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.

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…

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.

“I normally don’t give guns to little girls, know what I’m saying, I usually give something else, but you know hey, don’t tell anyone I said that…”

This week is all about E3, and this time it’s going back to the way it should be – all loud noises, special announcements and awesome presentations on a world stage. We released a preview video some weeks ago which will forever be known internally as “the one with Parrish’s moustache”, but I wanted to wait until the real deal to throw it up here.

Virtually all of the cutscenes in both videos were done by our team here in Montreal, so a special shout out to the hard work of the guys both here and in Edmonton, and Parrish’s moustache.

Despite a clearly phoned-in voice over, Fox News’ Gamers Weekly has posted a video highlighting Resident Evil 5’s use of a Virtual Camera in the production of its cutscenes. This technique has intrigued me for some time, though equally interesting was the section showing the realtime feedback on the fully skinned and textured ingame characters. While it appears to be diffuse-only, this looks to be a small yet significant improvement.

[via Kotaku]

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.

This, the final talk I’ll post from GDC’08, centred on the development of the first company-wide technology platform (or engine) for Square Enix. Despite the heavy tech-focus, this was the largest lineup I attended at the conference due to the chance of gleaning any information from these Japanese RPG masters.

Square Enix: The Technology of FINAL FANTASY

Taku Murata – General Manager, Technical Research Division

Traditionally, a new platform was created for each title, with the game first made in Japanese and translations following much later. This looks set to change with the latest upcoming releases which will be very exciting to many western fans, and the target platforms (for the engine) are PS3, PC and XBOX360.

Murata’s history reads like something of a chronology of technological breakthroughs in Japanese game development, with much of his work driven by animation – in particular facial animation. Of interest most of all was the admission that several of the driving forces for this new engine centred on displaying characters’ faces to a very high fidelity in close-up.

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Next up, in the first of three animation-related GDC ‘08 presentations giving us an insight into modern-day Japanese game development, here are my notes from the Postmortem of Feelplus’s Lost Odyssey, one of two Japanese RPGs created exclusively for the XBOX360 under the watchful eye of Microsoft Game Studios and Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi.

Feelplus: Looking Back at LOST ODYSSEY – The Challenge of Cross Cultural Development

Ray Nakazato – President, Feelplus Inc.

As with each of the Japanese presentations, Nakazato began by detailing the hierarchy of the companies involved in the project. Feelplus Inc. was established in 2005, with the team quickly growing in size to the final headcount of around 100 developers, many of which came from Microsoft and SEGA. Feelplus is 1 of 3 companies under the AQ Interactive Group, (including Artoon and Cavia), and the project was a collaborative effort with Sakaguchi’s team at Mistwalker who formed the core desgin team.

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