Samuel Drake and Baby Crunch Time

Our first child, Samuel Drake Worch, was born a week ago. It was quite a journey: from rushing home because Victoria’s water had broken; to driving to the hospital and seeing my wife go through six hours of painstaking labor; to supposedly seeing him being born “any minute now”; to rushing to surgery for an emergency c-section because as it turns out, Sam was so tangled up in the umbilical cord that it was pretty much impossible for him to come out the natural way. But mom and baby are doing fine, and we’ve been home since Sunday. The first few days have indeed been challenging – little rest, irregular sleep patterns, mid-night feedings, lots of diaper changes, and the ever-present need to care for somebody who simply doesn’t yet have that capacity for himself. I should be absolutely exhausted and dead in the water right now, but somehow I’ve managed. And I believe that a lot of that has to do with thirteen years of professional game development. Because really, all that Sam is asking of us is yet another crunch time.

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“What Happened Here?” – Environmental Storytelling

After a two-year hiatus, I’m returning as a speaker to GDC 2010 – not with one, but two sessions! The first session is game design lecture on environmental storytelling that I will be giving together with Harvey Smith. I’m very excited for this talk, I feel that we assembled a very comprehensive and thought-provoking dissertation on this topic. Below is the official session description from the GDC webpage. I’ll post more information on time and date as it becomes available. Hope to see you in San Francisco!

What Happened Here? Environmental Storytelling
Speaker: Harvey Smith (Game Director, Arkane Studios), Matthias Worch (Senior Level Designer, Visceral Games)
Date/Time: TBD
Track: Game Design
Format: 60-minute Lecture
Experience Level: All

Session Description
This lecture examines the game environment as a narrative device, with a focus on further involving the player in interpreting (or pulling) information, in opposition to traditional fictional exposition. We provide an analysis of how and why some games in particular create higher levels of immersion and consistency, and we propose ways in which dynamic game systems can be used to expand upon these techniques. The lecture presents the techniques for environmental storytelling, the key to the creation of game spaces with an inherent sense of history; game spaces that invite the player’s mind to piece together implied events and to infer additional layers of depth and meaning. In addition to commonly-used environmental storytelling tools (such as props, scripted events, texturing, lighting and scene composition), we present ideas for using game systems to convey narrative through environmental reaction. Environmental storytelling engages the player as an active participant in narrative; game systems that reflect the player’s agency can do the same. The lecture will analyze existing cases and provide a framework for dynamic environmental storytelling in games.

Intended Audience
This session is aimed at creative directors, narrative designers, level designers and level artists who want to take the environmental storytelling of their games to the next level. A good understanding of the subject matter, and game environmentalal design in general, is a bonus.

Takeaway
Attendees leave with a clear understanding of traditional environmental storytelling techniques, the current state of the art, and ideas on how to expand these concepts to new proportions using systemic environmental storytelling approaches.

10 Hour Gears of War Level

Man, I love a good level design rush. When you’re in the zone creating a level, it’s a lot like playing a well-designed game: there’s tons of meaningful short-term tasks for you to do, each of which gets you closer to the greater goal of finishing the level. And you just find yourself doing “just one more thing” until it’s way past midnight. Monday night was one of those nights.

I found myself wanting to create a quick demo showcase of my level design abilities, and figured a little Gears of War level would fit the bill. “Just a quick demo.” When I started it was 7pm in the evening, and 10 hours later (8 that night, and another two in the morning) I had finished my first ever GoW level, showcased below.

Seeing how little time I had and how this was a showcase more than a fully fleshed out level, I decided to focus on one key attribute: “scenic vista”. I wanted to use a big, picturesque landscape as the backdrop, using all the skills and techniques I had acquired in my last few professional gigs; and I wanted to put a quaint (if that attribute exists in the GoW universe) mountain village on top of that. So I used all the tricks in my book to simulate and render out a nice-looking terrain (which ended up a 6700 tri static mesh with a 2k diffuse and normal map), which tiles 9 times to create the backdrop. The “city” itself is just a single road, and is heavily referenced from SP_Eba for quick turnaround. Throw in some atmospheric settings, cover nodes and enemies, and you have yourself a quick but pretty neat demo level.

This isn’t a complete map by a long shot, of course. More of a vignette, a small scene that describes the feel of the environment. The level is tiny, doesn’t fit into an overarching narrative and has no history. But I had a lot of fun assembling it, and in the process I reacquainted myself with UnrealEd (which I hadn’t used since the Unreal 2 days) and dug into the Gears of War asset library.

C64 Assembly

When I visited Germany this year I found that my mom had dug up a few of my really old computer books. The original Amiga manuals hold marginal interest to me now, but there was one book that stirs some seriously cool memories: “Commodore 64&128 – Maschinensprache für Einsteiger”. It’s a book about programming the C64 In 6502 assembly, and that’s how I spent most of 1988!

