Beyond Aperture: Unofficial Portal 1 Epilogue

BoingBoing points us to this beautiful Portal (1) epilogue. Well made, clever.

Escape from City 17 - excellent indie-inspired short film series

Wow. This is awesome.

Indie Half-life 2 inspired film series.

From Rock Paper Shotgun: "the Purchase Bros describe the production as “guerilla style with no money, no time, no crew, no script, the first two episodes were made from beginning to end on a budget of $500."

I'm assuming that means they worked without pay and that the $500 was on plastic masks and headcrab props (where does one buy a headcrab anyway?). In any case it's awesome.

MIGS (Post 3 of N): Jason Mitchell's talk

Jason Mitchell (former ATI, now at Valve a couple years) gave a talk on "Connecting Visuals to Gameplay)

Rough notes below. Lots of screens and some video from Team Fortress 2 and the recently released "left for dead". Worth googling both before you read the notes below.

We'll look at two games today

TF2

- Distinctive silhouettes

- Stylized rendering

Left for dead

- Dark, gritty horror

- “filmic effects"

- Lessons from TF2

TF - Orignally as a quake mod 10 years ago, then half life mod

Class is selected by players. 

Initial TF2 1999 screenshot.

- Screen showing more “realistic” FPS, nothing distinctive

- Evolved to be stylized

Why?

- Gameplay (different classes)

- Readability

- Branding

Read hierarchy: What does player attempt to ascertain?

- Friend or foe (color)

- Class – run or attack (distinctive silhouettes, Body proportions,  Weapons, shadows, hats and clothing folds)

- Selected weapon – what’s he packin?

- Highest contrast at chest level

- Greadient from dark feet to light chest

- Lots to draw your eye up to chest level.

Early 20th centry conmmercial illustration influences.

Cornell, Leyendecker, Norman Rockwell

JC Leyendecker was biggest influence

- Clothing folds

- Rim highlights (light source orthogonally) – helps silouetttes pop.

- “red terminator” – where normal crosses orthogonal – increases saturation at that point, makes it red – actually makes sense inf you think about subsurface scattering

Screenshot from early short videos (“meet the heavy”)

- Before and after 2D paintover to make the image pop – rim highlighting was awesome.

Character creation

- Character silhouette (showed silouette of elephant, everyone gets it, despite it being orange)

- Bulding block, Identifiable at first read

- Interior shapes, Keep it iconic

- Work out design in ¾ pose

- Model sheet

- 3D model

- Front rear views

- Base ambient occlusion map, that's then used as a guide for painting skin

- Final character

- Iterate on the above

Environment design

- Create a compelling immersive worlds

- Team districntion through material hue/saturation/etc desaturate relative to players.

- Uncluttered painterly look.

- Bases – blue featured concrete, steel; red featured wood, sand.

Miyazaki was an influence – brushwidth foreshortened example. 

--

Left for Dead

Co-op first person horror, Dynamic shared narrative – "experience an action movie with friends"

AI director

Photo  - The valve “Shipping machine” (When games go live, they have a BIG RED BUTTON on a control panel of sci-fi proportions that Gabe hits at midnight. This then sends an 'enter' keystroke to a person's PC. Awesome. Took a pic, will post soon).

Gameplay movie (awesome).

Lessons learned from TF2

Filmic effects

Shaders enhance dark setting.

Filmic

-Color correction

-Grain

-Vignette

-Local contrast enahancement

-Dynamically communicate game state

Showed step by step

Color correction made it a bit greyer, desaturated

Grain – detail in greyed out darker areas

Vignette – mainly along top, to focus attention down at center.

Local contrast – highlights area around the player

We’re not film, we’re an interactive medium, so we might have info and cues we are looing to give to player

“sideband communications channel” like music score to film director

Gave example of normal stress level vs high stress

(local contrast driven higher, more stark

"Third strike", totally washed out, stark contrast - almost black and white.

[one note is that all the filmic effects were weilded subtly, but in sum were dramatic. good lesson here]

Lighting for darkness

Support fiction

- Fires

- Headlights of abandoned vehicles “clearly something has gone wrong”

- aid naviation - players tend to follow light.

"Smoking the set"

- Separate foreground from background

- - fog, light colord fog in dark areas to contrast with silhouettes, of infected in mid-ground

- Particles – adds atmostphere and helps accentuate silhouettes.

- Subway example of grey fog.

- Particles coming up from manhole

Reload shove and muzzle flash

- Player is the light source

- - increase drama and immersion (when Flashlight is attached to the weapon, and you are using it to light up a dark hall, reloading has consequence).

Self shadowened normal mapping

- Normal mapping locally alters surface orientation, causing detailed lighting effects

- HL2 “radiosity normal mapping”

- Turned out to be free by refactoring shader code

[note effect here was noticable but not huge, felt like he delved a little to deep into this one vs others. Hmm...]

Wet environments

- Film technique

o Wash down the set to geth that moview dark look

o Film noir

- Adds details to dark settings while still feeling dark

Then showed gameplay elements to show the above.

Portal Prequel coming soon...

