Happy Inside the Box: The Art of Old Man's Journey

[Music] good morning CDC hi I am supposed to remind you to turn off your noisemakers so please do that now and let's get started my name is Clemens Scott I'm the co-founder of a small studio based in Vienna in Austria called broken rules which was founded by these five guys actually the studio itself was founded by these three as Felix young and Peter who made a prototype of a game in that was nominated for the student award showcase' IGF in 2007 and after that they made a full game out of it and it was called

and yet it moves and it was done in 2009 which was also the time when our studio was founded and a short while later Martin and I joined the team and together as a team of five people we created two games the first one was a Wii U launch title called chasing Aurora and the second one was the PC follow-up called secrets of Ray Taccone that was released in 2014 I think and now a few years later Felix and me are working on a game called Altman's journey which is a game about an old man living by himself in a house on a cliff by the sea and he one day receives a letter and upon reading the letter he just packs his stuff and starts walking and as he walks play as he as he walks he kind of thinks back on his life and players find

out what happened to him that he ended up in this house and the gameplay what a game itself looks like this so this is the core gameplay mechanic what you do is you can touch the hills and shape them to create intersections between two hills and wherever there is the visible intersection between two hills the old man can jump from one hill to the other but when we started out with the game it did not look like this it looked like this and we had no idea of what the visuals were going to be for that game we had total creative freedom on how to develop this thing which is great but choosing a direction of a project that will dictate most of your wake time for the next two years and your financial future demands to be a really well considered decision right and creative

freedom is the reason that I that I decided to run my own studio but the more creative freedom you have or the more freedom in general the heart is to make a choice which way to go but luckily there are tools introducing the Box the box really is just a metaphor for setting yourself goals based on your own constraints and you can kind of use that to question or to test your own decisions or try to find answers to questions that you have about like where you're going to do go and how you're going to do it so this in and on itself is not a very particularly new concept and many people use it in project management management but it's also one of the the cornerstones of why old man's journey looks like the way it does and to us this has like sort of like three

main ingredients and that is the constraints that you have as a as a game developer and the goals that you have for the project and sort of the strategies that you will sort of how you will achieve those those goals so when looking at the constraints of broken rules for us as a team they're kind of like three things they wanna stand games that we want to make games that we are able to make and games to currently have a market and so the games that we want to make are things like they push the boundaries of the medium and they offer unique experiences and usually are not free to play games that we are able to make often have sort of a strong aesthetic and builds believable worlds that that players want to spend time in and the interesting one

is kind of like the third one and especially to where the overlap is so games that currently have a market do not push the boundaries of our medium at least not too hard and are also often free to play but with exceptions but the overlaps here are kind of like they they unique experiences and the unique aesthetics or the high production value so with these constraints in mind Felix and I set up the goals for what old man's journey was going to be like way before we were actually like producing the game when we're thinking about what are we going to do next what is what what is what do we want to make and we decided we wanted to make a premium high quality one-time experience type of game that connects with players on an emotional level that is not as common in games in our case our starting emotion

was sort of the sense of one the lust and wanting to to travel and be somewhere else and also we wanted to make that make a game that has a mass appeal without compromising our own artistic integrity also we wanted to make a game that is so beautiful it will stick out of the mass and make editors want to decorate their storefronts with it which means features for us and that is good we also wanted to make a game that is so accessible it can be enjoyed by a widely arranged demographic using the simplest form of input which is a single touch so he can move their old mine man by just pointing and clicking somewhere and you will walk over there and you can drag the hills but just touching them and finally we want to make a game for the so called reading look so a place that you sort of retreat to that way you kind

of read a book or have kind of like mmm no no time pressure to enjoy something so we decided we wanted to make a game that has about 19 minutes of playtime and about 15 levels so these were the goals but what what strategies did where we going to use to to achieve our goals so one of the one of the strategies that we thought we wanted to employ was to tell a simple story that everyone can relate to only using images so there is no text in the game there's no localization there's no reading all the story parts and the whole narrative is told through the old man's memories so at the end of each level it kind of sits down and rests and then thinks about his life and then one of one of an image an animated vignette like image like this

