DIY level design
Lumino City (out now on PC and Mac and coming to iOS later this year) is a puzzle-adventure game made in part with real-world objects like paper, cardboard, and miniature lights. During the course of development, State of Play Games created a 10-foot high city. It brought pieces from that original model to Siggraph, where it also encouraged attendees to craft their own levels using materials in the booth. They even had some help from the laser-cutter demonstrators who were behind the Lumino City area.
State of Play used those creations as part of its “live gamemaking” session. The simple shooting game that came out of it looked pretty good considering how little time the team had to put it together.
A ‘swamp noir’ and brutal battles to the death
As Hardison told me, Siggraph isn’t just about pushing the boundaries of graphical technology. It’s also about looking at the latest innovations on an artistic level. The independent games shown at the Media Indie Exchange (MIX) area reflected that, and two of them in particular stood out to me.
Arena Gods (coming to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, and Mac) is a minimalist competitive multiplayer game where four players have to fight to the death — and it only takes one hit from a sword or spear to kill you. You can dodge and knock players to the floor with your fists, but you probably won’t succeed without using a weapon. They don’t appear in the level right away, so when a match starts, it feels like you’re playing a game of musical chairs as everyone waits for the first weapon to drop. Then it’s a mad scramble as players run away from the person who picked it up first. Arena Gods is fast, fun, and bloody.
Knee Deep is an episodic adventure game that closely follows Telltale Games’ formula of player choices changing the story. It’s a “swamp noir adventure” where the death of a movie star sets off a chain of events for three different characters. The biggest difference from Telltale’s work is the theatrical hook: Everything takes place on a stage. But it doesn’t feel like you’re watching actors move around a set. The set physically moves with them as the story jumps to different parts of a Florida town.
The graphics have a toy-like quality to them as well. When I watched the walls of a store slide away or the scenic backdrop flip around to represent a different time of day, it felt like I was inside a mechanized diorama. Knee Deep’s first episode (out of three) is out now on PC, Mac, and Linux.
A lot of work goes into making the perfect mustache
I finished playing The Order: 1886 the night before developer Ready at Dawn’s presentation. And one thing that definitely stands out — perhaps even more so than the intricate detail on the characters’ clothes — is the hair. It’s hard not to focus on Galahad’s bushy mustache and sideburns (top right) whenever the camera focuses on his face. For lead texture artist Scot Andreason, hair “can be one of the first reminders of the limitations we face with our real-time rendering.” So the developers tried a variety of methods to make sure the hair blended well with the characters’ heads. They didn’t want the hair to look like wigs.
Hair is so complicated that one of the most GPU-intensive shots in the game doesn’t have anything to do with The Order: 1886’s numerous action scenes. That honor goes to a quick close-up of a character’s beard as he drinks a vial of blood (as seen in this video). If you want to look at the slides for yourself, you can download Ready at Dawn’s full Siggraph presentation on its website.