Magic & Mayhem

Development

The game designers for Magic and Mayhem had decided to create the creatures and monster characters using the stop-motion animation techniques made popular in the films of Ray Harryhausen, and employed a model maker who was a specialist in this field. Once the model maker had designed the characters, he requested that he be allowed to build them using foam and latex rubber for their skins, which is a professional stop-motion process, but was told that he had to make them with modeling clay as in the TV animation Wallace and Grommit. It worked out in the end, but on one particularly hot day in the sweltering summer of 1997, the plasticine models started to melt!

Programmer Thaddaeus Frogley:

The character models and animations were created using traditional stop motion / 'claymation' and photography.

The end results looked great, but it was a very expensive and long winded way to generate the art resources, and caused lots of problems that were had to fix - especially with animation loops, which we found the from-TV animation lead had trouble with, as TV animation doesn't usually require tight looping walk sequences.

If you look closely you can see the Redcap has a slight "limp" when he walks because of this.

Inspiration

Magic & Mayhem is based on Julian Gollop's Lords of Chaos.

Information also contributed by alan friskell and codemonkey_uk