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— Clive Barker
Thanks to Drama Princess, the characters (or “Actors” as we call them) in The Path are aware of their environment. This allows them to look at objects in their vicinity. The picture is made of several super-imposed screenshots taken from a tool external to the game, where we visualize the Actor’s activity with lines and blocks, so we know what’s going on in their heads.
i screenshot i took of them all together soon after i’d finished the first versions of all the girl models.
I feel responsible for her. Someone has to. She is always looking after the others. First born but last made. I think some of my weariness rubbed off on her. She was made in such a lazy way. Forced to grow up before she was ready.
This is not to say that I don’t find her perfect. I sketched her after being inspired by the films of Ingmar Bergman, the mannerisms and characters of his actresses, especially the lovely Liv Ullmann. It is hard to say if what I felt I learned by watching his movies has been injected vertex by vertex into Scarlet…. but I believe a little bit remains.
She is a serious young lady. More images of her are shown in the gallery and on flickr. She’s looking a bit frightening in the wallpaper, but i think it’s just her way of dealing with a frightening world. Let us all wish her well.
After a slight bit of panic and thanks to canceling a feature I had planned to work on, this week turned out pretty well. I was able to correct a few major show-stopping bugs and tweak some smaller nagging issues. I have also reconciled myself with the fact that we will not be able to do everything we want, that that’s not the point. The point is to make as good a game as we can within the given constraints. Gotta keep reminding myself of that.
The game not quite ready for the preview that Eurogamer Benelux want to get next week. But at least things seem under control now. At least for the part of the game that I have been working on lately. Next week I will be working on the other part. Hopefully the optimism remains…
In regular software development, a large part of the work consists of dealing with mistakes that a user can make. In a game like The Path with a lot of semi-autonomous elements, a similar thing seems to occur. Only we’re dealing with the mistakes that our artificial creatures are making, not the user. A large part of the work that I’m doing these days is correcting the mistakes that our virtual characters and other generative systems are making. Or at least trying to build systems that prevent them from making those mistakes. Of course, unlike the mistakes that human users make, anything that the characters in The Path do is entirely a result of our own doing.
More than anything else we’ve ever worked on, we’ve looked to film as a source of inspiration for our work on The Path. Not so much because the game will be anything like a movie but more for some kind of contextualization. We were asking ourselves constantly: “what is horror?”, “what makes something scary” and while we have our own ideas about that it seemed a good idea (and fun also) to plunge into the long history of horror genre productions in movies. So, we’ve been watching lots of movies!
At the same time we’ve been reading up on our fairy tales, we are considering our interpretation of this story we have chosen, Little Red Ridinghood. Ultimately, fairy tales are told to teach us something. They are lessons wrapped in beautiful metaphor. In our case we hope the “telling” is something which is acted out by each player via interacting with the characters in the game. And somehow it seemed inevitable that we would tell this story through anxiousness, surreality, surprise. What is it about the horror genre that makes it particularly suitable for the telling of these kinds of tales?
A series of podcasts by Mike Dawson for his Left Field Cinema blog ties all of these considerations up nicely. You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or find the mp3s at his site where there are also transcripts of each episode.
He analyses films like The Exorcist, Silence of the Lambs, Friday the 13th, and Se7en to determine if they are in fact modern day fairy tales and if so in what way are they in that tradition. His conclusions are most interesting:
Morality tales can be seen as using a cowardly method of making a point; science fiction and fantasy use the method because they can make commentary on current events and climates and avoid criticism for their views by claiming that one has nothing to do with the other.
oh really? Fascinating, as we try, in our way, to make a Video Game as modern day morality tale. 😉
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!