The Elementary Particles

[Music] i work for arkhan studios in france and today we're going to talk about change and adaptation from a vfx artist's perspective and we'll see how working for different companies makes your personal practice evolve so um this morning with ryan and mike we were talking about the outside of vfx and we'll keep on talking about art here we're back to basics so we'll just focus on particles and the fundamental behaviors and this is where the title is coming from because everything will be just plain and elementary but this time as opposed to this morning it's uh it's going to be a bit more focused on on on the relationship with gameplay so it's it's uh it's a bit more hands-on so here's how we're going to spend our time the first half will be we will be going back and forth between

two games i've been working on and we'll compare how the vfx were made on each of them so first of all we're going to introduce those games then we look at some similarities between them and then of course we'll look at some differences and during the second half we'll dig deeper into designer two and as a quick intro we'll define what makes the style of the effects on designer 2 and then we'll look at gameplay and we'll see how the gameplay and the features influence the way we create our vfx so as a super quick intro well i'll just tell you how i got into a real-time vfx because this is the closing theme for today so yeah i thought this would be a nice place to start so back in france i'm french i was studying arts and graphic design from the age of 15. then that got me to move to the uk to

study study new media and because at that time i knew people who were working in games then that got me to work on the compositing of a pitching trailer in after effects and then eventually that got me to proper game development so this is a career path and move that i really wasn't expecting it just happened but i'm really happy it happened and now i've been working games for 10 years so the first five years i spent at ninja 3 which is in the uk and at the end of the five years i got to a senior position everything really felt nice and easy and comfortable i was in in control and then i moved back to france my home country and starting started working for arcane studios and suddenly i was really out of my comfort zone everything was new it was a new company

new people a different type of game new technology so just overall new challenges and that's when i realized i had to change my habits before we get to that i'll present to you the two games that framed this transition so the last one i worked on at ninja theory was diva may cry 5. so it's a third person game although this one was a reboot that was made in the uk it comes from a japanese license because i'm short of a better word i'd say that the idi gameplay is pretty dense and what i mean by that is that there's a lot of information to communicate in a very short amount of time so as you can see the game is pretty fast-paced combo training is really encouraged you have several weapons you have many moves per weapons you have different enemy states some of those enemies are immune to certain

weapons so all of that and and and even more actually needs to be understandable throughout the game and finally the gameplay demands the player to be very reactive so everything is all about control skills and really knowing your moves and knowing your timing now what does all that mean for a vfx artist well first of all because it's sort of a fantasy it's not a realistic world you we were able to um to make very stylized effects so it was a really really fun playground as an effect artist but then within that creative freedom because we had so much to communicate we had to establish a visual language using shapes and colors and then finally every move had to read as a signature and be really clearly identified so um now let's talk about dishonored 2 which is the first game i worked on at

arkhan studios so it's a first person game and already you can see there's a contrast in pace it is an immersive simulation so that's a sort of a genre where it's all about saying yes to the player um you want them to be in control of their adventure so that in a given situation they'll be able to use different approach so your duty as a developer is to embrace the players creativity and and make sure that you don't break the illusion and that you don't remind them that they are playing a game so a lot of energy is spent in every department to make sure that this world really feels like it exists like it is tangible there's a great emphasis on depth and on consistency and then finally the game is uh giving you a toolbox and encouraging you to experiment and find some creative ways to uh to combine everything he has to offer so

uh what does all this means for vfx artists well first of all our effects need to feel believable it's not necessarily like photorealistic or anything but it has to feel right and it has to feel like it belongs to uh to that world then we can't really afford to to be really minimalistic we need layers of details to echo the detailed world that is surrounding our effects finally we need to cover every possible case because you never know what the player is going to do so everything has to work in any given condition to give you an example if you if you take a moment usually that's something that you you just plant and you know it stays there but then if the player decides to plant it on something that they can carry them around such as a chopped head or a limb then you need to make sure that your effects are going to work also when

