Ubisoft main mascot again. Let's hope for the best!

[Droolie]

Got4n and I recently discovered Dr JVTek's "histoire de vie" series of interviews with game devs. These are long interviews about their careers where they tell a bunch of interesting insights and funny anecdotes.
There are 3 videos in this series that contain pretty interesting/funny facts relevant to the Rayman series.
If you're fluent in French, I would recommend watching some parts of the videos, but not everyone understands French so I'll write down some of the things I found the most interesting below.

First, the most recent one from Arnaud Vergne: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SPSCeDzb28
He was a tester for King Kong and became a level designer on Rayman 4 and Rayman Raving Rabbids, eventually moving back to testing on the latter project when levels were finished.
He was also a tester on Rayman Legends.

Here's a summary of some of the most fun and interesting parts of the interview:

• Near the end of the development of King Kong, the team at Montpellier received a Xbox 360/"Xenon" dev kit. A team in Montréal had been developing the X360 port of the game, which is very much an early X360 game that uses all the cool new graphics technologies a bit too much - to the point it looks downright ugly in some places (for example, the characters' faces are shiny due to specular lighting being applied everywhere and it ruins the original art style). Turns out that the team at Montpellier agreed, as they were very disillusioned when they first tested this port on their new dev kit. A certain "Michel A.", very frustrated by how disgusting the game looked in this version, sent a very angry email complaining to the producer of this version, putting all of Ubisoft in CC. It sounds like it was quite a drama!
• After the King Kong game's success, they were asked to make a sequel. So King Kong 2 started development. In the meantime, a very small team including Michel worked on a prototype for a new Rayman with a very simple story - Rayman 4. King Kong 2 was cancelled and it was really eye-opening to see just how much of its assets were absorbed into Rayman 4 and reused. As a fan of Rayman 2, Arnaud's dream became reality: he got to work as a level designer on the new Rayman. With his testing experience, he tried to make the most bug-free levels possible, which he says was not very good for a level designer as it prevented quick iteration. In the Rayman 4 prototype, he designed the town on the trunk (this is the town in world 2/FPP_Exterieur) and the area with the bipod (world 3).
• Suddenly, a certain Michel left and they lost their guide. Even later, they learned that they would no longer make a Rayman 4, but they would make a game for the launch of the Wii keeping the same assets. They created a lot of minigames, but were disappointed after actually seeing the Wiimote's very limited capabilities. A lot of minigames had to be cancelled because it could not do what they had expected.
• In the final version, Arnaud was responsible for the level design of the mines FPS level. He was paired with a gameplay programmer whom he asked to make an infinite spawner for an infinite tunnel during this FPS level. During the last 3 months, he was downgraded back to a tester as the level designs were finished.
• Both the proto and the final game contain many somewhat moody/desolate environments (like the mines mentioned earlier) because this was the art director, Florent Sacré's preference (it's very visible in this game's concept art IMO).
• The first version of RRR shared on the internet came from a box from Micromania. They were able to find out because each batch sent to stores had been mastered slightly differently.
• RRR was the biggest success of Arnaud's career. He received additional payments from it even at the end of all of his work at Ubisoft much later on. The PS2 version didn't sell too well, but the Wii version was an insane success.
• When sending the game to Sony, they were given a "must fix" bug: "the controls of some minigames resemble mouse controls too much". It was their way of saying that it was too lazy of a port from the Wii version, so they had to come up with more clever solutions for some minigames (such as snapping the cursor to targets).
• At some point he also mentions the Rabbids were mostly created by Digital Banana (the CG studio who made all of the first Rabbids videos), not Ubisoft, and the interviewer says there was a lawsuit from D.B.? I'm not sure how accurate this is.
• Much later in the video, a question is asked about Rayman 4 and how much of it was finished, to which he laughs and says "25%?". He reacts to footage of the prototype starting here.

