Bound: Emotions Through Ballet and Modern Art

So, my name is Michał Staniszewski. I came from Poland. Um I was active on the demo scene for since 1997 and I was present there by a hand with bonsai from plastic. And today I will talk a little bit of creative process of making our recent project Bound. So, I will show the trailer of the game so you will have like you will know what I will talk about later on.

Okay, so who is Plastic? Plastic is a small studio in Poland specializing in making really experimental stuff, different experiences. We have a roots in demo scene since 1997 and we've made a couple of of demos that were nicely received in Europe. And then Santa Monica Studio external contacted us in 2006 and asked us to make an interactive something for PlayStation 3. Cuz they wanted to create a digital community on PlayStation 3 and ask

several groups demo scene groups um for help. And we made Lingering Shadows. Some of you may remember it. And then we've made Datura which was another experimental production um from design for PlayStation Move. And at that point we we were like having tiny experiences with like very early uh virtual reality. And it was too early for that game for that time. Okay, so after Datura we were thinking to what to do next. And we've made Katzilla to refresh the engine. So the thing is that we are really weird studio that an engine for each of our project. Which is pretty crazy, but it actually works.

And we are thinking that what we are good at and we went back to the productions from the demo scene. And we were still looking for a new direction. We knew that we were good technically. We could like made a lot of stuff on screen dynamic without too many problems and fighting with with the technology. But at the same time Journey was released, which was a great emotional game, maybe more an experience than a game. And I always wanted to make a game with a strong female character like in Miyazaki movies, but most importantly, my son was born. It was 6 years ago. And this got me thinking into family theme. So, I At first I called it Equality and the code name for it was The Princess. It was a

narrative It's supposed to be narrative not game with a fragility of the family as a main theme presented in a form of metaphor. But it was like a very ambitious on paper, so actually it also contained persistent multiplayer world with structure structures based on a lot of iterations from different players. But we also were thinking about speed running element because we were working with different digital communities. We were working with demo scene. We were working with Katsuhila, which is the overclocker's community. And right now we wanted to work a little bit with speed runners. But the most important thing was the concept of showing the story in a way that the players will have a different view on it and they would judge it on it on its own. So, in the the family problem presented in the game

we we didn't want to show any anyone from the family as practically bad and leave the interpretation to the player. So, we at some point we had a first working prototype. Like I Like I said, we are rewriting engine for for every project. So, we had those design blocks and tools written from the the scratch. Um so, this is like a simple shapes with physics and working camera around the character like the TPP camera, the events that change the camera. But the thing was that I for the 3D platformer, I needed more more depth and visibility. So, I asked one of the programmers to add me a lighting. And we got the first look of Unreal world. I always wanted to have in this project the red sky. And the ocean of cubes that would cover

the distances between the architecture. The red sky is inspired by the most in production from 2002 called Chimera by Halcyon. And it's a very very important production because it's a milestone in terms of dividing a moment where the demoscene was not mostly about competing programmers and competing artists, but the demo started to they they wanted to present some kind of content and some kind of meaning and to became an art form. And Halcyon was done by in 2002. It was supposed to be shown on one of the biggest demoscene parties, but it was disqualified because it was too abstract and and organizers like didn't feel that it fits into the category. The interesting thing about Chimera is

that the music for it like the ambience was done by Jaakko Iisalo, Croaker. And he's one of the original authors of Angry Birds. So he designed the characters in Angry Birds. So you can start with with such design to to go completely different places. And the Ocean of Cubes is inspired by a 64k intro Texas from 2008 might made by keyboarders. It was the first production of the most seen that used geometry shaders. So we had a lighting in Unreal world, but we were still thinking that what will be the actual look. We were at this point thinking about those as not the actual graphics, but we knew that the that the long shadows are very important for a production. On the other front I was trying to design a mechanic that

will cooperate with the story where the character wipes away her memories and tools making the the world disappear. So this concept was pretty unique. I actually I felt it was unique, but later on I discovered that 3D Mario World has exactly the same mechanic in the in the most difficult levels. But this kind of look didn't fit our previous efforts. So I asked for like show me get it a in a different way. And we've changed it to to dividing the cubes that we already have into a smaller chunks. And actually, it we were surprised that it worked so well. And it was pretty simple. So, the thing is that we didn't have the any kind of physics in there, just mathematics that just displays the the blocks

