The Art of Dear Esther – Building an Environment to tell a Story

[Music] right so today I'm going to be talking a bit about uh the art of deer and the environment of the game and how the environments are an important part of the storytelling process of the game but I think the first thing I should really do is just kind of go over the concept of deester and some of the history behind it and its Origins just so that you can get a better idea of why the environments was such an important part of the storytelling process of the game um so deester started out life uh as a source engine mod in 2008 and was originally conceived B by Dan pinchbeck as a um an experiment to see what would happen if you uh stripped out traditional gamepl from a first-person game space and instead just try to use that space to do something different uh outside of the normal traditions of gameplay um and in this case it was just designed to see if you could uh use that space to tell like a deep ambiguous

story about a a dying man stranded on a herdan island um coming to terms with a tragic loss and to kind of tell this story just through exploring the environment and being absorbed in the in the the story itself um and as a research project it actually did pretty well it got released and it got 50,000 downloads within the first 6 months and um it gained quite a cult following in the modding scene and it's kind of around this time that I stumbl across cross it myself and um although I found it really captivating really inspiring I couldn't help but it wasn't feel that it wasn't quite fulfilling its true potential especially being built upon this idea that it's uh around exploring the environments and telling the story through the environments um so in the original Mod you had this fantastically engaging voiceover narrative that plays as you explore throughout the island and um that not only gives you glimpses into the protagonist past and his reasons for being on the island but more importantly

and more interestingly for me was that it gives you all these glimpses into the history of the island itself and its past inhabitants and all the various plagues and misfortunes that have that have plagued them throughout the history of the island and um for me this was this is the most interesting part of the experience because all of these little bits of information that were coming through in the voice narrative were really helping me to build this world in which the story takes place um but the problem I saw with the original Mod was that this kind of visual detail that was coming through the this audio detail that was coming through the narrative really wasn't being represented with the environments uh and as a result there was this kind of real disconnection between the visual experience and the auditory experience um and as an environment artist I kind of felt really drawn to this project because I felt that you know I had this theory for a while that you know the backdrop that the environments their games shouldn't just be just a backdrop a passive thing

in which a game takes place and here I saw a great opportunity to make the back make the environments more of a backdrop uh and make it like an immersion tank to really draw the player in and make it integral part of the storytelling process um and today I'm just going to take you through some of the processes that I went through uh in order to achieve this and also some of the philosophies and some of the lessons that I learned along the way um and I think one of the most important lessons that I learned that really sort of made the impact on me as an artist and the project in general was early on when I was kind of wrestling with the idea of how was going to create this really immersive World um and I kind of started out into the slightly naive belief that you know in order to achieve realism in order to achieve immersion you needed to be as realistic as possible you need to create this like really believable World um and at the time I was working with the source engine and as some of you may or

may not know it's it's not particularly designed to work with large outdoor environments and as a result I kind of ended up having to cut out any normal Maps any fancy shading and it went straight back to only being able to use diffuse maps on the textures um and as a result in some of the early art tests which you can see here the terrain just looked really flat and unconvincing and just it became quickly apparent that realism just wasn't going to happen um and in retrospect this probably one of the best things that happened to the project and myself as an artist because it really forced me to go back to the drawing board and kind of reassess what this idea was what really made immersion and what the qualities were that made immersion um and I kind of started looking into other mediums and more more uh prominently paintings and just trying to get some inspiration and see see if this this kind of immersive quality was evident anywhere else and um I started

to be drawn towards this kind of impression stick style of painting um there was just something about it something about this mix of the real and surreal this detail and perceived detail that you see in some of these paintings that I thought really mirrored sort of dear Esther's strange and ambiguous story um but not only that I found some of these paintings like so atmospheric so uh immersive and so so absorbing um that I I really just felt inspired to kind of take just just to study these images and try and take some of the qualities that made these uh made these images even though they're not representations of photo reality um and adapt that into my work to see if I could create this kind of immersive quality in it so the first thing I tried to do is just kind of Identify some of what I thought were the key qualities of this impressionistic style and for me it was kind of this really strong sense of lighting that kind of creates the atmosphere in some

of these paintings these kind of like soft colors this like really soft lighting and I really like this idea of evoking emotion over recreating reality so only creating enough detail and enough Fidelity within the image to kind of bring across the the impression of that scene the emotion of that scene and I also like the idea of using the color palette to reinforce this kind of emotional quality and get this the atmosphere mooded just through the colors and the and of the picture um so I went back to my original art test and I tried to adapt some of these qualities into my work and just tried to make it a lot more softer and I made the lighting more ambient and just just I kind of embraced this kind of flatness that was there before and tried to make it a lot more paintly and style and already it was starting to come together and look a lot more of a beautiful interesting place to explore and this kind of really inspired me to to continue on later on in level and development when I realized that

