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Exclusive Interview: Artist Chuck Pires Discusses Outcast Odyssey

Bandai Namco recently announced Outcast Odyssey which will be a mobile card battle game with the chance to explore and discover new worlds. Outcast Odyssey will offer up a unique gameplay experience that allows players to collect and evolve hundreds of cards in order to create the ultimate deck. We recently had the chance to speak with artist Chuck Pires about his work on Outcast Odyssey, the game’s beautiful visuals and much more. Read on.

AMANDA DYAR: Outcast Odyssey will be released by Bandai Namco for mobile devices and features the combination of dungeon crawling and card battling. Can you tell us a little bit about the game?

CHUCK PIRES: Well I've only got to play the full version for a few hours when we were out at SDCC. They had to pry me off the game, because (as they said), "People who didn't work on the game would like to play." Whatever. Basically like you said, it's more of a dungeon crawler RPG with cards elements than vise-versa. What the heck does that mean? Well basically you've got your cards, and you traverse levels and maps within levels with various objectives. Sometimes you're looking to clear a map, while sometimes you're looking to hunt a specific monster. It's a lot of fun; it keeps things light enough that people won't have a problem jumping in while adding enough depth to keep you interested.

DYAR: The title is beautifully designed and features a very vibrant color palette. How did you get involved on the title and what did you hope to bring to the project?

PIRES: Well thank you! We've all worked really hard on it. I had been posting work online on sites like Deviant Art doing whatever work came my way when Jonathan from Magic Pixel got a hold of me. We seem to have very similar interests as far as art is concerned so It's been a very easy process. In all honesty, I just wanted to make something fun to look at. There's a lot of art out there for card games nowadays that's technically impressive, but in my opinion, it is not a lot of fun to look at. With that in mind, I tried to push the colors and designs as far as they would go, and I think that was a mindset we all had while making this game.



DYAR: What are some of the things that inspired your work on Outcast Odyssey?

PIRES: As far as inspirations, I think it's safe to say we pulled them in from all four corners on this one. I'm a total gamer, so when they said, "The cards get upgraded as they gain levels," I immediately thought of that old SNES game Knights of the Round. (It's a) Wicked fun game. Anyway, it was the first game I'd played as a kid where the character would get new and better armor as the game progressed, and it looked newer and better, not just better stats or anything. That really stuck in my mind while working on this game, and I wanted to give people that feeling of seeing these amped up gnarly cards. If someone had an idea, it pretty much got incorporated in some way into the final card. At one point, I was struggling with the look of a character and my wife came in and saw it. She goes, "You should make her look like a Disney character," and that got me on to a completely different train of thought than we had been working with up to that point, so it's been a lot of fun helping develop these characters.

DYAR: How will Outcast Odyssey stand out in your opinion above all of the other releases on mobile devices for this genre?

PIRES: I believe the exploration is our biggest asset. A lot of card games I've seen are just you using your deck to battle other cards, there's not a lot going on outside of that. In Outcast Odyssey there's a lot to find and explore to help improve your cards. Exploration is one of my favorite things in games, when you jump down that hole you cant quite see the bottom of in Darks Souls in hopes there's something awesome down there, that's a great feeling, so it's nice to see it taken into account in this game. That and our awesome colorful fun art!

DYAR: Do you have anything else you would like to mention and what do you think fans will enjoy most about playing Outcast Odyssey?

PIRES: Well if you're interested in what takes place in Outcast Odyssey, we have a web comic coming out that I'm doing the art for. It's been a lot of fun to work and hopefully that translates into a fun read.


To learn more, visit the official Outcast Odyssey website.

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