Post Script

Q+A: Chad, Jared and Maja Moldenhauer, Studio MDHR

The Delicious Last Course represents the culmination of the Cuphead story, with the Moldenhauers closing the book on their 1930s-inspired hero for the time being. Here, they discuss the character’s origins, and the challenges involved in bringing this long-awaited expansion to fruition.

You went through a huge range of character designs before settling on Cuphead. What made him the right choice for protagonist?

Chad Moldenhauer As granular as it sounds, Cuphead’s look really began with the glove and the boots. It’s no secret that Cuphead and Mugman’s relationship as brothers and best friends pulled from my time growing up with Jared. When we settled on 1930s cartoons as our inspiration, we began looking closely at characters like Mickey Mouse, Bimbo, Oswald, and Felix the Cat, really steeping ourselves in their physicality and playfulness to try to sketch a character of our own that felt like it belonged in that group.

What was the next step of the process?

CM We ended up iterating on over 300 designs, and exploring a huge range of ideas, from animals to magical humanoid characters. I remember that we were in a brainstorming funk, and started doodling ideas that were intentionally off-base, but that proved more serendipitous than we could have known, as it reminded us that toons of the era often gave personalities and faces to inanimate objects. And it just so happened that a cup and a straw happened to have a very distinct silhouette. Another great by-product of a cup and a straw is that it offered us the chance to embrace really off-kilter physical comedy, and we quickly found ourselves drawing Cuphead in poses with his head off, juggling it, or playing around with it. It’s easy to see in retrospect all the ways that it works well for what we wanted, but it was really the ultimate mixture of luck and stubborn perseverance, and we just knew it when we saw it.

You were obviously inexperienced as developers when you started. What were the biggest lessons you took from the original game? Were you able to incorporate what you learned into the way you developed the DLC?

Maja Moldenhauer Something that has always been true about the way we approach our games is that we want to consider the small details that not everyone might notice, but which will delight the people who do. This is something that was often at odds with the original development of Cuphead, as it was our first release, and it carried all the pressures that come with that. Beyond honing our craft as a team, I think we learned a lot about what creates a healthy development cadence. As with so many developers around the world, the pandemic certainly upended the concept of a ‘normal working day’, and as a team full of parents with young children, we were no exception. As we come to the end of development, I’m particularly proud of how our amazing team adjusted to these challenges, and prioritised each other throughout the creation of the game.

In terms of what was left on the cutting-room floor, was there anything you wish you’d been able to include? And are there bosses in the DLC that were part of the original plan, but you didn’t have the time or the capacity to realise in the main game? CM The biggest thing we left on the cutting-room floor in the original Cuphead was Ms Chalice herself. She appears in that game as The Legendary Chalice, and we had always conceptualised that at some point in the game she would become a playable character as well. However, time was against us, and we were never able to adequately incorporate her into the story in a way that felt like it did her justice. Together with the abundance of themes, characters and imagery from the 1930s that never made it into the original game, Ms Chalice’s absence was really the compelling reason we needed to return to the Inkwell Isles for this newest adventure. By coming up with a story we feel serves her character properly, and brings her to life as part of the core trio, we also got a chance to explore some of our favourite 1930s motifs that we ran out of time to delve into with Cuphead’s original release. Although, without spoiling anything, I’ll say that there may also be a few other things that snuck their way in that were left on the cutting-room floor of Cuphead’s development.

“It was really the ultimate mixture of luck and stubborn perseverance, and we just knew it when we saw it”

There are several major transformations among The Delicious Last Course’s bosses. Did anything change in the way you approached animating them? Jared Moldenhauer With The Delicious Last Course, we went more than a little above and beyond, and there are individual boss phases whose frame count is higher than the number in some of Cuphead’s full bosses. Likewise, Ms Chalice was animated from scratch – she doesn’t use any sort of wireframe from Cuphead or Mugman. Ultimately, that’s probably the biggest challenge we continue to face with a style like ours – there are whole swathes of this process that you just cannot speed up, and any additional detail and complexity has a larger impact on our development timeline than with a more modern toolset.