is shown in this case when he was still young and he went on a road trip vacation with his then future wife and the core theme of the of the narrative is the topic of family so we think that that family is a topic that everybody has some sort of connection to on an emotional level so if you have family or net not or whatever relation you have to your family there's some sort of emotional connection to that immediately so that was the one thing the other thing was that we decided that we wanted to align every single element every choice that we make in we wanted to align to an so-called emotional progression curve which is an idea that we took from that game company who did that with flour and and journey and that this emotional progression

curve looks like this in our case so at the bottom you see the numbers for for the levels and the line going up and down is kind of like positive and negative emotions and as the player progresses through the game this is where we're sort of like that this is the level of where we are in terms of positivity and negativity or happiness and sadness either the old men experiences but that is also reflected in in all of the puzzle game mechanics and and and the interactive elements and basically everything else so this was really useful for us to help pick the right environments and help pick the right landscapes and moods and colors for wherever we are it helped pick prototypes distribute different puzzles and cut content if necessary and it also made communicating with the team a lot easier because we could tell them what

emotions to aim for for whatever you they were working on and finally we also decided we wanted to build a world filled with whimsical details and rich interactivity so there would be all these things that you can sort of like touch and they were react and and and something would happen and and and and lastly which is a little bit of a no-brainer in a way but a sample of team of excellent collaborators which I'm pointing out here because one of those collaborators is Salone our pin and they are an animation studio that are partially based in Vienna at the same office as we are and partially based in in Lisbon in Portugal and they are specialized on visual narrative so basically telling story only using imagery and lip who is who's the art director of sort of woman being played a very important role in finding the art style for old man's

journey and that's basically it this is this is where our box is done in a way now we have all these components that we can then use to inform the decisions that we were going to make with the art style and that is a nice concept right but it still does not really explain how we got from this to this and that is still the same level right so this was one of the is the first level in the game and it introduces the players to to being able to switch between Hills so we all we had was this pink figure and this blue kind of like target market I tell players where to go and that was that and when we first only had these prototypes I started and and also when our box was not yet done I started making mock-ups for a game and testing out various things and since our game our previous game have been very much based on vectors it was sort of for me a

logical step to do something in vectors and the game was also based on these flat shaded shapes and it seemed like that would be a good approach because I came from a gameplay side of things so my ideas were always informed about you know I also by then already worrying about things like readability and that player would know where they would be going so this was another mock-up that I created and it also had the very first character design of the old man which was an egg headed potato nose bald clown with a tiny backpack and a jumpsuit and we yeah we pretty much realized immediately that was not going to cut it and so I played around with like different so in fact this vector designs and and kind of very stylized variants of this farmer guy or something that could be the player and we did not really know about the character of the

old man by then I was just kind of like playing around and seeing where we could go and so I kind of liked it did more sort of like this skee art mock-up type of thing that looked like this and it was also sort of informed by by concerns of the core gameplay like you could immediately read okay there are these hills and you have these intersections and that this is sort of like what's going on but there was no real emotional hook to this whatsoever because intersections are not like a good emotional hook for anything probably and so um we decided to hire a lip of Sauron our peen to come up with some some concept art for the for a game and his approach was was radically different so him coming from a cinematic background he did not like give two cents about readability or gameplay or whatever that stuff was he just you know aimed or his approach was all about like

vibe and the emotionality and textures and that suited much better for for what we had set out for and what sort of like our box was kind of like developing towards and it also had the the character of the old man which already kind of like pretty looks like like what it does right now but at the same time like when he was doing that we also came up we thought about like who the old man was and so we came up with all these kind of character traits about him and and the three main characters in the story and we could communicate that to lip and so he started sketching around and assembling like a couple of ideas and came up with this design which is pretty much what he looks like in game now this was pretty close to the to the final design so we were really happy with those results that he made but we felt we needed you know to figure out a way how to translate that into the game so we asked him to do like another

