Amy’s Escape has had a lot of work done through the years and it deserves a master post with all of it. but might as well talk about the new rendering tech and the direction the game took in the past years.
First and foremost the game is in 3D now, but we were only going to do that if we could reach a cell shading look that matched the game’s concept art. and that we did, this is the tech.
We’re inspired in games like Genshin impact, and wolf among us, but our tech is supposed to match Fernando’s concept art, our director. One thing we do have that Genshin doesn’t is shaped light on the character, as genshin is mostly directional, light and shadows are VERY important in horror games.
Also we have a model DESIGNED for all the facial expressions. Hopefully next post isn’t about tech and just show what we’ve done but we have a lot of tech done in the past half a decade.
Bottom line we tried and got a look that matches the 2D art and we succeeded.
A heartless doll finds her self in a familiar attic.
Global Game Jam 2020
We created an adventure game/Visual Novel engine on top of Unity. It was a collaborative from it’s inception we wanted to make something about fixing one-self, and the idea of using memories and a doll worked. Created under 48 hours in the Ciespal Lab site January 2020.
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Direction, Character design, Programming, dialog
Fernando Holguin ( @fern_hw ) http://fernhw.com/portfolio/
Programmer Reel 2020.
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I've always and I mean always been a Programmer first, I can draw, which combined with programming makes me a tech artist! Unity, Proprietary engines, C#, C++, Technical Art, User Tools, and some Physics engineering.
When the camera in a game is done well everything feels just right, everything just flows. It's the reason why Journey, why Inside, why Mario Kart 8, and just about every Nintendo game feels just as if anyone could play them.
Knowing how to deal with the eye not only helps you make your game more accessible but it also makes it easier to follow in the most hectic of moments.
From: PlayDead’s INSIDE
My goal: Is to explain how to design the game around the eye’s limitations and create experiences that are more comfortable for our users. I will start with the simple yet effective concept of Eye-Tracing.
An example:
From: Mad Max Fury Road
Follow the red circle: We can immediately read where the motorcycle is between shots and we see the barrel on the shotgun, each shot takes less than a second, yet we read every beat, and that’s because the eye is directed so well here.
Eye tracing is an editing technique used to direct where the eyes of a viewer will be across several shots, in other words it's strategically moving the eyes of your player to a specific point in the screen and using it in different fun ways.
Create an environment in which you know which part of the frame your player is most likely to be looking at, this can be performed a number of ways but I wont get in the details of composition, color theory, photography or animation. I will only talk about the eyes.
Now, how does something from cinema world, a world where everything is scripted, and there’s a cut every 5 seconds or so apply to an interactive medium? Well the answer is simple it does so in a completely different way.
I will jump back and forth between games and movies but this is a game focused article.
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Do Your Eyes Follow?
What does the player see? What do you as a creator want them to see?
Do those 2 align? Can they?
Eyes have a 5 degree central vision, this is where we read books, if our target moves outside of the near-peripheral section of our eyesight the eyes will have to change positions.
TVs tend to hang in the mid peripheral, it feels as if it covers the whole vision but it really doesn’t. Close one eye and make a frame with your hands observe how much your monitor or your TV takes of your vision space.
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My rules are:
Screen Is A Plane Not A Window.
Eyes Are Slow.
Eyes Need A Home.
Up And Down Before Left And Right.
One Thing At A Time.
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The Screen Is A Plane Not A Window
The screen is a flat surface, not a window to another world.
The key word here is Planar space! This is the basis of eye tracing, and designing moving media in a way that is easy to read for people. Even 3D movies need to compose in planar space.
Maintaining the focus in a slowly moving point in planar space makes it easier on the eyes because your eyes have to move way less.
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Eyes need a home
Even when there’s nothing to be seen, the eyes should be directed to a point on the screen.
From:Mario Kart 8
In hectic game-play, having one direct point to return to is imperative as it gives the eyes a simple point to return to as they jump from object to object during the action.
In games like Mario Kart the player doesn’t have to worry where the character is, but where the obstacles are.
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Eyes Are Slow
Eyes are freaking slow, if you bring motion to a target and this target moves too fast the eye will unhook from it, this occurs because of something called Saccadic Masking a mechanism in our brain that removes all the blur we should have in our eyesight and replaces it with point 2 in an image.
This means things on the screen need to move at a slow pace but not in any space but in planar space, remember the first rule The Screen Is A Plane Not A Window, as long as the characters move slowly through planar space the characters will be easy to follow, we are aiding the player to follow the character by moving it as little as possible.
If something moves slowly across the screen the eye has an easier time reading it.
if you move something too quickly the eye gets lost.
For example this is easy to follow by the eye.
This isn’t.
From: Playstation All-Stars
Now on this.
From: Super Smash Brother’s Ultimate
Unlike PlayStation All-Stars, Super Smash Brother’s camera is designed around the philosophy of making the action as easy to follow as possible.
Game camera attempts to make the characters move smoothly through planar space, it will even sometimes hook characters if they don’t move for a bit.
This philosophy means everything, this philosophy created this marvel of technical prowess. Regardless of how it was engineered the camera in Smash Brother’s is superbly created.
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Up And Down Before Left And Right
It’s easier for the eyes to follow vertical motion than horizontal motion.
This is why magazines design text in small columns, and entire languages are designed to be read vertically. Eyes find moving up and down more comfortable.
(Read on a large screen)
Up and down.
Left and right.
This also helped Journey’s devs to create a smoother camera that otherwise would have wobbled inelegantly.
Vertical motion will still cause Saccadic masking if motion is too fast, vertical motion just happens to be slightly more comfortable to follow than horizontal motion.
