Art of 'Thirsty Suitors'

[Music] so this is the art of thirsty suitors I'm Chanda I'm the co-founder of Crea director of outerloop games um been making games for a long time I started at Bethesda when I was 19 I was a baby and uh been in making games in various roles art design narrative production Biz um and then we started outer loop games in 2017 the the game we're talking about today is thirsty suitors is our second game the first game we did as a team is called Falcon age and thirsty is a game about fighting your exes and disappointing your parents while skateboarding and cooking I kind of call it a baby Yakuza game if you played Yakuza games uh not that it has anything to do with Yakuza but it's a narrative um RPG with turn-based combat and it's a

short version It's a baby version of it here's a little little snippet of [Music] [Music] it hey [Music] [Music] he

[Music] as you can see it's very stylized um so today we're going to talk about how we combine 2D and 3D techniques uh create a compelling illustrative look leveraging 2D which we've learn the hard way a lot of times on this project uh sometimes less is more which also we learned the hard way on this project designing around the strengths of our art team uh looking for scalable Solutions uh specificities Universal and cultural experience and inspiration the last two points are related because this is this game is really built on experiences and the fantasies of U the folks on the team and myself uh we get a lot of comparisons to scout Pilgrim um which I think is cosmetic mostly but because there's you play the role of Jala and you're fighting your exes um she comes back to a small town in Washington that we made up called Timber Hills and she come it's coming off of a bad break and she has really pissed off all her exes and her

parents so the game is about you coming home and trying to reconcile all those um relationships and that's where the termbase combat comes into play with the exes and then cooking through trying to talk to your parents through cooking the skateboarding ties into the narrative as well so it's there's definitely some surreal Elements which we'll get into um other visual Inspirations all over the place it's really a lot of our shared experiences um from the folks on the team so a team that worked on the game and I think we're yeah we're at 18 or so we're at 16 right now but it it varies from uh how on production and it's been about three years on this project of those folks nine is the art team before I get to the art team I want to say Justin and Anna are two main programmers none of this stuff is possible without them so uh artists be best buds with your programmers um BJ did Art Direction Concepts Tod uh Emma our 3D characters

and skinning on does we have a animation team of one um which I know it's it's a lot of stuff but he's he's a he's he's a beast Alicia and Lisa are environment artists Darren does environments Concepts in 2D W visual effects uh Ben visual effects and Tech art and myself um I'm still doing too many jobs but I'm trying to do less with each project so we're um we're fully remote um spread across four continents and uh Seven Cities so a lot of slack and Miro we do all of our art meetings and design work on Miro these days so for the ASN communication so this was the first well we had multiple iterations but this was the first key piece of art that vij worked on to really set the style um and we were trying to figure out like how to build the demo and what we were going to do and this is an early version of Jala that changed and a and a a version of Sergio which is if you

played the there's a demo on Steam it's her first ex her ex from third grade that still have feelings for her and your parents watching so this is going to really set the stage for what the style was going to be the color choices the texture ideas and lighting and then this is um another concept art uh vid I did to Showcase what the end of a fight could look like and some of the elements that could come to life so Jala went through multiple iterations um the first piece that actually we ever did for a pitch was the image on the left and so you know it had a little more realistic art style and then the second version is what what you saw in the key piece of art and then as a story developed you know she's in her mid 20s we we thought she looks too she looked too young for the type of relationship drama that she had gone through so we did the third version still felt didn't quite translate well to 3D and then the current version is on the right side

one of the early things we did was figuring out how many X's there were and what are the color palets were so we did some initial color keys for each of the characters of trying to set sort of a mood because each of the characters also has their own world as you get into a battle it's in the real world but it goes into what we call like their Fantastical inner worlds and each of those has a local color palette some of these uh names have changed and uh we changed color paletts along the way so the from the from that color palette developed the ideas for the various X's um and they all have kind of a a a range of color values that we pick from and this took a while to iterate on and there like three or four iterations on some of them and really it the art Direction and the art design evolved with the narrative as we figured out the story because really didn't know what the story was initially we knew um Jella just has the worse luck with her relationships but what that meant and what odor and and and who uh who she