...and it's made with PEOPLE!

Portal: Prelude Official Trailer from NykO18 on Vimeo.

via Rock, Paper, Shotgun, news of an 'official prequel' for Portal.

And there's people in it, which is a little strange, till you get the back story:

Its story revolves around the pre-GlaDOS epoch, even before she was plugged in. At this time, test subjects were monitored by real Aperture Science employees, whose work was tedious, lengthy and repetitive. This is why they decided to build a great artificial intelligence that could both replace them in these difficult tasks, and also take responsibility for many other tasks within the complex and compete with Black Mesa’s superiority. All employees of the Aperture Science complex are now eagerly awaiting GlaDOS. Maybe even a little too eagerly, as the upcoming events will tell… This game is totally free and set to be released somewhere around the end of the month. It offers a bit more gameplay hours than the original Portal, with 8 chapters, 48 challenges, 6 advanced maps, a brand new storyline and more than 400 lines of speech with english and french subtitles.

Gamers steamed over Steam? Distilling some learnings

There's an interesting thread over on the Escapist Magazine forums in which someone is raising a bit of a fuss about game prices on Steam. Specifically, their complaint is that many of the games listed, including some of Valve's, can be found cheaper at physical retail locations.

Having higher prices for comparable product isn't normally perceived well, but it's additionally aggravating in this case because (a) so much has been said about the efficiency of digital distribution, and (b) there's a perception that the customer is 'buying direct', and therefore should be given a better deal.

Now, I'm not faulting Valve. I think they have a great service. The issue here, is in the difficulty of keeping up with the aggressive discounting and/or promotion that retailers will do as they manage their inventory and shelfspace.

To some extent, Valve is between a rock and a hard place. Just keeping up with the pricing and promotions that all the retailers have going on would be daunting (I'd argue impossible). Even if they did that, then matching one retailer's price drop would be seen by another retailer as undercutting their channel partners. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

So what can we learn from this?

1) Be careful about message you send about the value of your service. I'm not sure that Valve has ever said that digital distribution would result in lower prices (I'm fairly certain they didn't). Still if the value was in the dynamic updates, or in the feel-good value of a larger share getting back to developers, or whatever, they should have made that the top talking points in all marketing efforts.

2) If people are comparing apples to oranges, make sure to point out that you are a pineapple. If customers ignore the above, and insist on making comparisions like the above, bring the discussions back to your product/service's value and to why the comparison is moot. In this case, it's not buying a product, it's entering into a service relationship with Valve, and that does more than get you the one game.

3) Prevent the upset from happening to begin with. This might seem a little schizophrenic at first, but I think that Valve should point people away from Steam. By this I mean they should clearly point out that some retailers might offer the game for cheaper, and that if all a customer wants is to buy the game, they are welcome to check prices at places A,B,C. They should then point out what the advantages are of buying through Steam. Customer doesn't feel they were duped, and you've reinforced your messages.

Long story short, I think this is a good lesson in how the customer doesn't always get your marketing pitch. Sometimes they write it for you. You have to plan for that and know how to address it.

ROFL

I was reading Yahtzee's Valve Travelogue and this bit about their Bellevue office locale made me laugh:

I notice out of my bedroom window that there's a store down the street called "Crate & Barrel," which, considering, strikes me as a very appropriate position for either it or Valve, as anyone familiar with the writings of Old Man Murray could tell you

If it doesn't crack you up, then you don't remember this piece.

Carmack's Back

Having not heard anything from the guys at Id in a while (then again, I don't follow the hardcore space so closely anymore), a long interview with him popped up on Game Informer.

I've always been a fan of Id's games, and of Carmack as a developer. While they seem to have fallen behind guys like Valve and Epic in terms of their development model (old skool small team vs large team w modular development, etc), I secretly (not so secretly, I guess) root for Carmack to come out and ship something that kicks everybody's ass.

Of note, this quote about Gfx HW, and when and what users should upgrade to:

I don’t think that there’s any huge need for people to jump right now. All the high-end video cards right now—video cards across the board—are great nowadays. This is not like it was years ago, where they’d say, “This one’s poison, stay away from this. You really need to go for this.” Both ATI and Nvidia are going a great job on the high end.

Wow. It's not just me then. If HE doesn't care about the latest and greatest graphics, then who does?

Also, a game-biz-101 bit from Todd Hollenshead for those that think that digital distribution will make their publisher-dependence woes go away (Steam is the topic of discussion, but to be fair, they are just a proxy here for all digital distribution services):

there were serious flaws in the economic analysis that [Valve] laid out for developers. The problem for most developers is not one of not getting paid enough once the game is out, it’s that they don’t have the seed funding necessary to internally fund development of their titles. That’s why they work for publishers on milestone schedules and advances against future royalties, and Steam offers no solution for that. It also doesn’t offer any solution for the marketing spend question, where if developers don’t even have enough money to fund themselves internally to develop their product, then they’re not going to be able to pay for a multimillion dollar marketing campaign, which is a huge amount of risk that as an industry standpoint is offloaded from developers to publishers.