breaking three of these boundaries of this realism really allowed me to play with the uh some of the designs of the island and the colors and the and the the the kind of symbolic uh uh imagery that's in there which I wouldn't have been able to do uh being stuck inside this kind of realistic uh realm um and it really helped towards the end of the game where there's this kind of real Twist on the on the story and Things become a lot more dreamlike and surreal which I'll come to later in the presentation but just to sum up this point I really felt like I learned that kind of realism isn't the holy grail for immersion it's it's in fact realism doesn't have anything to do with it it's not the Fidelity of the content that mattered at all to me it was actually it turned out that it was the message and experience that you betray through the content that really matters in terms of immersion um so speaking of that content I think I should really just quickly talk about um how it was built to

connect the story back to the environment um and I think the best way to do this just kind of show uh an example scene from the original Mod and show how it was built up and and improved upon in the remake and some of the most important steps in the process in order to kind of build this connection back up um so here we got scene from the original Mod in which the narrator references at several points in the story um where says he describes a shipwreck in the bay and the pollution that's been caused to the island and the Damage Done by it and also the various supplies that he's looted from it um and it's a really good example of where the narrative details didn't match up to the visual details where there was this kind of real disconnection between the auditory experience and the visual experience um and it was also an area that had that ended up having a huge potential to expand upon the story just through the environment and just through this one narrative detail

um but first the connection really starts at the the beginning of the of the the kind of building of this terrain at least it did for me because in my mind this terrain is kind of like the stage in which the story takes place so this I I like to think of a certain certain amount of things that to do before I well while I'm uh uh designing the environment so for me I wanted to create something within the terrain that would be unique to this aspect of the store story um and in this case I wanted it to kind of frame it within the story so that when they when they talk about the Shipwreck they could identify it within the environment um and not only that but I wanted to expand upon the game experience as well so I wanted to expand upon the idea of exploration and offer something that was interesting to explore and I kind of came up with this idea of these huge uh sand dunes that just stretched across the bay um just to make it a lot more interesting to explore and just kind of give it a use the the Shipwreck this un unique

identity when it eventually comes in and this comes in in the next stage where you start to add in the details and this is the stage where you really start connecting the story to the environment or at least I did um as you can see in the in the small corner there you can see the a picture of the uh original scene from the mod and you just have this kind of little troller with a few boxes floating around it which represent the pollution on the island but here I've really tried to up the scale of the of the scene really try to make it the more poignant dramatic aspect of the story um just so that the environment is really uh you know it becomes an integral part of the story within the environment there um but not only that I just made sure that the details of this piece were actually consistent with the story as well because this can be a real immersion breaker if you don't really think about these kind of this depth within the uh the the art of the environment so in this case um it had to be a fairly recent wreck uh in order for the pollution to still

have at hold and for their supplies to still be salvageable um but going Beyond this I actually expanded upon this aspect of pollution um to try and expand add depth to the story and I did this by just making the pollution caused by it just evident all over the island so it infests the soil the sand and the grass and it's just everywhere and it really emphasizes the the the feeling that this island is kind of this miserable place this un unpleasant place to inhabit um and again I just expanded upon this IDE DEA further by um adding in other shipwrecks to the island um some of them more recent and but more importantly some of them much much older um and what this does is just to suggest that you know the these shipwrecks these kind of disasters have been plaguing the island for hundreds of years and just adds adding depth to that one narrative

detail um and again just building upon this this idea that the island is this really cursed place um and what these details do is just add consistency to support the reality of the game World the reality of the story and so it's just it's it's more about building a past as well as a present um which I think is a really important thing um and finally I just decided that uh later on in the development to um try and connect the protagonist to the island the the character that you're portraying in some way through the environment and I started to add in all these little small details that connect to him um that are randomized and just just serve to reward the exploration aspect of the game so every time you play it you get slightly different objects spawn um and these just serve to offer a connection to the protagonist past and these are just a few examples of some of the items that you can find just around the Shipwreck area so you've got like the jaws of life partially burnt car seat and a

defibrillator these are all kind of slightly out of place and they just serve to to kind of Link back to his past to kind of like give you a glimpse into this tragic event that led him here in the first place um but there's also other details that are outside of this as well that kind of expand upon the story that's not portrayed throughout the uh the narrative itself uh for example in the lower left hand corner here you have like some burnt divorce papers and uh foreclosure on on a mortgage um and these kind of just serve to to kind of offer a slightly different interpretation of the story and the background behind it um so the reason for doing this is kind of to make the protagonist not just this presence on the island so you're not just this person just floating around but you're actually part of the the history of the environment as well it's kind of like making him part of the island itself

um and I think this just moving on from that just a little bit I just want to talk about one one other thing that I thought was really instrumental in in kind of bringing the immersion of the game up to a to a whole new level um and it was something I almost missed um as I was pretty much through the second level of the game um and I was the whole world everything was really coming together the story was really really becoming connected to the environment but there was this real invisible barrier this real disconnection between the visual experience still and I couldn't quite figure it out and one day I had this screenshot open and I was just kind of looking at it and just thinking well it looks fine I can't really figure out what it is and I picked up my mouse and I tried to move it around this screenshot and I was like At first I was like okay this is just caffeine deprivation but um it suddenly occurred to me that the reason I couldn't discern this between the actual game itself was that everything was just completely static there was no feeling of dynamism