if they're uh distant more distant from the character. It's No physics was used because the maps are just faster and we could show a lot and a lot of those chunks. And we were iterating on on those elements and we got inspired by modern art. I will talk about it later on in the talk. But we had to design some extra extra mechanisms like control zones who like who tell the designer what the parts of the world are more visible. And there was a tons of parameters, but in the end we've managed to shrink it just to the minimum and maximum distance when the displacement happens and minimum and maximum distance when the scale happens. But we also had zones to to maintain the the architecture of the

unreal world if we wanted to show some kind of buildings in the in the distance. And also we had scripting simple scripting of the destruction so we could use it in cutscenes and completely hide them or to reveal them or simple simple things. But our game also is about memories. So, we started to write another piece of code with the fragments that come together when you get closer, so you could see what's inside the memories of main character. The funny thing about it is that it was running entirely on GPU, but together with the gameplay mechanics. So, actually GPU we've checked on GPU which which chunks got into their places and based on that we've opened the door to the next parts of the game. Um the chunks were preprocessed, but it was like very very fast, so

whoa. Thank you. Um And we we had to iterate more on the memories because black and white was like grayscale was really hard to read by the players and we've added diffuse lighting. So, the characters could be seen as as different. Um the overall design of the memories is mostly influenced by Gone Home. Um so, environment environmental storytelling works best when the items are placed in the in the places where they actually should be. Um so, but but it's was still hard for the players to read what's happening in there. And we ended up with going back with the the textures that have pre-baked lighting. And to to make the characters more

distinguishable from each other, we had to use like the let's say the standard uniforms for kids, so blue and pink. Change the the haircuts, so players will exactly know that this is a boy and there's a girl. And we had a lot of work with balancing those memories, so none of the characters would be like felt that it's always bad or at some particular moment that it's like uh uh domestic violence is happening. Okay. So, we had the first solid prototype. Um and it had like a animated character. And the unreal world was mostly working. Um we've changed the name of the Equality project to Your Kingdom Come. So, it took us around 20 months to get there with three programmers and me.

Okay. So, right now I will talk a little bit about the modern art. Um So, when for for that prototype that you have seen, we had a biggest problem of that the world was like looking mostly constantly the same. And we decided to explore the modern art since at some point it was based on the primitive shapes. And we found that Piet Mondrian's work would work great because it's based on on the squares. And there are just five colors: red, white, yellow, blue, and black. And it worked. So, if we used those colors in the unreal world, it was really working nicely. But the thing is that more importantly we had those elements that reminded me of the paintings from Suprematism. Uh these paintings are really

interesting because they are they have a a a special way to do them. So, the thing is that the picture needs to be looked at as a whole and not as some fragment elements. So, if we had in this middle painting a red line, uh normally the your eyes would go in that direction. So, it's balanced in a way that there are added black squares in the bottom. But, the the most important thing about the Suprematism is not actually the painting itself, but the idea. So, it's a form of conceptual art that arose and like Kazimir Malevich was saying, it's the supremacy of pure artistic feeling. So, I will concentrate a little bit on that um because I know there's a lot of people that have problems with modern art because they think that it's just simple

and why they should be excited about the the black square on a white background. But, actually to understand the modern art and conceptual art, you need to look at the context. So, uh in case of supremacy, you need to go back to the whole art that was created by men since the the cave ages and understand that the human was trying to reach the realism. And when he finally did it, he knew that we as a human race can do it and we can deconstruct it. And then the impressionism arrived and then cubism. In the end, the suprematist was created and and this is the context for that. But, in Bound, we were mostly concentrating on how it looks. So, except for the paintings, we're looking at the modern art

like Bauhaus for architecture. And we discovered that the modern art museums have are made from the shapes that can be recreated in the game. And actually some of some parts of those museums are in the game. You can look at, uh, try to to search for them. But, we still had this problem that, uh, those blocks looked similar and similar. So, we've implemented a a simple decal projection system that was putting uh, little paintings on those shards in Unreal World. And it was implemented in such way that when the shards got, uh, like dissolved and displaced, the painting stayed on them. So, for each of the levels, we decided to make a tribute for modern artists of 20th century. So, for example, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy,

uh, in one of the levels, he was using simple geometric shapes involving transparency. But, uh, Laszlo has a lot of great works in in conceptual art. For example, think about this. One of his performances involved calling his friend on a on a telephone and telling him to draw a a paint painting. And when the painting was done, based on his descriptions over phone, he asked if the painting was actually his art or his friend's. Think about it. And, uh, next is August Harbin, for example. He was like concentrating on triangles and spheres and mixing them, inverting, and they got into one of the levels of the game. But, also Yayoi Kusama, uh, who is also a great conceptual artist, and she is in love with the circle shapes and polka dot patterns.

