Creating Narrative VFX in 'Temtem'

[Music] hello there everybody Welcome to our talk creating narrative FAL facts in temptem we're super honored to kick off the offal facts Summit right now and yeah without further Ado let's go let's show some magic all right of course it's good to know who you're listening to at least so my name is case I'm a senior fishal effect artist at kma games I started my FAL effects career as a 2d artist working on lethal leag Blaze and eventually transition to a 3D realtime visal effect style combining the 2D elements and currently I'm a full-time animator on temptem and also a teaching assistant and Mentor at visual facts Apprentice as you can see already from the pictures I'm a dog lover and for me dogs are here cats here there needs to be some balance of course with the visal facts team and and I like to explain

everything in sound effects y okay and hello everyone I'm mid and the Le effect is here at Crema and so far I have developed my career mostly working in Crema and in temp also some minor previous projects but mostly that um also one of my main tasks within the team is to translate case sounds effect to the rest of the team because you may know that not everyone speaks bfx language so that's a thing and also whatever he said about cats and dogs still under discussion we'll get to it okay so for the lot of you that may not know what temp is temp is a MMO creature monster creature collector that's uh with turn battles that are mostly 2v2 battles it was created by kma games which is a small Spanish team of around 30 people and regarding visual effects there have been four BX bfx arties in total but never more than two at the same time uh for us both we've been working there me almost three years and case a bit more than two years

and yeah we've tried to put a bit a lot of emphasis on handling the different Narrative of the different creatures that appear in the game we also wanted to say that the game has been developed using Unity with its built-in Runner ping okay and now case we'll tell you a bit about what can you expect from this talk what all right so of course you want to think what what what are the things we're going to talk about so the main red line of our presentation will be the narrative aspect that we try to incorporate with our visual effects technique animations so along this uh we'll tell about the different tools we use to make this a reality so we're going to show you the tool or the videos first without then we're going to apply the tool and tell it tell you what it does and how we think it becomes AA uh makes the narrative visual facts storytelling a reality and we want to point out this talks for intermediate to experienc visual facts artists that maybe want to put a bit more emphasis on narrative storytelling in their visal facts work because we think it's really important and and of course it might be

interesting for other art professions that actually want to start out as a fishal facts artist are there actually any people in the audience that aren't fishal effects artist well maybe after this talk you want to become a fishal effects artist because it's a really cool job and you could have already seen it repeated a few times on the screen along the presentation or during the presentation we show you many different visual effects to kind of set the tone uh to set the tone ready for the talk over here you see one of her many tum called dra not being smashed once not twice but of course three times by giant pixel block named turbo attack but of course what makes it narrative Migo yeah so what do we mean when we say that TM has a space for narrative visual effects okay so um temp has little gameplay limitations we of course have some design constraints when it comes to that um how much damage technique has how much stamina it uses the number of targets it has but not really apart from that um this comes from the fact that

the visual effects are mostly contained in 2v2 battles where information that would be key in other games uh can make competitive games like League of Legends or you know adventure games Soul flight games that information is not really relevant for us this means that we can focus and investigate a bit more into other aspects of the visual effects like for example The Narrative ones we also wanted to say that since the game came out as an early access game we've had a lot of interaction with the community um for us this has been a I think a privilege because it's mostly been constru a lot of constructive feedback also temp has a space for signature moves and these are um special moves that only one 10 can use and we've used them to further and deepen the the different stories of a particular creature okay so in here you can see the main three techniques that we're going to talk about in the presentation from right to left you can see um leech depress and coinet but for now we'll let you wondering how do the sequences look

and we'll tell you a bit about our production workflow all right so we think it's always nice to see how different games get created so we want to show how it starts from getting an idea of a technique animation up until applying and thinking of gameplay details up until the final product so what Mig already said we have little limitations in creative freedom so we have done things like G creating a giant black hole sucking everything inwards or a giant laa wall which eventually pours hot lava over this little platy pad which is fine and is still fine to this day I guess that's what happens when you let visual facts artists decide mostly what happens with visuals in the game but how does it actually look so we have some information again on the screen of course we have an idea this can be a designer as a little story like hey I got for example a lava wall and I want to pour hot lava over this plyy pad or we can even have like very a lot of freedom that we can create even our own ideas so for example next up we get some

gameplay details and you can see over underneath here for example we have thunder strike of course what kind of typing is it electric how much what is the category uh special physical what kind of damage does it do stamina and holds and these little details I'll explain further down because we think gameplay details are very important to even begin starting with official facts animations again next time for example fire tornado what kind of category is it of course element fire much for example you can see two holds this will also depend on how long will the technique take next up we have the concepting phase and this really depends on actually the choice of the visual facts artist of course we're in indie game so of course we're in IND game we're Indie company so we don't have a lot of people in the in the company around 30ish people so we don't have a dedicated 2D concept artist that helps us out so what we like to do we just draw our own concept art so we like to draw draw like the like the key frame the biggest

