What week are we up to now? (Wolf among us game blog)

Coolio, this week I played The Wolf Among Us. This is one of the Telltale games and has that typical telltale branching story with choices that can lead you down different paths.

You play as Bigby, AKA Big bad wolf, who is the sheriff of Fabletown, a secret community of fairytale characters living in New York disguised as regular humans. Following a murder you are dragged into an investigation where you must uncover the murderer's identity and save as many people as you can.

This game offers a lot of story interaction, some of it really doesn't change the story at all but other choice moments can lead you down some very different storylines, leading to characters deaths, characters responding to you differently, and changing how much information your character has about the murder.

Because some of these choices can change the narrative path so drastically, all of the decisions in the game seem to have more weight. The player understands that they do have some control over the story, and the game uses this to trick the player into feeling like they have a lot of control. In reality of course there are only so many paths you can travel down and only so many outcomes they can lead to. For instance no matter how you play the first episode it always ends with you in a bar making a decision between only two possible story paths. This method allows the game creators to keep the size of the game minimal while still making the player feel as though there are many possibilities in-game.

All up I'm really enjoying the game and I plan on playing it through to the end. Hopefully I make the right decisions.

Bish bash bosh, SuperPlumpHam signing off.

Simulations, concepts, 3D and more!

Very long time no post.
My bad, I'm terrible at keeping up with these things.
That said I haven't stopped working!
So here goes with a nice big update on what I've been up to.

First up is trying to simulate the spirt. In our film as mentioned in other posts, we have a golden spirit coming out of our main character. We discussed this being done using 3D particle simulations and as head of 3D it's my job to figure out how to do that.
I did a quick photoshop concept of the effect I wanted to achieve.

I showed this to the team and they liked the look, so I set out to figure out how to do it!

I grabbed up as many simulation tutorials as I could find and in the end I found a couple of tutorial sets by Digital Tutors that were super helpful. One was all about simulating smoke like effects using a voxel based system called Fluid Containers. The second was a particle simulator that runs off the ndynamics system in Maya.

The way I decided to create the effect was by using one or both of these effects emmiting from a 3D model of Oscar to make an etherial looking spirit simulation.

I started with the fluid containers tutorial set. I played around with this for a while trying to get the look I wanted. I managed to get the smoke effects emmiting from an object and being affected by gravity.

I found that to get nice smoke detail I needed to crank up the voxel count quite high which slowed down my computer quite a lot. The simulation time as well as the render time were enormous. I've since then found out that I can save out a simulation prior to rendering which speeds up the render by a tonne so that'll be helpful for future tests.
I quickly tried playing with some different colours of smoke as well.

I thought the effect looked nice but it could be taken further, though anything more complex will take a lot of time to simulate and render.

I realised that I would be able to cut down on simulation time if the emitter object wasn't full of voxels/particles. What I mean is that since my object was completely invisible I had to have a lot of voxels/particles covering its surface so that you could make out its shape. If I instead made the object visible I could have less simulation going on on the object's surface.
And so I created this.

After a lot of playing around in hypershade I managed to create a dynamic texture that looks like particles. I built the texture with multiple ramps connected to multipliers and a 3D noise texture so that as the object moves through it, cloudy particles seem to move along its surface.

I really liked that so I started playing with simulating particles flowing off of the sphere.
This time I used ndynamics. I watched another bunch of tutorials and eventually started to get the hang of it. I ended up simulating at a rate of 15,000 particles per second, which came out to about 80,000 particles simulated all together.

I was pretty happy with the result. Of course I didn't get this straight away, there was a lot of playing around and adjusting. In this simulation I added a turbulence field to give the particles more life. The blending between the texture and the particles came out really nice as well.

For reference, this is the look I was aiming for. It's not quite the same, but to render that many particles would have been impractical for me so what I have is good enough for now.

I showed the team what I had and they were pretty happy with how it's coming along. I have a bunch of stuff to try out with the next set of simulations. I want to add more size variation in the particles, I also want to play more with fields and try constraining particles to vector paths. But the main thing I want to try is compositing the smoke effect together with the particle effect to get more depth and variety.

So that's it for simulation for now, next up I did a little concepting!

I wasn't really on concepting on the schedule, but I felt inspired to do some environments.
I started by trying to do some matte paintings on top of existing environment photos.

