The Distributed Art Direction of Edith Finch

[Music] vitas Finch and so how best to kick off our direction boot camp to have me not an art director talk to you about it so basically my name is Chelsea hash I was the technical art lead in this project with Giants Barrow and one of the reasons I'm here talking to you today is because we didn't really have an art director no single art director but we did have a group of people that really loved a project had their own perspectives and worked together to make it happen I was also there for very early and stayed for very late so if I make any mistakes and characterizing people's efforts I apologize but I think this was like the inspiration for you know how we ended up going together so uh this is more of the same Oh me and

that audio don't worry about it so again this is how many to get him together an art plan without a single director a part of it was how we built our plan at our own pace and tried to stay true to a single goal while still not having it all planned from the beginning and then a big part of this take away will be remembering the bits that worked even though there were a lot of painful parts that were hard to deal with at the time so this is a an example of whoopsies I do not know how to operate this thing nope so when we got started we had just three of the original people from the unfinished Swan stayed on so that was a creative director technical director and one environment artist and so some of

the early shots of our of the greenlight trailer where we're evocative and sparse and not quite landing on this thing so this is an example of how we went from something like this to something like this so to get started and all started with Ian and creative director and we had a little bit of Google image search art direction but it wasn't just Google image search these were all collections of snapshots from movies personal photos from actual houses that we lived in all of these pill with explanations of exactly what they meant and how they fit in we had synopses of these are some scratch from art direction presentation we had some art math where we'd combine

looks from one area with some art inspirations from another tool and on a final experience we had knows we had nose definite nose and definite yeses and so no one could approach the project and say we didn't have a goal in mind but it was a very big body of inspiration we had collages for plans for many many bits of our work and you know in the end it was sort of a curation these were specific photos and yet we were not targeting a photo real look these were evocative and they had certain places and spaces but they weren't exactly what we were trying to build so it was that curation process that ended up being falling to the job on the concept artists well actually this is another one of my favorites all of the hit lists know and plans that bulleted lists of things that we were going to work on and my

favorite summary images what was going on at a given moment and so we started with some efforts we had some specific inspirations we were kind of aiming for stylized it was very difficult to go from a game like the unfinished Swan with its stark black and white art style and then suddenly say now we're jumping into a new engine with expectations much higher like what are we actually trying to build so you know we have one on the right which is a you know color graded forest and then one which is a custom concept kind of combining pictorialism and some art deco and so concept artist Theo aratus was the first person to really say you know this isn't a collage this is something specific you're trying to build together the house what did it look like we had you know this was again

we still could have been making a game that was a very flat so we had you know a bunch of examples of making paintings from some of these collages and turning them into mock-ups we had many many versions of the house the lighting condition and they were all like you know for mood and tone we you know I'm felt good about these things we started building started building so this is an example of you know we had some pretty strong reference and in the beginning a lot of these references sort of translated very literally into the spaces and therefore Corie environment artist and one of the beginning a holdover still with us from unfinished Swan like built our first space and so this is like a pretty faithful

reproduction we were getting areas that went from concepts into their spaces very specifically you know not yet knowing exactly the level of detail come on buddy there we go so we were be able to put together a vertical slice you know with this team no art direction we had a lot of inspirations we were hitting mood but a big part of it was that you know as part of the gameplay we had this experiment we had a whole house in addition to stories there were so many things to build is difficult for one person to do it and there are parts of it you know the note that the essence is there you know but there are parts that were empty move forward like you saw in this room was was empty we had areas that we started you're interacting with objects as one of our main mechanics you're jumping from from inside a house in one person's body to inside a story

