Long post alert…
The physical side of this build isn't really progressing at the moment. I've been trying to obtain parts (bezel brackets etc.) in the UK but having no luck, so will likely need to order these from the US and just swallow the shipping and import costs. I'm reluctant to put too much together until I've got these parts because I don't want to guess on sizing and end up attaching panels that need to be trimmed. The time isn't being wasted though. This build has needed a theme since it started, and that's where recent efforts have been.
I've said before that I do like the Popeye theming, but it's a landscape game and most games I want to play on this are portrait. Fixit Felix is a nice alternative because it's portrait AND has a second button, but I'm not a bit fan of the artwork style on the cabinet itself. I love the concept, and the fact that the whole design is so blatantly copied from DK, but I'd been put off by the art.
And then I had an idea. Since I didn't like the artwork, could I change it? Also, since the whole concept is based upon DK then why is the game Fixit Felix and not Wreck-it Ralph? So, let's make a Wreck-it Ralph cabinet.
Some challenges:
- I'm not an artist, not even close.
- I've never used Photoshop or Illustrator.
I didn't want to use the in-game art on the cabinet, but I didn't want to use the style from the film either. I remembered that years ago I'd seen the display of Wreck-it Ralph at Disney World and that there was an amount of concept art in that display. I had a few photos of that display, but none of them were particularly great. But other people, of course, have visited that exhibit and posted pictures online of various qualities. My hope was that there was enough from sources like that to make this work.
First a reminder of what we're working with. The original DK bezel:
And Fixit Felix bezel:
So it's a blatant copy with 1-1 substitutions in many places, but it still has differences from the original. That gives me choices about whether I slavishly copy the FF design or whether I just take inspiration from DK and can make changes. For instance, FF has the Niceland characters on the right-hand side because it has more characters to play with than DK. But, oddly, they chose to feature Felix in the two bottom circles and not use Ralph at all.
The control panel is a similar story. DK:
And FF:
Similar story here, with FF being pretty much different colours and some different images, but structurally it's the same.
The exhibit at Disney had a large selection of concept art from the film, but most of it is useless to me. I’m determined to only use elements that appear in the game, not the film, so that rules out all of the characters and elements that feature in the wider film. That's a shame because there are some great pieces to work with, but they wouldn't fit with the "game" theme. Also, much of the concept art, especially for Ralph, is from before they’d even settled on a final form for the character. Featuring a Ralph in this design that isn’t even human wouldn’t make a great deal of sense. So I’ve got art to work with, but not much.
I’ve spent much of the last month working to try and obtain as many usable pieces of art as I can find and to get those into Illustrator. This has meant a lot of time trawling Internet resources, and lots of slow progress as I got to grips with Illustrator. I’m learning as I go here, so I’m already shaking my head at things I did to achieve certain tasks a couple of weeks ago.
Being at the mercy of photos online I found that many of the things I was able to get into Illustrator suffered from dull colours. Re-colouring by hand, especially with my near-zero Illustrator skills, didn’t look like it was going to go well. After lots of searching I found a video that someone had taken of the exhibit, which was better lit than any of the photos that I’d found. The stills from the video were too low quality to use directly, but I was able to use those stills to grab colours and correct my traced versions. You can see this below, with the originally traced image, the still from the video, and the final coloured version. I'm still not 100% happy with some of these, but they're a lot closer than they started out.
I’ve also been making the most of the limited Ralph and Felix art out there. For instance, there’s a good Felix line drawing that I’ve been able to clean up and then colourise using colours from a different picture of the character.
I’ve located a combination of Photoshop and Illustrator files for a number of DK and FF pieces such as the bezels and control panels. These are being used as a starting point for any work, but I don't have everything in every format. Armed with this lot I’ve been putting together some drafts of the main cabinet pieces.
My control panel draft is a hybrid of DK and FF, using the layout of FF (two buttons) but returning much closer to the DK colours. I didn’t have FF in Illustrator format so I had to start with a DK panel and then work in the second button. The colours are slightly different from DK, using the palette of colours from the Ralph character where possible. This probably also means that the cabinet itself will be red, although I haven’t finalised anything yet. The game logo is a temporary copy/paste from a version of the logo that featured Ralph in the middle and which needed to be removed. It’s temporary because I’m not sure what to do with it yet. All WiR logos are the “two” words on top of each other, but FF and DK use the words NEXT to each other and so naturally fit in a longer box. Squashing the logo allows it to be put in the same place as the originals, but it doesn’t look right and so I’m in two minds about whether to keep it at all.
For the bezel I’ve again started with a DK bezel, since that’s the basis for FF after all, and I’m in early stages deciding what to do with the various elements on the page. My approach here would be to follow styles from the DK and FF bezels so I can influenced by both. Very much a work in progress…
I’ve also played around with the idea of doing something very different with the bezel and using the apartment building featured in the game/film. This has the advantage that I can take the Niceland characters and place them in the windows. But I’m not sure it’s working out, I’m not sure what to do with the bottom section of the bezel, and it also creates a very dull looking image for a cabinet that really needs to be all about bright colours.
One irritation, which I really don’t understand, was that I found that the Illustrator file I’m using for the bezel is 2cm wider than it should be. This is confusing. I can’t understand why the file would exist but be wrong. Anyone who had used it to print from would have found this, and yet I’ve got two original (and distinct) files that share this measurement. If anyone knows why it's this size (59cm wide rather than 57cm) then I'd love to hear. I’m hoping it’s easy enough to resize it down to the correct size. I haven’t got to that part of my Illustrator learning yet 😊
I haven’t even thought about the marquee yet, other than to know that the logo layout will be a problem. Side art is also not planned yet, but one simple option is to take the main logo and use that:
My plan is for the cabinet to boot into FF but then launch MAME if that game is exited. But it doesn’t make much sense for me to have a cabinet branded as Wreck-it Ralph that launches the game Fixit Felix Jr. I’d really hoped I could address that, and it turned out to be much easier than I’d hoped. From this:
To this:
Quite happy with that.
Thoughts/comments etc. all appreciated at this stage. I’m pretty much tied to this being a Wreck-it Ralph cabinet now, but other than time there’s nothing to stop me changing design elements.