Design vs. Story: How Uncharted: The Lost Legacy Addressed the Elephant in the Room

[Music] good afternoon and welcome hi to the design versus story how uncharted the last legacy addressed the elephant in the room I'm Marianne Hayden I'm a story animator at Naughty Dog I've been a story animator on currently on the Last of Us part two and uncharted the last legacy I was a cinematics animator for uncharted one two three and four I've been at Naughty Dog for about ten years I've worked on everything from cinematics to scripted sequences to level gameplay animations I also jump in the suit every once in a while and get on the motion capture stage so first let's answer the question what is a story animator well a story animator is different than a cinematics animator we aid at the design team and our writers

with animation ideas of how to progress character and story development during gameplay our goal is in between these two images help create high quality gameplay while combining design and story that stays true to the overall vision and narrative without becoming boring or confusing and losing sight of our end goal we are assigned levels and responsible for all scripted sequences in those levels when we create these sequences IG sees in-game cutscenes or POS points of interest this is what goes into it we previz the scenes by blocking out animations pose-to-pose try to get correct timing including a rough camera pass and then we direct the motion capture suits with our stunt actors uncharted the lost legacy was on such a tight deadline that most of our previous was shot on the motion capture stage before we even got animations implemented into the game we didn't have time for traditional previous which also

meant a lot of reshoots we made a 10-hour game in less than a year so if that explains any of that then we get the data back from the stage and we assemble the - we use tracks for lost legacy and we're using time editor for The Last of Us - and we edit the clips together for correct timing then we work with design to get interactive moments functional and script and in game at Naughty Dog we don't have producers per department so a lot of the production work that comes with these scenes is our responsibility we communicate with our background artists our foreground artists effects audio our writers to make sure we have scripts before we go to the stage to shoot we have to make sure we scene has everything that it needs we assign the scenes to animators review and manage the scenes up until polish until the game is locked and we're ready to ship that's the general idea of what the role of a story animator is at Naughty Dog

and if I'm lucky I get to keep a few animations like this one to work on from start to finish design at Naughty Dog often influences story and story often influences design story and gameplay are developed in concert one often does not come before the other a naughty dog frequently creates scripted sequences where the player has limited control and still allows to maintain a cinematic moment and these moments in games are always more emotional and have more impact when they're on the stick and somewhat interactive unlike cutscenes and over the years the seesaw has tilted back and forth from design to story and vice versa and this can present challenges sometimes we have a design idea that's so unusual that it could support the story in a better way than a cutscene so we find a way to incorporate into the story no matter what the complexity and the cost the elephant ride and uncharted the last legacy is

one of those moments so just curious how many of you have played Uncharted The Lost Legacy awesome not enough hands after the talk go buy it and help support my family so if you're unfamiliar to spin off of the uncharted series featuring Chloe a character from uncharted 2 among thieves and Nadine Ross a character from uncharted 4 a thief's end I'm going to play that six minute sequence that this talk is about and then I'm going to talk about our process what worked what didn't work and what some of our challenges were so if you don't want any spoilers and here's your chance to leave how to ride and get on a wild elephant

was one of our biggest challenges in this story beat I don't think she's wounded those explosions we heard must have triggered the collapse easy girl okay sorry girl we're gonna get you out we need to get down stay calm talking to me on the elephants easy easy okay then why is it taking us whyever at once at this point in the story these two characters aren't on very good terms they really don't like

each other and but small talk isn't their thing and they're stuck on this elephant you can't get off of it and ultimately they need to figure out a way to work together so once they're on the elephant there wasn't much for the player to do we gave the player a couple opportunities to feed the elephant so if you missed that last branch then there would be another chance in the next overhang to get that we wanted to take time to focus on our environment art in this sequence as well so we would focus the camera on things like this upcoming Vista we wanted to populate the area with monkeys that monkeys and animals other kind of animals that might be in this environment as well good appetite

[Music] this cutscene is a bonding moment between these two characters and it actually was written for a different part of the game but when this story beat was created we moved it to the back of the other hand I'm not very good at the whole people thing you're selfish ticket yeah you're right I am a selfish dick head yeah it's good to hear you say - well he that dad did get something from you after all what happened with your father he was the guy that couldn't

walk away the Ministry of Culture offered to finance one more of his expeditions because this time he said he was onto something big he was always on to something big / hurt and it's raided his camp and local authorities found in weeks later and this stupid thing is all I have left I'm sorry oh hey he certainly made his choice so listen huh no I know she was so

distressed hey about the old Sam look I get it what I've got mine she just sort out as well let's not have that stand in the way anymore hey okay deal [Music] well if we accomplish nothing else today

at least we reunited a family just keep your distance they've got a copy right suppose it would be a shame to come all this way and die right now here yeah I'll take this one Wow okay thanks you go for a little that's good no reach that way and hold out your hand what much safer way to pet an elephant much obliged it was in this level where the elephants were originally it's one of our biggest and most open-world levels we've ever