So, the implementation was very simple. We had those, uh, kind of simple paintings stored in an array of texture, uh, and with colors and transparency, and we projected the coordinates and stored in the vertex attributes of those flying sharks. But now I will go to to dance, which is another part of my presentation. The princess in the very beginning was not a dancer. Uh the design was made by Jakub Jabłoński from Platige Image and she was presented as a runner. It was a part of the story of the game. Um I will spoil it if I will tell why, but if you will play the game, you will understand. So we were iterating on the on the designs of the character and we decided to choose the delicate direction and at first we wanted the princess to go through her life and portrayed as a woman

uh becoming stronger and faster. But in the end because of uh production, uh we didn't wanted to make all those animation sets and all those characters, so we decided to have just one. Um but she was still a runner. And we hand animated her and all animation system is written by hand. It uh it doesn't involve any blend shapes, blend trees because I thought that they were not needed and I I felt comfortable uh with such approach. And at this point Santa Monica sent us their feedback and was pretty devastating. So designers did not feel like the character was expressive or felt like a female. We need to amp up her animation so that she feels like a unique character. But the so the character felt like a game character and we were making a game after all, so

and I was happy because I was I was lucky because uh my one of my friends sent me um a movie with uh a dancer with the contemporary dancer and she was having those kind of emotions in her dance. So I had to do a super fast course. Luckily I was training dance with my wife for a couple of years and helped me a lot. So I started to study on ballet, contemporary dance, gymnastics and even ice figure skating. I started from ballet and Tchaikovsky was a best start. Swan Lake and Nutcracker are the obvious ballets to watch. But ballerinas have a rigid classical set of moves. It's very rarely they are very rarely doing floor parts actually if you will watch it closely. So it's easy to

to show the beauty of motion with ballet but it's really hard to present emotions. Those moves were designed during a lot of years and they are really strict. But they have a good glossary because of that and it was easier to communicate with the choreographer. On the other hand contemporary ballet is has a lot more emotions into it and and dance is presented in a more more literal way. And finally contemporary dance it's there's a lot of references on on YouTube and it's easier to to go through them. And I've I found a lot of great let's say amateur dancers or dancers who were in a contest like So You Think You Can Dance

like Lydia Phillips Megan Branch, Olga Kurayeva, uh many many more. And at some point I was I was understanding the dance to this to this point that I could predict who will win another season of So You Think You Can Dance. But there were problems with glossary because it's not it's really hard to find it on the internet to show it like exactly what move is which one and it was harder to communicate with the choreographer, so I had to cut those movies into tiny pieces and then use tablet to to show what I'm talking about. But I was also I was also going through gymnastics and this was like a very interesting time. Um from gymnast I I wanted to take the cartwheel move and I discovered that the balance beam motion is really really interesting. But there is one thing, the gymnastics from the

'80s were great like Olga Korbut and her performances during the Olympics and also Nadia Comăneci. So those gymnasts from the '80s were adding a lot of graceful motion and balletic moves in between the the figures and right now it's just the points and figures, so I actually didn't take anything from from current gymnastics performances as and that's really sad. On the other hand, ice skating is is really great and especially for me Yulia Lipnitskaya. And from that I took the motion in the mirror. So going back to the to the game, the first attempts was like adding a dance figures to to the character motions. I still was using hand animation handwritten system, so I could add procedural elements in there based on

overgrowth presentation by David Rosen. So, the character could look um where she walks. Oh, this is how the the ballerina walks, if you if you can see. So, the thing is that when it's really hard to find a running or walking ballerina, and they usually um go more like this to enter the stage. And this is the the one moment when you can see them without making actual dance movements. So, like I said, the character was still hand animated, hand programmed. And this was the first prototype of dance that we did. It's it was very very rigid, but it was promising.

