The Art of Journey

[Music] um welcome to the art of Journey thank you for coming um all right cool um so have any of you guys play Journey yeah right on that's cool all right so um I'm Matt Nava I was the um art director on this game I uh joined that game company on flower and um this game I was on from the very beginning so a really fun experience um so today we're going to talk a little bit about um the kind of ideas behind the character creatures Landscapes architecture and the sequences in the game um and how we got to the final uh look so this is the character um as you know him um or her or it and um you might be surprised to know that one of

the earliest drawings I did of this character actually looked like this um very different um this drawing the very beginning of the project goova and I talked about this idea of U characters that could communicate without language and so one of our first ideas was to have them communicate with their eyes only so I drew this character with big eyes and that didn't work out so um so we moved on and we had this idea of cloth um in the world so I drew these a lot of drawings um of these characters who had cloth all over them and um I really wanted the character to be dynamic and jump around so I drew them jumping around and generally waving their cloth around um so this is kind of in the very early stages I did this color piece to kind of get a mood um feeling of the game and this is a one of the cloth clad characters and in the

foreground you see this kind of giant snake idea so the snake the floating snakes that you see in the game um were kind of an idea from the very beginning um but the style kept changing and one day I drew this drawing um which I think really set the tone of the game this was done in the first couple weeks of development and really kind of helped the team get a sense for the mood of the game we wanted to make and the character on the left um the mask that he's wearing is kind of very similar to the final mask that we ended up going with so we took this character this is one of the First characters that we um built in 3D and animated for the game and you could actually run around in the game as this guy he had like 25 animations or something so he could fly around and jump around and do all sorts of silly stuff we also did a 2d prototype um so I did these guys and they're super fun um yeah it used to be

that you could change your color in the beginning of the game because we thought that people needed to be able to tell each other apart via color so but that idea changed so um when we first uh pitched this idea of this game to Sony we made a animated trailer and it had this character and I'm going to play that for you so this is a very early version of how the game might have turned out see if this works [Music] e

[Music]

so um you might notice that that music that was in that trailer is actually exact same music that is in the first trailer that we actually um announced the game with Austin winry the composer um he came up with the theme like on the first day was kind of crazy um gu's amazing so um that trailer really helped us get the game started in terms of its design and from there um I wanted the character I I wanted to iterate on the character and make it better and one thing I tried to do was add more detail and um it got more and more complex and this character took a really long time to make he actually had completely animated fingers and everything and it was really crazy um he was in the game for one day and

then the programmers were like this is way too hard to make actually work so forget it um so um I actually had this drawing and this character that I made I was like oh my God what if we put like a hundred arms on him and um and they were just like no so um so I I kind of had to go back to drawing board and I started thinking about flower and that game had basically like flower petals that was what you played as I was like how do I make the character for the next that game company game and it has to be more simple so the actually the next design was this version um and this is where I started to think about removing anything that really wasn't necessary for the gameplay Gameplay at that point wasn't about climbing or anything with arms so I took the arms off it's was all about walking um so he's got little feet and eventually we took the feet off too but um and then I was like well what if we took off even more so I took off the feet as you can see on that drawing down

there I took off the head and then it was just a kite and um I was like well maybe that's a little too much uh but um that kite character actually did end up appearing in the game you see them in the desert these kind of flying we call them the fish but they were very basically like these kind of cloth kites so this kind of experimentation in removing even more actually was the uh kind of where that idea for those characters came so um but eventually we realized we need to have this character um use completely simulated cloth because the previous characters were all joint driven animation and it just like this looping waving animation on the cloth that looked really stiff so these drawings were um done to kind of create an idea for how the character might go together with a dynamic piece of cloth um and that's kind of the pression progression until how we got to our final guy and here you can see in his different states painted all these

different textures for when he's glowing or when he's white or when he's freezing um and so here are kind of all the characters that were at one time playable in the game I think except for that second to last one he was never in the game but um and that's kind of how the progression went you can see how it got more and more complex and then it went back to this more simplified iconic idea that we end up going with um so the next part I'm going to talk about is the creatures that you see in the game and this is actually um from one of the tapestries that you see in one of the ancestor Visions um of one of these creatures um this was actually the very first drawing I did of what and eventually became the kind of bad guys in in journei um this was one of the very first drawings I did for Journey at all it was the very first drawing that had uh the concept of the uh slit of light that you walk into into at the end of

the game you can see on the um Far Side that there's like this white vertical line is kind of confusing but that's what it is um and the idea is that these floating scary things are kind of hunting you and there's like this idea of Stealth gameplay um so yeah the first idea is I had for these were these kind of organic sand worms um that's kind of cliche um for a long time we had this guy in the game he was just kind of flying around this guy and I put these little funny eyeballs on him and um we have eventually figured out that if we wanted to make this interact with the player in the way that they do in the game um we wouldn't be able to easily animate a character that was organic like this so we actually decided to go with a segmented character um because of that so we I started thinking about what if they were kind of more like these robotic sculptural creatures um and this is one of the very first versions We had of the what we called the guardian but they're also kind of like the stone