they're in movement [Music] so my transition happened between these two games and they are pretty different in many respects but you know it's okay because i come from an applied arts background so really early on i was told to analyze and deduce and then create something whilst always strongly keeping the brief in mind and basically that's exactly what we do when create effects but so you think that should be a lesson learned but when i started working for arcane all those sudden changes made me realize that i was working out of habits more than i would have wanted to admit and i guess part of the reason is that i knew only one company i had only ever worked at ninja theory before so it was my first company and it was where i learned everything about games so i was lacking critical distance and i was looking the

lacking the means to put my practice into perspective and so that change of company just did that give me a bit of a of perspective so um now we're going to compare some examples between the way the effects were done on dmc and on designer 2. so first of all we look at some old tricks i still cherish to that day and then some other areas where you know you you have to do things a bit differently so um even though you know the title on the slide here says comparison i really want to stress out how there's no judgment value it's not about games and trying to define if one is better than the other they're just different and they're also made on a different console generation what we are comparing here is how you create vfx in one context or another and and again there there's not a method that is better than the other because it's all it's all about having

the right method for the type of game game you're working on so um first of all we're going to talk about textures we all have our favorite go-to textures that we like to use all over the place and so all these that you're seeing now are textures that belong to this other two but they mimic behaviors that were used on dmc and the reason for that is that i joined quite early on the development of dmc owner of designer 2 at that time there wasn't a full texture a full library of texture being built so what happened is that as i started working through my first tasks naturally i was reminded of other effects i had been working on before so i created some textures with a direct influence of other methods i had been using previously on dmc so now we're going to have a look

at two of them in more details this first one so that's the setup how it how it is in a designer two is just three textures rotated rotating at different speeds and multiply together to get a sort of a shimmery feel and even though in that case it was made with three textures you could just use the single one and multiply it with itself as long it's a as a rotating speed are different then it's going to work just fine and so um this is the way that it was used on dmc and um by the way throughout the talk i'm going to be mostly showing some effects that i've been working on because you know they're the ones i know the best but every now and again we'll also see some effects from other people so um if you compare that

to how it's being used on designer 2 it's quite interesting because the original material is extremely extremely close and similar but the use of it is different because you know the games all demand something different the material really stands out on dmc it's a big and flashy and you can really quickly identify it whereas in designer 2 it's harder to tell that element apart from the rest everything participates to the explosion and and that one just flows with the rest so the different context just means that you need to adapt your method a bit now our second example is just you know simple light streak a very convenient and versatile kind of texture and again let's have a look at how it was used on tmc

and it's the same thing here if we compare the use of that texture in the two games it stands out a lot more on dmc because it's telling something to the player it's telling the player to run away otherwise they're going to get really badly hit in a second whereas in the explosion from designer those streaks themselves they don't have something really particular really special to say they have a purpose and that's to give rhythm and emphasis to the to the overall effect but it's all about you know participating to the to the main event so let's keep on talking about textures and more specifically let's talk about shape variations on sparks now this is the kind of texture that is often used for sparks and you know it's okay but i think you can do better than this so um let's have a look at some

resources from designer two so what you can do is bake a whole cluster of sparks into one texture you can make variations even on simple static shapes even though you know those are those parts are going to be quite small on screen it does make a difference then of course you can use animated materials and finally you have flipbooks as well they're not just there for animations you can use them for texture variations as well um although well okay this one is a bit of a of an overkill i think like four of these variations could have probably be enough so uh yeah i'll just optimize that for the next game basically and so in in both games you see how the sparks are just more detailed than a simple round soft gradient and by the way if you look at the example from disney ii this one is using three of the textures

that were looking at just before and in both case there's also the fact that the textures that are the spots that are oriented towards the velocity their textures have a leading edge they're not symmetrical so uh that really enhances the motion and gives the gear gives a better sense of direction and that's something that a round centered texture can't convey quite as well now before we move on to differences we're going to have a look at a way to use the initial color so this is what you get when you apply the same base color to every one of your sprites so in our proprietary engine the void engine we have a two sort of initial controls for our color we have a base color and that's multiplied by initial color but that's a kind of a detail like