impactful key frame of the technique animation and this is a very fast way for the art director lead visal facts artist to already discuss yo oh yo sorry to already discuss uh within 15 minutes already this is what we want and it's really fast we also think maybe sometimes faster than kit bashing in a way and also little scribbles like this stamped scribble and also it's a very team collabortive effort that Mig and I work together so we constantly go back and forth over pains timing changes tune in little details and that that's really fun to do but let me explain further down what the gameplay elements actually are because we do have gameplay elements or the restrictions but we have different ones now compared to player versus player games for example so we have the duration that you already saw in a picture spectacularity and some other elements so duration what you saw is we have three holds and basically the

bigger the hold or the bigger the more turns you have to wait the longer the technique animation has to be on the screen so we can have technique Up animations that we have to make fishs on two to three seconds or the highest holds 8 till 9 seconds so that's a very good thing to point out okay we need to create an effect that takes 9 seconds next up we have spectacularity this is mostly based on the damage because if we make every technique 150 damage of course none of them would stand out so we have some restrictions some techniques are zero damage some are 10 uh 10 damage and some can go up to 150 damage and we have some other elements such as stamina how much stamina does it cost to cast the technique animation the priority does it go first second third or fourth because of the ter based battle system how many targeted numbers one temp time getting targeted to Temp or the whole area or the whole Battle Zone and what are the conditionings applied is it poison burned Frozen and

so on so even in the end it doesn't look like this much that much on their own it's really a combination of all of the elements together that we can pinpoint okay how big does the technique get but Mig okay tells can you tell us something about the unique game aspects M of course okay so this will be the last bit of information before we dive into the techniques and as for now 10 is have 12 different Elemental types each of course with its own color palette and shape language and we have water electrical fire earth melee Crystal you name it and we have developed these color palettes for each one that are useful for more things that you may think of uh for example for us bfx artist is super helpful to have this as a reference to fall back to and also for example case is color blind for some values of yellow and since we mostly want yellow electricity and yellow fire even if green fire is cool green fire is really cool but uh yeah having this to fall

back to has proven super useful uh also the game is divided in two main areas as we call them the battle zones and the free roam area the free roam area is where the game itself happens it's where you find the other players since it's an MMO game it's where you find the NPCs where the story itself happens and then we have the battle zon areas this is um the where a 2b2 battle happens and where we have developed most of our visual effects and finally uh 10m right now is at we have 164 different 10 and more than 350 techniques and if you think about it we well this has been one of the hardest parts of developing visual effects for temp because we have to consider that every technique has to look good on every temp because every tempton can potentially use every technique and of course they can resist them so we have to play a lot with the scale of the techniques and the different effects because it's not the same if a small tenm like this P but receives a technique a middle siiz tenm like this Bish over here or the super huge

electrical mythical temp time like this Vol okay so that was it for the information and right now we'll dive into our first big technique that's called leech all right so we have all the very important information out the way that we even think of when're before we're starting so we know okay how long does it take and everything so let's talk about leech and of course first what's the narrative how did it started so let me introduce you to one of our many temp called tyu and we can say taiu is a pretty big meme in the community because well taiu is a meme why does toos tyu look like a dollar store scissor like once every couple of months people are like hm tyu and then after a few games don't play tyu even for the memes tyu doesn't deserve to be good tyu deserves to be left in the dir so of course us as visual facts artists I can I can look at everybody in audience when you hear from your in this

case from a designer hey tyu needs a new special signature move so it's really special only for taiu of course we want to make tyu matter because who doesn't love this toost Dollar Store scissor so we when thinking of like an idea conceptualization we think of okay what does fit the best and makes tyu matter and be part of something bigger than the tamam universe and eventually one wanted to give Ty for the very nature Godly field that is like part of something bigger of course we take much much reference from games you have worked on TV shows everything we can take references of anime also and we thought a very fitting uh thematic for tyu a Godly nature feel was The Watcher from the what if series I don't know if you have watched the what if series but it's just the way he looking at you it's very maning in a way it's kind of like uh very Godly and we thought well we think this will be very speci special for tyu so here's a little sneak peek

and let's dive into it actually how we actually start out and what are the tools and techniques we apply so first of all we're talk about we're going to talk about with Lee's spectacular ISM I'll say spectacularity because a stum will cly over the word time remapping and temp battle Shader effects so first up spectacularity so you already heard us say a few times 10 is a term based battle uh battle game so so what we really try to focus on we need to keep the players engaged because we can have technique Up animations up to 9 seconds so we want to really ENC capture those hype moments because we create uh games for the players so every time they use a skill they're like yes I want to maybe use that temp Tam only because of the skill that's actually our goal and we want to make it really matter and fit the whole temp uh story itself so for for taiu that's the leeching part and also what really works the best for it is mostly anime because anime timeing is really great it's very Snappy and it's