mock-up of something that was closer to the to the in-game thing and he did this and well we really liked sort of or I really liked the the textures of everything and and also kind of like the lighting it was still like very very hard to read and and there was still like technical aspects about it where we did not know how we would implement that nicly and this was kind of like the point where where lips experiences that or non-existing experience in making games started to become a little bit of a difficulty so I would I what I did it was to kind of like go back into one of our prototypes which looked like this and and try to apply some of those ideas that he had put on a table so in this case this is a level where players learned that you can drop down waterfalls they act like sort of like one way downward conveyor belts in terms of gameplay and again I was I was coming

from the gameplay side of things but but I tried to apply those ideas and and do something more kind of like painterly and textures and found the results pretty pretty mediocre and not very interesting and and I was kind of I felt like I just couldn't pull it off what he was doing and that my my skill set just wasn't it wasn't high enough so and since I was going to be the lead artist on the game we had to find a style that I could make work right so instead of something paint doing something painterly we thought okay well what would we you know what what could we do maybe what about 3d doing something in 3d so I went into blender and did sort of like this low poly type of mock-up thing of what that same scene could look like right so does we got the waterfall we got the three Hills it's it's the same scene built in 3d and we surprisingly like really liked the results

it had like for the first time it had like really vibrant nice color choices it was still kind of readable and that one of the things that we liked is that you get this instant lighting situation where you just place one light and all of sudden you got shadows and you get moved and this just kind of like came along with that and so we said we wanted to experiment with that a little bit more and do another one of those and and and and try to solve some other problems as we did that so in this shot the camera is pretty close to the to the player and so we decided we wanted to experiment with some more extreme distances like this one so that this dark gray Hill could be pretty far in the distance and maybe we could we could do something about that and one more thing that we were kind of like asking ourselves about was what would we would be doing with that blue flag but because we felt it was like a super gamey elements that we wanted to get rid of in

in the final game so we had to find some solution for for better signposting so players with nowhere to go because if you remove that flag and just present that was players nobody would know where to go right so I tried to tackle both of these issues and came up with this and again we really kind of liked it the colors were really nice and vibrant and it also introduced something that has been is still in the game today which are color hue shifts from from top to bottom so when you look at that yellow Hill for example it's brightly yellow on top and fades into this orange becoming green eventually and this is a concept that is still like throughout the game today and also it kind of like supported that emotion of wunderlist and and and you know seeing the distance and wanting to go there which we kind of like set up in our box so that was good and I put this little hillside village there to

try to solve the issue of signposting but it still lacked a lot of the details that we wanted to have and and sort of that would make it feel rich right and I did not really know how to approach that because I'm not really a good model at all so I would be super slow with that and I'm not really a good painter at all either so I did not know how no how kind of like to go on from there and at this point I stumbled across a music video called Latin voice which was produced by the animation studio and Cyclopedia pictura and I really liked that video so I started researching about who made it and about the animation studio behind that and I found the concept artwork by a guy called Isaiah Saxon and this image just really inspired me to go back to my own roots which is actually line drawing so that is kind of what I'm feel like very comfortable with which is something that I've always been doing so I decided to do the same thing just with line

drawing which then ended up looking like this and then I kind of just put it on top of that 3d mock-up using like the same colors and and came to this and so it was it was still like this similar to the mock-up but it contained the richness that I wanted to achieve actually it went a little bit overboard with it I aren't all these tiny details and and I really like that idea though you had these little workers and they're picking up their grapes putting them in their bags putting them on that under under on their truck driving off and you know it could immediately imagine all these stories of what was going on in this world and the sheep kind of like bumping around there and stuff like that so I liked that it had you know a good depth and and you have a good idea but the out that outlines also made everything a little bit too cartoonish form for my taste and also having characters in there for the first time sort of like introduced the the idea of

of scales really because on that first Hill the old man could be pretty large and very well readable but if as soon as he jumped on that second Hill he had to be about the size of those characters and jumping on the third Hill he had to be the size of that ball at the house or something and then the next one back there he would be like this tiny little dot that you could not even like see anymore so we already then saw that like distances like this are just not going to work in terms of gameplay and so we had to find some sort of middle ground and also like the next logical step was that if we are going to use this village as the signposting type of thing then logically the next level would have to play inside the village guess so what would that look like so and once again I came back to our prototype puzzle prototypes this is one