Skpping ahead to the section about Rayman Legends:

• Skipping ahead to the section about Rayman Legends, he talks about UbiArt and how it was such a nice engine and "apparently" easy to work with. Ubisoft had said they would open-source it, but the problem was that this was a Ubisoft Montpellier engine, specifically the part that didn't like documentation too much (read: there was next to no documentation). So while they were advertising how easy it was, people who were using it knew that it was actually hell. Tools for testing were also insufficient.
• The Japanese version of Rayman Legends was tested by Mario Club. He says their work was perfect - they were really crazy testers. One bug they found is that the L on Globox Luigi's hat was inverted during 3 frames in one of the animations when turning.
• Later in the video, he brings up that some time after Legends, when Ubisoft Montpellier was tasked with doing co-prod on an Assassin's Creed game, many were dissatisfied and left for smaller projects, such as Valiant Hearts and a Prince of Persia project that had started development using the UbiArt engine. It was a Smash Bros clone internally called "Forgotten Souls" (I wonder if he got the title confused with Forgotten Sands?). It was very cool, very fluid (60fps), had multiplayer... but it never saw the light of day. He thinks some elements were reused much later in The Lost Crown, which I think makes a lot of sense. As for the Assassin's Creed project, this became AC Unity's DLC: Dead Kings.

Next up is Fabien Delpiano, founder of Pastagames: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cJC2TEdBNw

• One time, he planned to go to a restaurant with Jordan Mechner (creator of PoP) who asked "Would it bother you if I bring my buddy Michel?". When he arrived at the restaurant, only this "Michel" was there so they started talking, not knowing who he was. He was surprised to find out that this person also created videogames and even knew of Fabien's games: Pix'n Love Rush and Maestro! Jump In Music. The latter game had even been a great inspiration to them as they were researching musical levels! When Fabien asked what game it was that they were making and learned it was Rayman Origins, he asked: "Michel. You wouldn't happen to be Michel Ancel?".
• At the end of their dinner, Michel Ancel told him he had just bought himself an iPad and he loved it and how it controls, and he dreamt of getting Rayman Origins on there. Fabien told him no, but maybe a different game that took Origins as a starting point and simplified it. Ancel wanted to get a part of the marketing budget ready for him to make it because it would be cool to have this as a free game, as a sort of promotion for the console games, but Fabien had to refuse in the end because they had no time and no team at that moment (and it couldn't wait).
• Later, he met him again at Toulouse Game Show, where Ancel tried to convince him again and succeeded. Fabien came to Montpellier and was shown a ton of stuff with the team developing Rayman Legends at the time, and when he wanted to say no again Michel stuffed a hard disk into his hands telling him to look at it. It contained the entire source code and asset base of Rayman Origins, received without signing any NDA or anything! He checked it a bit and was impressed by how well the source code was written, how each different platform's code was neatly separated... and decided to go ahead and make a quick proto copying the main "polylines" system and the basic character controller from Origins. He took the idea of the Tricky Treasure levels where you were always running and implemented it by making a "fake controller" that pushes right and holds the run button. This prototype worked on iOS - it had 0 graphics or animations, but the gameplay feel from RO was there. So he returned to Montpellier, showed it to Michel and it was decided to make Rayman Jungle Run.
• At this point he mentions that he thinks Michel has problems taking no for an answer - his biggest strength and his biggest weakness. Once he has an idea in his head, he wants to see it done - he doesn't concern himself too much with how, but it will happen. He's very incompatible with what Ubisoft has become - Fabien calls him a sort of "punk of the videogame industry" who was used to working with a crew of 25 genius developers that always got things done, creating new engines every time. But Ubisoft has become a big industrial machine developing huge, infinite games with huge teams - which is totally the opposite of Michel's culture.
• Anyway, after 6 months they had a demo of Rayman Jungle Run and when they were eventually ready to publish it, Ubisoft's mobile branch was completely unaware this project even existed. After a chain of like 60 emails notifying the necessary people at Ubisoft, they were told that this shouldn't be a free promotional game as initially planned, but a complete game - Ubi's first "real" mobile game. And after some extra work, that's what it became. It was a huge success.
• While they were too busy to create a sequel (they gave all the tools to Ubisoft Casablanca and trained them to create Fiesta Run), they returned to Rayman for Rayman Legends on Switch - a small project that allowed them to become a Switch developer - and again for Rayman Mini. Rayman Mini was odd because Pastagames was asked to make a new Rayman in exactly 10 months - and they weren't told why. And this while they had just signed a deal to make a new Pac-Man with the same deadline (both were going to be Apple Arcade launch games). So yes, Rayman Mini's development was a nightmare as it was made in parallel with a different game with a very strict deadline and a lot of crunch.