constantly engaging in a way like the colors everything is working and we can really put a more emphasis on the thematic we can give it much much more power really uh increase power of punches and everything together and we really think that works great for leech and the technique animations next up we have time remapping and in this video over here we'll show you the video actually without the tool applied we'll tell you what the tool actually does and then afterwards going to take a look how it looks with it applied so what is time remapping so with time remapping we're able to slow slow or speed up time with time curves that you can see on the left bottom over here this is actually a very artist friendly way for us to efficiently try out different things like maybe we kick in a very slow motion kind of feel a very speed speed up kind of feel and we can give the technique 10 times more power with it so just imagine for yourself you're looking at this technique gif how would it look if it's very linear it would lose a lot of power

a lot of anticipation it kind of Misses that hype moment and that anticipation moment for the players so by just really increasing those curves we can really give that a very spectacular feeli feel to it and we can say what gets affected by it we can say everything gets affected in the scene we can say the source animators so the source TM is getting affected the targeted temp or we can say all the temp in the area so we have lots of possibilities if if you think of it so let's do a refresh for the mind how it looks without time remapping and these can be some pretty small details actually so the narrative is there but it's kind of missing that that juicy feel it's kind of like the oomph of it the really like oh it's coming it's coming and then bam it explodes so let's see how it looks with time remapping and it can be a slight detail that some of you might not really recognize in the beginning but it's for us it's really adding on top of that extra animation feel so tyu castes the skill it builds up it

goes in slowmo and it rapidly increases over time to really show taiu leeching the the Life Source out of the enemy temptem and for the last two of leech let's talk about temp battle Shader effects and you can already get a question to yourself or hey case why are two floating ice and some swishy swooshy solar coasters curve meshes yeah you can name it what it is we called solic hose for now let me explain actually how that how that works temp and battle Shad effects so here we show tyu in the unity Adder the scene and the cool thing we can do with temp battle Shader effects is we can place temp clones and you heard me say clones and Mig will tell a bit more about clones eventually but what we can do is we can set custom parameters during the animation timing of the technique so during the 8 seconds we can say we want to increase the fanel over time the texture uh speed the power

of the glow everything we have lots of possibility possibilities with this and we use it again with the Curve measures we showed you uh the curve uh files but we can do other things only giving Tha food a nature goodly feel we can give a tum uh a digital field that is a distorted hologram we can go more to nightmare field kind of uh effects like nightmare feed we can even glitch the temp them like it's stuck in a matrix and offset the fertic is so much for digital type effects and we can send out an extra temp clone with a battle Shader on it and we really portray the power of okay the tempton is getting punched Bon it goes backwards and it's like an AA Shader that we apply to it so again what does it do for tyu without the temp and battle Shader effects two floating I some swishy swooshy solar coasters it it's misses missing something but with the temp and battle Shader effect it comes out together the narrative is there that we think would

really uh try to give temp them TI it very nature Godly feel and it's a really cool tool to we can do lots of things with it and let's see how it looks actually when we have all the tools combined and with some sound effects on it and see how it comes to our whole final product and you might also notice at the end of the effect we let some particles linger so the player can already uh Rec uh register for okay this tenem just got attacked because sometimes there maybe four of the same ttum in the battle scene so with the first big technique out of the leech Migo okay tell something about our next mental technique called depress yep definitely okay so after are diving into thepress

this one is a mental technique uh it's a damaging technique that requires the target to be asleep for it to to work so given the name of this technique we wanted to try and recreate those kinds of uh feelings and emotions that you may get when you're going through a bad time our narrative idea for this technique was that if we were able to implement in some sort of way our own feelings uh into the game then the technique would be more fitting inside the temp universe but also outside of it and the players would be a ble to relate more to it okay so that's why as uh let me show you a technique as you can see the enemy temptem goes into some sort of personality disorder where it it sees itself out of its own body and some particles that are that play with it and then it gets back pulled back together Al but of course it's damaged okay so in here we're going to talk about two main uh our main tools that we made to make this technique stand up are the extra TMS or clones as case just said and of course post processing so for these

extra TMS or clones what these are H they are copies of the TMS that are within a technique and we can use several different animations for them we can use animations that we have they have in their um Battle Battle Zone kit that can be for example the get hit animation or the um attacking animation but also we can use some animations from the free roam area and this in addition with for example some more basic animation that's just um position rotation and scaling we can create anim um techniques that have sufficient narrative meaning just with that like for example you can see a lot of running TMS that's the stamped scribble that K showed you earlier also in the GIF you can see this technique that's called ID dasi and you can definitely see the impact that being able to animate this tantm has without it um well the punch would feel aot like powerful okay because we have the impact frame we have we have the time mapping but it will

