Hey, everyone. I know this update is coming pretty late at night. I’m in Toronto and it took all day to fly here from California. The reason I’m in Toronto is so that I can show off the Xbox 360 version of DMC4 at Microsoft’s X07 event tomorrow (Tuesday).

Anyway, Rey sent me a blog post update with a revised Vegas background today, so I wanted to get it posted as soon as possible and I won’t be back in the office until Thursday.

First of all, I would like to apologize to the artist that drew the background. As I mentioned before, this wasn’t an actual screenshot of the game. Actually I had taken the layers of the background and arranged them around to show as much of the new elements of the background as I could. The issue with the perspective and size of the SUV limo was due to my own error – I had put the layer with the SUV a little too high. This slight error made the people in the front look too small. Below is a more accurate representation of how it’s supposed to look. Of course, as with all the other artwork posted here, it may not look 100% like this in the final game.

Click through to keep reading.

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I don’t have time at the moment for a longer update, but let me address a couple of issues that have come up in the comments to the previous update:

– The background layers will parallax

– The floor in the front will have the same perspective/scrolling effect like in the original.

– Apparently there was still some confusion after my last post about who the support artists are for Udon on this project… Backbone is NOT drawing any of the sprites. Who the supporting studio is not important right now, and they will be given their due credit in the end. That’s what the credits at the end of the game are for. There is no conspiracy going on here, I assure you.

– Each character has roughly 200 (+ or 50) frames of animation. Since all the moves obviously have more that 1 frame of animation, I can assure you that there are indeed “in-between” frames. Each frame takes our main Udon character artist 2 hours to do, sometimes more. Including other sprites like projectiles, we’re looking at about 800 “man-hour days” to simply draw and render everything. This does not include extra time to run a frame through a quality control for animation and consistency. In short, it is necessary to use a supporting studio for this project. Which frames are done by Udon and which frames are “in-between” and worked on by our supporting studio is irrelevant, because the finished product will be on par with the quality Udon is known for. But I will say that every piece of art that I’ve shown so far has been directly from an Udon artist.

—Rey