The Titans: Creating Living, Breathing Levels in God of War III

[Music] all right everybody good morning and welcome and before we get started I wanted to ask everybody to please silence your cell phones or any noise making devices and if you could please just remember that after this to fill out the the electronic speaker evaluation forms that would be killer so thanks for coming down today we appreciate it I know Friday morning is sort of a it's a tough career for most people were really we're really happy that you guys could make it and we appreciate it and just to get things started I'm Chris O'Neill and I was a senior level designer on God of War three and I work at Santa Monica studio my name is Bruna Velasquez I'm the lead game animator at sunny Santa Monica studios we were really honored to be able to do this presentation with you our peers and I just want to say that even though there's only two of us up here this was truly a team effort and you know we're just honored that we were able to represent our studio and we also wanted to thank Gd Steve for approving this talk and letting us come up here

and share this with you so as the title suggests this talk is about the Titans and it deals with level design in God of War three and creating the spectacle kind of landmark sequences that we had in that game which were the Titans Cronus and Gaia so using Cronus as a specific example we're going to go through the entire development process from the beginning to the end and really outline the tools and technology as well as the philosophy that enabled us to kind of create the sequence and the you know from the beginning to the end and kind of how what what our process is how we achieve this stuff but before we do that I wanted to just kind of just talk about a couple of things and just dispel a couple of rumors or thoughts you might have about us so unless being from Santa Monica studio you guys probably think that we're obsessed with violence did we hate our fathers did we hurt small animals and then we engage in these like lavish massive sex parties and I'm here to tell you that actually none of that is true the reality is we actually just don't hate our fathers but so it's not just to kind of give you a little bit of background on who we are and what we're like so just kind of fills you in a little bit yes thank you for clearing that up Chris really appreciate it so to

get things started we just want to you know kick it off by showing up this video that highlights some of the moments in the Kronos Titan sequence from God over three for those of you who might have not played the game and also for those of you have play the game just kind of serve us a little refresher so let's go ahead and get that thing

[Music]

[Music] so my only regret about that was that it would I wish it were epic so let's talk about kind of a high level on what this experience was and you know really kind of nailed that down so it's worth mentioning that this was the the biggest undertaking that is a studio we had ever attempted to develop not only literally but only four but not only literally but also from an organizational standpoint just the manpower alone the amount of time effort resources dedicated to this was far and away unrivaled in our Studios history we had the nice distinction of being evaluated as the number one IGN boss battle which was interesting for us because this was never really intended to be a boss battle per se but nonetheless we're really happy that that was embraced in that fashion the next thing worth mentioning is this is kind of a million-dollar money shot and by that I mean it was just this is a 25 minute sequence and you know the amount of time energy and money invested in this in order to deliver on something

that's really about one-twentieth of our game is pretty extreme considering the other thing worth mentioning is this is a five core team developed kind of process and what I mean by that is they have consisted of me as the level designer insisted as an animator Jason Hall I consisted of a combat designer Adam Poole it consisted of it's Tyler bring on the character ID artist and Gary Cavanaugh the technical artist and three of us were dedicated as full-time from the beginning to the end also even though we had five core team members the total amount of people that were involved at the end were 35 which it's about a third of our studio at the time the animations required for this character were approximately 420 which were more than any other character that we've done except for cradles himself also the the joint of the the counts of huff joints for the character it was like 500 he was comprised his mesh was

also extremely complex he had 160 K triangles in about 18 million polygons the average time as Chris mentioned before was approximately only 25 minutes out of a 10-hour game so it was really just a you know it was a huge undertaking but it really was as a whole the amount of playing time wasn't as big as the entirety of the game also the character this was the biggest character we've ever done he was approximately 500 meters tall so we've never really done anything with that scale before and so let's really talk about the kind of inspiration for this and where these ideas come from and you know Albert Einstein said that creativity is knowing how well to hide your sources and you know game development is certainly no different you know oftentimes things are borrowed from other projects and at the beginning of development of God of War to the God of War - director Corey bar Logue had a vision to create god of War's version of the shadow of the colossus was another interesting Sony