feel much less powerful if we didn't launch the tempt app into Sky and it also helps us uh to give some comedic effect because as you may have seen temp visual effects lean into some sort of comedic or funny effect and you can see that little star up in the sky that's like okay okay and next up you can see uh the effect this one has in depressed without the extra tempton you can see some um particles floating around but you don't understand why the tantum has disappeared you don't really get where it is and it has no narrative meaning on the other hand when we put it back on you can definitely see that something's happening to it you can we also use uh well basic animation principles like this Squatch and stretch so you can understand the the violence of the pullback and the pull back together okay um also uh postprocessing maybe for some of you that may not know what post processing this uh it consist some filters that are applied in the

last stages of rendering and with it we can use uh we create some effects like vignetting or changes of contrast Bloom Etc so in TM we are able to modify the current post processing that we have at any current time within the technique animation and we can have two of them overlapping at the same time this means that we can have for example one handling a change of Bloom and another one handling a Lut color swap of the full screen we can do this also with curbing files that K showed you earlier in in Tim mapping so this is a very artist friendly way to do it for example this would be some LD textures that we created for post processing and with this we can portray for example the violence of an explosion in this technique that's called knockback BL with these full black and white values well color sorry we can also portray for example an electrical field with this um blue and dark blue

values and also we can create that feeling that you may have had if you had an electrifying machach maybe uh but yeah for example here we get a full black and white color swap of the full screen that in addition with an inverter Fel on the enemy tempton we portray that uh that thing that we may have seen in a lot of animes where the skeleton gets shown when you get electrocuted okay we've also created an Uber Shader for post processing because sometimes we want to handle more than one thing at the at the same time U for example if we have overlapping stuff in time it's easier to do it in just one file and not have to move it around and you can see for example how we handle uh in the right part of the screen viting in the middle part just kinetic lengths for some super fast techniques and up there is the Lut color stpes okay so getting back to the Press you can see the effect this one has so without uh postprocessing you can definitely feel that something's missing a transition feels a lot more bland and uh we're

missing something yeah but when we put it back on you can definitely understand that you are going into that sort of mental state where the damage could happen and suddenly it gets a lot of more a lot narrative meaning okay so now let's show it with sound effects of [Music] course [Music] so yeah you can definitely see the project finding then you get both copies or both personalities uh pulled back of the temp the projectiles and the particles that are playing with both copies and then the violence pullback so you can definitely understand that life will never be the same again for this temp okay so next up this is the end for the press and we'll tell you about our next big technique that's called Co

so our third big technique is called coet and maybe the wording is a bit wrong because it doesn't look very kosu for little mosu um yeah we can all agree about that fun fact actually if we show our work in progress videos we cast all the different technique animations on all the different small temp because we have we we think it that's the most impact and sells the idea a bit more and a lot of actually colleagues of us were like no the little temp so all right so what is The Narrative of KET so in coinet we really wanted to portray the feel of the temp getting pulled into the layer of Eric knite Spire temptem with the typings digital and nature where Eric knite crawls down and eventually Feast us on this little snack called mosu and yeah it's uh we treat them with love don't worry so what are the things we're going to talk about we're going to talk about actually very two very important things that uh we think is very special when when it comes to temp is camera movement and battle bz

change battle zone changes so you can already see in a video over here it's not shippable the camera is has an error or something so let me uh get you through it how the camera movement works and what we actually can do by adding extra movement on already everything that's there so yeah it's quite unique being a official effects artw temp them because sometimes we have our own ownership that we come with up with an our own idea we created it from the beginning until until the end and it's really uh we think it's really special that we can do that but also with this comes camera movement because camera movement is very important because we have the time for it with the turn-based battle system and everything so we can really create interesting camera shots and Camera POS positioning or camera positions but how are we doing it so we do it again with the Curve files it's a lifesaver for us we can do for example animated fi Fu curve of the camera so instead of only doing screen shakes we can create extra wobbles so think of for example a very

climactic explosion it goes and then it explodes those are kind of like the things we can do with field of fuel curves and we cann't go all out and just have a lot of fun with it actually next up we have curvings of different cameras so camera A and B and we have all kinds of freedom from how can we move camera a towards camera B so we can create shots of the cameras and how are is it transitioning or uh when is camera B kicking maybe camera c d e we have lots of cameras sometimes and during this actually approaching 1.0 of temp it actually released last September there was one colleague of us adri devono Andres we call him the Shader God and he had one thing like one sentence he constantly repeated to us and we want to share it with you so this is adrey and adrey always told us let the camera follow the effect and why is this actually well this way it looks like the player is naturally getting Guided by