you could apply that same tint to everything by either using your texture color or just specifying the same initial color on every of your sprites so anyway to get a bit more variety than this what you can do is use a range on initial color so that every sprite gets tinted slightly differently and i really love using a range on initial color because it's a very simple simple way of just bringing a little bit more life to your effect it's also making the most of our tools because if you're not tied to a texture color then you know let's exploit it um however that's a very very sensitive value so you have to be cautious with it because this is the result that you get if you use the full zero to one range and sometimes it might be what you after but uh you know most of the times it's not the case so um anyway you just use your restricted range and then on top of that you can also

add your usual cover color the live curves and and that exact setup with those uh um those values is um one of the elements that are used in the grenade explosion in disneyland two um so that being said sometimes you can use really really pronounced colors but you have to organize them around a common tint because you see if you um like if you pose on a single frame you see how sometimes you get really contrasted colors but it's controlled the way it was done in that case is that there are several limiters and some of them are balanced towards green and some of them are balanced towards purple and so that none of them can go through the fall the full color range as we've seen before and and and therefore the overall perception of the effect remains blue and

if you have too little elements or your effects doesn't last very long and you can't really use that range on the initial color what you can do is if you have several emitters just use a slightly different tint on all of them and you know you'll get the sort of same result just make sure that not everything is exactly exactly the same color now because gameplay dictates a lot of what you do there's obviously a lot of differences as well so our first example is going to be a bit of a case study and i'm going to show you the first effect i ever showed to my art director and that's a sort of flashbang effect and at that time i was still new at arcade studios and i was still still working under the influence of dmc so because it's so old i can't

show you that exact version that he reviewed so what i've done instead is i recreated what i imagine i may have done at that time or what i would have done while working on dmc and if i had been given the same brief so obviously it's a very biased exercise but i've tried to do it as honestly as i could um so his feedback on that or something you know kind of along that idea is that the effects were too smooth and too neat that the weapon that was shooting that is handcrafted by a gang of thugs and he wanted that to be visible in the effect so overall it needed to be more noisy and and to give a sense that the weapon was almost barely functioning and i i really remember that moment because it was the the trigger for my understanding of the arcane touch so this is the version that made it

in the final game and both versions are using exactly the same elements so the difference between them is solely on the way the particles behave and if we compare them into a bit more details well first of all the effects in designer two they're more realistic so we use dust and smoke and debris and so on you can see that i didn't put any smoke in the sort of a dmc like version so we did use some dusty elements back then on the game but usually they were very secondary in order to not interfere with legibility let me just go back because they're supposed to be in sync and then yeah you can compare them a bit better so then there's the textures on dmc because it's more of a fantasy register we can use more sort of fictional elements

and we are using some of those on designer 2 because they give a good impact but they're not the star of the show and they're a lot more prominent on dmc then the timing that's a single flash on the dmc like version but uh on dishonored the elements they appear one after the other it's not as neat and design and the effects have more of a like it's got more of a life of its own and finally the timing is more stylized in dmc the elements they can pop and flash whilst in the designer version everything is going to last a bit a bit longer because the uh the smoke just needs time to dissipate this is the way it is now in retrospect um if i if i look back at the version that made it through the final game i think i could have taken it one step further in the sort of a

noisy and messy aspect because there are a lot of elements in there and there's probably more than you actually get to see because some of them they just get lost in the mix so a better timing balance would have showcased them a bit better now the first thing i wanted to build when i worked on that effect was a the sort of core of the bright flash and this is what i had in mind this is the heat impact from dmc so i thought all i need to do is create my texture offset it from the center multiple duplicate it and rotate it and you know job done but this is something i can't do actually in designer 2 because in our game the players have the ability to slow down or stop the time and the thing is if you freeze an effect that is camera facing and you start moving around it suddenly you can see how how flat it is and it looks quite