screen puzzle where players learned that they cannot shape the hills that they are standing on and so they have to move on those dark gray blocks that are they cannot be shaped they're static and so they're moving off that curve and then they can pull up that shape below and move up and finish the level and we had to find something that could be represented that could represent these dark dark gray blocks and with the idea of like making a village you know I had thought you thought about like houses or something with replace houses on there and then you would be like chomping on the roofs of the houses maybe that could work and so I rough Lee sketched a village with houses over the same scene and also decided in terms of like better better signposting i I wanted to sort of give a better idea of where players came from or where the old men came from and where he was going so I extended wrong

direction I extended that sketch on the top and the bottom because I wanted to give a feeling of the old man actually entering that village and then kind of like walking up and as he reaches like the top there's nowhere else really to go and there's this hotel so this is obviously kind of like okay this is I guess I'm here now for for a place that was a house thing but it introduced one more completely new thing that we have had camera movement or we need to add camera movement to make that work and before we had only like one screen single puzzles and all of the sudden we were like oh okay we can have like multiple scenes and the camera can pan around and zoom and you can have parallaxing layers and mind blown basically and but it also introduced like a whole lot of new questions and problems that we had to solve but that's that's sort of a different different topic but also the ideas for for all of these houses they didn't come out of

nowhere when Felix and I were talking about the sort of like making a level inside a village Felix came came with the idea of he proposed a Italian town called Cinque Terre and when I saw that image it was kind of like oh wow yeah I want to be there I want to be there right now you know it is so beautiful it's so vibrant it's it's great I'm going to take that as an inspiration for for our little mountain village and I started sort of like gathering images and assembling a mood board and of little cottage mountain villages and little street scenes and and houses and things like that and when you look at those images like especially the top two ones especially maybe the first one insect at the top right one with with this yellow house and then you look at this keine it's kind of similar I guess and like

the top left one the green one and then you look at this okay yeah pretty familiar there so these things obviously didn't come out of out of nowhere but they were interpreted in the style of the game so I did the sketch and I extended it even more to add like a bit of sky or a lot of sky actually because I thought it was good for the composition and it had that nice vertical bookmark like feel and started putting down some colors and at this point I showed it to Felix and we only had like the super rough thumbnail and he was like yeah this this is it I want to do that that is something already kind of like started dreaming about yeah this makes me feel like I want to spend time there and in terms of colors it's also already shows like the first sort of like compromise of what we did in terms of realism and and and and being natural in a natural believable

environment and that was that we kind of like used very very natural colors but for the hills use pretty magical colors because there are no low hills or red hills like that but they are within the rest of the color scheme and the rest of the color palette so they don't stick out too much but they're clearly readable and and since the one really magical thing in the games are the hills that you can shape them and just jump around it's also okay if they have sort of like magical colors that signalize them and so it is easy for for players to accept that fact so yeah I just started detailing that a little bit and added added some sky and at this point I basically call it done this sort of just was it we it was like the the benchmark of what we wanted to achieve and also the image that we use to communicate of where we wanted to go

but it still lacked sort of like the the amount of detail and we still also didn't know if we you know what was with that idea of doing stuff in 3d you know maybe that you know especially now that we have a moving camera you know and 3d objects that have actual perspective that could be really cool let's let's keep on experimenting with that so I blocked the same three houses in in blender and and slapped some textures on top of that and did a couple of hill textures and we put it in unity in a level and and we had this and while we kind of really kind of really liked the results but I felt I disliked it sort of like geometrical look and the very clean edges so we invested some more time into figuring out if we could come up with a shader that would imitate textured edges but I never really found the results to be particularly convincing the rest of the team did lean sort of towards the option

