Two characters from one of Disney's more popular cartoon franchises Phineas and Ferb — sleuthing platypus Agent P and the titular Phineas — are joining the ruckus in Disney Infinity's Toy Box on April 1.
These two characters will be accompanied by two new power disks that give Toy Box a makeover to look like Phineas and Ferb's city of Danville: one is for an all-over terrain remake and the other paints over Disney Infinity's Skydome to look like the TV show's cloud-pockmarked sky. The Danville power discs even recreate the show's antagonistic Doofenshmirtz Evil Incorporated building and a small waterslide park invented in one of the cartoon's episodes. Phineas carries his trademark Baseball Shooter, a gun that fires baseballs, while Agent P uses his signature fedora to thwack things.
"The goal was to let players recreate Phineas and Ferb's adventures in Toy Box on your own," senior producer Michael Schneider told Polygon.
Both also have Character Adventures, special missions unique to individual figures that can only be completed with that figure. For Phineas, players are set into a giant pinball machine and tasked with laying out its guts in a way that will destroy waves of oncoming robots. Players will set up the the bumpers and flippers so pinballs smash into these enemies. Meanwhile, as Agent P, players can participate in a top-down adventure game with some side-on platforming elements, a mini throwback to classic video games.
Making a creation level within a creation level for Phineas' Character Adventure plays into the Disney Infinity setup, encouraging players to construct on their own intuition and whims rather than play with a pre-existing complete model, Schneider said. Phineas is also an inventor in the show, so having him create new things is in-character, he added.
According to Schneider, the decision to make this Phineas and Ferb content only available in Toy Box — Disney Infinity's creation mode — was all a question of resources and new content launch times.
"We had to make choices regarding scheduling and figure out where to best put our play sets," he said. "We do want to go wide with a lot of the properties, but we also had to make sure we could have some deep experiences with the play sets that we do have. Early on we had to decide what to do in each section. Theoretically everything could have a play set, but we're really inundated with all the stuff Disney has."
Schneider said that Disney Infinity's Toy Boy feature has proven to be a very large component in building the game's community. Every week, the team gets close to 1000 user-created Toy Box submissions, from intricately built to "quick and dirty." From there, the Infinity community group picks through them, cleans up any inappropriate language or content, and releases five as highlighted Toy Boxes for players.
Schneider added that community interest in these toy sets and what players make in Toy Box is something the team keeps in mind when deciding what new content to bring to Disney Infinity.
"Future plans plans are still to be decided," he said, "but we listen to everything people have to say and who they'd like to see in it. We'll work on that."
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