dragons snakes um that chase you so we also tried um creating this character out of cloth and um what we found was that the cloth felt it didn't feel scary um it felt good so we actually decided to um make another character in the game that you run into this guy um who uses exact same technology as the ones that are frightening um and you ride on him and he's he's super fun so um that technology got reused for that obviously but one thing that um was probably the most difficult thing to design for these bad guys was the face um I wanted to have this very scary and memorable um face to the bad guy uh and it took me a long time to come up with this and the way that I came up with it was actually by doing this drawing here which is kind of like my idea was what if your character you control was

actually you know was this dark side so I did this um Cyclops kind of version and that was really what um guided me to the actual um design that we went with for the for the bad guys and so here you can see U kind of how how they ended up and they have two kind of states in the game where you see them as a sculptural form and then they turn alive chase you and we had to make sure that they could uh do all of those things so it was quite a challenging thing to design um okay so the Landscapes of the game this is actually a painting I did I started this painting on uh Nintendo DS with colors app anybody use that no it's really good still my favorite mobile painting app anyway um so the way we approached the uh Landscapes and journey was with this kind of color guide um where the left

side represents the beginning of the game and the right side represents the end and on the top you can see this kind of very basic idea of how the colors progress and then it becomes more and more complex as you look further down this diagram uh and we actually stuck pretty close to these um color diagrams we added a couple more sections later on um but you can really see how that affects the game in this early concept art that I did uh was basically a cross-section of the journey world um and the colors that you would see um there so um this is a a really early landscape painting I did we were just at this time implementing the cloth technology and we I wanted to figure out a way that we could have cloth in this landscape um eventually this idea of these wooden flag posts essentially um became the kind of stone gravestones you see everywhere um in the game

and I was doing on the early part of the project I was doing a lot of paintings this is probably a little bit too dark to see here but um I was doing these paintings and um I was told to try to make these work in um 3D and so I tried to recreate this painting in 3D and I kind of failed miserably um and I really learned that we had to think approach the graphics completely differently um couldn't use use like regular kind of Lambert shaders and things for these uh objects we need to really think about the 3D in a different way and think about how we can make it more like an illustration and less like a um a 3D graphic and so this idea of this kind of Cavern eventually turned into this area of the game that's really frightening and um and you can see that the the way that it looks is much more um atmospheric than the original designs

so yeah we did a lot of things where we would take screenshots of the game as it was and I would paint over them this is actually a paint over of a screenshot of one of the first areas in the game um where I added these uh towers and these rocks and all sorts of things um and then we tried to modify the game to actually look like that and uh this is how it turned out you guys probably remember this part um this level was pretty interesting U we wanted this sense of openness and happiness in the desert level where players kind of at this point in the game know how to play the game and are meeting other people and are having a lot of fun and one thing that we did visually was we um let the player see further we push the fog back and it's more clear that kind of represents in Journey Across the game if it's clearer then it's kind of of a place where you're supposed to feel more happy and

and if it's more dim and the fog is closer it's becomes less um less happy and more scary and um I went for the sky being green because I actually wanted to save the color blue for the last part of the game I wanted that blue color to become a reward for players um kind of like a breath of fresh air you never see any blue sky until that last area so I was like well if I can't do blue I'm just going to do green I guess um so that's how that kind of worked out this is a 3D prototype I did of that area and then um this is kind of how it ended up in the game so um here's another um early 3D prototype I did uh for one of the early levels we had we were going to have a level called the canyon where players would run around in the Steep Canyon but it eventually turned into this area in the game um um quite a transformation um the idea of the

character sliding came in later and we needed to have a cool level where you could slide around um so we changed the canyon level to be the sliding level um one interesting thing was the evolution of the mountain itself the iconic Mountain that you're traveling towards in the game was originally a cliff um not a mountain at all and in the very early uh days of the project I was exploring this idea of having a very highly textured um painly kind of watercolor look to the game we eventually realized that would be really hard to do well so I later had an idea well what if we have removed all texture um so I did this 3D mockup of the mountain you can see it's getting taller now um where I tried to emphasize flat shapes um and actually make the 3D space look as flat as I could um give it more of an illustration look and

eventually when we finished the game um a little bit of that texture started to creep back in and it became kind of this blend between my ideas about making this kind of flat 3D and also this idea of bringing in um textural elements so talk a little bit about the architecture um so this is one of the um largest buildings in Journey that you climb uh one of the early models um started from this drawing uh every everything in Journey started from about a million drawings I spent like a week straight scanning drawings to make the art of journey book um this is how it turned out in the game they had a lot of atmosphere and stuff you can actually see um it's like guess there's Sandstorm around the building and stuff but this is not how the buildings um looked originally originally I was doing a lot of studies of existing AR arure from