of doing doing stuff in 3d but I felt I had to give to the 2d version a better case because I actually added a lot of detail to the 3d model that that painting before it did not have so that concept thing looked like this so it was still a lot more simple and so I went back and added more details to that and came up with this this is sort of pretty much with what it is in game right now so yeah now I felt like they were sort of on par in terms of quality and we could not like decide which way to go which way to go what we like better and so we came up with all these pros and cons and lists of what it would mean to choose like one way or the other in terms of production and and what the pipeline would look like and what the possible problems could be doing it this way or that way and tried to gather as much information as possible to make an informed decision

and came up with the tie and we still did not know how to do it so we consulted our box and what did our box say it said we have experience making 2d games we have no experience making 3d games so that was kind of an obvious hint that we maybe should stick with 2d but I also thought that the the natural stroke of a painted line better supports the tone of the game and what we wanted to achieve but in the end it really ended up with being a gut decision that was still in like by the end we just said okay you know what let's just do it today because we feel better about it and that's what it but we still kept on sort of like experimenting from here here and there with with 3d elements so at the end of this hotel scene or at the end of this level there's the scene where this bus drives in and and we

initially like modelled it in 3d to see if it would be a cool effect that you could see the front and the back depending on where where the bus was in the scene but we never quite found figured out a good way to make it really integrate in the scene and so we just decided against using 3d mode models for most of the most of the game and yeah technically it still is sort of like a mixed technique because behind the scenes our levels look like this there are all just flat layers on top of each other going into the distance and here's another here's another level that shows what what the what it looks like behind the scenes basically so this is also one of the core ideas that informs the art style everything is flat and everything is stopped the stacked on top of each other and there's almost no real lighting in

terms of volume everything is sort of like top to bottom so this is easily viewing when looking at like a single acid like like a generic acid like a bush so the way it works is we have this basic clear sort of reduced shape add some some some darker bits some sort of shadow on the bottom some a little bit of lighter bits on the top and some details and add another layer with a little bit of a color shift and basically the same same details and then the third one and this sort of like gives you an idea of a bush right but there's no real volume it's just like three layers that's it and we thought that would work well but then realized that when we put that in the game we would need many different color variations of these bushes and saving all those sprites to the same sprites in different colors it's not a very effective way of doing things so

what we did was to make monochrome versions of that and create shader in unity that would color map two or three colors onto Entourage sprite and we could get pretty similar results with that but it could also make something like this or something like this if we wanted to so that was good and I still had to figure out like the overall vocabulary it is easy for me to break these things down right now but in reality to get to this point there was like a lot of experimentation involved involved and also kind of consulting lip from time to time in time so one time I when I wanted to come up with an olive tree and I really struggled with that I asked lip what how he would do it and he always had the idea of like very strong lighting situations and you know sharp shadows and and lots of volume but we could not really make that working game because if you have these strong lighting situations and you would shape the hill

the hill would sort of like have to dynamically adapt to the lights and and that was forest just technically very hard to pull off and we did not even have like an idea of how we would do it so anyway we proposed this as a tree and what I liked a lot of the ideas and again sort of like the textures and especially the trunk I had too much volume so I did my own version of that and I sort of like broke it down again into into those separate layers using this gradient like color changes and yeah we were really happy with how that looked so we split it up into different parts imported it to unity reassemble it there added some physics and we had bouncy trees and we were happy that was good so what about characters there's the same scene at the at the top of the of the level at the hotel mm-hmm and this

is my initial sketch of camp or guys sitting there playing his guitar waiting for his girlfriend to pick him up with the bus and it was it was okay but I wasn't really I didn't feel like it was according to the rest of the style rules that we were currently sort of like building and making so again I asked lip if he could give me some feedback on that and maybe make another version and this is what he came up with and this was instantly like 500 times better and he had clear shapes it had it had the the color variants in it that it was everything was a lot more flat and easy to kind of like split into different parts and animate it and it fit into the rest of the style so it was great so let's look at environmental design when we start at our level designs it usually is on paper and it's with sketches like this and this is one of the one of the

