Our understanding and respect of the games industry is growing every day. How they can ever create these immensely complex AAA games is beyond me. The Path is only a fraction of the size of such a game but there is so much to do! Today I discovered that the absolute minimum time it takes to finish the game is 2 hours. And that’s when you’re either very lucky or use some cheats only available in the development environment. And of course if you skip over everything that is not absolutely essential to make progress (which, in a Tale of Tales, means most things in the game 😉 ). To do everything in the game will take several times that amount of time. And we need to do everything in order to check it and make sure it works. And when it doesn’t (which is often at this point), we need to fix it. Where are we going to find the time to do all that?
It’s fun to play around with the game in its current state, if you’re careful and know what you can and cannot touch, or know what errors to ignore, or have special cheats to get you out of tricky situations. But as soon as you start lifting the lid of that pretty colourful box, it’s like hundreds of bugs swarm out! And fixing one of them produces ten new ones. It’s like they use being fixed as a form of procreation 😆 . The amount of work to do is staggering. Most of the new issues I encounter, I take a note of. Because I don’t want to be distracted from the task at hand. This way I am producing a gigantic to do list. Several lists, in fact.
First of all there’s my schedule of the month, which is basically composed of the most important issues discovered the month before, divided in one or two day packages. The things that didn’t make it to the schedule are arranged in four lists entitled “Essential”, “Optional”, “Desirable” and “Very desirable”. My schedule is extremely tight so there’s hardly any time to do anything outside of it. In fact, there’s always things that I can’t get done on time. This produces another list: things from the schedule that weren’t done in time, divided in “Essential”, “Optional” and “Weird bugs” 😕 . And while I’m working on other things, new problems present themselves. These are mostly added to the “Desirable” list, unless they are “Essential”.
There’s also a list called “Removed”, but so far it’s very short. The Path is a very minimalist design. So there’s not much that can be removed. We just need to get it done. Somehow. There’s no way I will be able to take care of all the things on my lists. There’s just too much. So it comes down to smart prioritizing. That’s one of the good things about not being able to deal with problems immediately: it gives you some time to think and decide carefully what is important and what is not. Perfection is something we’ll leave to the experts. 😉
When looking at the game, it’s so tempting to try and fix each and every little thing that could be improved. It’s really hard to resist. “Let me just fix this little thing and get it over with. Instead of thinking about doing it every time I see it.” But I know that if I start down that path, there’s no end to it. And the game will never get finished as a result.
That’s why I make prioritized to do lists. I need to take care of the really important issues first. And at this point in the production, those are issues that can literally break the experience. Really serious bugs or logic errors. Those need to be fixed no matter how much cooler the game would look if that one particle effect was a little bit more orange…
Well, well, well, now we’ve come full circle. She’s the one you’ve seen the most, if you’ve been paying attention round here. But what do you *really* know about dear Ruby, eh? “You think you know me?” as she is fond of saying with a sneer (okay, at least in my imagination.)
When we had to decide which character to make first, I said it immediately, Ruby is the one! Through working out her character and style we solidified what all the characters would be…. how can I say, Before her, we had no idea what we were making. Ruby helped us figure all of it out. What’s more, she’s the girl who, for me, totally epitomized what I felt about my time growing up. What happens to her, could have happened to me. She’s like a friend I never had but still remember… or a long lost sister of my dreams…. Anyway, all that is to say, she’s been through a lot during the long process of getting here. To a final image.
The process started with lots of looking around on the Internet for images and inspiration. I found her absolutely in the short skirts and red knees of Fuco Ueda‘s girls and the undulating necks of Audrey Kawsaki‘s fantasies, pretty and distant. But, what kind of girl was she? Had to figure that out. Then I sketched around on paper and in computer til I had her.
Ah, nostalgia 😉
There are the usual beauty shots of her in the gallery, and some other things will be showing up on flickr. I made a strange and unusual image of her for your desktop, hope you like it!
We’ve worked so hard in September! We get up in the morning, do some work, have brunch, do some work, have tea, do some work, have dinner, watch Star Trek, do some work. Day in day out. From 8-9 am to 1-2 am. Apart from the weekends when we force ourselves to rest. And despite of the stress and the routine, it’s fun! In an ideal world, we’d probably want to spend much longer on the game and add all the elements that we imagine while playtesting. But it’s probably a good thing that practical circumstances forbid this. Otherwise The Path would never get done.