battles that came through all through development so as we got into each of the X's battles uh there's a a key color for each of the X's to design their world around and so these are some of the elements and some of the world ideas and kind of key pieces of art to Define what those worlds look like same with the costumes each of the X's has a big wardrobe change um as the battle start and they all tie into their key colors and personalities and each battle is a little different based on when Jala dated them and what problems they had together and and they're trying to resolve that through it's it's weird because the the battles aren't they don't really hit each other it's like all these Fantastical Holograms and things like that so it's really the the personification of if them having an argument um shown through a turn-based combat and the in between the combat there's uh narrative choices and

dialogue choices and uh some lines do emotional damage and so there's a lot of U mixture of sort of the the the physical movements as well as the dialogue choices and this is one of the early design process for Dia one one of the earlier exes that you meet the whole theme for this is around the idea that in her world she's a queen and um her Palace looks like a '90s hyp volums music video so there's a lot of like ' 90s music video Inspirations for some of these sets and again King offer colors to get the look that matches her outfit as well as the environments and then she has um three minions or crystals that support every everything she says I tend to come in on uh narrative design and then blocking so we'll block out the levels once we had the the fighting system figured out and then this is Alicia's work she came in over

after the concept work to do some initial Geo and then this is Geo lighting effects and some Shader work and so by the time we go through the process you know a bunch of us have touched the levels um I I'll come back and do a final lighting pass and rim lighting so we have a custom tune Shader this is all done in unity custom t tune Shader and standard lighting and this is uh Dia's intro as we start her [Music] battle

[Music] so there's a little sample of the battle um we're it's a fully voice game we're just in the middle of doing that right now so the way the battle system works in the game um which also affects the Art and Design is um you have to figure out your opponent's weaknesses so DIA has three question marks up there on her um her UI there and so Jala has to use various taunts and figure out where weakness and then you can follow up with uh attack that [Music] [Music] matches

[Music] so you see we do we mix a lot of 2D and 3D you know for every time jalat taant or uh diant there's a lot of spr work and these are all just uh you know Sprites we put together in Photoshop and then we lay it out in the world and they have sorting changes so that they don't conflict with the environment um they always draw behind the characters but on top of the environment and then uh when you put somebody in a mood there's you know obviously very very over the toop effects so cooking cooking is a way to build your relationship back up with your parents um the way the game is laid out in chapters and each chapter you can start the morning with cooking with your

mom or dad you can go uh skate around in town and there's random suitors that are trying to win your heart that your grandma's sending from India um and then um one of your exes will call you and then really the the big thing for that day is is battling with your ex so uh there's a good example of how we set up our environments the top is the concept art and the bottom is what the screenshot looks like in unity so you see it's very similar we bacon a lot of the lighting sometimes into the texture and a mixture of a directional light and some point lights it's not very accurate but you know we we don't really care so much about that it's more for getting the look that we want so this was built by Lisa and Alicia came into some props and Ben uh does our Shader work so we have one custom Shader that we share for the environments as well as the characters and I I came in did a final lighting pass and postprocessing this jalas home you can

come in there's a cookbook different recipes that unlock now cookbook is it's just frame [Music] animation so that's just the painting straight straight to the frame we did this the hard way we Tred to M out and try to do lighting it just didn't look as good at all [Music] so when your mom eats there's a memory of her this is her this is her and and your dad on their first date um she'll never tell you she liked it though so it's just you know that's what she's seeing again we try to use 2D as much as possible where it made sense um it's a lot faster for our concept artist to draw this than is to for us to build it you know the model out UI there there's a ton of UI in this

game as an RPG and all the different systems um yeah as as well as game directing I did all the UI work with BJ so I'll do all the layouts in Miro and and and really whitee box it out and then then sketch it out in Photoshop and um lay it out everything out with unity and then BJ came and did some illustration work on top of that but yeah I'm still working on UI and for each chapter there's a chapter card that we layer uh together and animate in there's a plugin called D TW in unity um I use that everywhere every every piece of UI that's moving or any piece of 2D element that's moving it's it's a um kind of procedural animation system it's really easy to key frame and it's makes it a lot quicker than just using traditional animation uh support in unity so any 2D element in the game I just use d The cookbook was I think it was four frames that was D tween together and cross fading between it as it opens and

closes in between the chapters you can go to uh the Timber Hills map and on the map is where Jala you know decides where she wants to go skating or go back home cooking and go to the skate park which is run by soundy uh a a mascot bear there's a whole thread for that and uh this is what it looks like in game so concept to in game version you also get notifications from each of the suitors so you can do extra favors for [Music] them and again it's combination of 2D and 3D 3D model for Jala and a bunch of 2D Sprites layered with a some some polygons as well and these are little 3D models simple flat models [Music]