later puzzles where you use sort of like these rolling wheels to break through walls to be able to continue and that was the that was the mechanical side of things so then I sort of like wrong direction again so it's sketching on top of that and adding like more different scenes in that whole level different camera views and and sort of like trying to figure out what the landscape would be and adding stuff here adding stuff there and then I would take one particular piece of that sketch and do a new sketch and sketch it on top of that and like if you if you leave that like laying around for two days and you come back to it you have no idea of what is going on anymore so it is it is really important for was really important to pretty soon take those ideas that we thought out on paper and sort of make a little bit of better readable versions of that and this is not the same level right now unfortunately I don't have those sketches anymore but it kind of like

shows the principle of like already on paper trying to figure out what the landscape aspects of that specific level would be and what all these hills and things could look like and this is the point where you start thinking about landscape itself so of course that also means that the level design starts to modify a little bit because for things to work visually you have to push around some things move some things over there try to keep with the stick with the same idea in the core level mechanic but make it work visually so this was always kind of like a push and pull between me and Felix who Felix was the game the level designer and I am the decorator so to say who's trying to make things work visually and especially in the beginning where we did not really know which elements are going to work in which what we're gonna put where and and and there were still like all these questions and open ends this dis approach was a little bit more chaotic so we already had

puzzle prototype levels that already kind of like look like this and then I kind of like sketched over on that and then we flipped those around and put them somewhere else and it was a very very iterative process in that way and often what I did then was was to when when trying to figure out what the environment would look like was to assemble a mood board and set up like a basic color scheme of where where we wanted to go which was informed by our emotional curve and and and then kind of like came up with this mood mock-up sort of of where we are right now and then then kind of like do this overview a simple overview and start working on textures and trying to bring that into the level as we worked on the project those all those processes became more and more streamlined so later on we already exactly knew which puzzles were going to where we were doing a lot of play testing and we already what knew

better what worked and kind of like what the difficulty curve would be would look like so we basically kind of stitch together various puzzle prototypes to make one level and and and this is how I'm usually doing mock-ups for a single level now it's by going into internal level taking screenshots of each of each camera view in the level and then I stitch them together in Photoshop and I roughly sketch the landscape on top of that like already like digitally and also again in this case we are in the middle of the level so our emotional progression cerf is dipping downwards at that moment and this is exactly what the what the theme of this level is there are like a lot of waterfalls you start at the top and you go downwards and the theme of the level is basically

everything's going down and so in terms of of coloring that was also the idea of what we wanted to do that we want to have something like a brighter warmer top and as you sort of like move downwards a kid gets more blue and cold so now that I have the basic outlines I go in and put down the the main sort of like diffuse colors and make sure that no two Hills that connect anywhere have the same to the same color so it stays readable once everything is rendered and then I add some more details to those diffuse colors and and kind of extend the color range a little bit and then at this point or at this previous point by the way I'm usually also adding gradients and those those color changes from top to bottom which I did not do here for some reason I think

it was mainly because I was going to use the shadow layer as sort of a consistent way to change the colors and nails you can best see that sort of on the bottom two cliffs left and right the red and just sort of greenish turquoise one that it changed started from red something more purple blue and sort of like similar on the other side and so I added some some sort of adjustment layer with the gradient so I would get the effect from from the top being more vibrant and warm to going something in more blue and cool and I had it added a couple of trees to that and basically the mock-up is done so from here on we try to get this into the game and the way we do that is by first setting up the hill textures to get most of their like the big color blocks the big chunks into the level so

we will see what it will look like really quickly and the way I do that is that I set up textures that look something like this so I set up the colors I set up the shapes and what goes where I put that as it is into into the level to see if things work out with with the curves and if nothing really Coolidge's out and so I have this sort of like temp textures and then I pass it on to our our support artists who's actually mainly a character animator but also losing or doing a lot of the art and the rendering and he adds he does the rendering and adds adds all of the details to make it look good and before that when when all those textures are or most of those textures are in a level it looks something like this and once those are in I again go through all the camera reviews and and

