Pode, a Rose Painted Adventure

[Music] thank you so much for coming i wasn't i mean friday morning after this week it's it's amazing that anyone can get up this early at all um i'm involved and i run a small studio called henchman and goon out of norway and last year oh by the way uh if if you can turn off your your uh noise making devices that would be great um yeah i run a company called henchman goon and last year we released our game pode to nintendo switch and we just launched on ps4 last month uh one of my main tasks on pode was art direction and that's what i'll be talking about today for the most part but first i want to show you our launch trailer so you can keep what i'm talking about fresh in mind

[Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music]

there we go okay um so i'm going to start at the very beginning when we were developing code we had some guiding principles that we stuck to the idea was to make a family friendly game not not necessarily a children's game but a game children could participate in playing and not and enjoy without feeling left out or unable to contribute we wanted to stay clear of any negative action even even on violent games today have you destroy objects for loot or materials and but we wanted everything

to be about growth and positive actions so that meant no negative impact on the game world and everything you do as a player should be about adding something to your surroundings we wanted a relaxing game which meant we had to stay clear of any stressful situation so there's no time pressure no enemies no danger and no dying in our game we wanted we wanted to be accessible to anyone regardless of age location or level of education which meant no text and no speech we wanted the game to promote positivity and compassion to connect people and make them want to help each other and lastly we wanted the possibility for asymmetric co-op when playing with kids or inexperienced players these guidelines had a big impact on the visual direction that we took having a slow-paced game where people spent a lot of time in one place solving puzzles meant the surroundings had to be interesting and engaging it needed to be bright positive eye-catching and interesting to look at it had to be a pleasant place cozy and

relaxing a place where you'd want to hang out and we wanted to give it a feeling of mystery to push the player to explore make them want to know more about the world and characters and background the asymmetric gameplay meant the less active player needed stuff to do they should be able to interact with their surroundings not just for puzzle solving and things had to feel alive and it had to be fun and interesting during down time we wanted them to be able to play around with the world twirl in the grass splash in the water and paint in the world as they played the world also needed to reinforce the positivity of the theme and morale of the game we did want mystery and secrets but nothing scary so that had to really come through in the atmosphere we wanted interaction but without negative results so anything you make happen in the game should give you a good feeling and we wanted there to be a positive change from start to finish give the player the feeling that they had a positive impact on the world so when you start a level it's dull and

barren but when you finish it's lush and colorful and it feels inviting we didn't really have a clear idea of what pode would look like and the early concepts didn't have any particular direction but one thing that stayed consistent are the characters they are the focus of the game and for the story to work we needed the player to feel connection to them as we explored this cute cartoony style started to emerge but we still didn't have a clear direction so we kind of turned to games and movies we like for inspiration and what stuck out to us was the cultural influences that you see in a lot of things for example you see a lot of japanese influences in pop culture today and this sort of had us switch our focus a little bit and and look at our own culture and maybe try to build on that so history time i love history time it's fun since the viking era norway sweden and denmark have been in and out of unions the latest union involving all three was the kalmar union which ended in 1521

when sweden withdrew and elected their own king and the danish king and nobles decided that norway should become a dependency of denmark so fast forward to 1814 denmark was forced to give norway to sweden due to intricacies of the napoleonic wars in norway unaware of the treaty between sweden and denmark was pissed off which prompted the writing of our own constitution leading to full liberation in 1905 and the importation of a danish prince to be our king and backtracking a little bit norway went on a quest for its soul in the mid-1800s the national romantic movement in arts was big in the nordics but in norway it became more it became about figuring out what is act what is actually norwegian what were we without the influence of sweden and denmark and it's been an important and defining era in norwegian cultural history which is still very present today in both art literature architecture and politics

so going back to my previous points we now had something that fit all the criteria with set for the visual design it's bright and colorful it's eye-catching and it's interesting to look at it's pleasant and cozy the motifs are relaxing and the environments are beautiful it's mysterious especially the the landscapes you kind of want to enter them and explore and there's almost a supernatural atmosphere to them so finally having a solid direction we started going deeper into the material to identify the main visual characteristics of the era and we found four cornerstones to build our visual design on you have colorful swirly plants and flowers which are found in rose paintings embroidery and carvings we have evocative natural environments with a fairytale-like atmosphere a maximalistic expression i mean everything is in abundance and excessively ornate and there's a lot of fine detail you see this in art jewelry

and everything as well as everyday objects so having our foundation we now needed to look at what challenges we would be facing apart from the obvious challenge challenges of building a super detailed organic growing and ever-changing world the two things that had the potential to get us in some rental trouble were that we were a very small team and we had very limited time and money to make our game at this point the company had just split in half so we started the project with only four people and due to the split we and that we wanted time to work on on game development we had drastically cut down on contract work so we certainly had some challenges to overcome during this project none of us had been doing this on a big scale before so we had to figure out everything as we went eventually we did find the funds and we were able to grow

our team to seven but that's another story anyway we didn't want to scrap the game or stray from the core idea so we needed to find ways to efficiently produce a lot of content in as little time as possible the most important thing we did was to create modular world building and decorative assets we made a small set of generic assets for the entire game including walls floors filler plants and some decorative elements and from these we created multiple combinations some of them generic and some of them level specific then we had a small set of level specific plant assets to give each level its distinct look mushrooms and pine cones for the pine woods level and cloudberries and cotton grass for the birch woods and so on and so we did the same with textures we had some generic textures with a few variations and level specific textures with different colors and patterns and this approach makes each level feel new in spite of the reuse of assets