cheap so if you don't go this way but you distribute your layers in a in proper 3d space then it feels again that the uh it feels like the effect is belonging to the that world and it stops breaking the illusion and um this is the method that had to be used to uh to build the core flash uh of that effect now we're going to talk about camera view um so we've seen that one game is a first person game and the the other one is a third person game and yeah what does that imply for vfx in this example you are seeing two features that appear in both games and that's shooting and slashing so first of all we'll have a quick look at the nozzle flash to give you a bit of context what you're seeing here is one of the different elements that uh make up the

muzzle flash in designer but it's been massively exaggerated just for the you know for the purpose of making a point here so the longest of those lines are 16 meters long and if you don't know about about a metric system then you know i can guarantee that's pretty massive what you're seeing on screen the tiny black smudge on the on the left hand side is the arms of the player and you can see the the the scale relationship to the longest of those sparks but you have no idea about that from the first person angle so um everything that is almost in line with the camera gets really drastically reduced by the perspective shortcut and this is something that is obvious for those of you who work on fps's but you know not everyone does and and personally when i started working for arcane i was i was quite disconcerted by uh by that camera goal i uh yeah i just had to to change a few

things so um it's the same for muzzle flashes or trails or anything that is aiming down to the center of the screen you have to find ways to make them visible despite that camera angle and and in the meantime in a third person game it's it's pretty straightforward to just uh make the muzzle flash look readable and these effects on the dmc the muzzle flash and the trails were done by my colleague at that time or marparada now the thing is second thing that we are seeing in both games here is the use of the sword so um on dmc that um that was a major feature for two reasons first of all well it's really important to gameplay because it's an area of effect so the visual representation has to be super accurate to the gameplay data otherwise the game is going to feel unfair and um and then because if it's a

third-person game it's got all that room to unfold it's a very good excuse for a bit of a visual extravagance so that feature back then has represented a lot of work for many teams for the engine team for the animation team for the design team and for the art team and whilst it is that really really crucial feature on dmc in designer it's more of a visual enhancement it's less meaningful and it's less significant and the reason for that is well first of all visually it just wouldn't work um in that world you know that kind of trails uh the trails from dmc would feel really out of place and then because of the camera angle um you know you just couldn't cover the screen whether with a long lasting trails because they wouldn't be a you wouldn't see what you're doing you wouldn't be seeing what you're doing in the game so um so anyway we still have a we still have a trail it's a game after all but it's a

lot more subtle and now for our last differences uh difference between the two games let's talk about animation smoothness and what i mean by that is how smoothly you you make things flow between the different states of your effects so um here you're seeing an attack being charged so if you release at the perfect time you're going to unleash a more powerful and more visually rewarding attack and you have to release the button after just three frames so the tell to the player had to be really obvious um originally i was animating that that glow in size and opacity but really quickly we realized with our designer that it had to be instant to allow the player to react in time now that's exactly the same principle and timing but on a different move and those two cases are really

extreme but generally speaking on dmc we were able to just swap one effect to another and you wouldn't see it popping as long as it you know looked kind of similar because your your wire your eyes and your brain just fills in the gap but again this is something that we cannot do on designer 2 because as i mentioned before the players have that ability to slow down the time so everything has to flow really seamlessly between the different states of artifacts and this one was done by my lead tibo gesha so looking at the way the effects were done on these two games it tells us something that we know already but that gets proven once more and it is that nothing is arbitrary in a game or at least nothing should be because the particular game that we're working on is going to dictate what we do we are here to serve its purpose

so that doesn't mean that all your previous experience gets lost because every time you you start working on a new project as an individual you do come with your personal luggage and your influences and and you bring your own perspective to the table but every time you just need to adapt it just a bit and and it's actually a really interesting challenge because it's all about trying to make the most of what you already know whilst respecting the current game you're working on so now it's time to focus on design two and as an intro quickly define what makes the vfx style in dishonored so these are a few weapons that create have been created for designer two and they've been designed with a lot of