 I thought they came out kind of muddy and it was hard to see the composition in them so I decided to break up the planes into colours.

I preferred the composition of the second one so I started to develop it further.

I removed the water so that all of the islands were floating in the sky. I really liked that composition so I decided to start to render it.

This one was just to get some atmospheric perspective. Then I added colour and started painting on the layers.

That's as far as I got with it but I liked the vibes I was getting. I was never really intending to use the concept since I wasn't rostered on concepting, but I showed it to the team anyway and it sparked up some good conversation about colour scheme and how the background should look etc. so I think it was worth it in the end.

Next on the list was the animatic. Oscar did the sound for that so I had to take that and match up the visuals as well as add a few extra little sounds to add effect.
I started by taking Tea's storyboard and cutting it into layers using Photoshop. I then imported those layers into After effects where I made a composition for each shot and dynamically linked them to Premiere Pro for the final editing. I also dynamically linked Oscar's Audition file so that I could edit the audio timing in audition. It too a decent bit of time to put it all together and add effects but I got it there in the end, so here it is.

I think that's generally what we're going for. The timing may change a bit and we may add in another shot or two. Exactly how the spirit world is going to work is still a little vague, but I worked with what I was given.

And lastly 3D. To be honest I haven't gotten super far with it. With all the simulation stuff and everything else modelling has taken a back seat for now. But I have some tutorials for making an organised human mesh and it's not the first human model I've made so I'm hoping it won't take too long. So far I have the symmetrical reference photos put together and my first basic shape has been laid down.

Hopefully Oscar doesn't mind me showing off his awesome body on here. You can see it's super early stages right now. The next step is probably a 5-10 hour modelling session to get it mostly done. Then I can move on to more simulation tests and other interesting stuff.

So All up I have a descent basis to work off for the rest of the semester as far as knowing what I need to do to get the effects that I want.

It's all bleet'n commin together!

Tres el juego (Game blog the third, 'The Banner Saga')

On this fine week I played 'The Banner Saga.' I actually started playing this about two months ago and picked it up again for this blog. I really enjoyed this game. The art is super nice, the music fits well, the story and setting are enjoyable and immersive, and the gameplay is really cool.

The story follows two main characters down different paths that eventually meet (not that I played that far) and you make decisions and fight battles along the way. The combat takes on a table-top like strategy gameplay, while the rest of the game consists of cutscenes, dialogue boxes, and as I mentioned before, beautiful artwork.

There are a lot of 'choice situations' throughout this game. If you don't know what a choice situation is, it's basically a point in the game where a player must make a decision with two or more outcomes. They also tend to have some motivation, or rather the player has a reason to care about the choice, but they may or may not realise that they are actually making a choice.

In The Banner Saga the player usually realises that they are making a choice and that their decision may have consequences. The game gives you enough information to speculate about what the outcome of your choice may be but not enough to know exactly what's going to happen. Because of this there is a certain weight to your choices and a hope that you made the right, or optimal choice.

One example is when an member of your caravan gets heavily drunk and starts making a scene which the rest of your caravan members do not appreciate. You have the choice of punishing him with varying levels of seriousness or just letting him off the hook. You are given enough information in this decision to know that if you let him off the hook then other members may become angry and leave, but punishing him too harshly may make your followers fear you.
Other choices, like whether to let your daughter join a fight with you or not, make the player feel like the story could be significantly changed by making a wring move. I think this is a brilliant effect because it keeps the player engaged and feeling as though they are driving the story even when the battles aren't taking place.

I think that the choices in this game are really important to the story and the experience. I think it is important that the player realises they are making a choice, because that give weight to their decision, and because of the limited information, there is a sense of anticipation over the outcome which keeps the player invested.

In all the gameplay is very well planned and lends itself perfectly to the style of story being told by the game.

Hamsizzle out.

Blogeridoo number 2 (Prince of Persia game blog)

Okilly dokilly, so this week I played Prince of Persia. It was pretty fun despite the weird camera movement and a couple of slightly clunky game mechanics. Most of the game is jumping around very linear levels to reach objectives whilst dispatching a few enemies along the way.

