The Art of FAITH: Horror at 192x160 Pixels

[Music] i'm mason smith i'm an indie game developer by day i'm an animator but by night and from the hours of 5am to 9am occasionally i'm known as airdorf indie game developer so i made a game called faith faith is about fighting demons who possess the body of a 17 year old girl and then erupt violently out of her face by show of hands how many people have actually played faith i've played a little bit great um who here is interested in horror games indie horror games all right my kind of people for those of you who haven't seen faith or played it i'm going to show you all the trailer

[Music] is [Music] please all right so faith is the story of an exorcism gone wrong during the late 1980s you play as a young priest who returns to the house where it all began a year later to finish what they started so i released faith in october 2017 on itch and gamejolt in december of that year

faith appeared on ign's listicle of the best horror games of 2017. so i don't mention this to brag but rather to illustrate what my talk is going to be about today here's a character from one of the other games that made it onto the list and here's a character from my game sorry i'll only keep i'll only keep it on screen for a while for y'all there you go it's gone uh today i want to tell the story of how a retro inspired chunkily pixelated nightmare came to coexist in the same space as aaa horror titles that feature next-gen graphics first i'm going to cover the inspirations and research behind faith's visual design then i will review key design principles and processes that guided my work and finally i will share the results of faith's visual design and what i've taken away from my experiences so faith began with a single question that kind of drove my design

process and that was could i make an effective horror game using just the most basic graphics that i could think of could a game that looked like the oregon trail feel like pt holy grail of horror games in my opinion i gave myself this challenge right after the cancellation of the ill-fated silent hills project lord bless and keep it that was helmed by hideo kojima in collaboration with guillermo del toro and yes i'm still bitter about that everyone should be bitter about that raise your hand if you're bitter about silent hills being cancelled okay so i was and i still am mildly obsessed with pt it is my absolute favorite horror game and i wanted to join the ranks of indie devs who were creating what i call pt ware or spiritual successors for pt so visage or visage and allison road but i didn't have the funds or the time or the know-how to work with high fidelity graphics like in the fox engine or in unreal

so i decided to make a horror game that looked like it could have existed in the age of the apple ii computer or the commodore 64 or zx spectrum like it was a forbidden game that you loaded off of a worn out floppy disk that you had to ask around for so in order to set the stage for faith's visual design i need to take y'all back to the first time i ever got scared playing a video game i was really young i was at my friend's house and we were playing doom i don't know if y'all heard of it it was my first time playing doom and i was having a lot of fun actually carrying my shotgun around blowing away zombified soldiers when suddenly this fireball zooms past me and i turn around and far away down this long stretch of hallway i saw this i was horrified and i didn't fully understand what was happening i had to stop playing like i told him to take the controllers

um i didn't fully understand until what was happening to me until years later i heard this quote from the movie the blair witch project oh my gosh what the f is that um how many of y'all know what scene i'm talking about a few of y'all okay do y'all know what um you all know that they don't actually show what the character is reacting to but um what they were actually reacting to was a member of the cast and uh draped in a white sheet and wearing a halloween mask so i'm really glad they didn't show that but we were more scared but what we couldn't see than what was actually on screen and this quote became the golden standard and it's my favorite quote from uh from any horror movie it became the golden standard by which faith's visual elements were compared and the most important reaction i wanted to get from players i wanted them to scream this line because fear of the unknown it creates feelings of dread and dread is the golden nugget of horror game design and it just so

happens that pixel art especially from the second generation of game consoles and game computers has a high level of abstraction and that abstraction makes for a great medium for creating fear of the unknown so let's talk about face inspirations the story of faith's visual design is a story of constraints i chose visual design constraints that were inspired by second gen hardware i wasn't making a homebrew brew game so i was only approximating retro hardware limitations i was trying to nail a feeling rather than achieve technical accuracy so i chose a canvas resolution of 192 by 160 pixels because i read somewhere on reddit that was the approximate resolution of the atari 2600 and it's probably not true but i just ran with it and to me it was more important to pick something and stick with it than uh to be completely technically accurate with the retro aesthetic that i was trying to achieve