love and care and the reason why i'm showing you those right now is that in this talk um i'm mostly describing the sort of real part of the effects the effects related to weapons and gadgets because we also have magic and powers but this is more about control and the the effects for the weapons they have to be feel a bit shaky and noisy and accidental because if they are too neat then it's going to feel a bit artificial it's going to feel out of place in in that world of many details so the noise that we bring to them helps them feel like they exist and as i mentioned before it's especially the case on the ones used by the thugs faction because they're made with bits and pieces so um the idea is that we have to make things feel accidental and sort of random and

that has to do with the way we use our properties so to try and illustrate this i recreated what i see as a sort of a generally gamey spark explosion and there's nothing wrong as such but there is a lot of room to sort of spice it up so right now you're seeing eight different loops of these same effects but you can't really tell it i mean they they all look extremely similar and this is more what a sparks explosion would feel like in december 2. every time it feels different you can really tell that it's been recalculated every time and in between the two versions that's all the properties that have been modified so you don't have to to read it all the idea is just to give you an idea of of how every little thing and detail can be pushed a little bit further

and in the end both versions they are going to fulfill exactly the same function it's a bunch of sparks shooting radially and covering a certain gameplay area but this one feels more alive and more unpredictable and that's exactly what we need in the world of dishonest so now we're going to talk a bit about the relationship between gameplay and vfx now even though the art direction is extremely important of course it's not the only factor that is responsible for the visual of the effects the gameplay is also a very good contestant because not only does it influence the look of our effects i mean it defines you know the size of it and how long it lasts and so on but sometimes it can also influence the way we create them so first of all we're going to have a look at a particular grenade because this one is non-lethal it just

causes a physics impact and even though our effects are quite detailed in the end we have to start simple and everything i'm going to talk about now sort of a crosses over what mike linden was talking about this morning it's all about you know working simple from the beginning so you can iterate a bit better because yeah making games is an iterative process so every feature is prone to evolve maybe get cut so you can't make an effect look final on day one because the chances are you're going to have to do it all over again now that level of simplification you don't necessarily use it very often but it can be useful for very early feature debugging it can be useful for your designer so they get the feel of the metrics and of the timing

and it can be useful for your gameplay coder because then they can make sure that everything is triggered properly but then then then it's time to start on your research phase because from that raw gameplay data which is just radius then there's a world of possibilities it's up to you to decide what what sort of intent you want to put into it so you you get to decide how you want to break it up and at that stage you just keep your element to the minimum in order to just define your intention and just get a feel for it and um you know how mike uh this morning was saying that he he likes to uh to uh to to draw that uh and not not get um how to say not spend too much time with the tools well i i don't really draw i've never learned about drawing animation so this is my equivalent of his way of

doing things and to not just spend too much time on the tools and on the engine while the idea is just to to keep everything to the minimum and it's a different method but it's achieving the sort of a same goal anyway when you're happy with the global feel your intention and your motion that's when you're going to start to add a bit more details and this is kind of an abuse process but i think that obvious reminders don't help don't don't don't hurt sometimes like i know that i have a tendency to really get carried away quite quickly so when i work i need to be aware constantly aware of what i'm doing so i can refrain myself before i move on too quickly now we're going to talk about the muzzle flash so this is the muzzle flash on designer 2 and this one is very much defined by the

art direction and by the narrative background it looks very sparky because designer 2 is not set in modern times so what we've used as references is muskets and on those two steel frames you can see the amount of smoke and sparks being produced when you're shooting so um and also the the muzzle flash is like a really that really thin straight line coming out of the barrel and this is something where actually i couldn't really stick to the reference because we've talked about it before if it's if it's you know too thin because it's aiming to the center of the screen then there's nothing to see so in that case the the sparks are much much wider than the barrel and also where we couldn't quite follow the uh reference is that the the smoke had to uh to vanish more quickly and be a lot more transparent because again it would just cover the

whole screen and yeah you don't receive your gameplay through it but then we've tried to stick to the reference as far as like flying residues are concerned so it makes it look very messy and and also we used a lot of different sparks texture so the overall muzzle flash doesn't feel too regular so you see everything sort of comes around so okay so very well but you may be wondering what i'm talking about it we're going to get to gameplay but i just thought it would be just a you know an opportunity to talk about then describe the image of flash a little bit so anyway gameplay wise this is what is happening you are shooting straight and aiming to the center of the screen but you are holding your gun on your left hand on the left-hand side and even though the