game that came out several years ago and that I kind of set the precedent moving into the third one how you're going to start that if you watched the end of God of War - you know that it ends on the back of Titan and the Titan guy on this big cliffhanger moment which later gets picked up at the beginning of God of War 3 and so you know that kind of taking that idea and figuring out what you know I'm sharing with you guys well how do we actually achieve those moments what is our process for as a studio for embracing doing these kind of high-impact games that you know really can be kind of easily insane spectacles and ultimately very challenging so the Santa Monica studio development philosophy is essentially that we always start our games with a bank that's number one it's that we really want to grab the player from the very beginning by the throat almost literally and say this is the what we're gonna be showing you for the rest of the game here's how we're going to start it you know there's no cool up you know we don't there's no cinematics really you know there might be a little one but it's just right into the gameplay you know it's just boom you're in it and if you look at God of War one through three it's it's always the case and we feel as a studio that we have much more of a chance of doing

something exciting and something that the fans will appreciate if we think huge and really are kind of unrestricted about what we're gonna try to do on the level as far as feasibility and what's achievable and we're just gonna go balls to the wall to figure out what's possible and then we feel that after that we can wrangle it in and we can be can condense it down from that rather than starting small with what's manageable and expanding outward which we don't feel works very well for us the other thing worth mentioning is that we play test a lot and I can't emphasize that enough you know there's no secret with these games are released and they have high review scores and at least in our experience is because we play test our game probably 12 times externally during the development process which can rain range from you know anywhere from two to three years and internally on any given level or boss fight we probably play test it between forty to fifty times sometimes more per level or boss fight depending on what stage of development it's in so you can see that there's a lot of eyes on this we don't develop things in a vacuum and the next thing worth mentioning that ties into that is the my

belief in my experience working at the studio I'm learning from this team is that great me great games are really made one piece at a time you know if you haven't if you have an intro that's rated a nine or a ten and then you have a you know a puzzle after that it's a nine or a ten and then you have a boss fight that's a nine or a ten you know you have a game it's a nine or a ten all the way through and it's that's very obvious but it was something that became kind of new to me seeing that in practice at Santa Monica studio one thing that I'm grateful about our studio is that there's a commitment to quality all the way all the way from the top so management really you know gives us free rein to to be creative and to push ourselves and try to make the best game possible also we've had some great directors on the God of War series Steve Jaffe Corey Barr log stay gas misen and they've been the gatekeepers you know everything every decision is made through them everything from you know marketing pieces everything to the music they really really really have a grand vision for for the game and that actually really helps us to get things done because we don't have to make

decisions necessarily through our committee or through a publisher or anything like that and you know although we do provide a lot of feedback as a team to come up with ideas but in the end we have that one person that really makes the hard decisions also our Studios is good because we specialize like Chris mentioned before we have a combat designer that focuses only on you know making sure they a I feels good making sure that kratos feels responsive feels great we have level designers that focuses only on levels in the moment-to-moment events that happen in the levels we have people that just focus on the character modeling environment modeling is very very and I think that helps us to to really focus on on the things that are that we really want to push and really sell and so it's a good way of approach a scene like like the titan also we don't like to play it safe you know we try to kind

of go for something that we're not really sure if you're going to be able to pull off so then by the time that we finish it we hopefully still have something that that was pretty granted and so the beginning of God of War three the God of War three director Stig Asmussen you know he he set forth to establish the vision with the team and really to figure out not only where the game will take place and what are the locations and that and the head of grand moments but also you know leveraging the previous moments from the from God of War two and really trying to and you know create those within God of War 3 and the Titan moment specifically so it's just how quickly about you know establishing a vision for our games what does that mean so when we set out to create our games generally the entire studio will spend a month or so or you know coming up with ideas submitting ideas to the director you know regarding locations and so our locations can be anything from ideas like I want to go to I want to go to the future I want to go to Egypt you know let's do something in you know the Stone Age or whatever it doesn't really matter but if you look at God of War three our key locations in that game were where

