I’m playing through Braid again after the initial realisation that years of hand-holding in 3D have softened my platforming and puzzle-solving skills, and took a trip over to the portfolio site of David Hellman, artist behind the beautiful painterly worlds. While not earth-shattering, the animation does fit the unsettling Czechoslovakian fairytale stop-motion aesthetic perfectly, (especially the  expressionless goombas that wander the levels – creatures that could have been lifted right out of my childhood nightmares).

Beyond examples of animated gifs like the one included here, you can download Photoshop PSDs of all the character animations in the game from this handy location. Certainly worth a look to get an idea of the animation process behind this wonderfully infuriating little game.

A few people at work have pointed me towards this audio interview I gave after the MIGS talk at the end of last year (a summary of which is still forthcoming, but you can see the slides here if you have a magnifying glass). If you can put up with the dodgy accent there may be something of use in there.

Montreal International Game Summit 09 – Blogcritics Interview

It covers a few points I missed out of the talk and some thoughts on ME2’s romance custscenes. Having a long enough break from the project I’m now playing through the game with fresh eyes, and seeing everything in context I’m most happy with the Thane romance but can only see the green guy on Youtube as I’m not playing female.

When I’m not making games, my hobby is graphic design, specifically web content. I’ve been able to fold this back into game development by creating web-based asset-tracking and communication tools that have helped both the Edmonton and Montreal teams throughout development of Mass Effect 2, and here’s a little something I can share.

iPress is my first full CSS conversion theme for the blogging platform Wordpress (I used to start with someone else’s and work from there), which began life as an iTunes-based asset-management tool for our thousands of mocap files, but with our own internal tool’s creation it later became simply an exercise in copying the layout of Apple’s music program as accurately as possible.

What you have here though is a CMS (Content Management System) visually replicating iTunes 9, with helpful archive pages following the same sortable list format that makes is so easy to quickly navigate hundreds of mp3 files. If you’re a fellow Wordpress user, head on over to the download page and give it a try.

Today in North America – Friday in Europe. Go pick it up for Xbox or PC!

This is the launch trailer, and I count some 75% of the shots here were done by the Montreal Cinematics team. So far the reviews have been overwhelmingly positive, but I still nervously await the ultimate litmus test – the ever-critical girlfriend…

Valve have posted the slides of Mike Booth’s recent Stanford AIIDE-09 conference presentation. While only the first section on path-finding will likely be of most interest to animators, he also goes some way to breaking down the famed AI Director used to dynamically tailor the game experience for each new playthrough.

They certainly give the outward impression at least that they’ve attained the developer holy grail of sharing technology across projects, recently announcing early Bots for Team Fortress 2 using the same decision-making as described in this paper. Find a list of all of Valve’s speaker presentations here.

In a period where the Australian government appears to be going on a rampage censoring games left, right and centre, it’s worth taking stock of the type of thing they do deem appropriate for consumption, namely the ways horror hero Jason Voorhees has killed his many victims over the years in all 12 of the movies NOT censored in Oz via this fantastic illustration from the National Post. Click for full size.

Roll on an 18+ rating for those poor kids.

[via National Post]

Here’s a fantastic game-influenced pixel animation from director Jérémie Périn. Hilarious, and about as NSFW as a bunch of moving pixels can be.

[via Motionographer]

This week Epic released their Unreal3 SDK for free download for non-commercial use, which is the same development software we use here to create Mass Effect 2 (minus custom bells and whistles).

I’d recommend this over any other engine for those wanting to break into the industry right now as it’s fast becoming a standard across many studios and any level of knowledge of its various animation-related systems like Matinee, Kismet, FaceFX and the AnimSet and AnimTree editors would certainly be a boost at the entry level. Nowadays I’m seeing Unreal3 experience on CV’s alongside traditional software like Max and Maya, so get downloading and start tinkering away…

With two weeks to go from today, I thought I should plug that I’ll be speaking at the Montreal International Game Summit, with the talk entitled Cinematics Sans Cutscenes. Here is the abstract:

Cutscenes are a divisive subject amongst videogame developers. We rely on them as a relatively production-safe solution for imparting exposition and story progression, to give the player objective location information, and to reward achievement and successes like level completion. However, they cut more than just the camera. The flow, immersion, and most of all, interactivity uniquely enjoyed by the medium of videogames all take a hit for their (often unskippable) duration.

In their defense however, attempts to forego their inclusion can result in a weaker visual presentation and take us further away from an emotional connection with characters and story. Additionally, a quick scan of screenshots previewing upcoming games illustrates our growing reluctance as an industry to present titles from the in-game perspective, where cameras are rightly skewed towards gameplay.

This talk explores various techniques used by games over the years to create a cinematic look outside of the traditional reliance on cutscenes, with the pros and cons of each, finishing with suggestions on how these might be combined in the future to offer cinematic moments while keeping the player in the game.

Takeaway: Techniques alternative to cutscenes for imparting interactive story and cinematic moments in games.

Intended Audience: Game Designers, Writers, Animators and those involved in storytelling.

Should you be attending the conference please stop by at 2.45 on Monday afternoon. If at least one of my observations is taken onboard then we might just reduce our reliance on cutscenes for storytelling.