effects are attached to the gun then you can't really keep the gun's alignment because it would look like you aiming to the side of the screen so we have to cheer the values and shift them down and left so they are going to appear like they are centered and since we're cheating we cannot just use the gameplay metrics and be accurate like you could do on an explosion radius for instance so what was done in that case is everything was adjusted manually using an overlay of the damage debug volume and just checking for the accuracy to the effect and making sure it match the the gameplay data now because i'm talking about debug i just really want to put a quick word about the importance of a console commands we have a lot of them in devoid engine and at any time i can find out exactly what is going on

behind the scene so to give you a few examples i can find the name of every of my particle system and of the container regardless of the way it was triggered i know how many instances there are of each of them how they are being oriented how much they cost if i don't know if a collision occurs i know the name of the instigator and the name of the surface if i'm working on character's effects i can make sure the ai stops reacting so i can check all my attachments and i can make sure that everything is uh properly triggered so so basically if i encounter an issue i can i've got the tools to really strip down the scenario and and get to the bottom of it and and just fix it basically but i think this is not necessarily the game for everyone in every studio and on every engine and it's a bit of a difficult topic because because it's all a matter of

resources if you don't have those but i think if you really have some needs maybe you can try to get your coders to understand how how that help is really crucial for you and you know if you can't really tug at the heart screens maybe you can just bribing them sometimes be okay makes the job it's worth a try now we're going to uh finish this talk with the in-game slo-mo ability that i've touched upon before so the players have the ability to slow down or stop the time in designer 2. and it's a specificity in our game that is a big deal on a number of levels and and have several implications on the way we create our effects so you see what's happening here i'm stopping the time then um shooting at the guard

and um just moving a bit so i see what i'm doing and then bringing back the the time and that's when he actually gets shot so this is a sort of a mine called the spring razor and that is going to chop your enemy into bits and this one was was made by a tibor and if i look at it at normal speed i can't really make much sense of what's going on it could be you know the effects could be made based of blinking rings with a barbed wire texture and that would probably work but if you start to use that slow mo ability then you really get to see everything unfolding you get to see the how the base undulates and how everything grows so at that point you don't want to think to see things popping out and and you

know it would be very looking very cheap if it was all choppy so it has to be really smooth now yeah i'm afraid a lot of guards were injured for the shooting of this presentation well that's their job so the upgrade for that power is that you can freeze the time and that means that the effects need to look good when you start moving around them because you remember if you post the game on a camera facing effect then everything looks terribly flat so there are different ways to organize your sprites in 3d usually the velocity is being used but i'll just take the opportunity to show you one one way that we can do in the uh we can do it in the void engine so i can specify some set of vectors according to which my sprites are going to orient and it's not just some default x y z axis i can really

tailor exactly what what angle i want so um if i specify one one set of vector then the second is the camera and the sprite is going to automatically rotate to try and face the camera as much as possible if i set two sets of vector then it knows exactly where to point at and it remains static in space and so if i use that method and um just use a range of minus one to one on on every sprite then i get a star shape in 3d it's all very well but there's potentially a problem with that because if you're really unlucky and that can happen everything could look sideways and then there's there's nothing to see to see so to address that there's a compromise to be made and to be on the safe side we double up our images so the white

ones here are the ones which are static in space and they're really what is building your effects but then you just add the red ones which are camera facing and you keep the lowest spawn rate possible on this one because they're just there to make sure that there's always something to see whichever angle you're looking at it from so you know you're going to see them face and rotate a bit but at least yeah you make sure you always have something to see now the best way of things to not look flat is to not use flat elements so for instance you can use beams and ribbons as other types of elements now let's talk a bit about this ability which is a really good showcase of of those um what happens is that those two characters they are connected