This game was very much a 'ludus' type of game. That is a game with a clear goal and simple rules for how to reach that goal and win. I think this game also falls under the definition of a 'top down', or 'narrative game' as explained by Marie-Laure Ryan in her paper 'From Narrative Games to Playable Stories.' In short, she says a 'top down' game is designed so that the narrative is already set in place by the game creator, as well as problems to be solved and mechanics to solve them. The player is not free to play as they choose, they must play by the rules. Similarly, a 'narrative game' gives you rules to play by and goals to reach, but the narrative takes a back seat and is only there to give some context to the 'play.'

In Prince of Persia I found myself not really caring about the story so much as I just wanted to jump around and fight and spin on a pole. I felt this was the real core of the game. There were cutscenes for days, but they mostly felt like they were in the way of my experience. They pulled me out of my interaction and made me sit through a short film instead of playing.
In this way I don't think the cutscenes added much to the game. While they helped me understand why I was doing things, I didn't really care why. I just wanted to do stuff uninterrupted.

Since the story was of so little interest to me, I found I didn't care that I had little to no effect on what happened in the story. There was no branching or decisions that had to be made, instead the story was entirely linear, and I think it worked for the game. Since it was so linear in both story and level design, I always knew what to do and where to go which meant I could just focus on getting there and having fun doing it. In a game that focuses on the story and not the gameplay it is much more important to make the player feel part of the story, but here I think it would have been better to have a little less story and a little more play.

To summarise, I enjoyed playing the game, but I didn't care about the story. The linear narrative was a good decision to keep it simple so play could be the focus, but the extensive cutscenes felt unneeded and at times very frustrating. Also spinning on poles is fun in games, I'm keen for more pole mechanics.

Final script and other stuff

Well it's been a little while since my last post so I guess it's time to make a few updates.

First off, our team has a name! We are henceforth officially 'JA HOT.'
It's an acronym of our team members' names. That sounds silly but how good is the name JA HOT? That's awesome. We're like super sexy Germans in a night club.

Ahem.

So we also have our final script. We all threw in some ideas and workshopped it into it's final form. We all had a pretty similar vision of the story so the process was very smooth. I possibly should have posted some previous versions but there's not much point now.
So here's the final script.

Script Idea

By Oscar W. Mitchell (Team Ja, Hot!)

Finalised version

­­

CLOSE UP OF MEDITATION TRACK ON PHONE, LOW BATTERY ON ORANGE IN

THE TOP CORNER

PERSON PUTTING IN HEADPHONES

SOOTHING MUSIC STARTS

MEDITATION VOICE OVER STARTS

VOICE OVER: Hello, welcome to this guided meditation. Find a comfortable position,

sitting or lying down.

INDIVIDUAL SITTING, UNABLE TO GET COMFORTABLE, SLIGHTLY TWITCHY

VOICE OVER: Allow yourself to enter a space of deep relaxation.

MID CLOSEUP BIRDS EYE SHOT: WATCH CHEST TAKE DEEP BREATHS AND

FACIALS RELAX AS THE BREATHING SLOWS AND THE BODY STARTS TO CALM.

SHOULDERS DROP

VOICE OVER: With your mind, slowly scan your body.

As you move from your toes up to your head, Feel your physical body being erased and

released into the universe, revealing your spiritual self.

FULL BODY SHOT: BLUE ENERGY/GLOWING LIGHT SLOWLY MOVES FROM THE

FEET UP THROUGH THE WHOLE BODY, REACHING THE CROWN OF THE HEAD.

ONCE IT REACHES THE TOP, THE LIGHT ENVELOPS THE WHOLE ROOM THEN

SLOWLY FADES OUT, ALLOWING THE SPIRIT WORLD TO SLOWLY APPEAR. GOLD

PARTICLES ARE LEFT SIMMERING IN THE BODY, AND THE ROOM SLOWLY

STARTS TO TRANSFORM IN THE SPIRITUAL WORLD.

VOICE OVER: Embrace the warm sensations running through your body, and drop all

preconceived ideas of what you’re hoping to expect.