Olympus where let's see Hades and the caverns in the labyrinth we're kind of the key locations and so it really gives you kind of the diversity of the not only the visual landscapes that you're going to be traveling but it just gives you a good pacing and to understand the tone of your game the next thing we really focus on is defining what our epic set pieces are and you know that's very important for us because if you look at God of War there's a lot of Ike you know throughout the game there many iconic kind of locations that you'll visit kind of frequently throughout your experience playing through the game and in God of War two another senior level designer and it works at our studio Jonathan Hawkins he had using this image kind of came up with an idea from you know the movie cube to kind of create a sequence in our game which ended up being the labyrinth so that's another idea as well as to kind of establish those set pieces and then lastly we really work on establishing what are our moments what are the things that are really going to anchor and brand the player in their brain and kind of the things that they're going to remember you know two years from now a month from now ten years from now there's is that you know really cemented in their mind and we think about those three things and that's the kind of

holistic approach that we take in order to establish what our what our game is we don't we don't define our game by story we don't define our game not by story but we generally define our game in terms of what what do we want to do what is the most compelling thing it's not terms of locations set pieces or while momentarily these ideas down and filter them through him and he'll ultimately make the final decisions so part of establishing the that early vision also is the previs you know getting the art team and the concept art team to start developing some inspirational pieces of the scenes that we were going to go for so this particular one here is showing off the kernel sequence and Kratos you know running around on his arm kind of setting the tone setting the scale and it's really really a good platform for us to jump off and and start exploring about how we're gonna actually get this done next thing also is doing a lot of storyboarding especially in the more complex sequences this is just a really cheap way for us to get something down with the director and start fleshing out

some ideas of what perhaps the sequence group could entail so it's very important for us to do this sort of stuff the next thing we want to share with you is this video this is a pretty cool previous video that we did we took God of War two assets we actually grabbed the cyclops and we just scaled them up and we started parenting all these environments on him and it was just barely really just an early way for us to start kind of wrapping our heads around how we were gonna do what sort of things were gonna occur on the Titans and you know at this point we didn't have any any tech or anything at all we had just all the assets so we just started you know kind of put any things together to get things rolling what's great about that is that you can you can really kind of prototype something very cheaply without having to actually build any art or tech or anything really other than things you already have and it's a huge saving grace for us because you can see you can sell that idea immediately to the team and to yourself so let's quickly talk about the brainstorming process there's a lot of different philosophies and a lot of different people have in studios have different ways of doing it the way

we do it at Santa Monica studio seems to be effective for us so that I would just touch on that really quickly generally when we kick off a brainstorm the director will come into a meeting with a design team and he'll submit a photo usually or you know a high concept and in this case the photo would have been something previously that we'd shown which is that high concept vision for for Kronos and so the team is essentially tasked at that point with with three criteria that they need to define as a group and so one is getting on it what how do you get on it what do you do do you take putting five playing and do it I mean do you you know do you go to a Chucky Cheese and I'm like he picks up the Chucky Cheese and swallows it like whatever like how do we get on it what do you do there like what is the what is the thing that you're doing when you're on the creature that's very important as well and then lastly how do you get off do you kill it you drown it I mean does he is your buddy like what happens do you guys go to McDonald's I mean I don't know so you got I'm just gonna have to figure those three things out and then the third thing is that the team will break into groups or individually rather for 30 minutes at which point you know we'll go read Wikipedia or try to come up with

