Some updates of what’s going on at the moment:

- Still working on an unnanounced title over at Epic Games Poland (People Can Fly). It’s going really, really well and everyone are super excited about it. Really looking forward to getting it out there to see the reactions from people.

- Trying to spend spare time on my spare time project “Iskall” that me and a bunch of fellow devs from Sweden have started. Short description: Side scroller hack ‘n slash action in a scandinavian mythology setting. Very dark, bloody and dirty. Going to post some concept animations soon!

- Unfortunately for “Iskall”, most of my spare time is devoured by the Starcraft 2 beta. GODS this is a brilliant game. Got the beta a week ago, and haven’t had as much time to play as I wanted to so I’m not totally 1337 with it yet. But I’m already loving it. I really think this is the next big hit within e-sports, and hopefully it can unite the e-sports scene (specifically the Warcraft 3 and Starcraft: Brood War communities).

- Started a twitter account, where I twitter about lots of stuff regarding game industry and game dev. Not the most efficient twitterer(ererer?) yet as I’m still getting used to it. But you can find me at www.twitter.com/WidunderSE

- Really sad news: The mastermind behind the Samurai Champloo soundtrack, Nujabes, passed away recently, due to a car accident. If you haven’t heard him, check him out. It’s truly brilliant funk/hip-hop/jazz/piano stuff. Relaxing and beautiful. RIP Nujabes :(

That’s it for now. More updated to come, with fat and juicy news. Promise!!!1

Dragon Age Score

My main problem with Dragon Age is the lack of polish of the game in general. Especially art wise. Sure, Bioware has never been a studio of stunning art. But Dragon Age just takes the price. The character models is a joke, the hands are monster-big and the faces makes everyone look like statues. The animation is even worse. First of all, all of the characters shares the same animation set. As in male and female characters. This makes the female characters look like they have a big stone up their bum. Also, ALL of the characters have the exact same identical idle pose in cut-scenes, which is as generic as it can get. When in dialog, the facial animation is a disaster. The only thing that is clearly moving is the lips and the eyebrows just blends between 3-4 positions depending on the current mood of the character.

Default Idle Pose

When it comes to gameplay, there is two things a player does in this game; go through dialogs, and fighting. The dialogs are very well written and interesting. The characters are rich and the story is somewhat compelling. The fighting in the other hand is really awful. It’s your average ultra-generic D&D combat system with the option to pause to give out orders. They did add a strategy-system in which you can “script” your guys for battles, like “if this guy has below 50% health, use potion” or “when close to an enemy use attack X”. It’s a nice touch and you do feel like you can trust the characters somewhat to handle themselves in simpler battles. During a difficult battle however, you really must use the pause-feature.

Anyhoo, the worst thing about the combat, is that they use to waaaay too much. Sometimes you encounter 20+ enemies and when you’ve finally killed them and moves 10m forward you encounter the same amount of the same kind of enemies again. The more I play the game the more I feel like the combat is really just a sort of “traveling” between the dialogs and the next piece of juicy story development.
If I wanted to play a combat heavy RPG I would’ve played a game with an enjoyable and GOOD combat system. Like Diablo for example. Not the same kind of game, but it does have a combat system that is enjoyable to be a part of again and again and again. Dragon Age’s combat system is not.

I don’t know if EA has payed for their awesome score results in reviews, or maybe Dragon Age just is 91/100-good. The strange thing is though that I haven’t talked to anyone (both inside and outside the game industry) that actually thinks Dragon Age deserves this score, or that it is a brilliant game in general. So either we’re all wrong, or the reviews are just pure rubbish.

Part of the studio

It was my first time going to a mocap recording session. I must say it was a great experience and I learned a lot. It felt very different tellin a person how to move, and trying to convey the feeling of an animation to him, rather than a piece of software on a computer. It was very cool seeing the raw result instantly on a monitor as well. Once we actually got the cleaned mocap material I had much greater understanding of what it should look like in the end as well since I was there when it was actually recorded, watching the actor doing his moves.

