Those games that line the shelves of your local games store don’t just appear there by magic. There’s a lot of money, time and above all, effort that goes into creating them. Tameem Antoniades of Ninja Theory was kind enough to share some of the steps in the creative process during a presentation at the recent Eurogamer Expo. And with a cinematic, story-heavy game like Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, there are a lot of things to work on.
The original concept for the game was based on the traditional Chinese story of Journey to the West, specifically, the Monkey version of the tale. In fact, the game was originally simply called Monkey: Journey to the West before copyright issues got in the way. The lead character is still called Monkey, however, in a nod to the original movie.
The idea behind the game was to create an interactive buddy/road movie, exploring the relationship between two characters. In this case, muscle-bound protagonist Monkey and female companion Trip. Antoniades draws comparisons between Enslaved and earlier games such as ICO and even Another World (aka Out of this World)—the tale is as much about the changing way the characters feel about each other as the epic journey they are on.
One of the first steps in the development process after defining the basic concept, explained Anotniades, is to create a CG trailer to explore the look and feel of the game. The original trailer for Enslaved shows how much the story has developed since its inception. Initially, Trip was a much darker, harsher character. Her voice was much more threatening. In the final product, Trip is a much weaker, softer, more vulnerable character whom Monkey needs to protect. Character and environment designs were all refined through conceptual artwork.
After the initial conceptual work is done, it’s time to move into the engine. Enslaved was Ninja Theory’s first encounter with the Unreal Engine, so it was important for them to get to grips with it quickly.
“We had never used it before,” explained Antoniades. “A big worry with Unreal Engine 3 is that everything ends up gray and brown. So we did some art style tests to see where we could push it using colors and lighting.”
These art style tests involve the team creating environments purely to establish a visual style and also to experiment with audio. No thought is given to collision or gameplay at this time; levels are later built using these art tests as a reference.
The characters go through the same process. The animators produce a “virtual casting session” for the various characters in the game and define the way they move, the way they look, the way they act.
“We want to define how these characters look and feel,” said Antoniades. “So for Monkey, unlike Nariko from Heavenly Sword, he’s got to be rough and brute-like. He’s not gone through a martial arts training course. He’s learned to fight for himself. So we tried to capture that through his movements.”
Anyone who’s had the chance to play the game will know that Monkey’s movements are quick and fluid, like his animal namesake, but also have a “brute-like” quality at times. Certain elements of his character model, like the hanging belt around his waist and his bare feet, are clearly designed to make him look more “monkey-like.”
Like the level design, every future animation created for the game refers back to these initial tests, and this also ties in with what the actors get up to when they take to the set.
“On the performance capture side,” said Antoniades, “we’ve got Andy Serkis, who co-directed the motion capture with me. I believe he’s one of the finest character actors of our day. He’s not just Gollum and King Kong.”
Motion capture has certainly helped cut scenes in games look more and more realistic as time has gone on. But it’s not without its challenges.
“The reason it’s so difficult to get characters that feel real in games is the uncanny valley problem,” explained Antoniades. “It’s to do with the ‘solving’ of the face. The actors are all set with these ‘dots’ all over their face, and captured by a hundred cameras around them. How do you translate those dots into something that feels real, with wrinkles, where you can see the skin rolling over the muscles? The key to that is a piece of technology called a ‘facial solver’.”
Ninja Theory invested a lot of time and money into this technology, seeing it as vitally important to creating convincing-looking characters. Antoniades demonstrated Serkis “training” the system by speaking a variety of gibberish phrases in different tones to create different mouth shapes. The only part of the face that the technology doesn’t work on are the eyes, which have to be animated by hand afterwards.
“And the solver’s not perfect,” clarified Antoniades. “It does take a few animators to go over each scene and touch it up.”
But it certainly makes a huge difference. Antoniades demonstrated a scene from midway through the game featuring Monkey, Trip and another companion called Pigsy. The quality voice acting coupled with the beautifully-captured physical performances—including facial expressions—make a huge difference to the cinematic quality of the game.
“In this game we had a lot more confidence that what the actors were doing on set would come across in-game,” said Antoniades. “Whereas in Heavenly Sword we’d never tackled this technology, so we shot all the scenes a year before we actually got them in-game. So we had a much more exaggerated, theatrical style. In this game, we have a much more subtle style.”
Noted author and screenwriter Alex Garland had an important role to play in the production of the game. His involvement is something Antoniades was very excited about.
“He’s a massive gamer,” he said. “He was actually looking for an opportunity to work in games and so when we met, I had no idea that someone of his caliber would want to work in games. We didn’t know how to work at first; he’d never worked in games, I’d never worked with a screenwriter of his caliber. We agreed to just figure things out as we went along. We spent the first two or three months writing a first draft of the script but also going over the level design plans, figuring out where to put in the story beats. Story is something which has to pervade the entire of the level; it’s not something you just restrict to cut scenes, which I think Heavenly Sword could be accused of doing.”
It’s clear Ninja Theory have learned from their past mistakes, and also from success stories such as Uncharted.
“I was quite surprised by the script [Garland came up with],” said Antoniades. “I was surprised because it seemed so simple. Deceptively simple. On the page, scenes don’t seem that remarkable. But what Alex understood is that in a screenplay, it’s more about what’s left unsaid. And we can do that because we can rely on the actors’ performance. When you can’t rely on that, and facial expressions in the game, you have to fall down the route of exposition. This is why games’ narratives often don’t seem to be as deep or sophisticated as movies.”
Following the initial script and shooting, the team then spent five weeks with a movie editor to simplify the scenes.
“The thing that Alex impressed on me,” said Antoniades, “was ‘one scene, one purpose’. Every scene should have one clear purpose, and clarity is the ultimate objective.”
Garland also continued to work on the game after the cut scenes had been shot.
“He could have walked away from the project and he didn’t,” continued Antoniades. “He came back again and again to watch the scenes and early levels play out; to see how they worked. Very quickly he started to give feedback on the small things; things that maybe we as game developers overlook. Like when they first land in Grand Central, he asked ‘why is Trip standing like that? She’s supposed to be frightened.’”
As a result of Garland’s feedback, the team made a conscious decision to evolve the characters’ body language throughout the game. It’s not overly obvious, but Antoniades believes that people will really notice it if it’s wrong.
Garland also explained that the game’s environment and camera work should be used to tell the story; rather than simply having enemies spawning next to the player, tension should be built up using sound, dialog, shadows and the like.
“We got a cinematographer in to teach us the basic principles of film-making and editing,” said Antoniades. “And we’re constantly doing that in gameplay. I think when you’re actually playing it you don’t get bothered by it. It seems like if you pick a moment and you cut at the right point, as a player it just seems completely fluid. That was a bit of a revelation.”
Following said revelation, the team went back through the whole game several times to set up camera work and voice overs. These helped to add to the game’s cinematic nature, even during gameplay.
“During the gameplay we wanted the characters to talk a lot,” explained Antoniades. “A lot of the exposition happens during gameplay, not in cut scenes. It’s a pet peeve of mine that a lot of games focus on boring gameplay tasks and ‘shopping lists’ during cut scenes, when cut scenes should be about close-ups, amazing wide shots, more about the drama of the characters. So during the gameplay, we used a lot of voice-overs.”
The amount of love and effort which has been poured into the game really shows in the finished product. It’s clear that the team at Ninja Theory are very proud of what they’ve created. And the full game of Enslaved certainly looks set to live up to its promise of an “epic road movie.”
And it’s out now. Why not check it out?
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