different concepts and jog our brain with ideas and well basically write all those down and within the criteria framework and we'll bring them back and we'll regroup and we'll put it on the board and that's a pretty gnarly process and it takes a lot of time but it's very valuable because you get a lot of ideas and it's a huge smattering of different ideas and then at which point the director and the leads will take that that list and they'll evaluate that privately and they'll figure out you know what are their favorite three within that list and then that group of maybe six to eight people will get together and they'll ask his popularity which actually is totally a typo but I just left it in there because I thought it was kind of funny and design was spelling you know we're super good at it and at which point and we'll figure out and assess the popularity of it and you know it'll probably get to still down to a few at which point the director will make the ultimate decision on which ones he wants to put in the game so it's a very democratic process that involves a lot of people and we find it to be very effective and leveraging the the cohesive kind of team brain rather than the individual brain which is one way of doing it but we find the strength in numbers is very important so you know a

little bit about our philosophy a little bit about establishing the vision in our studio and a little bit about the inspiration but let's talk about the research and development because this is not something that was very easy for us to do we didn't have the technology it was in place in order to pull this off there was a lot of new things we needed so first and foremost see if this is not cooperating so there we go initially we didn't have the ability to attach a character to a mesh and move the mess around and have the character respond so Fabrice adara one of our senior programmers basically who works on our navigational system he created a dynamic state transition system that would allow any AI or player character that while moving the environment around team would respond dynamically to that so that was a huge element in terms of selling the dynamism within that experience so that when players are playing through it they really feel like I'm on this creature I'm not just like standing on a static object so next this is our gray box man

which was the initial innovation of the Titan as soon as it loads up basically it's uh it was just a quick way for us to get something just start animating something started trying to figure out if this guy is going to be walking on two so on all fours what is he going to be doing in the environment it's a house he's gonna be attacking or interacting with kratos but this way it was just something really cheap and dirty that we could do and the nice thing about this is that we were able to get this guy into the game and it start actually prototyping and getting credits too attached to him and climb on him in a very very economical way the next thing is you know now that we had this grey box man we wanted to iterate and and start fleshing out what the character was going to look like so this is the cinematic model from God of War two so we were able to strip that from the cinematics that were actually high rendered there were separate models than the one that was actually used in the game and we were able to just quickly take that and start adapting it and start getting into her into our new

engine so that was a huge huge saving some time for us so you all know this you know you make games you design levels it's very obvious that you usually you're working in a static environment like yeah any of your levels would change or something a little bit but generally it's a static medium and the big challenge for us is that you know we built this on a real creature this isn't fake so how do we do that that was the the initial super challenge for us to achieve was actually getting all of our in-game kind of scripting logic and our in-game entity system the controls our cameras our level scripting our sound everything to actually exist on the player there was no way that we could do this without having a system created that would allow us to attach it to the creature so I'm a Darrington one of our senior tools programmers basically build us a system along with our tech art department that enabled us to attach specific any game object that we wanted within Maya to specific joints they were defined on the creature and so as you can see here you have you know everything in red is kind of designer entities and scripting and everything in

in green is for the camera team and everything in blue is for sound and so that as the character moves around like this those objects from the T pose would also match the mesh of the position that he moved in so this is a hugely important part and actually selling this experience because if we couldn't have all of the actual information within the game following the character there was no way we could achieve this without it being a cinematic and so I'm sure you're wondering woke a that that's all well and good when you're any t-pose but unfortunately the game isn't played like this because if it were it would be pretty bad so we ended up having to figure out was well what happens when the character is moving so if the character you know is in an animation then what do we do and the big problem with that was that you know immediately going from this to going to this or anything all those game objects that you had at a specific kind of orientation within Maya would you shoot all across the level and became supe super nightmarish for us to try to build this way and so what we ended up having to do was to basically to create a preview animation system that tech art created for us which allowed us to play animations and to see where those