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One Thing At A Time
One thing at a time, and only one thing at a time.
I’m not going against the laws of composition nor framing, you can do amazing things with multiple characters, and crowds. This rule here talks about how even in highly composed shots we still only see one face at a time, one item at a time, or one enemy at a time.
Eyes can only see one thing at a time. Crazy huh? You have to literally stop looking at one thing to look at another. Hell it’s even scientifically proven we can’t multitask. So don’t force people in your supposed-to-be-entertainment product to attempt things that we aren’t biologically designed to do (unless it’s multiplayer, or if you figure it out, who am I to stop you).
From: Super Mario Odyssey
Make sure that if something is happening on the screen that only one thing is happening that requires the player’s full attention, now this may go against the idea of action game-play for a lot of people, specially in games with a lot of AI going at you, this is easily remedied by having only one AI attack at once, think, and ask yourself the question, What is the main focus at this very moment? and make it immediately readable. Yes, even if it’s outside the screen.
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Solutions
I will give some solutions to improve your game on the engineering side.
1) Create the camera system backwards.
Engineer the camera system to respect the points in planar space first and then calculate to it.
2) If you know where the eye is, use it.
Dynamically determine where the eye is right before the next shot, or right before elements are to be displayed.
We can create things that only games can do, we can dynamically adjust the camera, the next shot, or item position for our users.
3) Guide the eye.
It’s your job to guide the eye, and figure out ways in which you can do it the most effectively.
Things like the opening in Journey are just brilliant. The eye follows the character to the top of a hill just to bring an even bigger hill from the horizon.
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The Future
I hope this gives people a better understanding on how the eye works in games and helps us understand the one issue that I think plagues entertainment software the most, we think of the camera as a dual state thing, it’s either a “Game Camera” or a “Movie Camera”, I think we can embrace something that is neither a Game nor Movie camera.
With a better understanding on how to handle eye-tracing we can do things film can’t even imagine, so I hope this article helps you learn something I noticed. And helps you realize that one thing that only your game can do that will blow us all away.
Cheers,
-Fern.H.W.
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studio high ground https://www.studiohighground.com/
Happy Halloween! Welcome to the first ever update of Amy’s Escape a horror adventure game in the lines of the point and click genre.
In this game Amy will meet 30+ unique and quirky characters that show the vile side of humanity and solve mind bending problems to escape a cursed hotel that doesn’t let it’s inhabitants die, all while not loosing yourself in the process.
I’ll talk about the design of a game I made for the global game jam in under 36 hours.
We use visuals, sound, and motion. The huge difference is software has a 2 way communication, you communicate with it and it communicates back, the communication back needs to be easy to read so the user can interpret it’s surroundings.
A good silhouette, a readable character
3D Games are not safe of this. In class shooters being able to know the character just from there silhouette is VERY important.
Animation has and will always rely on strong silhouettes.
Wendy was designed to be extremely readable since she’s very tiny in the stage.
Anthropomorphize game mechanics.
The wind machine was originally just a box that threw wind, giving it a face allowed to make it something that the player would eventually care about, a living thing that also houses the iconic elements of the game in turn making the game iconic. This is common in nintendo games, where a fairy represents the Z-Targeting in one game, a Luma represents the spinning attack in a platformer, and a water backpack represents the water mechanic.
Just for some examples, every time a character talks to you in a tutorial that’s also antromorphizing game mechanics
Time
With <36 hours We didn’t have time for complex art so I had to design an easy to animate character for my assistant to clean up, and for me to animate.
Visual design
Visual design has to be redundant, not everyone sees the same thing, we need to know where the eye is and how to move it where we want to at all times.
The game makes you place your hands on the keyboard by first making you click on the keys that you will use in-game
First stage (and only one we had time to make), the player can only move from left to right, so it will eventually hit the green button.
There’s also some environmental storytelling, the tube right above, the dead wind machines, all creating a story without words.
Game focused on keeping the characters readable and easy to tell apart from the background.
Final notes
And that’s it please play this one minute prototype I created during the weekend. and remember the amount of work it takes to make a readable design.
Appeal is the most important. A character design is first and foremost a visual description, please consider that the user should know everything they need to know of a character with a glance.
more at studio high ground https://www.studiohighground.com/
Our site closed the first day from 8pm to 8am so we lost 12 hours of work, and my modded laptop needs to be plugged to a video card to work so... regardless, in the remaining time we finished a small 1 stage prototype of a game called THE WIND MACHINE, a game where wind(”Waves” theme) is the main mechanic. I opted on a fairy tale aesthetic and took my apprentice to see a game made from start to finish, the aesthetic meant we could create the game quick, I could have done it solo, but I took advantage to teach my apprentice a thing or two.
I’m not a hobbyist, I do this professionally and intend to make games with precise design aesthetics, It had to be readable and easy to play, I was the only game who asked a member of the audience to join in, to show that yes, your game needs to be played by others.
I did get a “That’s it?” from a lot with people playing a game, probably because it was set up as something bigger, we did design 4 other puzzles we didn’t manage to create, but instead of having two stages I wanted to have a small cut-scene and a nice tutorial.
Second discarded “first playable” prototype engine for Amy’s Escape the first one was done in flash this one was running on the GPU but this is Adobe Air, hard to port the game from Air, so after Project Sen I decided to either make my games proprietary engines in LUA or make them in Unity.
Pre-alpha shots with placeholders, so many placeholders.
EDIT: I forgot to mention this is the nyan-cat engine, with a hell of a lot of tweaks so it goes with the physics of this character yet she is a lot quicker, and has a very defined short and long jump you control very easily, by quickly tapping the jump button, or hold pressing it.