the visual effects instead of An Almighty being controlling the camera what if tyu so what do we mean by this let's go uh for example through some examples so over here you have unseen blow and you can already see something and uh I'm letting the first run a gif again yeah and you can already maybe see something that when a a projectile starts we first let player register okay there's something happening with the projectile but we only let the second camera kick in when the projectile's halfway through the traj trajectory so this way the player knows okay uh I need to take a look at the projectile okay the projectile is going to do something it's going to damage the other tempt because if we instantly let the camera move towards the target the player doesn't know what to do and it's kind of we're forcing the player in a way and the player is like oh I'm maybe not really together with the uh visual effects and the projectile movement of it over here you have the coach net itself

so you can see also with the the line how the camera is moving so first camera moves down it uh we do the anticipation also like it's really building up to that highp mod like and it goes back to the normal Battle Zone area and what I was talking about building up to that climactic explosion with field of view curves so this is one uh technique called DG threat so the camera is zooming inwards we really increase the feel fuel power and it's like we're holding at moment tiny bit and then it kicks in it zooms uh very far actually inwards and we show that yeah the temp is damaged by quite quite amount of damage so let's see again for koset how it looked without the camera movement actually so Eric Knight's casting the skill and of course there's something wrong it doesn't look shippable at all but let's see actually how it looks with the camera movement so Eric Knight is casting the skill

crawls down like Spider-Man and EV eventually feasting on his little snack called mosu so with camera movement out of the way let's talk about battle zone changes and you can already see this is not the final battle Zone this actually our official effects test scene it doesn't look yeah that great so let's see how we can make it even better so what are battle zone changes battle zone changes our custom Unity scenes where we hand place all kinds of different assets that are actually at our disposal and we're doing it really and capture that because we do mostly the battle zones for signature moves that are special to one certain tum so we can really uh gives a tum like Eric Knight AUM like leech like tyfu much more meaning to the overall the skill of it and what it does so what we did for example we created a giant spider web that's actually like the focus Point leading with the shape langage the lines to the middle that little mo so there's

something going to happen with the Enemy temp and with that we also added some uh environmental effects so we give the feeling of the players inside the spider cocoon and there's no something going wrong and it's definitely going to go wrong with the Enemy 10 but also with this if you think of yourself we have lots of possibilities with it with this because the temp imun firste for us is very big as visual facts artists so what are some other things we can actually do with this we can create a toxic Wasteland a stone Dune trench environment a more martial arts melee environment and we can even summon a stormy uh a stormy sea where Thunder and tornadoes appear just a bit like in a Netherlands where it's constantly raining and trust me I am from the Netherlands it's constantly raining actually also in San Francisco this week so so you can already see like we're having loads of fun also with this and we just kind of can go all out and just use all kinds of different things and the wise and the how of a meaning to the

scene because why are we doing it we're doing it to give again Eric knighted special feel that maybe people want to play the spider temp because we can cast enemy temps in a giant spider cocoon and how are we doing it we're using basically everything at our disposal that we can use so if for example some 3D artist created some very cool uh environment art assets we think we can use it in a way create some interesting composition and camera shots and if that work works we yeah we use that actually so a refresher for the mind how does it look without battle zone changes so again you can remember the normal facial facts test scene it's not fitting at all it misses the whole point of the technique but with the battle zone change there's already more meaning to it the narrative is there and just and capture that moment of a spider T what could a spider t 10 be and lastly let's see how it looks with

some sound effects because we think adding sound effects getting added to the visual effects makes it the whole picture and become a final [Music] product and there's also one thing I want to point out is that with certain Tech techniques we favor uh some cameras on the right side and the left side this is more because when a camera is favored on the left side it could be the friendly team and when a camera favors the right side it's the the enemy team because what I told you again some temp can be there can be two of the same T and temp them in the Battle Zone so this is like a small cue for the players it's like okay the enemy is using this skill right now so with our third big technique out of the way coinet we have one more thing that's very important when it's getting applied to our technique animations which is

composition can you tell us something more about that Mig yep okay so as you've been seen tempt techniques are a little bit like small cinematics or like mini mini movies and we've tried to to learn stuff like for example for animated series or movies and put what we've learned from them to use we of course try to live up to those standards and we have tried to implement this like for example with a low angle sh to portray a temp as much much more powerful or even just the opposite like if we portray a shot from a super high position um and it's a small temptem in a super big environment then then that temptem suddenly fiddles super weak we've also tried to put two things uh together like one thing was that what Cas said that the camera has to follow the effect and the other thing is that the visual effects have to guide the eye this is really important for us so let me show you what I mean in this technique that's called Crystal delou we

