In December over on the Left 4 Dead blog, Valve’s Jason Mitchell posted an insightful look into the making of the Left 4 Dead intro movie, arguably some of the best acting and cinematics done to date in videogames. It appears to have been an incredibly iterative process, with the animatics rigourously playtested in the same manner as the rest of the game.

Over the course of the next couple of weeks of refining the story, we found that the romantic tension between Zoey and Francis that you see in this version did not playtest well, as it proved to be a distraction from the gravity of the Survivors’ desperate situation. As a result, this was dropped from subsequent versions. Later in the piece, when the hunter pounces on Louis, the timing of Louis’s line and the hunter’s pounce consistently came off as comedic, which was certainly not the intended effect.

Of interest, the initial animatics appear to have been knocked up quickly in a “machinima” manner via the Source Filmmaker, which wikipedia describes as:

…an application that runs inside the engine. It allows users to record themselves many times over in the same scene, creating the illusion of many participants, as well as supporting a wide range of cinematographic effects and techniques such as motion blur and depth of field.

It’s Oscar season. More importantly for this space however, the nominations for the 2008 Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences awards are in. Why is this relevant? Because unlike most end-of-year videogame awards these are peer-based, not to mention having two awards devoted to animation and character performance.

Additionally, after missing out on Console Game of The Year in 2007, Mass Effect is back in with a shot at Computer Game of The Year after the later PC release, though is once again up against some seriously tough competition. (UPDATE: Though it did pick up RPG of the Year – don’t want to sound like sour grapes). Congratulations this year must go to Dave for Prince of Persia and Jay and Laurent for Gears of War 2’s nominations.

Outstanding Achievement in Animation

• Castle Crashers – Microsoft Game Studios – The Behemoth
• Gears of War 2 – Microsoft Game Studios – Epic Games, Inc.
• Left 4 Dead – Valve Software – Valve Software
• Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots – Konami Digital Entertainment, Inc. – Kojima Productions
• Prince of Persia – Ubisoft – Ubisoft Montreal

Outstanding Character Performance

• Gears of War 2 (Dom) – Microsoft Game Studios – Epic Games, Inc.
• Gears of War 2 (Marcus) – Microsoft Game Studios – Epic Games, Inc.
• LittleBigPlanet (Sackboy) – Sony Computer Entertainment America – Media Molecule
• Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (Old Snake) – Konami Digital Entertainment, Inc. – Kojima Productions
• Tomb Raider: Underworld (Lara Croft) – Eidos/Warner Bros. Interactive – Crystal Dynamics

Computer Game of the Year

• Fallout 3 – Bethesda Softworks – Bethesda Game Studios
• Left 4 Dead – Valve Software – Valve Software
• Mass Effect – Electronic Arts – Bioware
• Spore – Electronic Arts – Maxis
• World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King – Blizzard Entertainment – Blizzard Entertainment

At the risk of coming across as a fanboy, here is a second dose of Metal Gear 4 details divulged on the net. It appears that the Kojima Productions team did the rounds quite a bit post-release as it includes yet more images and information on the making of Metal Gear 4.

The image to the side shows the skeleton used for main protagonist Snake, revealing the inclusion of deformation bones to maintain volume on the elbows, knees and wrists on top of the now-standard twist bones for the shoulders, hips and wrists. Unidentifiable, however, are the curious bones at the neck – perhaps to aid shoulder deformation or simply to attach weapons to?

Some stats from the article:

• 115 bones in total, comprising:
• 36 in the face.
• 47 in the body.
• 32 in the hands, (3 for each finger, with an additional bone on each hand between the thumb and index finger – presumably to maintain volume).
• 1700 animations, over MGS3’s 1200.
• 1400 polygons, up from MGS3’s 4400.
• 5MB of textures, with a 512×512 for the face and 1024×1024 for the body.

Additionally, a higher-res screenshot of the FaceManager facial animation sliders allow us to peer deeper into the variables used to bring their fantastic characters to life. Here’s the modest list of facial expressions to accompany their similarly conservative facial bone-count:

• Nose_Up
• Open_Jaw L/R
• Smile L/R
• Anger L/R
• Kiss L/R
• Frown L/R
• Extra_A L/R
• Extra_B L/R

One imagines the last two to be unique to each character, and there are clearly additional tabs for Phonemes, Eyes and Wrinkles.

…for not screwing it up. In the likely event that I’ll change this sometime, here’s my XBOX avatar as of January 20th 2009, for posterity.

The latest issue of IdN magazine features an interview with motion graphics studio Logan’s Alexei Tylevich on his collaboration with Hideo Kojima to create the ten tv-spot-style intros for Metal Gear Solid 4, revealing a fair assessment of game development through the eyes of a design studio.

While what we’re doing is very segmented – the final look comes in the final moments, and you get impatient – in building a videogame, it’s more of a gradual thing. In games, you’re layering it consistently; so by the time you’ve got your engine running really well, even for the person who’s working on low-level stuff, everything looks great.

And on this side, we’re still trapped in this universe that requires such things as massive rendering times, which makes it impossible for us. The better it looks, the heavier it is; for us to change the movement of this character, we have to backtrack and change all these other elements. Whereas on the game, they could look at something on the screen – a door handle, say – and change that doorknob to make it look beautiful. For us, it gets heavier the better it looks. There was a moment I was watching what they were doing and I thought, “I want to do videogames!” Because they’re building this thing – and once it’s in working form, they’re working in real time on beautiful stuff, all within the engine.

It looks like the iPhone is now officially a gaming machine, with the release of Rolando – the first game to be neither an overly-sensitive console knock-off or one of the throngs of amateur offerings.

As much as I appreciate their balls though, I’m still unsure as to whether or not the development team can or should be sued for COMPLETELY AND SHAMELESSLY ripping off both the gameplay and visual style of Loco Roco. At least they improved upon their source material, and the Mr Scruff soundtrack doesn’t hurt either.

Just watching the Golden Globes awards there, and the Best Animated Feature award was announced with the preface that the nominees’, (Wall-E, Bolt and Kung Fu Panda), collective box-office income amounted to the impressive half-billion dollars. That’s the same sum GTA4 took in just its first week – I guess kids just don’t have that much money any more.

Check out these initial pre-vis tests for the Dark Knight movie’s Batpod, done by my old college buddy (and fantastic animator), the equally fantastically named Brendan Body.

One of my most enjoyable parts of game development is the pre-visualisation stage preceeding pre-production. It’s when your imagination can run wild before the harsh realities of real development take hold. I find the animator in a strong position here as complete sequences and gameplay scenarios can be mocked up without any need for a programmer.