I’ve been able to do most things on my to do list for September. Only a few things have been cut, or pushed down to the “desirable features” list. For me, the door is now closed on adding new features, and now I’m shifting my attention to tweaking and fixing everything that is in the game. There’s a lot of work still to be done!
In the asset creation area, Grandmother’s House is starting to look very very nice! But there’s still some work to do. So we didn’t quite make the asset creation deadline -again. And after the Grandmother assets are done, we still need to work on animations and visual effects. So that will be an important part of the October workload. After which Auriea can get back to the forest and finalize the graphic elements there.
In September I was able to implement a few nice and fun things that will definitely add to the enjoyment of the game. For the first time, I’m also really starting to see (and feel) its artistic potential and emotional effect. I must admit that I was a little bit disturbed. It’s one thing to say that you’re making a game in which you lead your six avatars to their deaths. It’s kind of funny and provocative to say such things. But to actually do this, and see the effect. Is chilling. Even for me.
It made me think that the developers of all those violent games must have a real talent of transforming that pain and death into lighthearted entertainment. If you show these things in their plain and dry state then I imagine the emotional effect can be devastating. I think politicians who complain about violence in games now haven’t seen anything yet. I think all those developers are holding back!
I was actually worried that The Path would be too extreme. Not in terms of blood and gore, but in terms of psychological and emotional tension. But then I reminded myself of the fairy tale aspect of the story. And that everything in The Path is a metaphor. Maybe there’s even a reason why you would want these girls to die…
Anyway, October will be a lot less fun. Now is the time to make sure that the most essential elements of the game work properly. Ranging from controls and game flow to the user interface and the save system. It all needs to work well and be clear to the player. After that, hopefully, finally, we well get to play a bit with our doll house and author the more artistic aspects of the game.
Almost all collaboration with other people has stopped. Laura has finished all animations. Marian is making some final versions of the new logo. Jarboe & Kris are adding some extra elements to an existing composition. And Hans has helped a bit with Grandmother’s House. Soon it will just be Auriea and I, tweaking this bag of feature into a lovely experience.
We hope to squeeze in some play-testing too, this month. But we can only really do that when the game works reasonably well, technically. And that’s not entirely the case yet. Too many unwanted weird things are still happening. But I feel quite confident about fixing them. A lot more confident than I felt last month. I think the biggest issues were taken care of in September. The rest is easy. 😉
All hail the fearless, little Ginger!
I think every parent has a favourite child. You don’t let them know it, but there is one that always surprises you. One that reflects the best of you while still becoming their own person. Ginger was always my favourite. Not only was she the one I feel I finally modeled perfectly correct, but with the animation’s Laura made for her, she’s absolutely not like the other girls. Also even though she is 13, she is smaller than her little sister Rose… something she is not happy about. 😉
In my original sketch she was more boy-ish. But I changed my mind to make her a little more flirty and feminine after revisiting a favorite film of ours:
The hair, necklace and penchant for playing with wolves are pretty much where the similarities end, I think making Ginger more of a little girl who doesn’t know her own beauty was a successful choice.
She is outgoing and active, and is a lot of fun in the game! 🙂
We’ve had a lot of trouble making characters cast shadows in the game. Our engine uses a technique called Stencil Shadows. Those can be created very fast on the videocard. Except that they don’t work with characters! So we always had to resort to a very slow software-based solution. In The Path, turning on shadows could easily reduce the framerate by a quarter.
So we started experimenting a little and came up with an extremely primitive yet efficient solution. Instead of using the deformed mesh of the character to cast the shadow, we modelled simple shapes that approximated the character’s different body parts (head, arms, pelvis, etc).
Then we render these in the place where they are in the game (at the position where the character’s skeleton’s bones are). It is this collection of simple objects that we use to cast the shadow.
Of course the result is a very crude shape. So then we blur the shadow to make it look pretty. Which is kind of a bonus, because soft shadows are another thing that is hard to do in games.
The result is realtime shadows that look nice and cause virtually no framerate reduction.
We implemented the last behaviour today. That makes for a total count of 70 behaviours. Behaviours are things that the characters can do. It’s a concept from the Drama Princess engine that we use in the game. And even though Chris Crawford is famous for saying that interactive storytelling requires thousands of verbs, we’re pretty proud to have exceeded the classic amount of 5 verbs (turn right, turn left, move forward, move back, and fire) quite a bit.
