| Tale of Tales “8” VAF Mile Stone Plan |
REPORT
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Step 4: "Graduation" (May 1 - Jul 15) GAMEPLAY DEMO |
| Introduction |
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Despite of the new schedule, this has been a very intense few months. We have finished the gameplay demo. But it still has some bugs and there are a few things we would like to tweak before we want to make it public. We will do this in between our new jobs of presentating to and contacting publishers and investors.
But we are capable and available to give a face-to-face presentation of this demo at any time.
It has been quite a rush, especially in terms of programming, to flesh out the newly designed game engine. Some features are still missing, others are poorly implemented. But it was a little silly of us to expect to create a complete game engine in three months. And we have to leave some things to be done during actual production time! |
| The demo |
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The demo we have made consists of 3 areas: the Tailor's Workshop, the Tailor's Store and the Theater Gallery. From the Theater Gallery, one can see the Palace Courtyard.
The demo contains a mini-quest that ends with the completion of the plan of the Tailor Prince to free his favourite slave. On the Theater Gallery, the Sultan and Sultana are sleeping with torn clothes. If the Girl casts a Telepathy Spell on them, we see a movie from which we understand that they are in this state out of grief for their Daughter who pricked herself while spinning and fell dead. The player needs to have the Girl find fabric and put it in a magical Sewing Machine. Then take the clothes produced by this machine to the Sultan and Sultana. After the new clothes magically appear on them, they have shifted position and the Girl can now take the hand crank that was lying under the Sultana. With this hand crank, she can lower the platform with the Tailor's Mannequin into the Workshop. This mannequin is dressed with a wedding dress made of human hair collected by the Tailor Prince from the sleepers in the palace. The mannequin should have flowers for eyes but is missing one. The Girl needs to find a flower and put it in the eye. When she does that, the mannequin platform starts spinning up by itself and ends up breaking the glass of the display case in the Tailor's Store. This is where the demo ends, providing a cliff hanger that should leave our audience with a desire to see more.    
   
Despite of it's shortcomings in terms of A.I. and incompleteness in terms of assets, the demo does create a sense of immersion in a place that makes you want to return there. Which is the major goal of the design. It also generates curiosity for the other spaces of which only the outside can be seen in the courtyard. We do seem to have lost a certain freshness that the previous demo had. This is probably mostly caused by the character of the Girl which, while more sophisticated, has not reached the finesse of the previous system. We simply haven't had the time to fine tune this (more about this below). After a brief crisis when we realized that for all the new professional and high quality assets, the game was not getting better in terms of how it looks, inspired by paintings of Dutch neo-classicist Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Auriea was able to capture the freshness of the original placeholder geometry with some radical texturing techniques. As a result the game has never looked better. We have implemented consistent colour palettes based on the orientalist paintings and are getting very fluent with visual effects and achieving a unified picture on the screen. We think our game already looks better than most PC games out there (though there may be some difference in tastes here since a lot of people equate "look good" with "look photographically realistic", which is exactly what we do not want for “8”). We are still struggling with the design of the extra characters, the sleepers that have no other function than to populate the world (we have changed the original design concept that all these sleepers should be in meaningful scenes in favour of focussing the attention of the Player more on the Girl and the main characters and story). For reasons of performance and time, these must be simple models that can be made quickly. Also, for reasons of gameplay, they must blend in with the scenery more than the important characters (the ones of which you can see the dreams e.g.). We have found a partial solution in texturing these characters with colours similar to the environment. But ultimately we ran out of time to do serious research on this matter. |
| Artificial Intelligence & Autonomous Behaviour |
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As opposed to in the previous engine, the main character of the Girl now has artificial intelligence. In the previous engine, her autonomous behavious was triggered mostly by random factors. Currently, the Girl has an awareness of her environment and is able to respond to it. Oddly enough, the difference between random behaviour and intelligent behaviour is not so great. In fact, random behaviour has a slight advantage at the moment, making the Girl seem more alive and charming. The reason for this is most likely that the current implementation of artificial intelligence is incomplete and hasn't been fine-tuned yet. The latter is a work of authoring that is quite intensive and takes a long time to get right and bug-free. The intelligence of the Girl is based on three factors that define her mood (happiness, energy and concern). It takes a lot of tweaking to ensure that the behaviour that follows out of these factors is logical and interesting. The big advantages of having artificial intelligence, and the most important reasons why random behaviour is not acceptable, is that the Girl can respond to the Player's actions in logical ways (if you make her walk a lot, she becomes tired and wants to rest, e.g.) and that she can help the Player play the game. In fact, the Girl would be able to play the game almost on her own, providing that the Player help her go from one room to another (the one thing she can not do autonomously). The real power of the A.I., however, will only come out when a larger area is available for playing and more time can be spent with the Girl. The idea is that the Girl's mood and behaviour change as the game evolves, implying a personality change as well if the Player behaves in certain ways (if the Player is in a rush, the Girl will become very annoyed and refuse to help; if the Player is lazy, she might start playing the game on her own, etc). |
| Extra systems |
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Ferry Marcelis (NL) has completed what he calls the "Advanced Motionset" on time. It is a system that allows us to blend animations for the Girl in a very fluent and convenient way, allowing us to expand her motion vocabulary tremendously. A few minor shortcomings aside, this system has been performing remarkably well and is very stable and reliable.