THE GOLD PARTICLES START TO ELEVATE UPWARDS, TAKING A HUMAN LIKE

FORM, THE SPIRIT WORLD IS BECOMING EXTREMELY CLEAR, AND THE SOUL

STARTS OBSERVING ITS SURROUNDINGS; A PEACEFUL/MAJESTIC FOREST WITH

A LAKE IN THE MIDDLE, WITH STEPPING STONES LEADING TO AN ISLAND IN THE

CENTER. THE SKY THROUGH THE TREES HAS AN AMAZING VIEW OF THE

COSMOS, DANCING WITH COLOUR AND LIGHT.

VOICE OVER: with no earthly tethers, allow your soul to move freely on its own accord­­

SUDDENLY THE MEDITATION CUTS OFF, THE PHONE HAS DIED THE RINGING

SOUND OF TINNITUS STARTS TO BUILD

THE SPIRITS GLITCH OUT AND TURN INTO DARK SPIRITS,THE STEPPING

STONES START TO FALL AWAY AND THE PEACEFUL SETTING BECOMES DARK

AND OMINOUS

A CLOSEUP OF THE PHYSICAL BODY, SWEAT ON THE FOREHEAD.

SUDDENLY JOLTING AWAKE AND RIPPING OUT THE HEADPHONES, PANTING,

THEN CREDITS

Aaaand that's what we're gonna be working with.
I think each of us has a fairly clear idea of how it should look so when we get to storyboarding we'll see just how similar our ideas are.

Next up is the production schedule. We were told to each create a schedule to dictate who in the team does what and when during production so that we have targets to meet which should keep us on track.
I created mine as if we were doing my story just as a way to practice creating a schedule.

I chose to be the director since I wrote the story and I thought Jo would be a dependable producer. Adrian did really well with 3D last year so I chose her as head of 3D. Since there are lots of moving shots with animation compositing in my idea I gave plenty of space for roughing out the match-moved animation and also for compositing.

Of course since we're actually using Oscar's story we all made a production schedule together that we think will work for our production. Dane and Keat had us make a couple changes to hopefully make things go smoother. So here's our current schedule.

In this schedule I'm the head of 3D. There isn't a tonne of 3D in this film so I'll be handling all of that myself I'll also be doing a lot of the compositing and VFX since I'm fairly well acquainted with After Effects. We're putting a focus on sound early in the process so that we can lay it out almost like a music video where the visuals play in time with the audio and the compliment each other.

According to this schedule this week I'm working on modeling. I'll probably also be working on this for some of next week as well as helping Tea with the animatic. The 3D that I'll be working on is a 3D model of Oscar (our actor) that I will use to simulate particles which will look like a spirit leaving Oscar's body.

This is an example from 'The Ledgend of Korra' that Oscar found. To do this I'll first need to model, rig, and skin my model of Oscar, then animate it and run particle simulations using Maya fluid containers, and finally light and render it for each shot.

Because I haven't done much with simulation and dynamics in the past, I've decided that before I get too far into the modeling process I should do some tests with simulation so that I know what I'm doing. I have a bunch of Digital Tutors tutorials on the subject so I'm going through them to gain a better understanding. So I suppose that'll be my next post. Look forward to it.

Until then, au revoir.

Her Story

This week I played Her Story. A fairly simple game in which you are searching through a police footage archive to find out information about the murder of Simon Smith. And now I must answer how the game told it's story.

The gameplay is deceptively simple. At the beginning of the game you are shown a computer desktop with a search window open. Two readme files on screen tell you how to play. You must type key words into the search bar to find videos which you can piece together to understand the story. As you learn more you find new words to search and discover even more. This simple mechanic is the core of the game and aside from using some other helpful features like labeling videos, it is all you do in the game.

It occurred to me while I was playing Her Story that there are actually two stories in the game. There is the story of the murder, the one that you are piecing together from videos, and there is the story of the player, or rather the character you are playing as.
The murder story is one you cannot change. It is in your power as the player to see and understand more or less of the story, but no matter what you do the story stays the same. It's like reading a novel. The story happened in the past and you are discovering it as you go.
The other story, you the player, is one you can change. You decide how much your character understands. This story is happening in the present. As you make decisions the story is created.
What you eventually find out is that Eve, one of the twin girls being interviewed, is your character's mother, and you are searching through the footage to understand what happened to your parents.