Greek and Roman Roman design um I was really fascinated by this this idea of a Canon of architecture of kind of a rule set that dictated how the buildings were designed back then everybody used the same proportions the system to make things look good so I took that idea and I made my own kind of structures with it and then tried to incorporate the idea of Journey cloth um into it and eventually I decided I really needed to make my own Cannon of architecture for this game which was super fun um and this is another Nintendo DS drawing but it's very interesting because you can see that I started to think about these arches and the Arches um in Journey are kind of memorable because they have this stair step design here you can see an arch that has like half stair step and half um round Arch so it's kind of like when that idea formed um and here's a final building and a and a mockup building you see kind of how they transitioned um in terms of architecture

style so um this is one area where the player is surfing and he flies out of a waterfall and this is really cool because I got to really integrate the landscape with the architecture and this drawing um actually ended up being almost exactly how it turned out in the game which is kind of kind of rare to kind of nail it right on the spot like that it's pretty cool we also had a level that was basically this underground Cavern which I wanted to be complet completely architectural and it was a very um a very difficult task to U figure out how to implement that and this is one early version of it um I did this painting of this Tower um this is a underdrawing and then we have the uh painting I did um and this is one of the final levels where you're climbing this Tower and this painting is blue right it's like it used to actually be the same level as the previous level which is very blue so in the very end I decided I need to change level color so

it actually ended up like this in the game I swapped it to be orange and it kind of really was a good choice I think because that gave it a more of a holy feel it start of became like this Temple um it kind of worked with the music and everything like that the final area of Journey had this bridge I wanted to have this very scary Bridge um so we I did this painting of it um and then this is kind of how it turned out in the game this is one of like the most punishing moments in Journey if you fall off this thing because you have to walk all the way back around it's like really bad and you used to be able to fall off of um these buildings which would have been so punishing um so we decided to change that but um there you can see some of the preliminary drawings I did for the um very final architecture you see in this sow level um which contrasts heavily with the architecture you see in the very final level which is very very spare you don't see a lot of it um but I took

inspiration from the Japanese Tory gate which is kind of in the Shinto religion it represents kind of where the Sacred Space is delineated from profane space and I wanted to have this final level have this very dreamlike quality where you would feel like um you were in a very magical and spiritual zone so that I put this kind of architecture in there to kind of reinforce that idea all right so the last part I'm going to talk about is sequences um so Journey uh did a lot of storyboard drawings so this is um storyboard drawing for the um part where you kind of wake up and you blast off into the clouds um we did a lot of storyboards for the gameplay we also did a lot of storyboards for the ancestors we call them the ancestors um that you see at each level and the game didn't actually always have these characters we put them in because if players didn't really know when the level ended and without them and they didn't really have a sense of

completion without some sort of Storytelling at the end of each level some sort of feeling that they um understand the space a little bit more so my first idea this is one of very early um ideas for how this character would appear he would kind of materialize in the air um and it was really really weird so I have this kind of old footage of the game you can kind of hear goova snickering about it I think so basically this is one of the early versions of these ancestor interactions and you see two guys kind of like overlapping cuz there's no code at that point to tell them to not sit right on top of each other and what he does is he just kind of comes out and then he flies away and it's really awkward and you can kind of see up his skirt and it's like and then he just like disappears it's like oh great okay what was that that so so we had to change that they just didn't seem meaningful at all um and you can see that the game was really ugly back then so um so I was like okay well how can they leave in a way that is not

so weird so my next idea was like okay so I did this painting I was like well what if they like just totally explode and [Music] um like that you know it's like well no that's not really good either so um I kind of put that problem off and I uh started to think about um uh what they were going to say and so we we wanted to communicate without language so I started doing these designs for these kind of hieroglyphs that they would show you the kind of History of the World with and I instantly was told this is too high resolution we can't do that many images so try a 128 by 64 texture okay and so we try to do that so these um images uh eventually became scattered throughout the world and you see um uh little secrets and we also created I also created this really long um image that kind of of goes from uh left to

right you kind of uncover throughout the game uh you can see some details of it here um and it kind of tells you the the um back story of the game so the ancestors had something meaningful to present and the final um thing that we figured out with the ancestor was they just can't be in the same world as you so the player actually enters this kind of Trance or vision and they see the ancestor and then when they wake up the ancestor disappears so then that way you didn't have to fly away or explode or anything it was just kind of worked a lot better um so that was good very ending of very ending of the game um I had this storyboard for this guy who kind of like walks and touches this light and and there's like one frame where you can kind of see his hand like touching the light and was like the TGC logo and I thought that was really cool and um but eventually what we found was that the players really didn't want a cut scene at the end they wanted to be able to

control the character all the way to the end and so we actually removed the entire sequence and it became much more meaningful um for players so um that's kind of how the ending turned out um so yeah uh that's kind of my talk we um started with a lot of drawings like this and then we did a lot of prototypes like this and after a lot of iteration we finally kind of came to the final art of Journey um so thank you very much thank you so if you have any questions or anything also there's an art book that I made about the book and it has a lot more pictures if you're interested and also I just started a company so if you're an engineer you want a job come talk to me um um but yeah if you want to ask questions we have time for questions

I think okay so I'll be out in the hallway if you have any questions thank you