story in another person's body and so this is sort of where I came in with the team of character artists and we sort of asked ourselves a question is this some duplicates is this a game are we going to be the indie studio that makes another game with a person without a body you look down I mean there's a lot of challenges if we're gonna have all these interactions suddenly we're committing to have to build out characters for each one and yet swords like for me I felt very strongly that having this moment and the repeated essence of seeing hands and seeing not your hands was very important so we started with an outsource and these were the first two hands in the game we had Edith and Molly and it was also as I was assuring everyone don't worry every kid can use the same small kid hands but uh you know it translated what was previously empty is that I can't see

what it's playing into moments like this and so you know despite the concern that this was not going to be enough time or this was not going to be enough bang for the buck so to speak I'm sort of soldiered on you know we went from moments that had read like this in the vertical slice you know to moments more like this and then we have these moments of transition where it was starting to change the design trying to build something that communicated effectively went from a purely design problem or a purely static mesh problem to like the combination of these elements in early versions of the game you could there was

no hands in the scene which kind of gave us didn't give us the opportunity oops to silently communicate most people when they play the game wouldn't necessarily think about who is this person but then being able to see them again at the end you have these like silent mechanics things that we didn't have to call out and so suddenly writing is being helped by art which is helping design and we didn't this wasn't a preconceived notion it was just dealing with what was happening at the moment with the assets that we had in the moments that were working so sometimes environment art would rise to meet the challenge sometimes sometimes character art would and so this is skipping a little bit ahead in my narrative of how detailed it was but being able to start to build the game around this isn't having access to it was meaningful in addition there's

previously empty spaces started to be filled with people that had impressions and motivations and styles you know we were still trying to establish what would be in these scenes because in early versions we just had white sheets over all of the areas we knew that we wanted to have a story object in a space but we didn't know are we hiding it are we making it available like who are these people did they know each other and part of that investigation came through building the characters themselves and there were stories actually sorry there's stories like this one where the spindle at one version just had no hands and it didn't need an explanation but then later when we iterated on stories like this one it would have been much harder and much less of an

experience had we not committed to that early so there were stories that we never would have executed the way that we did had we not made these choices in the beginning and then I think that might have been overboard on our examples of characters but there were moments to where we promised there will never only ever be hands and then we started to include more but never more than we could handle and so with that information a level designer Chris Bell could go on and take rough outs that looked like this and start to build more bones our previously empty spaces were partially empty because we didn't have you weren't sure what needed to be included we knew we didn't want it to be overstuffed with the wrong kinds of things we knew we wanted sort of mundane props we knew we wanted to have a sense of having been lived in and sealed off

but who were these people so our level designer went through and revised each room over and over again as we built a better understanding of these characters and then generated very detailed gray boxes in Maya and did lots of temp prop modeling just as quick as he could to put something together they communicated and then after searching through his image post history on slack this is like not even 10% of the level of specificity that you know design and based on the narrative was providing to this environment artists and then over time you know like these gray boxes you know as we had more in the engine got more sophisticated so we had things that looked more and more evocative of the final product being delivered and so now with that level of information or this is my fun transition we could go and make not have to make trailers that

looked so much like this and instead transition to a team that could fill it out so we were joined by some triple-a Talent Brandon Martin omits and you know he put together an environment art team that was ready to take all of these experiments and all of this definition and then start to get specific rather than just like color and mood studies where you know or I'm an artist was sort of struggling disabled yes it's you know it's orange or yes it's blue but like you know what are those blobs so you know if we got more specific direction from concept art we had strong tie-ins from you know we we hadn't lost the spirit of the original photos we had photos we had color studies but we also had specifics like these line drawings are very very close to what we ended up building you know and then ìletís does to finalize the look of the house we have these specific props telling

specific stories about people's lives and not sort of consuming with a house with generic fill like this was a house that was specifically for the finches having that kind of specificity as well providing context for the design team suddenly we had a big machine that was ready to churn out art and so some of these investigations where we thought maybe it could be one way or maybe that it could be another like eventually if the game was going to get chipped we had this pressure that you know you had a team of people that could make things look amazing and much higher more than we had expected before but it meant that we had to make some decisions so like in addition to just increasing the overall quality and polish we started to get distinctive feet we had the ability to really dive deep on individual characters and locations and like you know and round them out we also had this is not the best