The ending is open to interpretation. You could choose for your story to never end, watching and re-watching videos forever, or you could choose to end it before you know much of anything about the murder. On top of that you never get to see definitive evidence of what happened. You only hear the girls stories. In this way your experience of the game could be considered to not be a story, since a story has to end. But you do still see a story in the game, and if you play long enough (and take some notes along the way) you can understand it.

In all I enjoyed the game. It was unconventional and could be considered boring or tedious, but seeing the story unfold felt rewarding. The game relies on you to piece together and understand the story, and if you do you should enjoy it too.

Scripting and other stuff.

So I finished the script. It turned out pretty fun and it has the feeling that I was going for. I went with the first idea of the struggling art student having hallucinations from lack of sleep. In the end I didn't bother trying to script the other one since I had a clearer picture of this one in my head.

So here it is.

INT. HIGHSCHOOL ART ROOM - 5:30pm 

DAVID is sitting alone in the room, frantically working on a painting. He looks tired and is shaking a little as he paints. There are empty energy drink cans lying around him.

His eyes flick nervously between his painting and a clock that reads 5:30pm. On his desk is an assessment outline that reads “Due on Friday 6:00pm.”

As he goes to rub his eyes he hears a small, slightly high pitched voice.

VOICE

Haha! Wow, you sure got yourself in a bind
this time.

David looks down at his desk and sees a small purple creature that looks like something out of a kids cartoon. It opens its mouth to speak again.

CREATURE

          I mean I’ve seen procrastination before
          but this is on a whole other level!
          Cramming half a year of work into 3
          sleepless days? I’m impressed.

We see David sitting alone at his desk staring wide eyed at a patch of empty space.

DAVID
(In a shaky sleep deprived voice)

          Wh-wh-who are you?

CREATURE

Well I’m your creativity of course! Here
to help you out!

DAVID
(Clearly delirious)

          Oh cool. But hey man don’t worry
          about it this is my last painting so I
          think I can finish on time

CREATURE

          Nonsense!

The creature takes a bottle of paint and spills it over the painting. David looks shocked.

CREATURE
(Voice slowly losing friendly high pitch, sounding more like an angry man)

          I’m here to help you out man! What
          don’t you want my help? Think you’re
          too good for me or something? I’m
          your freaking creativity man where
          would you be without me? YOU’D BE
          NOTHING!

DAVID
(Talking to thin air)

          Hey man it’s cool I was just kidding.
          I need your help, of course I need
          your help.

CREATURE
(Starting to look slightly insane)

          YEA YOU DO! This work is all stale!
          You think anyone’s gonna remember you
          for this?

          NO!

          We need to spice things up!

The creature starts looking around. David is looking more concerned now.

CREATURE

          AH HERE WE GO!

The creature shoots a magical spark at a desk lamp which suddenly springs to life.

  

CREATURE

          This’ll be just like that Pixar thingy!
          He can help us out!

The lamp starts looking around, then begins to scream and goes into a frenzy, jumping around the table, knocking over paints and stamping on pastels.

David starts to make a worried low scream that begins to rise.

CREATURE
(Shouting over noise)

          WHAT YOU DON’T LIKE THE WAY I HELP??
          YOU UNGREATFUL LITTLE…

The creature starts screaming and jumps onto David. David thrashes around as the creature attacks him and the lamp jumps around on the table.

From a distance we see David screaming as he smashes a lamp against his desk like a madman. He picks up tubes of paint and squirts them around.

The screaming gets louder until his eyes roll back and he passes out in his chair.

INT. HIGHSCHOOL ART ROOM – 6:00pm

An art teacher walks into the room and sees David passed out at his desk with mess all around him. He picks up the painting from David’s desk and sees mad splatterings of paint and frantically scrawled images of the creature.

He stares at it for a while and smiles

ART TEACHER

          I LOVE IT!!

That's what I came up with. I was going for a sort of dark random humor that I tend to enjoy. 

In the finish our group didn't go with my idea. I was happy to go with any of the other scripts, and we ended up choosing Oscars idea of a person's spirit leaving their body. My script was the only comedy idea in our group so I felt it didn't really fit with what everyone wanted to do. Oscar's script is one that everyone is happy with and has plenty of elements that each of us can work on. Also the relative simplicity of the story means that we can get the basics done first and spend our remaining time polishing and making all of the animation and environments look really nice.

I'm looking forward to working on it. I think it should be a lot of fun.