Crash Bandicoot 4: The Story Behind Cortex, Dingodile, and Tawna as Playable Characters

Studdert of course noted from a production perspective, that would greatly increase the scope of what the team had to accomplish, but also the developers recognized some inherent issues players might have with the idea.

“From a player-information perspective, they then would have to go, ‘Okay what does that do? If I shot the dinosaur and it turned into a baby dinosaur, then what does that mean for me?’ And to have to do that at every single interaction we realized very quickly, “No, no, no, we need to simplify it.’”

But the ideas for this transformation blaster didn’t stop there.

“Then it became, ‘Okay…what if you hit it with his blaster and it turned into an object from the game? Maybe I shot a chicken and it turned into a bounce pad,” he explained. “That was funny, but it only sustained itself so long, because you wouldn’t know what you’d get when you hit it and because Crash is such a deterministic game you have to figure out [what to do next],” Studdert explained. He joked that this idea led to the team coining the phrase of a “producer pistol.”

“Someone said to me, ‘Wait, you get to shoot a gun to then reuse content from other parts in the game. Is this a producer pistol?’”

Development jokes aside, the team eventually landed on Cortex’s blaster as players know it, but not without even further refinement. At one point, Studdert explained that there were even three states players could switch enemies among, but ultimately paring the options down made more sense.

A New Tawna Rises

And while it might be easier to see the framework for which Cortex would fit into Crash 4’s story, and even gameplay, Toys for Bob’s new take on Tawna is a polar opposite. Featuring a completely different iteration of the character than we’ve seen before, Studdert explained how they took the responsibility of including Tawna very seriously, especially in a series largely dominated by a lot of male characters throughout its history.

“We knew from the start that we wanted to bring a new voice and a new perspective to Tawna,” he said. “We took that task very seriously internally, getting a very cross-functional group of developers to weigh in, different writers. Mandy Benanav on our team had a lot of hand in her flavor and her character and the writing. And the art team brought in different inspirations and the character team did a bunch of different iterations.“We knew early on that we wanted to not just update this character, but really give them a role that they haven’t had a chance to play. Especially also for Coco, it was an intentional part of us as figuring out what this game was, is that we wanted to take these characters [and] break them free from those roles of sidekick or damsel in distress and make them as equal billing co-stars for the game.”

And in deciding what that meant for bringing Tawna more to the forefront of Crash 4, the team inevitably settled on going full “action hero” as Studdert put it.

“What does Tawna look like as Batman,” he said the team asked itself. “We want her to exude confidence and strength and just general awesomeness. And then the art team, experimenting in different looks and different appeals so that way she’s still recognizable… and then using those foundations for us on the narrative development side to figure out, ‘Okay, well, where does she intersect with this story? And how do we also rectify where she’s been in the previous games?’”

Studdert explained how, as evidenced by earlier versions glimpsed in the Crash Bandicoot 4 art book, Tawna had a boomerang before her eventual hook shot, among other iterations. But the team’s plans for Dingodile actually steered them away from that tool.

“Once we realized what we wanted to do with Dingodile, the idea of getting something and bringing it back was already covered by a vacuum,” he noted. But Tawna’s hook shot allowed the team to really dig into Tawna as a mobile character.

“Tawna’s hook shot is less about the combat and the interaction than it is about moving her,” he explained, noting that there might have been some influence from so much of the team playing Sekiro during development.

John Wickodile

But as for the third playable character, Studdert explained how Dingodile was a good example in Toys for Bob’s approach to choosing these additions. They could come up with some great ideas, sure, like turning Dingodile into the John Wick of the Crash Bandicoot universe, but if it didn’t narratively and mechanically gel with the rest of the adventure, what was really the point?

“We worked a lot to try and figure out, ‘Okay, where does he go after his diner’s destroyed?’ At one point, we jokingly referred to it as ‘Dingodile becomes John Wick,’ trying to take out all of the bats through all of the dimensions for destroying his diner,” Studdert said. “He’s on a full-on mission of revenge. And he has nothing to do with the rest of the game,” he continued, noting that the narrative t

eam questioning that move actually helped with level design, too, because it didn’t lock those designers into a very specific kind of Dingodile level.