what you do to one will happen to the other so you can stun them or burn them or vaporize them or anything this is going to propagate to the other character and i think this effect looks uh works really well and i i can say so because my colleague vanco rosie made it i think there's something really sort of um really satisfying about that stringy motion the line is going to expand and contracts uh contract as the camera characters move around and i think in that respect it is very successful because it exploits the nature of the future and then it just makes the meaning crystal clear you see the connection between those characters and even though one may die die off screen then you know you you connect them you understand what's going on um so another thing that you can use obviously is meshes um again this is a vance rosie who made

this one um what's happening there is that you are summoning uh a swarm of rats and they're going to be able to attack your enemies so the concentric concentric circles um are going to properly fill out the space because you know the meshes they exist in space it's actual volume and they also got a very good do a very good job at hiding the way the rats appear out of nowhere and and even in in slow motion or when when you pose and freeze the effects everything works really well and it's all well integrated together and then on top of that you have a lot of uh small specks of dust remaining at the end and um they're really scattered through the space so as you you move uh through them you're going to feel them moving past the camera and it really gives you a sense of space

now the last consequence of altering the time is that we need to add details to our effects because you want the ability to feel rewarding so as you slow down the time you want to see a bit more happening so to sum it up to make our effects work in that slow-mo mode first of all we need to add layers of details we need to have a very smooth animation between the different states of the effect and we need to give them volume and that keep can be achieved by using sprites facing the camera but properly distributed through space or using sprites which are oriented in 3d space and finally of course you can use elements which are made of actual volume such as meshes and ribbons so we just covered a few uh examples of how the gameplay can influence

the way we make artifacts the way they look and the way we actually build them and what that tells us this is going to load eventually yes so what that tells us is that adaptation is not just about changing jobs because that can happen within a single projection the specificities of certain features might challenge the way that you used to work sometimes and yeah we're done here so now we're going to take a minute to enjoy a really entertaining playthrough of dishonored and you'll see what i was saying about the the ways the players are able to combine everything together and this one is going to have audio because during the rehearsals audio guys there were really disappointed that i had muted all the video so because they make our effects sound really cool then yeah i had to comply

[Music] [Music] what's going on [Music]

[Music] [Music] [Music] producing [Music] [Music]

[Music] it's what [Music] give me a hand just stop this i'm sorry um well it's quite fascinating isn't it um yeah but uh yeah i have to pose it because you won't listen to me otherwise um so anyway just to recap um so first of all we'll uh we've been talking about how i had to adapt by uh transitioning between combat

effects on dmc to weapons effects on designer two and then we've seen some some features within designer two and how they sort of shaped and challenged the way that i've had to create my effects and this is all very personal and specific to my case but i think everyone from there can extrapolate and sort of project their own situation because this is what games is about it's all about adapting and evolving because there's always a next something a next feature your next game your next engine release your next console so every time you can take the opportunity to stop and step back a bit and and try to put things into perspective so that over time you can build upon your previous uh knowledge you've got you've got that existing base and then you can just dig into it and try and grow to the next level so as you keep your practice evolving then normally every time everything should get a little bit better and now

if you fancy a present transition yourself well arcane studios is hiring so you've got the email address and you can check what positions are open at the moment so i just well yeah quickly i want to thank everyone here for coming and uh thank ninja theory for allowing me to show all this material and everyone i've ever worked on because it's so important it's a it's it's a team job and without the rest of the people you just you know you know one so um yeah thanks everyone [Music] so now it's going to be time for questions and i forgot to remind you to please fill out the form after you're done so are there any questions

well oh yeah um near the beginning there was uh the first person uh muzzle flash that was like 16 meters in length um how did how did you allow the player to how did you reconcile that with them being able to see that from the side if they stop time well actually um so the question is how uh okay so it is not actually 16 meters long in the game i just made it much much bigger just to prove a point there but it is quite long and and especially when you stop the time you can actually see them in the game you can see them and they probably like uh i don't know three meters long or something and but you know that's not really a problem actually sometimes it's quite satisfying to uh to move through it and people really accept that and actually uh enjoy it so you do you do see how exaggerated it is

as you uh you move around it thank you okay well looks like we don't thank you very much