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.

Cinematic Script Ideas

New year, new posts I guess.

I'm planning on updating this like 2-3 times a week so hopefully there'll be a little more content this year.

First class of the year is Cinematic Production. We were told to come up with short story ideas for a 30-40 second video mixing live action and animation.

Thusly I began to list ideas

• Person turning into werewolf
• 2D may be easier to animate a transformation than 3D
• Real person turning into a cartoon wolf

• Deadpool-esq hallucinations
• Tripping on shrooms
• Overtired/overworked
• Seeing personifications of own ideas/creativity

• Amazing world of gumball – classroom setting

• Characters in different animation styles all living together

• Real person in animated environment

• On a spaceship or another planet

• In a cartoon world

• Godzilla style monster attack
• Living shadow
• Magic fight with animated characters
• Drawings come to life (CLICHÉ!!)
• TV ad that turns really weird
• Person trapped in an ad?
• Things that happen on ads happening in real life?
  • Voiceover
  • Strange marketing mascots
  • Jump cuts
  • Before and after shots
• Product placement everywhere

I was trying to come up with ideas that would work with mixed live action animation with an animated character and a live action character. My favorite two were the Deadpool-like hallucinations (if you haven't seen deadpool I highly recommend it) and the "trapped in a TV ad" idea.

Next up was developing them a bit further.

Idea 1:

Overworked art student trying to finish a painting before the deadline.

Starts to hallucinate a creature that claims to be his creativity (2D).

The creature starts to mess with him and they get into an argument.

Objects in the room start coming to life and join in the argument.

The argument heats up until the student passes out.

Art teacher walks into the room and looks at the paper covered in freakish drawings of hallucinations.

Teacher loves the artwork.

Idea 2, Trapped in an ad:

What is it selling?

• Cereal
• Makeup
• Infomercial for exercise equipment or weird invention

MMMmmmmmmkaaay. So there's not a tonne here so far. I'm not great at ideas. I'll go do some more brain storming and try to develop these out more. Once the ideas are more solid I'll have to script one and edit it till I'm happy. Theeen my group will choose one of our scripts to use for our assessment. So there's a bit more to do. I'll post more when I have it.

Rationale

To start this project I had to come brain storm to come up with my animation idea.

 

My final idea was a Marionette puppet Spanish soap opera recreation of the ‘I am your father’ scene from Star Wars. I chose this idea for the same reason Pixar created Toy Story, because toys are much easier to animate and render than humans.

Once I had my idea down I had to go about creating concepts for my character and scene, as well as a storyboard. I designed my character with 3D in mind, considering basic shapes and how I would model him.

 

 

 

I also designed a second character made of the same pieces as the main character to save time. Then I made turnarounds of each character so that I could put them into Maya as modeling reference.

 

With the turnaround imported into the front and side views of Maya I was able to model over the image using x-ray view. I built the characters out of the basic shapes I mentioned earlier. 

    

I had two attempts at modeling. The first worked well enough but the mesh was messy and didn’t smooth very well. The second time I planned how I would build the mesh more carefully and it came out much cleaner. I also made sure to keep the character low-poly so that I could smooth later and keep Maya running faster. Low-poly is also much easier to UV map than high-poly.

  

I modeled the body, head,and hair as single pieces rather than halves that I could mirror because stitching halves together can be messy and the pieces were relatively simple shapes that could be modeled using just world symmetry on my modeling tools. I did however model all of the limbs on only one side and mirrored them. I found that mirroring objects inverts normals on the mac version of Maya which meant that I had to flip the normals back and delete their history. As this was my second attempt at modeling I had already discovered that not deleting history can lead to some horrific crashes and glitches so I made sure to keep my project clean.

 

I made a sheet of colour concepts for my character and then picked my favorite so that I could paint my textures.

 

I had to UV-unwrap my objects so that I could texture them. I used multiple techniques such as plannar mapping, cylindrical mapping, and automatic mapping. Each has it’s own use for different types of objects. I did a lot of stitching to make the maps easy to paint on.

Next I painted/photoshopped my textures. I made some out of heavily edited pre-existing textures and painted other parts by hand.

 

When I went to un-smooth my meshes to start rigging I discovered that un-smoothing ruins the textures if they were created on a smoothed model, so I had to go back to some previous versions to retrieve unsmoothed meshes and fix some textures for low-poly.

Once I fixed the textures I started placing joints to build the skeleton. I didn’t plan the structure very much to start with and my first attempt didn’t work out very well. I also had a lot of crashes due to some history on certain meshes that I had left.

   

Once I’d figured out how joints and constraints worked by playing around, following Keat’s tutorials, and watching some Digital Tutors tutorials, I started my second attempt. I had a plan in my head for the structure and it worked well. My original idea was to keep the puppets fairly rigid with just toy-like joints but I decided to make some of the pieces flexible by adding more joints inside them to give a better performance.

    

I was careful to place joints in the centre of where I wanted parts to pivot by using snapping and I ordered my hierarchy as I’d been instructed along with consistent naming conventions. I managed to keep everything very clean and had no issues this time.

    

I made all of my controls using curves and constrained and parented them in the hierarchy. I also used set driven keys for the mouth and for the fingers so that I had a simple hand control and so that the mouth had limited movement. I used IK on the legs and arms with pole vectors on the knees and elbows so that I could control the limbs more naturally.

 

Next I made a fairly simple test animation to make sure I had all of the control over the rig that I wanted. It was very easy to animate with so I was happy with the rig.

 

I then repeated all of the texturing and rigging steps for the Grandma character and found that it went a lot faster than with the first character.

Next it was time to set up my scene. I had a sudden idea of how to change the scene so I did some new concepts for the stage and a new storyboard. The new concept was about a 1 minute long video rather than 10 or so seconds.

 

I started to model the room and desk, and I also modeled a bunch of objects to litter around like a bottle, candle stand, and some books.

I also had to UV-map and texture these objects, I also tried bump mapping, transparency maps, and specular maps, and played around with all kinds of material types and properties.

 

 

I started doing rendering tests with different rendering engines and settings. I settled on the MentalRay renderer and built a physical sun and sky in the render settings. I really liked the look of this render even though the render times were immense.

 

Once the scene was more or less built I started laying out my shots according to the new storyboard. I made 7 different cameras for the 7 shots in the plan and placed my characters into the scene. I rendered out single frames of the shots and put them together in After effects to get my initial timing.

I began to block out the major movements and figured out where the words would be placed. I recorded myself saying the lines I had planned and put together some simple music in Garageband. Then I imported the audio file into my Maya timeline so that I could match up the movement with the sound.

I roughed out all of the lip synching and started to clean up the character and camera animations. I did various playblasts along the way, mostly of single shots. In order to save on rendering time I usually had a shot rendering while I was working on another shot so I didn’t have a playblast of all of the shots to watch together until the final renders were mostly finished.

 

I found that the renders were taking even longer than I expected even though I was rendering on two computers so I had to render some of the shots using the Maya software render engine to save time. I optimized my scene for this renderer by changing some materials and adding more lights in an attempt to more closely match the look of the MentalRay renders.

 

I rendered my shots a jpeg-sequences and brought them into after effects to edit them together. I could have used Premiere to edit but I had a lot of effects I wanted to include so I chose AE. I did some color correction, mainly on the Maya Software renders to make them match the other shots. I also added some atmospheric lighting using solids, masks, and various built in effects.

Then I did a final colour grade using Magic Bullet and added chromatic-aberration to give an old VHS type feel. I added simple titles, credits and subtitles to the video and then it was finished.