in the world there was no feeling that this was a living breathing space and this was really I think what would this last disconnection was was being caused by and so hopefully this will work um play video okay ah here we go yeah so I started to add in all these like little random elements to kind of really bring in this movement and this organic feelings of the world so you got this wind blowing and the grass blowing in the wind and you've got all these leaves being picked up by that and you've got the kind of cloud scrolling along the sky you've got the the water flowing into the bay you've got um the waves splashing against the shore you've got Mist uh evaporating from the from the water you've got all these different El that kind of create this

this kind of real organic feel to the world and it just makes it much more it made it much more of a believable World it just really it really just jumped the immersion level up massively um and it's just I think it was such an important part of of really making it the world uh this kind of believable place so finally there's just one last thing I think I should talk about um and it's probably one of the more complex things that I I use to tell the story within the game and it's something that called subliminal sign posting so subliminal sign posting is just quite simply a way of using the environment to unconsciously guide the player through some of the more figurative aspects of the story which are not directly conveyed through the narrative um and the most of these sign posters can usually be symbolic in nature you can use them to kind of navigate the player around the environment which is kind of the more traditional way to use subliminal signpost so like using the aerial to to guide the player in the right direction

but I've used them a lot more I think a lot better examples are some of the more symbolic ones and these are used to kind of portray some of the uh some of the protagonist's kind of state of mind his thought his feelings his memories and emotions and really build upon the possibility of the island or parts of the island being kind of unreal or a delusion uh of his imagination CED up in a kind of fever or kind of a Purgatory um and I think this is most prevalent during the C caves level of the game where the protagonist is kind of at this height of his delusion he's broken his leg he's got this infection and he's been taking all these painkillers and he's kind of reached this Crescendo when he descends into the caves and I really wanted to create here like some kind of subtle break from the physical reality of the previous levels and kind of make it more of a symbolic Journey for his own body his own mind um and his inner psyche and just as because he it's it's a turning point in the game where he kind of comes to terms of the events

that happen um which I thought was really fitting so as a result there were really number there really quite a number of uh prominent subliminal signposts here um and so for example in this in this level in one of the first scenes you come across one of the first rooms you come across is this room here and this is just really representative of his heart which is one of the most important things of the story it's motion it's the it's the turmoil um and it wasn't supposed to represent in any kind of literal sense or physical sense it's just there to serve to make an impression so this this this kind of like very loose colors there the colors the shapes and everything like that are really designed to just bring this impression across and I think in this case I chose this one cuz it's a little bit more literal if you focus on the blue colors uh in the scene you get this kind of very loose blue outline of this kind of heart shape um but later on it can be even even more subtle than that um and you've got other areas such

as this this kind of is towards the end of the caves level where you kind of go into this cave and there's all these writings and stuff around the walls this is really symbolic of his kind of inability to figure out the events that happened this this kind of fractured state of mind that led him here and his kind of tormented mind and the infection and various other things and It All Leads up to this this probably most poignant scene in the game which is kind of like a mix between uh the kind of literal sign post posting and the the symbolic sign posting I mean it's literal in the case that you've got this kind of it's hard to see here but it's just like this car wreck um but it's symbolic in the fact that it's submerged beneath the bottom of the ocean and it looks like it's been submerged for decades and it kind of Representative of his kind of uh repressed memories of this this event and is coming to terms with these memories so it's a good example of where the environment can kind of really represent these kind of thoughts and feelings and I think the last really strong image

comes uh at the end of the caves level when you're exiting out and you're exiting into the next level um and this whole room is just designed to look like this giant eye and you're going through the iris of this eye and it's it's you know again it's not not completely literal but in this case it's it's kind of been more literal but it's it's very symbolic of this kind of exit of the uh of the inner psyche and back into some kind of reality um and it it it's it's I didn't want to create this kind of like really surreal like literal representation of all these things in a level I didn't want to do kind of a max pain event where you're following a trail of blood around I still wanted to maintain the reality of the game world that I built up so doing it in a subtle way really kind of just creates this uh idea that that people can interpret it however they want they might take something else away with it and they might just think it's a case but at the end of the day it's kind of it's a nice way to communicate the emotional aspects of the story so yeah just to

conclude um I I really believe that choosing an art style shouldn't really be an aesthetic Choice it should really be a choice of being able to Define your experience and support the goals within that experience and it can also open opportunities for you to communicate with your audience in new and interesting ways um and in this case choosing the impressionistic style really allow me to express the uh unreal and The Surreal aspects of the story really play with with that within the environment but not only that but it's it's not just about creating a physical landscape um for me it's also about creating an emotional space in which the player can navigate and using that space to really Define The Experience um so all these details the small the large the the the literal the figurative um are really the the the glue that adds depth to the story and the environment and uh really helps to create this immersive world that's full of mystery

just waiting to be explored um and if there's any questions hopefully I've got time um thank you