take new screenshots and take those screenshots in 4k because our game is based on 4k resolution so it can be played on like a super beefy PC and but also it's actually a tablet game so you can play it on small resolutions as well but this 4k is our base resolution so I go in there and I start drawing sketching the props in that that I would then sort of like export and put back into the game so now I got this 4k screen shot and I put a single prop in there and that is now also sort of obvious but when we started out working like trying to figure out how we would make our 4k pipeline work we thought we had to like each texture actually had to be like four thousand by four thousand pixels which is not true obviously so they are in in the appropriate size according to this specific camera view and since we know what our camera views

are like we can set those up in the according resolution if there is ever a single prop in in two different camera views where one is closer and one is further away we usually choose the one that is closer depending on how much of you actually see so after that once that is set up I again pass it on to Brian who's doing the rendering and then we put it into the game and we do that with all of the stuff around that and at some point it looks like this which is pretty close to what it's going to be finally and I also go in to level and start adding all these objects manually like bushes and trees that can behave dynamically and react to what you're doing or you did sway in the wind so there are separate elements and I also add a couple of you know smaller rocks and and and details like that so this is the

basic process of how we build and decorate our levels but obviously doing a game for mobile there are technical bottlenecks and these are the major three bottlenecks are fail rate loading times and file size so fillrate basically is that you have a lot of transparent pixels on the screen and the more transparent pixels you have on the screen overlapping each other the more performance it will cost so we try to tackle that by by splitting the meshes into transparent and opaque parts so we are using a plugin for unity called sprite sharp which does that for us it splits all the sprites in an opaque core and sort of a an outline around that and that is that is important because both of them are then added in the level as

two separate game object and one is rendered with it opaque shader and one is rendered with the transparent shader so this basically looks like for example if you have something like a circle like this in unity it will actually create a mesh that it puts that texture on top that looks like this and the opaque core in this case is this and this will not like so even if you have opaque pixels but you render them with a shader that supports transparency it will cost performance so if you can render those with a different shader there's an opaque shader it will be a significant change in performance so how we have this opaque or and then we have to outline around it and this part is the one that is rendered with with transparency with alpha and this was like if we do the you do it for all the sprites in a level that was that huge huge huge former's increase that was the main

thing that pushed our FPS upwards and also one of the advances that we have is we have a very slow game so we can get away having 30 FPS in parts you don't really need 60 FPS for a game about us Oh men walking slowly through the landscape one of the things that I learned when when doing that when I was when I was painting my textures that I often did things like this and it's not really good to see so I did another show love that cranking up the levels this actually looks like this so there are all these semi transparent pixels somewhere and and when you put that in unity you get this and that is obviously not good so when doing that you have to make sure that the core actually is like you can pull up like with the circular marquee tool and make that part actually opaque another problem is of course loading times we have tons of textures it's super acid heavy and we use sprite sheets like many

other people as well it's a quite a common approach and we use level specific packing tags so only those oh there's nothing here there you go only those textures are loaded in in the level that we actually need and that generally works best with like small to medium sized sprites because the Atlas itself can't be larger than 2048 by 2048 so we have sort of like level specific acid sprite atlases and sort of like the the Atlas is used over multiple levels and finally for for the file size what we do is to generate acid bundles for various devices this works mainly on iOS and it doesn't matter really for PC because if you have to download 1.5 gigs that's alright but if you have like a tiny iPhone it's it's better if if you have like a smaller app size right and so what the app store has this feature

called app thinning and so we basically generate four different packages with different base resolutions where all the other sprites are kind of scaled down towards Pacific resolution create these four packages upload them to the store and when when you downloads the app sort of Apple knows which device you use and gives you the appropriate package so this is basically it I hope this gave you a bit of an insight into our process and and and how we work and how also like building a box can sort of like help you find an art style and make decisions but so a box is a great tool to help you do that but it can't give you all the answers so there's still a lot of manual labor and experimentation involved to to find the right solutions so also a box should kind of like always be a little bit flexible over thousands some a box that is like if your rules