specific game objects would exist within the creature itself and this is I can't even emphasize how annoying this process was in a long run it was the only way we could do it but it just takes forever because for all 400 animations that you have you have to check that each specific object that you need is in the exact right location at any point within the animation timeline and it just is you can imagine how much of a nightmare that is and at this thing there's no secret this thing took you know several years to develop so that kind of gives you an idea of kind of how we achieve that and the most important thing is that in really emphasizing in this video is that we could not have actually done the sequence without this technology and the next thing that we had to do was to create a new collision system and so Vasily Filippov our lead programmer and Jim telander a senior programmer on our team essentially created as a system that enabled us to put collision on a on a meshed character on something that wasn't a cup kind of a primitive carom ative geometry and as you can see here we kind of have we have the arm of Kronos and you know the green is the ron

and the in the red is kind of like a nose flip stuff and the important thing about that is that we had gone from a studio that could basically move around primitive shapes that we called seedy halls that could it be animated but they couldn't be very dynamic or very literally straight too much would have too many polygons to a system that enabled us to animate a mesh and the same way to animate a creature and to attach a collision to it and so as you can see here here's Chronos as he's actual like whatever million 50 million or whatever polygon count even now it's it's out of control but we could never put collision on a creature like that because the amount of just you know faces on a creature is just it's too crazy so there was no way to do it in that fashion so this match was actually just a visual component there was really no collision attached to him and what we ended up doing was in his same way you'd have like armor pieces we had specific instance versions of collision by region that we would turn on and off throughout you know the sequence we would define it by hand by stomach by arm and it was the

only way we could do it without crippling the power of the PlayStation because if you put collision on a character that big it's just not going to run so this isn't way we were able to achieve it and it was definitely a new system for us so this video showcases a combination of like the three months of research on the development that we did now we had you know an actual model in an environment we had Kratos fighting enemies he wasn't completely falling off he was able to nab on him and we have some kind of rough animation blocked in alright so we've talked about all that stuff the tools the technology the philosophy etc and now how do we sell it this is an important thing it's it from the very beginning the mandate was well we can't just create this kind of like magnificent like idiot robot like this needs to be legit this needs to be like an actual creature did you feel you're having interaction with it it emotes that lives it breathes you know it can't be you know we can't spend two years developing something and just have it be overseas we really need to focus on how we sell this experience so the first mandate that sig gave me specifically he was our game director and God of War three was this

thing needs to be alive we have to bring it to life if it doesn't feel alive we're totally screwed so how do we achieve that how do we bring this thing to life and the first thing we really tried to create was the emotional build-up so if you play through this experience you know from the beginning Cronus's rather you know amused with Kratos he's kind of holding him on his thumb laughing at his grandson and he's basically like whatever you know your your flee to me I don't care about you you know you blind him he gets irritated you land on his hand you break ass or now he's like he's kind of pissed off and then you proceed forward rip his fingernail off now he's furious he's you know he's he's angry he's like what you you know what are you doing you look at my finger oh my god I gotta kill you now and so he goes through this kind of dramatic kind of character arc and through that process you know he ultimately is defeated and he goes through these kind of agonized stages where he's becoming progressively more and more disturbed and defeated and she really wanted to try to achieve that and in telling that story for the character the next thing was we had to really keep this believable you know yes it's Greek mythology yes it's fantasy but we came at it from the perspective of how would a man kill the Giant and we felt that if

we could anchor it in that context then it would feel more interesting and more believable for the player in the context of God of War so that was very key to us as well the next thing is dynamicism which actually isn't really a word but it's just kind of something we throw around it's Toni Santa Monica and it's just really is the dynamism aspects making sure that you know we have those moments where the character throws his arm out and God you know grunts are falling off and falling into the abyss or you know a rocks are falling and that the character is moving in your changing States he really had to bring that and we had to sell that so the animation early on when we pit we were pitched this idea we knew that it was going to be critical to sell the the emotion and to sell the progression of the battle and as well as you know dealing with an actual moving level you know we hadn't really done that before the visual effects were also going to be critical part you know all the sequences which cradles in there acts with them and begins to slowly kill him or do damage to him we know that the visual effects had to had to be spot-on and had to really complement the animation as well