So, from that point I knew that there would be a responsiveness and and the beauty of motion, and they don't work together. So, if you want to have a responsive character, then I would have to cut down the blending between the poses, and if I would like to have a a nicely nice movement, then I would need to take off the responsiveness. And I decided to go with the the beauty of motion. So, we're iterating on this, and we we were like finding a new poses and trying to animate them by hand, but at some point it was really really hard. It was hard to find a reference of dancer, for example, walking on a ledge or a dancer walking on a ladder. So, so there are things in the internet that are still not there. So, so some there are still some things that you can't find on the internet. And we got more and more feedback from the from the players that they wanted to

dance. So, if we will give them possibilities of dancing, then they will just dance in a game, and it was great. So, it was like the best decision that I did during the project to finally contact the real dancer and choreographer. So, we wanted a dancer that that knows classical ballet, modern contemporary dance, and would be flexible enough to perform all all those cartwheels and gymnastic movements. And we have chosen Maria Udod and choreographer Michal Gorol. It was like the the best pick. And the first motion capture session was really good. The dancers were preparing in the the hall with mirrors for 1 week based on on the materials I I provided. And after that, we were performing the session. It was the first session that

we did as a studio, so I was a little bit scared. And also, it was the first day at work for our new animator, and he didn't didn't work with motion captured animation before. So, I was double scared. But in the end, it was really really superb. And it was so good that we decided that we need a second mock-up session, and we decided to change everything. So, all the hand animation that we got in the project was replaced with the motion captured one, so including jumps. But also we recorded cut scenes and and they were hard to perform actually. So, what we wanted to have is that in cut scenes the character would behave in a balletic way

like in an actual ballet stage. And it was really hard to to mock up because we had only animatics, but thankfully we also had the choreographer. So, he was looking at the animatics and in fly he was like showing up the the moves to to Maria how to do them. And also we recorded full 25-30 second sequences. So, for player to to play with them like in a in a fun way. And those sequences were different for each of the level. And now I will go to the to the next stage of my presentation about emotional design. So, it's So, this is the the most the part of the game that I'm

mostly proud of. So, emotional design we at first we had the first design doc which is was called the equality and was 56 pages long. And there was everything. Like I said, it's it's supposed to be a multiplayer game with with persistent world and and so on. But from that design doc only 10% landed and was implemented in the final game. And next design doc was just 11 pages long. We changed the title to Your Kingdom Come and we had also art guide which was based on Vimeo staff picks that I was like collecting. But at this point we we didn't have ballet and modern art. And the third design doc was the actual presentation for the pitch at Santa Monica. And we discovered that probably the VR was like the the thing

that got the biggest attention. But back to the emotional design. So the most important thing, you probably know about it already if you go to the session and it's good to tell it more and more and more is playtesting. When we are doing Lingering Shadows, we didn't do any playtest at all. You can believe me that we we shipped the game without testing it with any player. And and it's it's because we were coming from the demo scene and on demo scene you you didn't show your demo to anyone because it would ruin the competition. So actually the it was element of surprise that that could make you win the competition and that's why you haven't you you're not supposed to show it to anyone. And we delivered that in Lingering Shadows, but but by our surprise like people still

enjoyed it. But the draw had only two playtests and we made the first playtest when we had like 80 or 90% of the game and when we did it we knew that it was a disaster. So the second playtest didn't change anything at all. So Inbound we decided that we need to playtest from almost the beginning when we had the working prototype and we had around 50 of them. But it's important to make it properly. So it's not in a way that the whole team stands in a back of the playtesters. Of course you do it in a in a normal playtest like during the jams or during during the showcasing your game. But when you make an emotional game, it's really important that the the tester is alone with the game. And because like every single joke, every single word, and every single explanation will break the feeling of the game.