official setup um because it's I think we have 21 speaking characters um 18 actors that we're about to record we wanted to make sure um again with one animator how do we animate all these characters and we ended up doing blend shapes and a real basic set of uh phonm I think there's eight um shapes plus some extra smile pout teeth clench and um we created an a automated process to do a base pass where we can feed in the script um to a spreadsheet and then the wave files and it generates and then we can go in hand clean up as we need it but mostly it's uh mostly animated I mean automated and it works out pretty well speaking of Animation This Is AO our animation

Department he also does weird tricks when he's not animating and a lot of that translates to the everything's key framed in the [Music] game [Music] [Applause] [Music] h

[Music] yeah he's a very prolific animator um when we design the suitors it's always fun to you know it's a combination of narrative and animation and you know everybody gets involved uh being know a small team I think what I really uh treasure is that when we're designing these characters in these battles uh there's everyone gets a chance to um add to it and um it's been a fun project project um I think we're almost done so sometime uh this year we'll be out with it um so that's thsy suitors so thank you I I know there's a lot to cover I just wanted to save some room for any questions if anybody had any questions about anything in the game uh thanks for the insightful talk

it's a really stunning Vision um with a really small art team that you have um how long is your production cycle and and how is it segmented yeah so we typically figure out like what the game is in the beginning so um the first thing we did was Prototype a Suitor battle um and then that really went through a bunch of iterations till we figure out the current sort of combat where it's like okay how much conversation um how much uh fighting moves and what the elements are once we had that down uh we usually spent about some of the levels probably about two to 3 months there's a whole skate park that was in the first part of the video and that was like probably one of the biggest scenes and that took probably six months uh a couple artists and then most of the the sets are by 1 to two months and then characters it varies depending on how many costume changes and uh effects but those should probably in a in a we have like monthly Milestones that we kind of figure out what we're going to do so so from design to completion it's probably 2 months per

section uh of an area so cool how long has it taken all together so far oh three years okay yeah three years and we started with a pretty full crew um well maybe 12 and ramp up to 16 yeah yeah cool thank you yeah hey looks great um I was wondering you at the beginning of the talk had uh cultural like inspiration stuff as the last two points and I'm wondering if you could go into more of that and how that's played into the different characters in the game and the setting yeah I mean each of the X's is based on uh someone from the team or multiple stories so we talk a lot about we there's a lot of immigrants on the team and we share a lot of shared trauma uh so uh we yeah we a lot of it's just based on our personal stories of people we know I mean some of it's definitely like Fantastical there are things in the game that I would never say to my mom but we let the player decide if they want want to or not um yeah so um it was

interesting we're one of the one of the X's is um South African our producer South Africa so we did a lot of you know she talked to her parents and we did a lot of research about like what what's the region of South Africa we want to derive the uh the visual look from and then we're casting uh casting has been kind of difficult it's a very specific uh game and I wanted to for each of the uh X's or characters I want to be very specific about who we cast um yeah so everything I mean everything in the game is very culturally uh um represented and it comes from the team and um the game actually started when I first pitched it it was a game about range marriage um but we decided not to do that because none of us on the team had Direct experience with range of marriage and we didn't think we could speak to it um well so that's that's when we turned it from arranged marriage to Jala and her personal relationships um yeah thank you yep so I'm obsessed with this I feel so

seen by this character first of all like literally attacked in every single slide in a good way but what I want to ask is about you know some challenges around designing a character like her because as a Indian gamer musician like in that type of vibe age group Etc um I also recognize that even though it's like oh my God I win I feel seen at the same time we have so many different experiences cuz like South Asia as a whole has so many different cultures so how did you overcome some of those challenges to like create such an awesome character but also be mindful of those differences and what's you know considered okay not okay Etc yeah we know we're not going to please everybody right and that was from the beginning we're like that's not a thing we're trying to do um so Jala is half Sheran and half Indian Magna our our main writer she's Indian and I'm Shri Lankan and that's sort of like we took our Inspirations from that um the uh

