This is a studio that takes its work seriously. And since Toys for Bob is in the game industry, this means an epic amount of toys, imagination and fun. On a recent visit to the studio, I got up close and personal with the famous creatures and saw the whole design process from sketch to toy to game.

Nestled in the sleepy town of Novato, CA, right outside San Francisco, the studio has created an imagination wonderland out of an old aircraft hangar. An elaborate nautical theme begins with a reception desk made out of a small sailboat, mast included. On one side, a Tiki-themed area with giant palms, bamboo and beach house facades, the other creates cubicles out of a giant pirate ship. Basically, Skylanders is designed in Disneyland, which is perfect since everyone who works there tries to feel like a kid when they’re designing.

Designing an Army
The magic starts with the studio’s character and toy director, I-Wei Huang. Even in his spare time, this is a man who can’t stop designing, which is great since Skylanders now boasts more than 250 figures to choose from. Using a large Wacom Cintiq, Huang sketches anything that comes to his head, making countless versions of an idea until he hits something that pops. “You want a tactile element that you want to touch, that’s important to me,” he explained. These are toys after all, and he needs to create something kids will want to play with in and out of the game. Even if an idea doesn’t fit in with the current Skylanders limitations, an idea rarely gets thrown away. Chopper, a T-Rex available for Trap Team, was actually designed for Giants originally. “He was too long and wouldn’t fit in the package, he would knock over the others.” Instead, Huang had the idea to shrink him down for the new game, and give him weaponry to balance him out. Now Chopper’s a new favorite among staff members.

Huang shows a metal painting guide for molds while on the right a soft outer coating is cleaned off newly printed figure prototypes

After Huang decides on a sketch, he makes a 3D model and tries out different color combinations with a program that shows the real paint shades available to them for production. Every nuance matters, so it’s important for designers to be able to quickly see how their character holds up in the real world and make changes immediately. Luckily Toys for Bob found a solution: in-house 3D printers.

Right next to Huang’s desk is a whole Skylanders mini-factory. A rough 3D printer quickly makes models to help Huang know if a certain detail or pose is working while another 3D printer shows finer detailing but takes much longer to print. Metal molds are made for plastic injection and painting so the crew knows the best way to create the figures when sent to the factory.

Magic Portals
But what about getting these characters into the game? Robert Leyland, the senior software engineer at Toys for Bob, has a big hand in that. He’s responsible for convincing kids the characters are real through the use of the figures’ RFID and the famous portals, a role he feels a little uneasy about: “The game is about the magic of the world, and kids really believe their toys are alive, but as an engineer I’d rather have them take apart the portal, to see how it really works and learn about it, but I don’t think parents would be too happy with me then.”

Prototypes for the portal's speakers

Over the past three years, the Skylanders magic portal has pretty much worked the same, but with Trap Team the portal now needed a speaker inside so the trapped villains could talk from their prison. This was a big step, since the cost of the speaker would make the price go up for consumers. A balance was found by making a small wedge speaker (using the resident 3D printer for a prototype), and using a spectrum analyzer to get a flatter sound from it.

It’s interesting to note that the very first Skylanders portal design included a speaker during the planning stages, but there wasn’t a good use for it so it was cut. Each design and idea of Skylanders must push the game further or else be stockpiled for a future game. Toys for Bob always looks ahead. “2015’s is already well underway, ’16 is being planned,” explained Leyland.

Another aspect is backward-compatibility. With almost 300 figures in circulation from past games and new, every one of them must be tested on the new portal to ensure they work with the latest game. This includes the swapping action of Skylanders Swap Force figures and, looking forward, the Trap gems. According to Leyland, “I’m not sure if new ones will be made, or if it’ll be an extra accessory for portal compatibility.”