So it's good to prepare a playtest room. So So this is a room from Santa Monica, but you probably if you're in a small developer will not be able to use it. But you can just have a single place like separated place and use private streaming to another place where you can review it. It's super easy on PS4. It's also very easy on on PC and it's I encourage you to do it like from from the start. And also good thing is to prepare a questionnaire in a network at form so you could like have those answers and send them to your team. And during those this like playtesting during the last ones, we were managed to to notice that actually the game started to work. It was very late in the in the production, but this is something that we wanted to achieve

and it started to work. So basically we divided the players into two groups. Those that were emotionally connected and those who were emotionally disconnected. So emotionally connected people were those who had similar life experiences like our character in the game. And from from this group we've extracted a group of players that had cathartic emotions at the end of the game for some uh in a therapeutical way. And players from that group were not playing the game. They were not playing the princess. It was princess that was playing uh their lives. That was known from the beginning that uh the main character, he's a kind of ballerina and modern dancer at the same time. Um but the story I got to know when I already arrived here just before we started working. And also the story is a bit touching to myself. It's about the woman who wants to go on

with her life and solve her family issues with her parents. Her father left the family and now she has to decide if she wants to see him or she wants to continue be with her mother or other way around. So, I have it myself my parents unfortunately have separated as well. Inner fight is quite close to me. Also in that age when I'm trying to make a decisions, whose fault was that and what should I do with it? I think it's nice also that the people who's going to play the again, they would have fun to make your own decision because it's a big decision. In the beginning, I had a chance to see myself put into the skin of the character. It's very funny to see something else moving like you. It's a bit abstract, I would say. But uh at the same time we have very similar body. She moves as I move. So, I make it

happen. It's going to be looking really cool. Okay. So, in the next part of my presentation, I would like to talk a little bit about Bound in VR. So, um with VR we had a very first Morpheus prototype. It was Santa Monica Studio who sent us their prototype and was really nice, but I broke it like in 5 days. It shattered in my hands. But it was enough for us to play the game and run it and I've seen that the the camera system works for third-person perspective. You just need to make it static for for those that are experiencing motion sickness. And and because the game was showing the actual performance of a dancer, we made

a camera in such way that you can get close to the character. But the game was PSVR compatible. It was not PSVR exclusive, so it was really hard to to deliver that message with the players. They were mostly prepared that the game is VR or the game is not VR. And we've made the we've made the trailer for the PSVR launch, but we didn't decided to show that trailer because it actually looked like a normal 2D game, but with a shaking camera. Take a look.

But like you have seen in the very last the cut of this video we've made the the princess to look at you when you look at her. So, basically in VR you don't feel like you are the

character. You feel that there you are a third person around her and and you have a visual connection and if you can feel the presence. And when you have a performing artist, you can feel the presence of the artist in a very close distance. So, this is important find because normally when you go to ballet or opera, you can see the performer in a long distance or maybe if you have like a very good tickets, but normally you sit in a distance and it doesn't feel different like a TV screen but with better audio. And during the motion capture session we we felt that it's really great to be so close to ballerina and we've managed to represent the same emotion um inside the VR game and players really loved that. So, um like this is a comment the VR mode in this game is incredible and elevates the

experience leagues beyond the 2D mode of play. But I've also discovered like recurring messages like this. In VR it's almost a religious experience at times. So, what's happening? Like, what happened? Um I was thinking about the presentation of Jenova Chen a couple of years back on on GDC when he was talking about the spiritual feelings inside a game. And when we live in a city and see a lot of like human creations, that it's really hard to get this spiritual feeling. So, it's easier to do like get it in the mountains where you can't see any kind of human-made structures or in a space station when you can see the the Earth from a distance.

And in Bound, we have a world that is based on on pure mathematics. So, maybe it's worked such way because the mathematics is the language of nature. Okay, thank you. Okay, so if you have some questions, then you can use the microphones. Hi, great great talk. Nicole L'Huillier from Z Design. I was curious on the emotion palette, the other emotion architecture or the profile. What were the emotions that were easiest to get in that great combination between the you know the character and the you know the environments? Um you mean it's like emotions to evoke in a player?

Yeah, I mean like were there Did you actually maybe just the question itself was like do you have Did you have like a list of specific emotions you were trying to target and then you did you make adjustments to you know to get towards that? So so I I in in terms of like in emotions in dance I I really started from the basics like the movement and and we've like we're expanding this but like the the choreographer Michael um was like enlightened me about it how it should be done and and actually we didn't design those emotions. They were like there after we got the performance captured and yeah so we were not concentrated on So it's like emotion in terms of the expression of the of the character not necessarily going after fear here or you know, joy there or curiosity there. Yeah, we had just like couple of places where for example fear at this point and so on. We were

mostly and also we got those elements where she was fighting with with her fears. And this is something that we designed actually and then it was like made by the choreographer. So there for example when we had the perils that represents one of the fears of the of the character then the the motions like contain those kinds of of movements and for example another one has a paper plane so she was like hanging her her arms so yeah I think that that actually answers your questions. Thank you. Thank you. Hi. Absolutely beautiful game. It's amazing. Thank you. Um you said when you were play testing that you found that there were some people who felt attached to the game and some people who felt detached. Um is this kind of like the attached ones liked the game, the detached ones were giving negative feedback of the game? Yeah, it's it's a really good question.