you can see that we try to at first the visual effects the camera following the effect sorry because we don't start moving the camera up until the the B effects have left the camera shut and also we have that triangular shape so we make sure that the player is looking downwards also that way the transition feels a lot more natural and this is important because um composition in temp we don't want play to miss any important information and we've tried to do it uh and it's been one of the hardest parts of developing bfx here this just would be a sketch of the Triangular shape I was talking about and you can see that the effect has already left the screen this next technique that's called anow you can see what Cas was telling about about earlier that we don't start moving the camera up until the projectile is like 50% on its way over the enemy temp time in here for we put our higher values in the projectile so we make sure that the player is looking

well of course at the projectile and that they are looking at this action line and finally here this is the signature move of was pin that's a wasp Temp and we do uh we do portray the temp as more powerful with this slight low angle shot at the beginning and also with that conic shape that we do upwards we make sure that the player is looking above and beyond be kind theend them because of course the first time they see the technique they are not not not going to know what's what's going to happen but at least they know where it's coming from so they are not surprised and they're like okay I I wanted to look there but in in a way we're making them look look there so this would be the action line that we want the player to look at and yeah we are getting close to the end of the presentation but not quite there because but wait there is more so let's do a small recap of what we talked about with the three techniques leech

depress and coet we've talked about things such as time mapping adding spectacularity tempt them battle Shader effects temp them clones and so on and we really think we have many more tools but we think these are the most important tools that that we can go actually all out and capture that narrative feeling of the technique animations we also think even in the sliders this could also work for you because narrative visual facts meaning is very important we think and to give that maybe that's the basic explosion a bit more meaning to it but of course but wait there is more because we're all FAL facts artists there are lots of FAL facts artist over here imagine what we can do with this so with that out of the way can you tell us something about the Divine God called pic okay so this is the signature move this P tum that's called p p and uh let me tell you the story for this one so so since the game came out as an early access uh there was a lot of interaction

with the community and some temps in the beginning they were super overpowered like insane and in it was the case for this p tempton and of course since it was so powerful people started comparing it with a God and like shortly after this was all around in the Discord okay and shortly after of course the P Charge was born that that was a thing and we wanted to give back to the community in a way and and and try to put what well what they showed us put it in the game so let me show you okay so of course this is a meme for us but we also wanted to to make it look good for well the players that are that weren't there in the beginning um but yeah I think it's been super super fun developing bfx for this game and you can also see that we've used all of the tools that we've been talking about like for example the time remapping overlapping post processing with that

viting and chromatic aberation um but yeah next step we'll tell you a bit about another technique that's called horror yes so approaching 1.0 we kind of got like super comfortable with the tempt IP I think we can speak for a lot of people that when you get at the end of like a stage for DLC or a game you're really trying to push yourself okay we got all this let's create some crazy things actually so what we try to do with the mental technique especially because fire is fire electric is electric but mental can be lots of things it can be dep personalization with depress for example or it can be something in your mind like something affecting your amigdala think of games such as bloodborne stories of HP Lovecraft I'm so myself a huge fan of those I was like let's see how we can really put maybe temp them in the in a tum universe and let's summon the depths of cthulu and put it in a tum jacket that it fits the whole narrative so [Music]

it so we summoned the giant tentacle eye floating looks like a raid boss in a way to give that feeling of composition oops oh sorry to give the feeling of composition and uh the menacing field of the temp that's in the mental Realms oh no I'm not going to be the same after this anymore and what we did was we sent out a pulse of mental powers when upom impact tentacles burst out with tuxes viscus goo splashing towards the player screen the next technique is called outgrowth or first when it started drain climbing plant and this was actually a Technique we came up with our own like the whole idea was up on our own and the designer was like told us okay sure you can do it good luck and then afterwards oh okay how are we going to do this so this technique is for one of our mythical tum called tranic which comes from the fire volcano environment and his typing is fire and nature and what

we wanted to encapture with this technique animation was the full force of nature ramping uh towards the enemy creating a tree of life and eventually exploding in nature colors and nature schematic and a bit of flavor of Naruto wood style Jutsu so for this technique it was a real team collaborative thing and again our Shader God comes back adri devono Andes created a root Shader because this was very un necessary thing for us that we needed so I'm going to explain you actually how we set it up and how we made this uh possible this effect so first we needed some custom meshes that we created in blender and you can see some red vertices painted on these meshes maybe some of you already know how the root Shader works or like how you like sh how how you let the roots grow away but these actually these vertices determine the thickness of the root because again shape language is

very important and we want to get rid of the symmetrical shapes in the technique animation so it feels more natural and The Roots really feel natural in a way next up we have a basic Shader that cover that actually chromian made over here together with Andre and these cover things such as for fanel for example uh a texture Penning because that's a very important thing also together with the roots and also of course the root growing in to in a point actually instead of being cut off because then it feels more natural and believable to the players we painted our own personal uh root uh tileable texture and you can see over here how we try to implement the roots hand placed again with the battle zone change that we think really fits the camera movement and the Battle Zone and the composition for the battle zone changes and it's also nice to see how it actually started because this was the first color scheme but of course the narrative is very important but you can already guess it tyrannic comes from a