are too rigid you kind of get unreceptive for for natural growth and opportunities so for example one of the rules is we have no text in the game but we actually broke that rule a little bit because we have these bits and pieces of French flavor text that we're never going to translate it's just on signs and things like that so and goals and constraints usually work best when they complement each other so constraints that contradict each other will stay contradictory up until the release of your game for example if you want to make a game about perilous but you you're sort of like constrain is maybe that you are going to do something about encouraging playful curiosity those two things might not mesh up together too well because every time players play fully and curiously to try something and they get a hammer over their head and die and have to restart again they're not gonna do that anymore so yeah I

think this is it thank you very much you can follow us on Twitter I'm also available for questions later on and one of the wrap-up rooms and yeah thanks for coming [Applause] [Applause] so any questions of the no good oh I have one question oh well I'm Morgan oh there you are hi the way you're using art and the kind of simplicity of the game mechanic reminds me a lot of other games that do that that seems Lee did keep me into the game the game mechanic seems to be there to keep me involved in the game it primarily to enjoy the beauty of the art style it's like it really becomes a work of art that can

exist over time and that time is expanded because of the game mechanic and the art seems to be them and in the news case the emotional narrative seems to be the primary goal which are things like trapper I personally love games like that is that something you guys would always is that something also that you see as primary goals or is it so so so the question is that if our primary goal was to create gameplay that would make want to spend people time in the game that's right your primary goal like to make and time with yeah a game yeah well well we wanted to make something in between sort of like like what this it definitely does have this experience first character to the game and we wanted to make or have a game mechanic that would support that but we always knew that the game mechanic around shaping Hills would never give really enough depth as a game mechanic to create really brain twisting difficult

puzzles but we were confident or we felt that it was just good enough to keep players interested but never frustrated so that is that is sort of the idea of how we wanted to design the game mechanically in a way and and yes it is it is about experiencing the story and experiencing the world the other thing I love about if it seems like the in case the game mechanic itself also becomes a metaphor that really relates to the narrative itself this idea of yes shaping hills reshaping and an idea of that how that relates to memory that memory is simple thing that never is specific and so yeah they're actually there is we tried to do that like as much as possible without like enforcing it and that it feels starts to get like rigid or cramped or feel like forced in a way but there is for example this one level where you have to move away hills and you dig deeper deeper deeper and he walks downward downward deeper deeper deeper until he finds that one memory

and that is sort of in sort of a metaphor that goes from the from the gameplay to the narrative so these ideas definitely where something that we consciously chose your mind if I love a lot Monument Valley on the games yes yes they're wonderful yes they were a big inspiration Thanks yeah all right anybody else yeah yes please [Music] okay yes so the question is if we had a deadline on in various stages of the

production yes would it so but we initially planned to only work 12 months on it now it is 14 months and we're still going to take a little bit longer to finish it but we are sort of within our timeframe but our pre-production phase took a lot longer than we initially expected all this experimentation and and iteration it took about five months and that but that is all working full time on the game so for example building our box think that took like way longer but there's something that needs calendar time that is something that you think about on and off and sort of like have it in the back of your head and then sit down sometime again talk about certain things or try to decide certain things but that took like six months before we even started actually like working on the game we were working grant applications and

budgeting and things like that and so out we do have deadlines and we do have an idea of how long things should take and we also make plans about how long we want to spend on things but there is a certain amount of flexibility especially like in a smaller studio we feel you need to be agile and things need to kind of like take their time to be able to sort of like grow and and and and kind of just sit there and develop themselves a little bit to does that somehow answer your question okay how long it is so the question is how long it took us until we had that like that final thing where we decided this

is how we were going to do it so that for us was was the pre-production for my face that took about five months but then there were a lot of like a lot of like the vocabulary and how we would translate it to all the other levels that definitely was still took a while longer and it's something that was also like sort of a little bit of an ongoing process as we went along like by now everything is sort of like all the questions are pretty much answered and we really can just kind of like produce that thing and draw the textures without having many questions anymore so but yeah the initial phase was five months and then the rest was kind of like long went along as we worked on it you're welcome all right I think we're we're good to go yeah you can just ask me afterwards somewhere and down the hall if you have any questions come say hello or oh yeah and you can also of course play the game at the at the igf

booth as well as at the unity booth if you want to try it so yeah thanks again for coming [Applause]