So those that were emotionally connected and based on the life experiences, there were There There's a part of players that were really liked it, and there was another part that really hated it. Because I don't want to spoil the ending of the game, but there's a decision in the end. And some of them already did that decision in their life. And we asked them to make it another time, and that's why they hated it. But those who didn't make this decision, they've seen it in the game, so they could make the first step. And And then they could like try to do it in a real life. And like I said, we made a questionnaire, and in this questionnaire was something like what decision you made in the end. And they were like answering this, but another question is why did you make this decision? And this is the moment when they like revealed what they felt about the game and their true feelings.

Do you Do you feel like the you know, you're It's a I would imagine it's a bit of a controversial game in the sense that it's not a gamey game with enemies and points and respawn and all the usual things that people sort of demand out of games. Do you And when you kind of like divide your response groups into like the likes and the dislikes, do you just discard the dislike? Or are you Are you saying like I How do I get more of those dislikes into the like pile? Or do you just say, "Good, I've identified who doesn't like the game, and I don't care about them anymore. I have to make the game for those who have you know, who I'm who are kind of on my side." So So the thing is that That was one of the biggest bad decision that I made in the game to make this kind of polarized audience. One contained with players that are real players, hardcore players, like those speedrunners.

And those who just want to like experience the the audio visual feelings and emotions in the game, and they don't want that game mechanic at all. And the thing is that So, what I was thinking if we will deliver things for the players and things for not gamers, then they will find their path. But the the problem is when they were like crossing paths, and those who don't usually play games went to a moment when it required some skills, then they would get frustrated. And those who just want to play a game and didn't find those places where actually needs some skill were also frustrated because they thought it's like it's easy game without the mechanics at all. And there's like a big mechanic that for speedrunners because the game can be passed in 120 ways, and one of the of the ways is the fastest. And we got like a very tiny

small speedrunners working on that. And they they've managed to like beat the game in 27 minutes, and it's nicely designed because they drop it like a couple of seconds more and more. It it requires a lot of work, and they spend hours in the game, and they are really happy but they discovered that. So, and they think that it's it's a game. But in VR mostly, people enjoy the audio visual like the presence of the game, and they concentrate on the story even though those players. So, VR works differently on on real players. So, it It So, you say are you are you actually concerned about the parts of the game that require like a skill mechanic? Like is that actually fighting the intent? Like I guess where have you decided to land? Who is your perfect player? Um yeah, it was like I was thinking that if we'll like manage to get as most players from from different sides will be the best, but

I think I would go in the direction where those players seeking for emotional narrative storytelling without any skills because they are already tired of of like solving puzzles, fighting, and so on, and just like contemplate on the audio-visual and story side. I think that these are our players. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you. Um Hi. Um Uh could you talk a bit about uh the final uh locomotion system that you uh put together after you got the uh mocap session, and how it was informed by your aesthetic understanding, like like does the technical implementation um like was it in- influenced by your aesthetic understanding of ballet and dance, and do you have like a specific example uh of that? Um so so the locomotion system is actually really easy, uh but we

we motion captured everything including the the walking, running, and so on. We just needed to add the the loops for it, and and it's really really simple. I mean, it's we are just blending one animation to another without any sophisticated tools. We don't need blend trees because it's we have like the one single character without any items. Uh we don't divide movement between hands and and legs. So, in this term was really simple, but still what I wanted to do is to have like a maximal maximum flow of blending those animations including when you like walk on a on a ledge or jump. So, so this was what I was concentrating on, but as for implementation, it's really a black box. And you wouldn't take anything from from that implementation. It's just like writing and hard coding. And if I would do it one more time, I would do it exactly the same.

Okay. Interesting. Thanks. Thank you. Okay. So, if there are no any more questions, then thank you.