representation but we had time of days within stories and we also had a narrative shift with sort of like a behemoth technical effort prior to big sets and unreal to allow the house to actually change times of day as we move through and it also expanded our color palette we were building a range of a range of experiences that weren't just in our dark moody phase but turning into like what what becomes Moody and after different snapshots of lives of these like lives expanded and so in addition another industry medicine veteran Keith Garrett came on with experience coming from Naughty Dog here as a visual effects specialist we had suddenly we had these gorgeous looking scenes that were more static than we wanted and

there were problems like things that were like not even obvious problems that were solved but like this moment without the wake behind it sort of like a bobbing scene suddenly with you know more effect attention we get something that was a complete thought and so you know it was invaluable to be able to complete this thought and also do honor to some of the original inspirations it's just sort of like the sublime force of nature so we had moments in the scene we're like very like you're you're finding out intense things in the story we also don't want to fill it with words so the ability to actually fill it with things that you know looked beautiful and were evocative of the theme you know like made a huge difference there are things that you know could have been just rushed passed through that suddenly invites the players to stop and look we even had small one-off moments after being able to time no video why the

confetti comes come on let's see if I can't get it to work there we go we're visual effects have specific punctuation of a moment so these were all things where we were kind of building this as a boulder it was a snowball rolling downhill where we were grabbing things as they became available to us and as they became necessary without that we had lots of hopes we had lists lists and lists and lists of hit lists on things that we hope to be able to build in but it sort of created a meritocracy of or hierarchy where the things would happen as quickly as they could happen and if

you had people that it they really cared about it you know one of the other one of the things that came in sort of late to the project is that we had hands early we had characters and we had locations but we worked with towards the end of the project we worked with a character or a illustrator Holly Rothrock on giving the family faces we had an original inspiration for the project for the book a hundred years of solitude and part of this thing was that this family members were such a diverse and similarly named and stretched out groups that we had a family tree and some of our original desires were to keep a version of a family tree that looked like someone had actually drawn and maintained it and this was a serious point of contention versus how how claim looking could something be and have us like accepted as a final product so we went back and forth on how well can he

differently draw how much energy would she have put into this moment but ended up with the family tree at the end that ended up becoming a big part of the actual gameplay experience we cycled we made sure we visited every time it reinforced these connections between these people and then eventually at the end of stories we ended up being able to see these faces and the shrines and so really there's nothing more evocative of the the group effort that it took to put together this game come with a final product and the shrines it was the effort of environment artists to make these specific carefully crafted props for characters that grew over time originally you know bodyless or maybe photographs then they developed limbs and eventually bodies and painted faces into these moments that you know it took an entire five years of development to make and so basically in summary I've

I've sort of oh my gosh we can't do this I'm gonna sweet it stopped so in summary I sort of like walked us through all of these moments as they go as they perfectly handed off with each other but honestly you know there were parts of these that were tense it was difficult we believed in different things and we weren't sure things were going to work out you know but in retrospect like I look at all of these choices like exactly the right choice was made a very few regrets and like these final decisions and you know it comes together as a complete experience so my recommendation to art directors is uh build in some process of not knowing and leaving space to figure things out just in time if we had pre-planned every aspect of these things their whole

portions of the game that just wouldn't exist at all and having that space and being comfortable with it and then rebuilding over and over again I think we come up with some estimates we probably made 2/3 as many much materials like we build three times as much than actually made it into the final version because we were willing to edit and build the right thing and so and this is also maybe just my bias but thinking about hiring people that you trust with the design of the final product and not necessarily just on the portfolio obviously people have to be able to make the work but I think it's a I think it's it's harder to teach taste than technique so that's my talk I think I I burn through it [Applause] it looks like I do have plenty of time