so i throttled the game's fps to 15. that helped me in the animation process and it made for an overall clunkier experience i worked with a limited palette probably no more than six or eight colors on screen at a time and i used a limited number of objects on screen that was completely arbitrary uh it was more getting the feeling down than an actual hard number so to give you all an idea this is a visual representation of the pixel real estate i gave myself for faith versus a game running at 4k can you all see that there should be like a on this side yeah that little orange square that's what i had to work with versus 4k i just want you all to appreciate how much pixel artists can achieve with so little 192 pixels by 160 is a six five by five aspect ratio which afforded me more vertical space than four by three or sixteen by nine and that's something that i kind of gripe about with uh modern game monitors it's so horizontal and stretched out and i get like field of view and all that but i kind of miss verticality in in our

sprite design and environment design so i really enjoy designing environments with a little more verticality in the scenes so fine art wise faith has a few big inspirations so my background is in animation so i naturally i've i've studied a little bit of fine art this was a big inspiration christina's world by andrew wyeth i i really like how the visual elements in this painting are minimally arranged and not that it's a minimalist painting but it's elements are arranged in kind of a sparse fashion there's lots of visual tension here and there's to me there's a sense of foreboding and it really gives me feelings of isolation francisco de goya happens to be my favorite painter and i really like his black painting series they're very macabre and they these scenes are pulled out of darkness to me the predominant color is is this black mysterious field and

that's why faith has a permanent black background for for the same reason and of course no good piece of horror wouldn't take inspiration from the art of manga artist junji ito hope i didn't butcher that name i probably did let's move on so from a research standpoint faith takes place during the satanic scare of the 1980s who did time in the 80s they did two years in the 80s okay um the rest of y'all listen up so that satanic scare the 1980s was a period of widespread paranoia about satanism devil worship and occult practices like the band kiss and and dungeons and dragons uh i wonder how harry potter would have done in in the 1980s i i wanted to recreate the world of the unassuming bourgeois middle class that was in the height of the decade of excess in order to do that i had to reject some visual stereotypes that we game developers have created about the 1980s first no blue and pink

neon cyberpunk cityscapes like that was in the 80s like that that wasn't that wasn't an actual thing instead i researched so no so i researched four floor plans and architectural drawings of big suburban homes with interconnecting rooms no deloreans who declared the delorean the car ambassador of the 1980s like how did that happen get out of here just give me a four-door sedan and i i said no to the 80s punk aesthetic just for this game um i wanted boring working-class adults who still dress like it was the 1970s and then forced their kids to dress the same way it's not the idealistic nostalgic vision of the 1980s that we've created but i think it's something a little more authentic because there's a dark side of the 1980s there's these things called pay phones and if you didn't have money then you couldn't call home and like there's no gps or way to kind of put yourself on google maps if you got lost or

or something so looking at my process the process of representing objects and characters from this era as pixel art it was more of an additive than reductive process so rather than take my reference images or an image and reduce it to my canvas resolution i would just start from nothing and i would pull that object out of the black background until it was just enough detail to be recognizable rather than taking away detail but with images so minimalist it was a challenge to not what i call over produce certain objects and environments oftentimes i would go back and actually take pixels out and take details out of a sprite or a scene that i created and i really had to just trust the charming nostalgic appeal of these old chunky pixels and simply walk away from working on a sprite once it was there once the representation was there

and then for the demon design these are just a couple besides keeping it ambiguous and creating that fear of the unknown just pulling off of really common things like spiders and blood were naturally disturbed by those things so adhering to gestalt principles helps tighten the composition of even the most minimalistic scenes here in these images i'm using the principle of negative space to imply paths in the woods that are meant to mislead the player without giving anything away you can actually get lost by following these paths so you can't trust them some more examples of negative space on the left i created a cramped space that is also isolated from the outside thanks to this large field of black this large amount of negative space around the environment the player wonders what is lurking around outside of that little window and the use of negative space on the right it creates anticipation and unease with the placement of those

sewing mannequins the player knows that something is going to happen with them because of how they are positioned relative to the player negative space is a great little technique to harness that feeling of unease and anticipation so arguably the most distinguishing visual elements of faith and the most popular are these rotoscoped animations that play throughout the game my inspiration was this critics accolade that i saw in the trailer for the witch in 2015. it feels like we're watching something we should not be seeing there he goes in my rash that became my rationale for subjecting subjecting the player to these animated sequences i wanted to shatter the expectations of players who were probably expecting something like the mini-games from five nights at freddy's so they were getting used to the chunky pixels and getting used to how things moved and how things worked there's something very unsettling about