fire volcano layer and it's typing is fire is nature so Le more towards the orange orange colors the more brighter colors so we changed it up all the we changed it up totally and it took a while of course but these things mistakes can happen in game death and I think everybody makes sometimes these mistakes and let's see let's also show you the first ever draft of outgrowth and there might there are some important things I want to point out afterwards so you can already see the camera movement is there the composition everything is there the roots are basically working but it's very cluttered you don't really see where you have to look the color scheme is all all wrong but this actually shows that camera movement is really a key into our visual fact animations and that yeah a lot of signature moves we just even start with camera movement and on top of that we add ficial fact layers so we make it easy for

ourselves next up Migo's going to tell us more about black hole MH okay so as we've been saying sometimes the ideas for the techniques came from the designer or our CEO Ros who was the one that uh created the techniques but other times the ideas for the techniques came from either ourselves or more Tech part of the company so this was the case for black hole in this one we wanted to try and recreate the the moment that you could feel we think inside a black hole of course that's you hear nothing you see nothing there's nothing happening so let me show you yeah so that that was that and yeah we also did a custom PR processing here that's a let me show you actually swirling Distortion in the middle uh to also portray that feeling that everything's been ins sacked in inside the black hole you can see it right over there so yeah that also helped out a

bit okay so this would be our last technique uh so case will you do me the honors here I can uh I think we can speak for a lot of lot of people and this technique will speaks on volume actually and we have all experienced this like maybe every week three four times five times and if not well you have a very special computer actually so let's just let the technique speak for itself yay blue screens who doesn't love those okay so well what we want you to take from this of course we know that you have to be in in this sort of position where putting this in your game makes sense um but if you are to take anything from this doet that in some cases less is more okay because you see that this is literally one big blue billboard and a SAT face and it has a lot of narrative and comedic meaning so

we think that if you able to implement well maybe any of that even if the slight is in your own games maybe you can benefit from that okay so thank you all so much for coming this was the end of our talk but we didn't want to leave before some shout outs and some thank you so of course we didn't create temp on our own because yeah that's just not possible and we want to thank the just want to give some huge shout outs to the team back in each and every person is super talented and just working with such a team that has so much passion for the temp IP is just great and that we can share our visual facts work with them it's just an amazing opportunity also we want to thank our bosses enri poos and gam Gil andras for believing in US letting us give this do and just having trust in us as uh representing TM the IP also Alex Muno and our Shader God adri devono Andres uh during 1.0 and just working on tempt techniques the feedback sessions were just super into

detail with uh animation to time uh shape language everything shaders also helping out and it's just for us a really valuable uh people that really helped us out a lot and Jason where are you sitting Jason thank you so much for reaching out to us to give us the opportunity to give this talk about Temp and creating narrative visual facts animations it's actually our first time time going to GDC and our first time in America so it can be PR quite overwhelming but just sharing because we're also quite quite new in visal effects industry and just sharing our how how much fun we have creating visual effects and how we can also do other kinds of visual facts and narrative visual facts it's just amazing to share that and of course lastly regarding the GDC team giving out the important information about travel documents and everything it really helped us out a lot and thank you especially Sam Warren key for replying so super fast so with that

out of the way actually there is a little time time that has actually a question and that is are there any [Applause] questions yeah yeah MH uh yeah if it's the mic that could be possible yeah yeah could be I think that's best I'm a little short uh excellent talk thank you uh I wanted to check what were the um main points of collaboration you had with the wider team like what um departments are you mainly collaborating with so the main point with the wire team like the collaboration so I think with especially with adri Andes and the art director really wanted to and capture that that the temp style of the visual facts fits the universe but for example also with the sound uh people that created official facts sounds we also they also sometimes asked us like

hey what what is actually your feeling with this technique animation because sometimes the ideas come up ourself and I can think also with game design when we created out grth with the The Roots moving forward we had this idea and we show the concept but of course then the designer is going to ask oh how many targets does it have is one target two Targets how long is it because if we make technique animations too long compared to 50 damage then players would just be come on again again again sometimes that happens yeah I I think well since it's a rather small company in the end we've had a lot of interaction with every Department mostly because for example some techniques I can think of uh the Sange M wreck uh that one the the animation team did the animation for that one and then we put on the B effects also sometimes the 3D department created some of the environments or in the end actually a mix of every Department almost like for example a