Even though I never turned into a professional programmer, my first real contact with the computer (other playing than games, of course) was programming the C64. My dad had bought the system under the usual pretense; we were going to use it for bookkeeping and other useful tasks, of course, and he even took a BASIC programming course. But in the end, it was I who got the most use out of the machine, and I used his coursework to program various simple games in BASIC myself. This all happened when I was only 9 or 10 years old, so the programs were simple. But the first ever English words that I ever learned were “if”, “then” and “print”.

A couple of years later I had met an older neighbor kid who had a few connections to the local cracker scene. That’s how I learned about this newly released book, “Maschinensprache für Einsteiger”, advertised as the ultimate way of learning to program the C64 at its core level, Assembly. My friend was all over it; so I saved my allowance, bought the book, and found myself programming C64 assembly when I was about 12 years old. The young age was very much reflected in the complexity of the programs I wrote – apart from pushing various register values around and creating loops, the most I ever got onto the screen where simple raster loops that created 16-color rainbows. And after a while, I moved on to different things… probably the Amiga.

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Disney Resemblances

When you work in 3D animation you’ll sooner of later hear of the term “retargeting”. That’s when the artist/TD takes animation that was created for one rig (the skelton used to puppeteer a character) and applies (“retargets”) it to a different rig. That’s how animation sharing across multiple, different characters becomes possible. But if you think that this practice is a modern development, think again! The 2D equivalent of retargeting is “rotoscoping” – and it looks like Disney animators did quite a bit of it:

Quite an eye opener! Of course production realities and deadlines often encourage these kind of shortcuts, so I’m neither condoning nor condemning. The resemblance is very fun to watch, that’s for sure!

Found at ThinkingAnimation.

NASCAR In Game Design Terms

I was having a great dinner at GDC last week when the conversation drifted to NASCAR. As is often the case, I was the only fan, and I invariably found myself explaining my interest in the sport. My answer to this topic is usually two-tiered: for one, the NASCAR garage is one big dysfunctional family. There’s 43 guys with different personalities who are shoving, pushing and banging on each other 36 races per season. You know that tempers are bound to flare, and that rivalries aplenty are bound to spring up – on and off the racetrack. Having an opinion on NASCAR is easy, and it’s fun! Just start watching for a bit and you’ll catch on.
The other reason to watch NASCAR are the actual races, which, believe it or not, are very entertaining. That part is harder to explain without reference. But since I was at the Game Developers Conference, it occurred to me to describe the appeal in game development terms:

NASCAR is the Mario Kart of real-life racing.

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Normal Map Information

This paper on real-time normal map compression, written by J.M.P. van Waveren and Ignacio Castaño, is a great read for everybody who wants to deepen their fundamental understanding of normal maps. The paper fully explains a whole bunch of issues with normal maps that I only touched on in my 2007 GDC talk, and contains a lot of details that I didn’t know about yet. Highly recommended reading for all technical artists and grpahics programmers.

Always Remember The Passion

As I was driving home the other day The Almighty iPod Shuffle decided to take me on a serious nostalgia trip. After serenading me with a megamix of terrible songs from the early 90s (turns out that I wasn’t “too sexy” for my car), the “Travel Theme” from Ultima V: Lazarus came on. The Travel Theme, for those who don’t know, was specifically written for the Amiga port of Ultima V, and it was the only piece of music included with that version of the game. So the music looped, over and over and over again.

Ultima V for the Commodore Amiga wasn’t a great conversion. It was over two years late (Ultima VI for the PC had already been released , significantly advancing the state of the art); its primitive EGA tile graphics it looked positively outdated; and it lacked all musical variation found on the other computer systems, featuring that one single song instead. Oh, and it was copy protected! The Amiga Ultima V came on two nastily protected 3 ½ inch disks, and it saved the only possible savegame on that very same disk! I’ve never been so afraid for a game investment in my life.

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Bald Men In Videogames

GossipGamers has a comparison between male main characters from a multitude of modern videogames. And why the similarities are indeed striking, the article is missing the main reason why that’s the case: we simply cannot do good realtime hair in videogames yet. The limitation is slowly going away, and several games have made an effort to put some actual hair on their main guys. But it’s still a pain in the ass to do. That doesn’t excuse all other similarities or uninspired character design, of course. But it does lead to a certain character type.

Religion, Myth and Games

As expected, Bill Maher’s new documentary Religulous is stirring up strong reactions from supporters and opponents of religion alike. I probably won’t watch this movie because it seemingly aims to prove a predetermined point: that religion is ridiculous. A more bipartisan effort might have tried understanding why people subscribe to a religion, and what the religious belief adds to their lives.

But I don’t think that a discussion of the validity of organized religion will lead to a fruitful result, anyway. As game developers, understanding why religion plays such an important part in many people’s life can help us, though! Because religion is myth. And understanding myth can help us to create games that connect with the audience on a deep emotional level.

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