created it's a jungle in Western Ghats India we created a space where exploration and interactive scenes could take place in any order and in an earlier version of this level it's included stumbling upon an elephant pond which was visible in the distance but not reachable by the player the elephants were supposed to be a background element animals in a jungle in the far distance they're underneath the trees in the middle we were never supposed to ever even get close to them and that space became this space up in the pond as we started playtesting it people kept pointing to it closer and closer to the elephants so once we placed us to the space being clear that the player wanted to reach the elephant pond so design afforded the players a

chance to observe the elephants up close never once the player was allowed to get near the elephants they wanted to pet them and feed them and ride them so while we began exploring this idea we lost our sense of being grounded this is a car in the aftermath of an elephant attack elephants are not docile so most people who approach a herd of elephants let alone try and pet their calf wouldn't come out alive our game director Curt Morgan al tweeted this sequence exists because Al Madina Soria was doing a test and put Chloe on an elephant as a joke then people wanted it for real I hated it so much my gut was

oh my god how do we make this not dumb and silly after many iterations we found a way Thank You team for being persistent so my lead Almudena used our old horse tech from uncharted 3 to prove that we could actually ride the elephant we called the elephant Horton for a little while like horton hears a who because our file name from uncharted was horse ten and so once we allowed the player to ride the elephant it seemed like there was no going back because people really loved it it was really fun I mean who doesn't want to ride an elephant you know so I was at this point in designer story realized that the elephant needed a more structured and cohesive moment so we contacted an animal animal welfare consultant and a cultural advisor and they suggested from the beginning that we shouldn't be able to just hop on an elephant right or wherever we want to because if we did this that would suggest that the elephant had been

trained and in turn most likely abused during that process so for the player riding the elephant was fun but it was really silly so this making us believable was a huge challenge for us so through collaboration between design and story we came up with multi layouts some I've shown you already and prototypes and previz is of how we find the elephant and how we get on it once we decided we're going to ride it this new version of this beat got moved to another level at this point the story was more developed and Chloe and Nadine discovered that the antagonist of their story had caused an explosion which in turn had trapped one elephant this gave us the justification as to why there was one elephant and why it was trapped but this is the original block mesh for this new location there were three design goals that we needed to hit unblock the path rescue the elephant and ride the elephant their justifications came after

many iterations so as I mentioned before whenever biggest challenges was to find a grounded way of riding a wild elephant here the idea was to traverse up and around which then would cause the collapse of debris which would open a path for the elephant but we still didn't know how to get on the elephant at this point that version wasn't working and so we cut that layout and we tried again and it turned into Chloe Nadine working together to release the rebel which also opened the path for the elephant you helped the elephant and elephant helps you get out of the cave you can't really see it here but the elephant is actually kneeling down so that you can climb on the log next to the elephant and get on her and she does this because she says thank you for clearing the path not pretty flawed so this wasn't the correct solution but we needed to get on the elephant in order for the game to progress until we

figured out a better solution in this version Chloe and Nadine still worked together to release the rubble and free the animal same beats but different ending I still have the challenge and major issue of how do we get on this elephant and make it seem as grounded as possible in each version there were some elements that did work and not carried got carried over into the next version like helping the elephant by moving the rubble and this one was lately different than the previous it was still very flawed the previous layout wasn't working because we couldn't get on the elephant in a grounded way it got cut and we finally landed on this version basic concepts still there but now the elephant is physically trapped and Chloe and Nadine have to help her and work

together to free the elephant and in return the elephant helps them by taking them to their next destination other than the initial story beats of how to ride a wild elephant there were a lot of other problems we needed to solve to make this moment work I remember being in the meeting when riding the elephant was joked about like well we can't mocap an elephant and to make a move set for one is kind of take forever we're on a really tight deadline there were a lot of hesitation a lot ahead of tasting from a lot of people but in the end we got a lot of support from our leads our standard player camera didn't work once we were riding an elephant and two characters were attached to her the first few rounds had the camera either too far away from the characters or clipping through the elephants but here the camera is clipping through the head

and the butt and characters are not in an optimal position so our design scriptor for this part took two different player cameras that would blend in and out of a custom spline depending on where you were relative to the elephant if you were in the front of the elephant we wanted to make sure that we framed her face very well and if we were in the back we wanted to avoid colliding with her butt and if we were on the side we wanted to frame Chloe and Nadine nicely in the beginning the player sort of drove the elephant I had total control so we experimented with allowing the player to drive the elephant and then it made it seem like player was riding a horse or horton so we wanted we wanted more control over what moments forced we forced the player to look at and we lost that control when we gave more control to the player so eventually full player control of the elephant got