suddenly switching visual styles on the viewer but much like these uncomfortably detailed close-up drawings from spongebob and other cartoons when i when i saw that i knew that i loved spongebob that was the moment it catches the viewer or the player off guard so these rotoscoped animations also had the effect of reaching out to the player again i wanted this to feel like a cursed game that was that was sentient and knew what knew about the player knew their fears like the game itself wanted to scare them and at the very least we humans are disturbed by images that fall into the uncanny valley we naturally get uncomfortable watching things that move like us and the animated monstrosities in faith have the this uncanny quality because they're based on real human performances it me

so there i am shooting reference for uh the stabby scene that's enough of that so having a little bit of stage acting experience from high school and knowing that no good animator starts an animation without shooting reference first i performed all the rotoscope scenes myself so here you can see me editing when i after i added the original footage i edited it to take out frames and mess with the timing to make it a little more unsettling so my process was pretty straightforward first i would wait till my wife was at work and then i would scale it then i would get in costume then i would uh film the film what i wanted to do and it's kind of therapeutic so after i was done filming the footage i would scale the original footage to my working resolution and import the frames into photoshop and convert it to

15 frames per second then i would hand trace the outline of the character for the cut scene and fill in things like like the face or any colored fields that i i wanted to have or any solid fields of color and on another video layer and then finally i would add things like facial features and other elements specifically to the character on another video layer and most of that was it was a little bit of key frame animation then filling in the in-betweens but mostly it was just straight ahead animation where i was just trying to make something grow out of a face or have you know blood dripped down from the mouth it was mostly just straight ahead stuff so using photoshop video layers it was a very non-destructive workflow that which i really appreciated as an animator i don't probably wouldn't have gotten these done with it gotten these done without it on average each rotoscope scene would involve 75 to 120 drawings

so the result was a disturbingly lifelike animation that brought the chunky pixels to life this is all me there's me my texas apron it actually required two shots there's me in a mirror so animating at 15 frames per second was a smart move really smart considering the amount of drawings i had to do our eyes have kind of our own kind of natural frame interpolation when we look at moving images or changing images this is something that richard williams and famous animator called the persistence of vision so our we produce an ocular after image when we look at a a changing image and basically one frame bleeds into the next frame and effectively fills in the gaps for us a lot of players remark on the smoothness of the animations when in reality they're running at a very low frame rate so talking about the results these are

chat messages from a streamer from a twitch stream someone who played faith so there are many ways to define success in indie game development for us horror game designers we actually have the added pressure of scaring the player on top of entertaining them so based on player reaction i think face unsettling visual design contributed to its effectiveness as a horror game so here's what i want you all to take away from this talk basic graphics can be scary of course a good horror game combines not only the visual elements but the audio and it needs good scare design needs good scenario and level design just like any game but if you don't have the means to work with cutting edge graphics or the time or the patience your visual design can still contribute to a feeling of horror i just stuck to one aesthetic and working within my constraints i had a lot of fun with it and i think it turned out pretty compelling

i should probably change the first point to basic graphics can still support your game's vision because the research and design techniques and the processes that i've spoken about can apply to non-horror games as well so the tech for video game graphics has gone so far into the future and i hope some consideration if possible can still be made for those of us who are stuck in the retro era second constraints can set you free free from creative block free from stylistic inconsistency and free from the expertise or time or funds needed to develop cutting edge graphics and i for one and i'm an evangelist for uh these retro inspired horror games but i still enjoy modern graphics and games myself and i there's definitely value in them but if you want to make horror games but are daunted by the skills gap of

creating good graphics then join us there's a lot of us we're growing we have scan lines we have dithering we have a fine polygon transforms retro-inspired horror is a thing and lots of indie horror devs are combining their design skills with the nostalgia aesthetic with terrifying results um you also probably know this by now this is fnaf uh none massacre by puppet combo is his he's kind of the king of playstation era throwback games uh paratopic which just one just one award last night and uh this one's called world of horror i really like this aesthetic so you can find me on twitter there's my email and if you want to support my work you can find my games on itch and gamejolt i released faith chapter 2 in february and i released my most recent game called the wind yesterday morning and it was actually i was on a deadline i was actually commissioned by ifc films