Next up, Frédéric Markus, who worked on Rayman 1 for Jaguar and for SNES: https://www.youtube.com/live/qqlc17LkFRI

• Going back in time, back to when Michel had moved to Montpellier, Michel was working on a prototype in GFA BASIC on Atari ST. This featured a limbless character jumping everywhere with incredible animation. When Michel Ancel was looking for publishers for this demo in Paris, Frédéric asked to see this proto of Rayman and he fell out of his chair. He convinced him to do it at Ubisoft with Fred Houde. Apparently the circumstances are quite mind-blowing, so much that he doesn't want to talk about it and will maybe write about it in a book one day.
• While Frédéric Markus was working on Rayman on the SNES, he got to see a demo of the Jaguar and was very impressed by its much larger color palette. He thought that by the time Rayman would be out, next-gen machines would be here with better capabilities, so it would be better to drop the SNES version and switch to Jaguar. He called Michel and asked him to create a demo for how a Rayman would look without color limitations. He was sent an image drawn on an Amiga that looked like a real cartoon. He showed this to the Guillemots and they were convinced to switch to the Jaguar. This was a crazy improvement, going from sprites to real scanned and colorized illustrations.
• When demo'd by the Guillemots at CES, Atari offered to fund a large part of the development. Here, Sega and Sony also made deals with them to make sure Rayman would appear on their new consoles.
• Frédéric was more of a hacker, someone who tried to push the hardware to its limits and made crazy things - not a very good programmer at architecture level. For example, Rayman on Jaguar (and SNES before that) was entirely written in assembly! With the PlayStation however, arrived C. Ubisoft switched to C programming for these ports. Frédéric thought he no longer had a place in the videogames industry and decided to quit Ubisoft.
• Before quitting, he was given a list of features to complete on the Jaguar version in 3 months. He completed the entire list in 2 weeks, received all of his money, took a flight to Polynesia and spent the rest of his 3 months there.

And that's most of what Rayman fans could find interesting. A long wall of bullet points maybe, but I'm sure you will find some fun facts in here!

[PluMGMK]

Wow, that's a pretty impressive mine of information!

Near the end of the development of King Kong, the team at Montpellier received a Xbox 360/"Xenon" dev kit. A team in Montréal had been developing the X360 port of the game, which is very much an early X360 game that uses all the cool new graphics technologies a bit too much - to the point it looks downright ugly in some places (for example, the characters' faces are shiny due to specular lighting being applied everywhere and it ruins the original art style). Turns out that the team at Montpellier agreed, as they were very disillusioned when they first tested this port on their new dev kit. A certain "Michel A.", very frustrated by how disgusting the game looked in this version, sent a very angry email complaining to the producer of this version, putting all of Ubisoft in CC. It sounds like it was quite a drama!

Oh dear… I wonder if it was followed by a storm of "Please remove me from this email thread" messages

[*]When sending the game to Sony, they were given a "must fix" bug: "the controls of some minigames resemble mouse controls too much". It was their way of saying that it was too lazy of a port from the Wii version, so they had to come up with more clever solutions for some minigames (such as snapping the cursor to targets).

Wow, that's an… interesting response from Sony…

Frédéric was more of a hacker, someone who tried to push the hardware to its limits and made crazy things - not a very good programmer at architecture level. For example, Rayman on Jaguar (and SNES before that) was entirely written in assembly! With the PlayStation however, arrived C. Ubisoft switched to C programming for these ports. Frédéric thought he no longer had a place in the videogames industry and decided to quit Ubisoft.

Sounds like my kinda guy!

Before quitting, he was given a list of features to complete on the Jaguar version in 3 months. He completed the entire list in 2 weeks, received all of his money, took a flight to Polynesia and spent the rest of his 3 months there.

Wow. I wonder if this "rush out the door" helps explain a lot of that version's brokenness…

And that's most of what Rayman fans could find interesting. A long wall of bullet points maybe, but I'm sure you will find some fun facts in here!

Indeed, thanks for taking the time to put this together!