as the sound effects in the end of VO you know it was important for us to have the sort of dialogue in place so that he could kind of have a back and forth with kratos so it wasn't just you know some soulless creature that that didn't have any feelings or emotions we really want to make sure so that's why it was important for us to to fit as much dialogue as possible throughout the sequence so here we have Kratos you know men love and women want to be in whatever and he's seven feet tall roughly on average then we have Hades who's about a twenty twenty five feet tall then we have the Colossus who is I can't read that but he's pretty big and this is actually the real reference size of how this would be in the real world you have the Empire State Building now next to the Colossus and then finally you have Chronos who comes in at about 1600 feet tall and so you can see the actual kind of scale that we're dealing with here on a character such as this so we knew of course that the scale was going to be critical to really sell

this to make this really grand but in order for us to do that we also wanted to make him a real character not just a you know a set of pieces like one arm here and worn one head there we really want to build a whole character and this this really really really was challenging but it was actually in the end it was a big payoff we also needed to have moments of relative scale you know that's why we had enemies running on Kronos and and Kratos interacting with other enemies other than him we also had to display moments where we could show Pandora's temple that was strapped to Chronos back which got a war probably like I think around 70% of the game took place on the back of of Kronos so if we wanted to have make sure that we included those moments as well as the moments where you could see Chronos place his hand on the side of the mountain and they kind of show a couple shots of the ground to really really sell that relative scale the camera work was was also very critical we had to make sure that we had you know dynamic

up shots down shots and that's another reason why we wanted to have a real character in the environment because there was many many points where we needed to really remind the player that they were on top of this giant character and the director would say pull the camera back you know way back and if we didn't have the real character we would have ran into a lot of problems so by having this this guy really being in the environment really really saved us also we wanted to keep it all real time so we really reduce the amount of cutscenes that we had during the sequence and the amount of cuts it was someone consistent camera throughout the from the very beginning to the end with the exception of maybe when we swallows you and you go down his throat that was probably the only time that we really cut but other than that it was sort of like a seamless thing we kind of you know inspired by like scenes from for movies like the opening of Boogie Nights where it's just one constant shot going through one scene of course without all the cocaine but you know we really wanted to sell that and of course like a mission before

the animation that was critical to sell the scale we needed to make sure that this guy felt heavy that he felt you know grand and and slow so it was a special challenge for animation team to really pull it off so Bruno did a great job and it sounds kind of the sense of scale on how we achieve that but let's talk about the design decisions that that were intentionally made from the very beginning and the first thing that we made you know very clear as a team was that establishing this was an experience and not a traditional boss fight you know God of War has a lot of great boss fights you know if you look at Hades that was a really cool one or you look at the Hydra in the beginning you know you know we have traditional boss fights that are stage based encounters where and he fight a guy who's roughly your size at this stage and you do damage and he moved to the next stage and you're engaging kind of a natural combat and the natural kind of you know narrative and fighting and in this we were not emphasizing that he really wanted to sell the experience not so much a boss fight the next thing is you know that as designers were always trying level designers as well we're always trying to show the goal whenever we you know you know to the player whenever we're creating our environments

we always want to you know dangle that carrot in front of their face and this is certainly no exception and you know when we were play testing everybody asks people what do you think the goal is and you know overwhelmingly the response was it's his head you know it's his head you see his head and that's where I'm supposed to go which was actually our intention but we were surprised people intuitively knew that and the other thing he really wanted to establish was the in addition to having the you know the large goal you need to have those intermediate goals as well so if that's moving from you know the wrist up to the to the forearm you know and then a you know destroying his fingertip and showing those goals all along the way and you know presenting them every few minutes is very important for us and in doing that and then having those kind of you know intermediate goals and long-term goals we really feel it's very important to to reward the player for everything that we ask them to do and that's a you know as you you know you move up eventually to his belly and you know go through this whole sequence where you're you know you're fighting a cyclops on his shoulder you're rewarded with being able to be swallowed by him and go down and do a stomach and then break out of his stomach and every five

