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.

Your videogame developer association is at a crossroads. The senior board staff are leaving left, right and centre and member apathy is at an all-time high. You’re looking for something, anything, to drum up passion once more in 13,000+ strong community where the vast majority of members are signed up automatically by employers often without their knowledge, or only to recieve industry-related discounts. What you need is a controversy – one so great that it will get folks who had never even considered themselves members calling to arms, becoming the hottest gossip in studios around the globe as the soap-opera plays out in real-time…

In step Dr. Timothy Langdell, a masterstoke of invention in a creative industry run on heroes and villains. This surely fictitious character was supposedly a board member on an association to advocate the rights of game developers internationally, yet was continuously embroiled in litigation with the most defenseless small game-related companies unfortunate enough to approach his trademarked “EDGE” brand. This was a developer/publisher with a claim to over 700 games backing up that brand, yet had not released a game since the early 1980s, leaving confusion in the marketplace (and therefore a legal leg to stand on) impossible. Such a stickler for legality, Doc Dastardly had been exposed time and time again using others work for his own financial and status gain, ranging from game, comic and television works in no way connected to him, to stooping so low as to pass off a 15 year old girl’s artwork as coverart for his incoming “products”.

It was this last practice that drew the ire of most IGDA members already frustrated with his ongoing suit against a celebrated iPhone game developer, signing Cease and Desists as IGDA Board Member, further damaging the reputation of the organisation. To which end, over 2000 members including myself signed a petition to oust him, or at least call a meeting to do so. A meeting was called, (to decide how to call a meeting), after which the meeting was set. In some semblance of decency, Little Langdell resigned a week later, but not without kicking and screaming on the IGDA forums and comically failing in updating his online store to support his case.

So there it was – a villain vanquished – the members feel empowered and are now looking to the next challenge in resurrecting the IGDA’s status – the character served his purpose. But the story continues. Langdell, it appears, is not so fictitious after all, and lives on beyond the board. You can follow his continuing comically incompetent capers here…

[Unlike the subject, sprite image used with permission of the artist]

By some strange paradox, E3’s lack of announcements regarding the next “next generation” of hardware has prompted many news sites (and publishers) so speculate as to when the next cycle will begin.

When I first began animating games at home in my highschool years and was invited up to the local game studio, DMA Design, back home in Scotland it was exacly at the time of the big shift from the 2D of the 16bit consoles (SNES and Genesis) to the impending 3D revolution of the as-yet unrealeased PlayStation and N64. I still clearly recall being informed by my tour guide (Art Director Oz, who by some strange twist of fate now works just up the road from me in Montreal at local studo A2M) that it would be “a long time before we’ll be seeing round edges in games again” with the move to hard-edged low-poly games like the original Tomb Raider and Tekken. As such, I promptly ditched my computer and all my 2D skills and instead decided to apply for art college to get drunk and meet girls.

On completing my studies and joining the industry proper it was 5 years later and the old-hands I learned from and I were wrapping our heads around the leap from the original PlayStation to the PlayStation 2, with its analogue input and superior power and memory specifications. During this period a lot of over-estimation of these specs on our part resulted in much trial and error, (with the latter being most prevalent), and the unfortunately disproportionate ratio of actual creative-to-technical work was quite the learning experience. But hey, I didn’t know any better…

4 years later and I make the jump across the Atlantic. After a brief stint with the Xbox, it’s on to the Xbox360 (at the time, known as Xenon) and the then unfinished Unreal 3 engine. Again, lots of over-estimation of hardware specifications despite being some of the first developers to receive the new hardware kits and being the UE3 early-adopters. Again, having to relearn how to create animation in games from scratch as we apply new methods such as blending, additive animation, IK and an entirely new facial system, not to mention the poor artists who had to completely rethink their workflows with the move to normal maps and Z-brush modelling.

So here we are once more. 5 years later and on the verge of when another hardware generation cycle is expected to be announced, so I’m going to put it like this…

Can you imagine how crippled the art of filmmaking would be if every time shooting starts the vast majority of the crew’s time is spent creating reels of film and re-designing how it works inside the camera? If every time an author sits down to work on his or her next bestseller they must first spend years establishing workflows for simply getting the words down on the page? And every new album is delayed months as your favourite band is holed up in the studio, luthering their own guitars?

For the first time ever I’m coming into work and purely creating art. Not worrying about whether I’ll get the tech in time to finish the workload. Not dealing with crashes, bugs, delays and instead just knowing that when I want something to work, it does. For the first time in my career I’m spending 100% of my day creating mature, thought-provoking content, and it’s really something of a marvel to be discussing character motivation and story arcs safe in the knowledge that everything else is taken care of.

To this end you can keep your new hardware and your fancy camera inputs and magic wands, because I’m concenrating on content.

This is awesome, and so close to home it hurts. I often say that the lowest and most indefensible point of working in games is that many of them consist of nothing more that shooting people in the face.

[via lightspeedchick]

In a follow-up to the recent post on the AIAS Awards relating to animation, I must congratulate Dave (and his team) on winning the Outstanding Achievement in Animation category.

If any of you out there would like to work with “The Academy Award Winning Animation Director”, sign up here as he recently rejoined our team, being one of the former BioWare alumnus ;-)

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

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.

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.

The other week the industry awoke to the shocking news that the last bastion of competition to Autodesk’s domination of the CG market, Softimage, was finally consumed alongside the earlier aquisition of Maya. What this kind of monopoly over the CG Industry will bring to artists in the long-term is still unclear, but the minimal increase in features of the last couple of Maya iterations point to this not being a good thing.

On a positive note though, the “Customer Stories” section of the Japanese Softimage site have now been translated, so offer insights in the production of not just MGS4, but also a handful of other major Japanese games such as Capcom’s Devil May Cry 4 pictured above. Go check it out.