for questions so if anybody has a question they can come to the hi hi thank you for the talk Thank You first of all by the way you guys in order to motivate you to ask some questions there's like a dozen t-shirts there so if anybody wants some swag first twelve people get t-shirts but my question for Chelsea was actually you mentioned that you did have some differences as you were working through this and could you speak a little bit more to the process through which you resolve some of these differences because obviously a lot of passionate people they're passionate about maybe different things but only one can sort of survive for that process of how did that go I think I'm son so the question was how speaking more in detail about the differences of opinion and I think my summary would be on some levels it was a war of attrition and on other levels it was just letting the ideas speak for themselves there's a lot of prototyping

that was made with very disparate quality levels to try to prove out a concept I think I myself put together a series of technical demos I think one thing was on the the our original version of the tentacle was like segmented pieces and we were debating if we were going to procedurally generate and I was like the artists need to have control over the tentacle this has to work so I made this kind of like horrific little demo with a capsule and attaching like a physics rope to it and just like pathetically dragging it around the character controller and I'm like like this but good and so I went through three or four versions and like kind of built and increasingly horrifyingly complicated contraption but then finally convinced the tech director that it was a reasonable way to go I think at the end of the day it was reality was coming down on us things either worked or they didn't and we really listened to whether or not it was true to the story and so

there are some things that you know we had avoided for a while that ended up being more necessary there was even a moment where the game was going to be heard there were some we're gonna have a house at all because there wasn't enough time and now you're like all of my god and they can't believe that almost happen so yeah hi a great talk I was just wondering when you have mostly creative individuals who are more worried about creating assets and communicating their ideas like how did you decide like producer roles like who made tasks and made sure people were following through on those tasks that's good well that was that's easy oh so the question was how do we make sure that work was followed through and that was pretty easy the creative director ian was very on the current marching orders we didn't necessarily have a good sense of if everything was doable then we had area leads of the technical lead in the art lead that made sure that those

subtasks were organized so some indie teams have a completely flat hierarchy that has no lead roles and that's something that I find to be difficult you almost have sort of like groups of people that are pushing together on an effort sometimes even if it is a separate prototype but yeah we definitely were organized via creative direction I was just wondering if mechanics influenced art at all there are a lot of objects of significance and the stories and things that you interacted with I'm wondering if the thing that you interacted with specifically was influenced by the mechanic that you were executing oh man that's a fantastic question so the question was did mechanics affect the art direction at all correct okay they were so one in the same I mean and I think one of the greatest strengths of our open-ended design is that we wanted

an evocative experience and each thing had a hook so you know there was a specific request and there's some things I could have said we called out but like one of creative directions ideas was the house was built in certain timeline and then all further updates were from items you could have purchased at Home Depot so to not indulge in the Overlook and some kind of overly ornate Victorian aesthetic which also sort of extended to our story objects where it's sort of like this should be a regular looking object we didn't have crazy ornate keys we had just like the master lock padlocks that were very simple we had I mean each of the story objects we they were very difficult to build and we probably built like any times as many because the idea was that experience goal and we specifically because like there are games that have interaction mechanics that are you know which I

respect this commitment where you say you can open drawers you can open doors you can pick things up and spend them around I think the only animation that we've reused in that game was the walk cycle everything was bespoke and it was that commitment to bespoke that was like to me a part of the art direction I don't like since blurs the lines between design and art and everything else but you know I think again if we instead of the beginning knowing art like no animation would be reused I think we actually could have saved some time trying to like systematize be like no just do a great job once because there was definitely a lot of time hoping we'd systematize things it was just like commit to this book yeah one of your conclusions was build a little time for not knowing and for free time did you have trouble arguing for doing

that in terms of like finances and a timeline or was it pretty easy or just how did you go about arguing that at that time will be worth it I think it'd be okay okay okay I will answer that question in the wrap-up room yes yes okay thank you sorry [Applause]