minutes the player was experiencing something cool and I really call it you know kind of caught called God of War kind of a bro on the couch game because I feel that every five minutes somebody watching you players gonna see something interesting whether it's you know ripping the eye out of out of a cyclops or if it's you know fighting a Titan or whatever it is every five minutes really try to give someone a big payoff and the next thing obviously is comfortable pacing yes this is a high-impact sequence and yes it's very tense seemingly but we we couldn't expect the players to be stressed out for 25 minutes constantly dying constantly frustrated we had to create the sense of danger at all times with only with picking and choosing very specifically when we were going to actually have it be tense and hazardous and then lastly plausibility and we just really needed to make this have this the whole situation makes sense you know it's there were no laser beams we weren't going to you know ready magical unicorn and like strangle and with invisible lasso like we couldn't do anything like that we had to have it make sense like is this justifiable could a man kill a

creature of this size okay so we had our research and development we've roughed out you know some stuff and we kind of had to lay out of what the events were going to happen we knew what the goals were now I was time to actually start executing it executing the sequence and of course Kronos was going to be the the star of the show so we needed to focus on him make him make him really really detailed and and one of the biggest challenges was for the modeler Tyler Brianna character artist that worked on Chronos that usually we have character artist focuses just the characters and we have environment artist sees through the environments but this was a unique case because we have to tell Tyler guess what you're now promoted to environment artist as well as a character artist because at first we were going to have two different people work on the disk air one for environments ones for character separately but we found out that that just wasn't gonna work out because it's like having two people work on the same thing at the same time it was really

challenging so I think it worked out for us to actually have the cart are just kind of take over that responsibility as well the next thing was super important to touch on is that you know generally in a level design process at our studio you know the designers will work on kind of the levels in isolation from the artist and we'll kind of build things in Maya and essentially construct our spaces how we want and iterate on them unfortunately in this case we didn't have that luxury because we had to create this in tandem with the actual physical model itself and so you know when you're on top of the hand is you can render the hand rather when you're as you can see in this photo and Kratos is kind of climbing along that path and the thing that was very challenging was that you know in that ceiling climb state the creature you know would move his hand and animate it slightly and then you would fall and there wasn't enough fidelity actually carved into the mesh that enabled us to have kind of clean navigational transitions through the mesh so one of the Dove happening was you know and in order for us to get that cut properly it was it was pretty much a nightmarish process where I had to take screenshots and as you can see

here kind of draw in and say I need more fidelity here cut here cut here cut here and then the character artist Tyler would spend you know an afternoon doing that and then he would hand that off to our technical artist who would then reskin the whole thing and that process took about two to three days so you can imagine it's you know just assembling that just the back and forth and that pipeline was just super arduous but it was the only way that we really could do it at the time so it was definitely worth noting but super frustrating so we're just going to talk about a little bit about sort of the challenges that were facing each department and as Chris mentioned you know tech art had to continuously update this character and one of the things that we added to Chronos after the e3 demo was well-received there was a sequence there were the Centaur got D gutted by cradles and it's you know you would see the entrails come out so the director was really happy with that and he's like okay we got a we got to do that in a much grander scale we got to put that in Kronos so we had to kind of transfer this super tech that we have developed from us very small character into this

really giant mechanic scale and that was really really complicated also we had a side mission before a massive joint count not not that kind of joint but but you know we had five hundred five hundred joints that we had to deal with so we had full facial animation on the character we have full fingers everything that was required to really bring them to life and every time that as Chris mentioned before they had to change the path of where credit's was going to be running they had to reskin it every time eventually we developed a system where you know we could we could transfer the skinning a lot easier but it early on at the beginning it was it was it was not that way it was definitely definitely challenging and for animation we have never really done something like this usually we animate a character that interacts in the environment but we never had a character that was the environment so we had to definitely figure out how we're gonna do this I'll pull this off and