who released the babadook human centipede autopsy of jane doe they asked me for an oregon trail style horror game so there is a demand for retro grade horror and i hope i hope this talk was encouraging i hope this uh talk kind of illuminated the visual visual considerations that went into a retro horror game that could stand its own against triple a horror titles in some aspects thank you looks like we got maybe three minutes for questions oh don't leave me hanging exhilarating so now that faith and the wind i guess are out where do you plan to go from here are you going to work on something in the same style or branch

out from what you're currently doing that's a good question so you're asking what my future plans are with kind of my retrograde horror style that i'm in faith chapter 3 is eventually going to happen i wanted it to be a trilogy and but i would actually like to branch out of like the atari era or the second generation at some point maybe go into this new newfangled thing called the famicom or you know maybe this 3d graphics stuff with the the playstation area uh i've i really enjoy playstation 2 survival horror titles i think they have a charm on their own and i don't know how this happened but that's apparently retro now and uh i want to get into that eventually thank you hey i love the series it seems like because they're lo-fi you could probably like produce these pretty quickly right i'm sorry you can since they're kind of like oh phi you can kind of work on these and produce them pretty fast how long does it usually take you to make one of these okay so you're asking my production cycle so faith i was

working a day job and i had other commitments like grad school and so faith was just something i worked on here and there and it took about two and a half years to finish faith chapter two i was a lot more serious about and i finished it and the standalone demo in 13 months but it was not before i established a pipeline and kind of a discipline for how i wanted to constrain myself when enough was enough for certain sprites and environments uh ifc films gave me a turnaround of 10 days for the wind oh okay it it's it's about a five minute game but still ten days thanks thank you hello howdy uh do you continue to um at this point uh maintain your day job and uh do the five to nine am uh production cycle or is it that you've moved this to your primary focus okay so you're asking if uh i wanna eventually move into primarily working on

airdwarf games as opposed to my day job and other activities well i'm kind of kind of a family man so family always comes first and this might be for another discussion but the work i do i've gotten some notoriety but so far it pays for a little bit of travel and a nice date night every week but it's not something i can hang my life on at this moment and the taking the risk to do that full time is up to each individual right now i'm still doing my day job and then working on air dwf games when i can thanks hi thank you for the talk howdy so you mentioned you're an animator what was your level design pipeline like since it seems like you didn't have a background in that how did you know you were doing it effectively to scare your players so specifically what were my considerations with level design yeah okay that's a great question so i there's my timer um that's a good question i've played i watch a lot of horror movies i'm kind of scared easily in some

aspects and i uh i play a lot of horror games basically when i first saw my my first horror movie when i was like in sixth grade or when i played my first horror game which i think was resident evil 2 for the n64 i knew i wanted to do this and so what i do is i think of things that would scare me i personally am terrified of supernatural horror and kind of this religious horror not just christian but there's exorcism stories from other religions that would blow your mind they're insane i wish we would make more multimedia about it so my pers a lot of my personal tastes come into play i prefer a sense of dread if i watch a movie or play a game and then i drive home and i'm scared to look behind me in the back seat at night then i kind of log that away in the back of my mind i'm like i want to do something like that and sometimes it's hard not to copy directly from a movie or a game sometimes you can do it for homage's sake like there's a lot

of the exorcist in in phase chapter one i tend to drift away from jump scares so my pipeline is i plan everything out on paper and then i do my beauty pass which is just like graphics and then i do my overlay wall pass for things that are layered up on top of the player and then i do my collision pass where i kind of paint in where you're where you're not supposed to walk and then that gets thrown into game maker i use game maker and it all kind of the scares are a lot of iteration thank you so much yeah sure hi i just had a quick question so usually in games they're higher fidelity you go in and you do the block out with like very simple meshes and shapes uh did you do that with faith or did you kind of just draw a thing and know you wanted it to be that way like from the get-go that's a great question and just so happens when working in pixel art

you're already blocking things out because pixels are blocks and uh but but you bring up a great point uh i do have to do a lot of pen and paper stuff and often times i especially with chapter two i was very uh not sure of myself because it was a sequel i didn't want to suffer from sqlitis or turn it into a disney sequel where it was too much of the wrong thing you know and so i'll often plan it out on paper i'll write stuff out i'll write down dialogue and i'll let it incubate for a while move on to something else and i have a small inner circle of friends who are both good designers and easily scared and all run things by them and when it's just artistically it's just something that feels right and then i implement it thank you thank you okay thanks everybody