unique floral and crystal combinations give each level the feel of its own shape and texture the combination of generic assets and level specific assets give the impression of a much bigger variety than there actually is and the unique color scheme for each level reinforced the idea that when you enter a new level everything is completely different from what you've seen so far another thing we did was to make small playable areas there are nine different levels in the game all based on different parts of norwegian nature and each level is split into smaller rooms varying the size of the rooms prevents the feeling of repetition so going from a tiny room to a more open one shifting from moving in depth to moving horizontally or vertically completely closed in rooms versus open area ones always keeping the navigational space relatively small but giving the illusion of big open bottomless spaces sorry the small the small size means

there is less repetition in use of different plants and combinations so we could create variation in flora not only from level to level but also from room to room introducing new level specific plants and crystals and combinations the further into a level you go makes it feel like the world is constantly evolving throughout the game having a fixed camera made it easier to have control of floral compositions all compositions are set up to grow in a pattern relative to the camera this gives a less random and more decorative feel emphasizing the influence of traditional rose painting which would be incredibly difficult to pull off if the player could view the compositions from different different angles having full control of what the player would see at any given time made optimization easier as we could limit the use of growing and moving objects and it's what allowed us to do grass the way we did as well it looks absolutely horrible from the wrong angle and it's nothing but visual trickery that makes it look

lush and and beautiful it also opened up for extensive use of fake lighting all the bleeding volumetric light in this game is fake it's all just transparent gradients on on planes and these are also used to create color gradients in some places as well as shades and vignettes and this only works because we have 100 control of the angle it's seen from when it comes to animation we face some issues getting the growing right was very important for our idea to work there was no point having a living growing world if it didn't move or feel right and this became a constant battle between optimization and our visual goals we had growing moving stuff absolutely everywhere so even in the smallest levels we had latency issues most objects were okay to work with we could just use scaling and a bit of rotation and this worked for crystals moss small flowers and all kinds of rigid objects where we just used simple low poly

models and no animation sorry no idle animation plants and combinations were a bit more tricky we had a lot of swirly plants and rose painting although it has no animation the dynamics of the paintings makes it easy to imagine the movements they should have it needed to feel like it was growing in an organic and natural way we started out with a lot of morphing objects but luckily we discovered that this was only necessary for a few things and combined with scale and rotation that it gave the impression of natural growth so for this the amount of objects actually worked in our favor which was nice for a change and combined with the speed of growth it helped the illusion as you never really focus on one single object we use the same approach for idle animation um where after our plant has grown we switched it from from a dynamic object to a rigid object with slight rotation just

to give the impression of constant movement in life and this had a massive impact on latency issues as well for plant and crystal clusters we started out with everything being separately triggered to grow we figured we wanted we wanted people to move around and kind of just like make everything grow as they went um but we we kind of discovered that this wouldn't work with large collections of plants and we wanted we wanted control of how the combinations grew and looked and for it to be less of a hassle to for the player to grow everything in a room so we decided on using a few triggers spread out through each level to set off a cascading bloom and we created a tool to set up our growing objects in sequence this also let us control the timing between each step in a sequence so everything could be perfectly timed the grass is a combination of single triggers and sequencing to give the player a bit more freedom so if you trigger the grass

and stay still it'll keep growing but the spread is slower than the character's movement so if you move around while using the glow ability you'll get to paint it in yourself all these things combined gives the player the impression of full freedom to grow the world but with us having enough control so so the world feels cohesive and everything grows with a nice flow so what did we learn from making code it's been a very steep learning curve for us being a small and inexperienced team and we certainly made our share of mistakes along the way some of the things we're taking away from this is you need to work smart streamline your pipeline because with a small team there is absolutely no time for idleness make few and reusable assets you really just need enough variation not to hinder the creative process or make the game feel repetitive you need to be constantly cutting everything not vital to your core goals i mean the the phrase kill your darlings is cliche for a reason right

you simply can't create uh quality content if you don't have the time or resources to do so you have to be ruthless build your game with a machete focus on what's most important and perfect that you have to make sure not to lose track of your goals visual design is really just a tool to help tell a story and for us it's a growing evolving world telling the story of a growing friendship and evolving emotions our increasingly detailed and beautiful world mirrors how empathy selflessness and cooperation makes the world more beautiful and thus scary and entering into uncertainty together may reveal things about yourself you didn't know and lastly fake everything if the player can't see it by bother so by trying our best to follow these rules in the end we managed without mentionable resources to create a finely detailed excessively decorated world with a distinct recognizable look that sets it apart from other games and that we feel helped tell the story of our two star crust friends

and that's it thank you so much for coming to my talk i think we have time for a few questions yeah so if anyone has any questions for me i think we have microphones on either side of the or in either aisle here okay have a good day everyone a question okay um i was curious since um everything's about like the growth of plants um how your approach to like differentiating uh levels from each other through color was since it's uh since you're probably going to tend towards staying towards like greenery how you work within that to differentiate so we like i said we had there were the nine different levels and each of those are based on different parts

of norwegian nature so we have kind of a level that represents the fjords and we have one representing the high mountains the glaciers and stuff like that so what we did was taking our color schemes from each of those areas and and kind of finding what is unique to that area and how can we how can we use the color scheme on our already existing assets to to make it to to have that come through in the game thank you yeah yeah hi um how long did it take to develop the game from start to finish and how much of that time was spent on the pre-production in the art style um oh so we started the game in june of 2015 so it took roughly three years for the entire thing to be finished and to be honest it was being such a small team being only four people in the start it's a lot of back and forth between all like finding a style starting the production so so it's it

everything was sort of parallel for the first few years um and although we had we had the the direction that we wanted to take it was it was kind of a long way to get that to finally kind of nail that look so so it's a difficult question to answer because it's not like the first three months are a prediction yeah cheers okay well thank you so much for coming and remember to fill out the evaluation form that you should have gotten on your email already and good happy ddc everyone