monkey getting animated jumping up with two giant rocks and smashing it downwards those kind of things so it's really cool to uh create effects for that that's super cool thank you no problem hey there uh first it's like really impressive you built this game with 30 people like pass off to you that's great so you guys obviously have like so much creative fre freedom to like build these effects for your tempts so like where did you checkpoint yourself in terms of like budgeting or memory usage or time because you could build environments you can build shaders like what kind of went on with that process so where do we build the budgeting timing everything thing well I think for optimization the hardest thing was for for example Nintendo switch because we have lots of billboards that are just full on in screen so you can already imagine overdraw so when we optimize for the switch it took a long time because we want to en capture that feeling like it feels like like very rich the effects but doesn't lose the the glow and everything and the shapes and that was

pretty difficult so yeah we had to kill our Uber Shader from for the that we have for PC oh yeah and just build like several super minor shaders that work for that and also regarding time I think our May mostly we did every technique within three or four days um of course Sun took more sun took less outg growth took two weeks because of the color change and everything and me like slide color blind uh values I was like okay this color oh no that again again back and forward but that happens that's yeah and a followup do you guys use use the visual effects graph or you guys use particle systems or do you guys use like what's the core for what you build we use shuriken because uh it was with a built-in Runner pipeline the 20 2019.4 version gotta cool for example oh sorry for example like the roots we animated by hand with the animator because because you just have control in the way the feeling control like you have the feeling this okay how can I really when

the root grows it goes like uh it bursts upward and you let it hang and then so when it goes It goes yeah kind of like how they do it in naroto like the animes that like very timing feeling yeah cool well thank you so much thank you thank you uh hi guys I was curious about um how you went about deciding when to trade off between making sure keeping the anim um as satisfying as possible and how much time the animation takes because I realize that sometimes take the animation as good as it can look that you need a certain amount of time but after a certain point you're making a player wait a certain amount each time they play it so how did you go about deciding when you were when it needed to be this long or when it need to be shorter and what did you do like what was your what was the thought process when you have you have to make those tradeoffs we can use laa wave as an example so regarding timing and how long do you think a technique and should take and how we decideed so we have the holds for example so zero holds is two to

three seconds and three holds so how long the technique animation holds before getting cast or possible to cast it's 9 seconds but we have for example the giant laa wall that you saw with like paty pets standing there and then eventually lava lava will pour over the tum first that technique was 15 seconds or so 13 because we had like a whole concept art that the lava walls are pairing we have a camera pouring like over the lavall looking downwards then we follow the lava following downwards and then our uh Shader got ad Andes he was like it's 15 seconds it's to hold so it needs to be seven seconds so we had to just cut off like half of the technique animation and still make it work so sometimes it's also a try and error we have the because we have lots of loads of fun but sometimes you forget O Okay this takes too long players are not going to like this we got too excited with this yeah and also if you think about it like if it's a three hole technique uh it's

going to be seen much less so um because you have to wait three turns to to use it so in the end we balance it out like a technique that's 3 seconds maybe you can just three times so it's in the end it's 9 seconds and one technique that's you can use it once every three turns it's 9 seconds so it's it kind of balances it out yeah all right thank you and oh yes um thank you so much for doing this talk it's really nice and really cool to about and I was wondering for your concepting stuff what are you guys trying to like focus on with that are you more like color theory stuff or like I guess just what's your focus with that uh I think when I start out at 10 time I really I'm a huge advocate of over pains for official facts artist because for example when you're a smaller team you don't have concept art and I think it's uh for example kit bashing sometimes might take a bit longer and just drawing it out even a little sketch or just full out sketch 15 maybe up 20 minutes it just shows in one shot this is what we want we don't do like some techniques

we do the charge part the impact part and then the ending part and we concept it out but we never go longer than 30 minutes in a way MH but this is just uh sorry what was the question oh just yeah you're focused for the concept right so yeah so with the focus it's like to and capture that main impact moment the highest part of the technique animation awesome thank you much thank you hello um I have a question about your gradients and your gradient management system how do you iterate making new gradients let's say you make a new like uh attack class or damage type and then also how do you balance that against your very vibrant and colorful environments like do you mean uh for example how do we te our color gradients for example the Lut textures mhm the what sorry the UT textures ah um well we can for example with knockback blast

that you saw with the very black and white FR flashing frames that you're really building up to the anticipation sometimes we invert the Colors by accident and it's like oh that's cool that's cool and then we use it for loads of other techniques but yeah with colors and everything yeah and other other times we just uh like for example if it's an electrical field we think that we have to go for those blue or bluish dark Val so in the end it's mostly um going back to our color paletes and applying that to the to the technique um also of course if it's something super particular like the electrocution thing we have to go for references outside of the game uh so it can be anime references or um other games of course um so yeah I think that's it thanks awesome thank you no more questions right cool thank you so much [Applause]

[Music] everybody