Some pictures of the session can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/yfxlanc

Me on the set

After installing the game I try to start it, and it starts to update the game, at 0%. In 200kb/sec. !?!?!?!?
I restart steam again and it still wants to install MW2 from the start, through downloading. I’m confused at this point, so I go into the Steam folder and look for the MW2 folder that I should’ve just installed. And there it is! Just as big as it should be, just sitting there.

At this point I’m thinking that something must’ve gone terribly wrong, so I reinstall the entire Steam application and then the game once more. SURPRISE! Same problem still!
I also noticed that there is 2 DVD’s in the box. What the hell is that all about? What is the second disc for?

At any rate, at this moment I’m installing MW2 through downloading it off of Steam, and it is sloooooooow. Will be done sometime tomorrow I think. Mind that if I start some other random download of any sort outside of Steam, it goes at the speed of over 1mb/sec.

I wasn’t really keen on Steam before this, but as of today I am a pure Steam-opponent. Digital distribution can fuck off! Give me a box that proves that I bought the game and let me use the discs to install it. It will ALWAYS be quicker than download it, and it will ALWAYS be more fail-safe.
Also, I wonder what happens if Steam were to close down? I guess all of our game licenses goes bye-bye. I’m not buying a game through digital distribution anytime soon, that’s for fucken sure.

A lot of people, especially outside of the industry but also within it, thinks it’s completely awful to work overtime for free. Personanlly I don’t mind as long as it’s not insane amounts of extra work, like 14h days. But I won’t say I like it either, but then again I am in game development because of my burning interest of video games and video game creation. I am investing my personal interest and time into this project and I do care about the result. So, if needed, I will always be willing to work that little extra to reach the quality we aim for.

In the end though I think one can only do so for so long. When you get older and maybe got a family to take care of I think you will probably get less and less keen on spending your already short spare time at work, doing something you’ve been doing for 10+ years. But I guess it depends on what kind of person you are and/or what kind of life you want to have.
But generally I would (regretfully) say: Expect overtime in game development and do expect difficult hours.

Dilbert on Overtime

Unreal Engine

Indeed, that is the engine we’re working with at People Can Fly/Epic Poland. A really sweet engine if you ask me. By far the best engine I’ve worked in, in terms of over all quality and the possibilites when it comes to features etc. One big reason is of course that the Unreal Engine is a product that studios can buy, which makes it a “complete product”. Compared to other in house engines at different studios, where the engine always a work in progess solution for what they need right now and might need in the future.

Anyways, I heard today that the unreal engine now is free for developers to use! Which is awesome news! The deal looks like this: You, as a developer, gets to use the engine and make money off of your game. Up to 5000 dollars that is. After that Epic games gets 25% off the profit. Not the best deal out there probably, but for indie developers this is really brilliant.
You can read more about this here: http://www.unrealtechnology.com/news-article.php?id=102

After working with Unreal Engine I really think that it’s a really good idea for studios to use licensed engines like the Unreal Engine. It’s much more easy getting started and most of the features are already there. Of course there is the cost of the actual license, but it’s not free to developer your own engine either since it takes A LOT of time.
This may seem like a commercial kind of post, sorry about that. It is not my intention!

http://www.split-screen.com/2009/10/23/first-animation-reel-of-ninja-theorys-enslaved/

Animator Markus Hammarstedt, whose previous experience includes GRIN’s Terminator Salvation and Massive Entertainment’s World in Conflict has worked on a special melee sequence animation for Ninja Theory, copyrighted in 2009. The animation only shows the basic punches and kicks – hopefully Ninja Theory will reveal the game soon enough and we can take a closer look at the weapon combat.

In other words, it implies that the animation is intended for Ninja Theory’s new game. And that I work for Ninja Theory. Wrong and wrong!
In the mail from Ninja Theory, they said they understands if this is not my fault. But they kindly ask me to mail this split-screen dudes and ask them to correct the information.
I of course did, and I also deleted the animation test from my Vimeo-page. Wouldn’t be good if this misunderstanding happens again.