colorism is also you're familiar in South Asia is a big thing so we were very mindful about like Jala and her ex Tyler that's in the cover um you know seeing two let me get back to yeah see you don't typically see two dark skinned women on any cover so um you know and we also made sure some of the men character were lighter skinn than the women because typically it's the other way around um so a lot of it is very specific and we know we're not trying to like you know really attract all South Asians so we we thought if we focused on the character's Journey then we could be more specific about Jala um and that's how we approach it and we're still going to get people that are probably not going to be happy with it but no that's awesome matter respect you're doing great work thank you hello uh thanks for sharing this is really cool to see um can you talk a little bit more about how you decide between choosing using 2D or 3D for like a particular asset yeah um a lot of the

times we did it well let's build it 3D and then we spend months doing it and realize that's like the bad approach and then we go let's just paint it um so for the cooking we um there's a at the end where she's uh showcasing the food to her parents we made that sure the camera never changes so it's like it's it's animated and it's fixed and then we painted something just for that so um and then for the map and when that worked out like oh let's do the map that way let's do the memories that way let's do some of the UI that way let's do some of the um the moods that way and it just kind of expanded just added a little more and there wasn't really much Tech to it it's just standard Unity Sprites and sorting was the only issue and then that kind of extends to the effects the look of the effects as well so there was no master plan it's just uh hey our concept artist is really good at doing this versus what we can do in 3D and let's you try to utilize uh the special powers of people on the team more yeah that's awesome

thanks uh hello sorry I think the Arts looks really good although I'm curious about some of the game design decisions mainly pertaining to the different gameplay Styles uh and how they play into the narrative cuz you you see the T the RPG moments it's like qtees and turn-based combat uh while there's more action stuff when you're not in Conflict so I was curious on why you decided to go that direction um just for pacing and it worked out for the narrative we wanted to do um so the cooking is very action-y cooking like the combat but instead of battling somebody else you're trying to win your mom's approval there's an approval meter um and she'll comment on every time when you do something whether it's she'll never say you did well she'll just uh um and then some recipes are harder or or less hard depending on on with your when you're cooking with your dad it's a whole different vibe um in the game and then when um I think in the video when you fall in battle there's a giant version of your dad that picks you up and then

throws you back into battle um yeah so we like we really try to key in on each of the characters and you can summon your auntie when you need to buff up and things like that um there's a bunch of different summons that are like folks that you might be some exes or uh your mom or whatever how it works out um in terms of the me mechanics um we started with the idea of doing term-based combat because we thought it lends itself to really for these narrative moments where we can have conversations uh combat and conversations instead of doing like at the beginning as more of like a cut scene approach um that's really the decision because the again the the conversational moments and decisions are as important as the the action that you do all right thank you yep bit of a specific Tech question here um with those 2D assets were those like lit or unlit or just default Unity Sprites or how did you end up matching the lighting of a 2d asset with the 3D World they're completely unlit so there it's just like straight PSD um in a texture sheet uh brought into um

into unity and then they're painted with General lighting and shadows again our lighting isn't so strong that you I mean if you've stared at it you probably notice the lighting direction is not exact but for the moment it works sure thank you y anything else okay hi um you mentioned that you have a lot of like remote team and team all over the place um how would you say cuz it seems like there's a lot of like interconnection between how the art and the programming and the design more so than most games I was wondering how you found success in making sure everybody's on the same page when not even in the same time zone yeah so we do Mondays we do standups at 4m. West Coast time that's when beijing's waking up and Brisbane is waking up and so everyone's almost like either end of their day or beginning of the day um so we do a lot of like what we're going to do for the

week and any issues to talk about live and then I do my narrative mornings like 8 in the morning um and then sometimes I I'll uh go over stuff with the Australians when they wake up um so like I'm kind of doing on on both ends but we do a 4-day work week we've been four days for two years um so Thursday afternoons at 400 p.m. we'll do a play test with the whole team with wherever the build is and all those notes go into and get and gets assigned to different task and then after the play test we all hang out and just chat and and check out games so that's how we kind of build a culture for over three years and then uh yeah so Miro for as a reference for I have a giant beat map that is like the story for the game and what happens when so that everyone knows where where things are and that gets updated as we change for narrative and then we have reference for each of the characters and each of the environments um All We Have Art meetings every two weeks on I think on Wednesdays and there's a giant Miro that has like all the art art meetings

from the last three years so we try to not do too many meetings but those are like the three we try to sync up on everything else is on slack or notes on miror to each other or notion tasks thank you yeah anybody else awesome I think that's it so thank you so much [Music]