and in the final version there's minimal control for instance if the path split like one went to the right of that rock and one went to the left of that rock we had two splines you could choose which one to go on but that was pretty much the only choice you had so once we got the elephant on a spline getting her to move on the spline similarly to a ride car fluidly was also difficult it was pretty clunky because the elephant was reacting to the background collision over this very rough terrain so eventually the collision was flattened out and smoothed out and the background geo was not monkeys rocket launchers and rifles were problems so transitioning from the elephant ride into the cutscene on the elephant also proved difficult the monkey moment doesn't last too long but it took a really long time to figure out what that transition would be into the cutscene background needed to be adjusted for this section of the ride so we could see a nice silhouette of the tree and the

monkeys climbing it and the idea started we didn't have the background to support this and the idea started where there was a rock in the middle of the path and I just started placing foreground branches everywhere I was like wow my monkeys could go up here I guess and then that translated into the background creating the elements that we needed for where that monkeys ended up climbing we needed a way to guide the players eyes up so that would motivate that the cut for the cutscene so we had to constrain the camera at the end of player control so there was facing the right direction for the first shot of the cinematic this transition started with leaves falling which helped to guide the players eyes up and then we slowly started to constrain the camera to look up at the monkeys and that like I said motivated the camera cut normal gameplay allows for you to shoot your weapon but you

can't have your weapon enabled when you're not an elephant otherwise everybody wouldn't be trying to shoot elephants so it was disabled in this section but that was the first level that the elephants were in and when it got moved to another level the script er changed with it and so we had a lot of you know back and forth think oh where is that in script can we turn that off again please so we had to give the player some interactions during this very quiet ride you're with a character who doesn't want to talk to you and you can't get off you're stuck on this elephant so the player could choose to feed the elephant three times if they pleased or not you could grab the branch or you could not grab the branch and you had three pieces

of fruit on this branch that could be fed to the elephant rifles the first shot of the cinematic we hid Chloe's rifle I kept clipping through Chloe's shoulder and the elephant's back causing it to be very distracting to have it visible but we give it back to you at the end of the sequence once they stand up out of the water some actor choices in the cinematic proved visually unappealing this cut scene was emotional on the standalone results were great but once placed on a hairy elephant it looked like Chloe was resting on a big hairy butt so not very pretty to look at so this version was cut and we reshot it with direct given given direction to our actor not to take that position how do we land in an elephant pond as fluidly as possible elephants don't jump into the tanks

sodas height but does I needed a way to valve the player once we were in the pond and for a really long time this cliff was really high and the pond was really shallow so it took a while but eventually we made the cliff really low and the pond really deep plus tighter more cinematic cameras also helped in the final version what interactions can we have once we're in the pond you know people love petting animals especially baby animals and life and in games and in beginning we gave you the option to pet the baby so ultimately this was too silly and not grounded enough to keep in the game so I mean of course we can allow you to pet a baby elephant but as a herd of wild elephants going to let you pet their baby I don't think so so unfortunately the baby elephant was

not an option and that had to get cut the feedback we kept getting though was like everybody still wanted to pet the elephant so we added the ability to pet the elephant in the beginning of the sequence while you're riding her and if you attempted to pet the elephants the bull warned you to stay away we didn't give many other choices for interacts you either attempt to pet the bowl we we also wanted the player to continue on so by the time you arrive at the pond since this beat was essentially over we wanted you to keep going but this was the last interaction that we allowed it was a picture to be taken and stored on Khloe's phone so you can look at it later and it's a nice keepsake for the end of the moment take time to explore options within design and story if you take anything away from this talk it doesn't matter

how big or small your project may be moments like this take a lot of trial and error and test them and get feedback add to them and then make them up and then make them the best moments possible and if something isn't working try it again in a different way when try it again in another way and if it still isn't working then just cut it and move on a cute whimsical or silly idea like riding a wild elephant might get easily dismissed before it's tried so we continue to try a lot of different versions and then and had different ideas of how we could make this elephant a bigger part of this game mostly because people really liked the idea and it was fun and it was different it was also a fun challenge to solve with each version we got closer and closer we were never supposed to even get close to these elephants they were supposed to be a background animal so you just saw the development process of how this background beat became a quiet peaceful moment in a high paced action

adventure game so like this moment small background be always has potential for more development of course there were many more issues we encountered during this sequence but I only have 30 minutes if the sequence would have been possible without everyone at Naughty Dog who worked on this level beyond design story and animation there's of course our actors Laura Bailey and Claudia black our stunt actors are character designers TD's audio engineers programmers background artists effects artists production team QA focus testers thank you to our creative writer a creative director and our writer Shana Skye co-writer Josh a game director Curt Marga now lead designer James Cooper level designer Michael Barclay design scriptor Felix Park and lead animator al-madinah Soria thank you very much enjoy the rest of your time at GDC [Applause]