Pretty weird thing though, do game journalists just make assumptions  on what they find on google? My video on vimeo did not say anything about this being a part of a game. And also, if they had found my portfolio site or my linkedin profile (which is easy to find if they had just googled my name) they would have found that I haven’t ever worked for Ninja Theory.
Strange indeed…

BUT, I think that you can still promote a game by talking honestly about the developing process. For me personally I enjoy this more than just pure promotion talk. I would rather hear about the hardships of the development process and what problems they had to overcome. And how they solved their greatest obstacles.

Good example:

He’s talking about how they came up with the idea, what tricks they used and how they came up with the name. He talks about the earlier stages of the development process. This gets me more interested in the game, and in the developer as well. Because they share more information than they need to and for me the prooves that they really wants people to develop games and that they want people to play their game, not just spend money on it. Of course, they want people to spend money on it, but it’s not that very obvious.

Bad example:

In this one they say things like “It’s not a game, it’s not a movie, it’s an experience…” and “We decided to push the limits” as well as “We don’t see it as they are making a movie and we’re making a game. We see it as we’re building a world together”

This is the kind of quotes which makes it really obvious that they are only interested in selling the game and to hype it as much as they can. Again, it’s probably because of a push from the publisher. Of course, it’s always about the money. A developer and a publisher is always mainly interested in the money. But, as I mentioned before, you can make it less obvious to the audience.
“We decided to push the limits” for example. Well of course you did! What else would you be doing? Making something really basic and bland with intent? Of course you push technology and ideas in order to make something new and really awesome that will sell. They also talk about that they are sharing assets in the production, between the movie and the game, as if that would be something new and unique that they figured out. Which it really isn’t. This is the most common way if producing a game based on a movie.

I don’t know if it’s just because I’m not the target audience for these movies (since I think most developers are really critical about these things) that they just don’t do it for me. I only get more and more skeptical about a game when I see this. I have no idea how big of an impact a developer diary has on sales for a game or if the majority of gamers likes diaries, but I guess it’s not a big difference from a regular trailer.

As I said before, I don’t blame the developers for doing this as I understand the purpose. And I don’t despite the Avatar devs for their video, and I hope that they don’t take offence if they read this. I just don’t agree with the way their doing this.

For instance, if you’re an animator and you are applying for a job at Studio X. A producer or human resources person recieves your application, looks at it and hopefully forwards it to a lead animator. The lead animator will then look at your CV roughly before opening your portfolio page. The very first thing he is looking for is animations that can show off your abilities, to see if you’re any good for the job. Hopefully an animation reel.

A lot of pages fails here, making a guest at his/her webpage look for the content instead of serving the guest the content. Mind that this lead animator probably gets a lot of mails every day about a new animator looking for a job, so he has looked at LOTS of animation portfolios. His patience is probably pretty short by now. So, if he can’t find what he’s looking for he will just close it down and ignore you.

Another thing is, never ever include irrelevant work that doesn’t have anything to do with the role you’re applying for. No lead animator cares about how well you can draw different stuff. He’s looking for animations, NOTHING else. Sure, some studios are saying on their job page that it’s a plus if you’re skilled at photoshop for example, or if you’re good at drawing human figures. But if you’re work isn’t world class then it’s probably not worth showing up. Less is more, just keep the amazing animations instead of lots of other stuff that has nothing to do with your wished position.

Regarding showing up only animations, only keep the GREAT animations. Quality over quantity. If you have 5 animations, and 3 of them suck, then it’s way better just showing up the 2 instead of all 5 of them. As any lack of detail or quality will pull down your overall score in the lead animator’s mind. The same thing with bad 2d art, or 3d art for that matter. If you’ve included stuff like this in your portfolio, it will unfortunately just make you look worse at what you do. The lead animator will assume you’re as bad at animation as you are at 2d or 3d. And even if your 2d and 3d work is amazing, then he will probably just think that you’re not serious about animation and won’t be interested. As he only wants to hire passionate animators. Not a animator/3d artist.