Making Villains into Stars
Of course, no game would be anything without a story or goal for the characters, which is where Alex Ness, producer and chief-of-staff, comes in. He admits he kind of fell into the role of the games’ writer, and most elements are really a group effort. There’s always small inspiration from the original Spyro games and bits are dropped in here and there for fans of the series, but Skylanders is really its own world where really anything is possible if they can find a place for it. While actual Skylanders are strictly made in the design department, villains and levels come from the story.

Many characters are voiced right in the studio by the various staff members, Ness included (the fan-favorite Chompy Mage to name just one of his contributions). The team brainstorms a villain’s personality, how they’ll sound, etc, until they have a solid nemesis for players. They usually try to think of ones they can personally do voices for as it helps them get closer to the characters and know them better. This was especially important for Trap Team since the captured villains will continue to talk to players through the portal for the rest of the game. Each villain needed over 100 lines so they could believably comment on anything at any time.

Bringing Life to Characters
Every figure, every villain, pretty much everything that moves, falls into Paul Yan’s department. As the Animation Director for the games, Yan must decide how every character is going to behave and attack. After the design team finalizes the digital sculpt for a character, it’s sent to the tech artists who give it a skeleton system and movement points; that’s when Yan’s team takes over. Using Autodesk Maya, a powerful and popular 3D computer graphics software, they go through all the controllers for the joints and push the limits of the characters. Since they are cartoons, things can naturally bend and stretch past the laws of physics.

Poses are always first so animators can get a feel for a character’s personality and movement before continuing. Different running styles are animated next, before one is chosen, with other actions influenced by that chosen style. Characters are then tested in the “white room,” a simple space with boxes and shapes that allow the character to be recorded in action. This is where animators can really cut loose and pile on powers while figuring out a character’s strengths and weaknesses.

“It’s really important to see how powers can relate to each other and think about combos. A combo can look really cool, but when you consider the enemies, it might not be practical.” Yan pointed out how a giant smashing leap attack might be fun to deploy, but could take so long that a character could be surrounded by new enemies by the time they landed. With attacks, every second is important.

For the most part, once a character is animated, it’s locked in. Very rarely, animators will revisit a past game’s character to make it compatible for newer games, like when jumping was added to the series, or with minor graphic errors like overlapping feet pop up.

Fun with Sound
Usually the final part of a game’s design is audio and sound effects, but with Trap Team, the sound department really started everything. Dan Neil and Jason Bowers, the Audio Director and Sound Designer respectively, came up with the latest game’s trick together. Sound drives everything about Trap Force, it’s the sole element that makes kids believe a villain has really been sucked from their TV into the portal’s prison. To push it further, Neil and Bowers really wanted to make a difference between the heroes and the villains. Neil explained, “The Skylanders all have the background sound, it’s orchestral and soft, meanwhile the villains mix it up, old timey fun music for Bombshell, Bruiser Cruiser is energetic. It changes whenever you switch.”

The portal lights up in time with the villain’s lines whenever they speak from the portal. “This helps it feel more connected and directs focus to the portal,” explained Neil. Villains will comment on everything, hats, challenges, worlds, to make them feel more alive and sentient. In fact, right as Neil brought up the new Skaletones mini-game, a trapped Chef Pepper Jack told us all about how he loved the Skaletones band, prompting Neil to throw the “creepy” Trap Gem across the room.

At the end of the day, everyone can agree that Skylanders is unique. As other companies are jumping on the bandwagon, Skylanders will always hold the distinction of being first. As co-founder Paul Reiche III says, “We didn’t know we were inventing a genre at that point, but we did, the toys-to-life genre.”

This is a studio that loves what they do, and they keep it all under one roof so they can work together as a team, dedicating the whole staff to just one game at a time, and it’s definitely a formula that is working for them. According to Reiche, “If you take the Skylanders that have sold between when we started and now, and you stacked them one on top of the other, they go up four thousand miles now. So, there are a lot of Skylanders out there and we want kids to continue playing with the Skylanders they’ve got. Then every year, we introduce some new innovation. We hope that they will go out and enjoy what we’re bring to Skylanders this year.”