Dodo Blog

Raving Rabbids Travel in Time, a game I did animation on, came out last month! I’ve updated my reel with a few new pieces. It was a fun project to work on.

Some more interesting addresses:

A gorgeous light-show on a 600-year old clocktower,

great interviews with indie game developers,

Monet and web-design,

Dovi Anderson (Pixar) on animation lists

and an interview with Glen Keane. (en français, translation here)

1UP has a great feature on a project I worked on (briefly) at Arkane before it was cancelled. A rare look at a game that was not to be. There’s a lot of wasted work in the games industry even on titles that do make it out, but you don’t usually hear about the ones that didn’t…

Some of these are old but didn’t get around to posting them before:

Seven Camels ponders tone and colour,

Chris Hecker et al argue in favour of brevity,

Cameron Fielding talks of work abroad,

and Derek Yu says you should finish your game.

Some pictures from my trip to Chile. The Atacama desert is pretty amazing.

Made another update to my game prototype. The rocks look a little nicer now, though I’m leaving the rest of the graphics alone for the time being.

Various gameplay additions also, including the recording of hi-scores…

A series of posts on the use of interactive animation in games …

Next: Red Dead Redemption

Last post I talked about proximity as a gameplay device.

Red Dead is another game that does some interesting things with this… I was somewhere in Mexico doing odd jobs for The Resistance, when ‘man of the people’ Reyes asks me to ride shotgun on a stagecoach. Now, you can choose to sit down next to him, OR if you happen to think he’s kind of a hypocrite, you can ride alongside on your own horse instead, to which Reyes responds:

“I guess my company is not good enough for you anymore, hm?”

You could argue the only gameplay consequence is missing some exposition… but it’s a great step towards making social cues matter in how your interactions with NPCs pan out.

You can also greet people as you walk or ride by. If you press the interact button when close to another character your avatar, Marston, tips his hat and says “hello”, or replies if the other has already spoken.

The game is full of little touches like this. NPCs call out and gesture to you when they want to ask you something and wave excitedly when you come back. If they’d implemented “He went THAT way!”-gestures as well, the mini-map would’ve been rendered all but obsolete.

[I found playing with the mini-map off a lot more enjoyable as it made the game less about riding from mission to mission and more about really exploring]

Of course, you can’t talk about Red Dead Redemption without mentioning the horses. While you could argue they are like the cars from GTA, there’s a believability and life to them that goes beyond that…

Like Agro from Shadow of the Colossus, they are characters you come to care about and this is in no small part thanks to the fluid animation and all the little details in their behavior, from the head-shaking when you push them too hard, to the intricate interaction with the terrain.

If you whistle anywhere in the world your horse comes to find you. It’s possible to keep the same horse throughout the game so you can get quite attached to the creature, to the point where some players felt compelled to mourn the loss of their horse when a stray bullet, or cougar took it…

To me this is the whole point of game animation: creating interactive characters you can believe in…

A series of posts on the use of interactive animation in games…

Last time I wrote one of these I believe I said something about weekly entries… Well, so much for that, but I’ve got a couple of new ones:

… starting with Assassin’s Creed 2.

I’ve talked about Assassin’s Creed before, but the sequel takes things a step further…

Where AC1 had you tagging along automatically with groups of monks at the press of a button, AC2 is all about proximity*. ANY gathering of NPCs can shield you from the eyes of the guards. Just standing close enough to or walking with a small group will make you effectively disappear. Your enemies are looking for a lone assassin. Blend into the crowd and you can travel freely.

Straying too close to the guards when they’re on edge will blow your cover. Like AC1, their state of alertness is communicated through posture.

Moving from group to group, pretending to chat with random pedestrians, weaving through the crowd, you can approach unseen – strike – and be gone…

[Incidentally, there was an interesting talk at the Paris AI Conference about how groups form in conversation, adapting to new arrivals, etc. They don't go quite that far here, but you could layer these systems on top of each other to great effect.]

Hiding in plain sight and adhering to social norms to avoid drawing attention to yourself is not something games experiment with a lot and it’s good to see someone taking this on.

Speaking of which, Spy Party continues to look interesting as well…

* more AI than animation, but it is body language.

Plastic Animation Paper 4, the tool I used to create my short film, recently became freeware. If you have a Wacom tablet and want to do some 2D animation, it’s a great piece of software… and now it’s for gratis.

If you’re new to games, or consoles were more your thing in the 90s you may not have heard of Looking Glass. They were a game studio that pioneered a genre that came to be known as the “Immersive Sim”, focusing on deep player interaction with a detailed and consistent game world using a unique blend of narrative, artificial intelligence and physics simulation. Famous for titles like Thief and Ultima Underworld, its influence can still be felt across the games industry.

Right now there’s an excellent series of interviews on Rock Paper Shotgun about the rise and fall of this particular school of design and its continuing legacy. Smart people talking game design philosophy. Great great stuff.