To be fair, there’s actually a few behaviours that won’t be used anymore, remnants of Drama Princess tests and old versions of the game. “Bow to Greet” and “Wave” are not part of The Path and “Dance” didn’t make it either. But “Move Happy” is still there, “Go Home”, “Chase”, “Act Sad”, “Drink” and even “Pray”. Many of these behaviours can be acted out by several characters. But some are reserved to a single one (often because of the limits of asset creation -each behaviour typically requires a unique animation for each character- or sometimes because it’s not appropriate to the story -things that a certain characters would never do).
In Drama Princess, behaviours are like little programs that run at the very bottom of the software structure but that are capable of influencing the entire game. I’m not sure if that’s a good idea -I’m not a programmer ;). But it’s very practical. And it works quite well. Each behaviour can be entirely unique, though several share common elements (like go to a certain spot, or look at an object -which , I guess, are extra verbs that I didn’t count separately).
All the behaviours we need for The Path are in the game now. But they are by no means finished. Many require a lot of tweaking and fixing. And we also need to quite extensively author the rules by which characters can choose to act out certain behaviours. As you may or may not know, all characters in The Path (including the avatars) are capable of autonomous behaviour (at least in the main part of the game). They choose to do things based on what’s around them and how they feel about those objects and characters. Since these feelings change, so can does their behaviour. A lot of our authoring now involves limiting the freedom that the characters have. Because they have no intention to simply act out our story. We need to force them a bit. We’re like the directors of a troupe of anarchistic actors. It’s fun, but…
I don’t even remember her walking into the room, but one day there she was.
I thought she seemed a bit too jealous of her older sister so I made her skirt longer than in my initial sketch. The lace I added later seemed to express her innocence but also the visceral quality of lace… kind of like veins.
If I talk inspiration of her character it would be Lain (from the anime Serial Experiments Lain) which I watched again for the thousandth time when I was planning the characters. I loved the hairstyle so much I made a variation for Rose. Here, the intro to the show:
And then in the course of looking through all the amazing artists work out there I must say one thats stuck with me is Esao Andrews… he deserves a separate Inspirations post but for now I’ll leave you with this painting.
Quest3D is the authoring tool we use to develop The Path. As a realtime visual programming environment, it allows us to play the game while we develop it, and vice versa. There’s no need for compiling: the game is always playable and editable within the same authoring environment.
But because the game is relatively complex and because it can sometimes take some time to get to a certain state where you want to edit things, we have created tools to do certain tasks. These tools are also made with Quest3D and they use the exact same code as the game. So any change we make, will be applied to the game automatically.
The names of the tools speak for themselves, mostly. There’s a Cut Scene Editor, a Forest Tile Editor, a Motion Viewer, a Rooms Editor, a Music Composer, an Opening Titles Editor, a Drama Princess Configuration tool, a Drama Princess Test environment, and even a dedicated Safe Ending Editor. I’m sure we’ll end up making a Bad Ending Editor as well. 😈
Sometimes several days go by when I don’t look at the game but only edit through these tools. Then Auriea tells me about something that happened in the game, as a result of these changes. These is usually quite fun and surprising. Like the characters suddenly starting to do certain things. Or a special event suddenly happening. But I’m always afraid I’m going to break something. 😕
Introducing Carmen!
What can I say about Carmen… In contrast to Robin, she has been nothing but trouble. We wanted to show her to you now, just so you don’t think the Red Girls are all sweetness and light. The original party girl, when she’s not breaking curfew she’s giving me fits trying to get her topology correct… not sure I ever got it correct, her curves were dangerous, even to me.
While all the characters were heavily inspired by doll designs, she was perhaps the most evidently so. I based her silhouette absolutely on images of dolls that I found. Sketched out a design for her. I actually had to model her twice, as after her first version I was advised that the way I’d done her shoulders, knees and elbows would never deform correctly during animation. So I rebuilt her… funny how making something that everyone makes, a sexy girl in 3d, gives me the most trouble… typical, for me anyway.
Beauty may be more than skin deep but I think she turned out pretty well for a shell. See her with her make-up on in the gallery and on our flickr page and don’t forget the exclusive wallpaper for your computer desktop in the downloads section.
This journal chronicles the making of The Path, a single player horror game developed by Tale of Tales, the game was released in March 2009 and can be downloaded via this website! Contributors to this journal are the game’s main creators Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn.
We hope you will enjoy our candid revelations about the work process. But we do want to warn you that if you truly want to experience The Path fresh, you might want to avoid reading these pages. We cannot garantee spoiler-free content!