Alex Mouton (USA) has achieved very nice results for the Wicked Branches. This is a system that draws the branches that represent the Wicked Fairy in the game. Basically the system allows us to plant seeds for these branches in the game world and have them grow according to certain parameters. Contrary to our expectations, he did succeed in making a version of this system that we were able to include in the demo. Later he will add motion and flowers to the branches. And a way to remove them with the pruning spell. |
| Team work |
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Our team worked! With the exception of a few minor glitches, the team we have gathered, performed extremely well. A few deadlines were missed here and there and a few minor features had to be cut for reasons of time but nothing dramatic happened. (Most issues were caused by scheduling too much work for Auriea and Michael, e.g. -we're still underestimating the management aspect apparently...) Lina Kusaite (LT/BE) has once again created some wonderful characters and Martin Michl (AT/BE) designed a great Tailor's Workshop and Theater Gallery. Ronald Jones (AU/CH) has designed a new much more future-proof game engine and has implemented as much as he could before leaving for Australia to get married to his Dutch wife (he lives in Switzerland and works for a Dutch and a Belgian company... We have discovered the strengths and weaknesses of our main suppliers of assets, Meerkat in Estonia and Dragonfly in Ukraine, the first being more suitable for characters, the latter for objects and architecture. But both have performed splendidly and have delivered very high quality assets (that we did tweak here and there to make them a little less "standard" and more our own). They have really convinced us that working with external companies can be very beneficial to the project (doing away with our former prejudices against working with "impersonal companies"). Laura Smith, our American animator, did a great job animating our Little Girl character and the Sultan and Sultana family for the Telepathy Spell Vision in the demo. All parties involved have expressed an interest in continuing to work with us when full production gets started. Laura even said she would want to move to Belgium for this. |
| Production experience |
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I think the most important evolution that has taken place during this mile stone is that we have acquired a much better idea on how this project can be brought to a good ending. This is where the value of an extensive pre-production phase is proving to be worth it's weight in gold. We cannot thank V.A.F. enough for this opportunity. From solo artist-designers, we have evolved to directors, producers and managers. We know very well now how we will need to set things up for production. We know what kind of people to hire for which positions. We know how long things take and what they cost. We know how to make schedules and meet deadlines. And we have already assembled at least half a team. |
| Conclusion |
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As for the three goals... We have created many many models, textures and animations for the game world and designed and implemented a completely new game engine. And we have developed a workflow and acquired a lot of experience in how to get things done. With the finished demo, tons of concept art and a much clearer design, we have all the tools required to convince anyone that this is a worthwhile project. We will focus on these presentations and contacts during the next mile stone, starting with the public website. Our team has proven itself to be solid and reliable. With have no doubt that we can make the complete game with these people (if supplemented with a few pairs of hands and brains, especially to take some of the load off of our own shoulders in terms of managing the different aspects of the process). This is not to say that the rest will be easy. Despite of the quality of our presentation material and our experience, “8” still remains an odd game in the current games market and Tale of Tales an odd company in the current game industry. To convince publishers and investors will still be tough. But we couldn't have been prepared any better. |