because of that we had to deal with stability issues versus aesthetic issues and what I mean by that is that of course we want to make this guy feel alive like like he's really there and not not just some animatronic character but at the same time we had to keep in mind the gameplay so we couldn't just have him flail around and move like crazy because you know things could you know creators could fall off things could could could could break you know and that wouldn't have worked out so we have to constantly balance that with the sign alright does the character feel alive yes they see is he moving I see not moving too much just enough so that the gameplay is stable yes and then we were able to achieve that in the end also the animation resolution because the character was so large the further you got out to his extremities like fingertips the animation will start like you know shaking and and it would just start becoming unstable so we had to deal with that and we had to you know work with

our tech art department to to find solutions for animation compression so that it will to work in the end so let's give it up for keyboard cat real fast and we love keyboard cat and so basically the level design challenges that we faced at least for myself for that you know I went from basically working on maps and designing levels and then hang them off to art and a kind of traditional pipeline that's governed you know you hand it off you just assume it's gonna get done pretty we have producers that worry about that and yeah all interfaces the artists a little bit and I'll come ask you questions but this is very different in this instance you know the level designer myself at the time you know essentially became the nucleus of this effort insofar as that my job kind of transitioned into also you know half producer I was also I was the only person who really knew everything that was going on with this creature amongst a massive team that eventually was comprised of 35 people so you know no one else knows so you we didn't have a producer on it so you know half of your job is actually doing the other half is just like kind of task management of figuring out where

everything is and who's working on what and when it's gonna be ready so that was certainly a new challenge the next thing was you know you literally had to become like one with the animator I mean we might as well have just like you know had our bodies like suture together because he was my left hand and I was his right hand because I couldn't work without him and he was basically moving my level around and without us being able to directly collaborate very easily it was near impossible to do anything in a reasonable timeframe so we had to actually end up sitting together just like side-by-side and essentially like stepbrothers you know like we were bunkmates so I just became kind of weird but it was actually super necessary in the end and then also working like I said earlier with a new collision system wasn't it was terribly daunting it had a lot of challenges associated with it in terms of debugging and make me at work and then you know violence and other disciplines and like I said before you know traditionally designers at our studio can kind of work in isolation but in this case it was being very much tied into the animation team very much tied into the tech art team and the character art team and like I needed these guys in

order to to achieve what we were trying to achieve I couldn't do it by myself and then as far as camera design is concerned you know obviously the moving foundation is a huge concern how do you camera a level when it's moving so we needed to kind of tackle by to figure that out and Mark Simon are you know or the camera designer who did a great job when God of War three Cameron the this map sorry this will this character level you know I think he think he nailed that pretty well and then also obviously selling the ridiculous sense of scale was super challenging for us and you know being not being afraid to pull the camera into the detail so like Bruna had said being able to pull it out so those are challenges that we face in new ways of designing so we've talked a lot about kind of where we came from but let's talk about you know what would happen we were actually getting it done so you know after the initial research and development phase and that prototype you guys saw earlier where we were into the development process was Nathan Gary was the level designer on it at the time he would pioneered the technology and kind of taken it in its very early stage and the goal now was to get it into a shelf form which is essentially to take it from the

very beginning all the way to the end with our big kind of spectacle moments mocked in it gives us kind of a rough outline and you can play through it doesn't have the connective tissue it doesn't really have anything in it other than you know the kill and then all the intro maybe five nodes of like what you do from the very beginning all the way through and it's basically just to kind of get kind of the starting outline of starting palette to work from within but let's talk quickly about that because it's very important for our level design kind of process we we like I mentioned we use a process where we where we define shells for our levels and so as you can see here this is the Haiti shell from God of War three and what shells enable us to do is to create a continuous mapping and progression of our of our worlds and this is the Haiti's world and all the levels that are comprised within that world and how do they physically fit together not only obviously physically but also in terms of what is the pacing for each area you know we need to have a boss fight here we need to have a coating hallway here there needs to be a puzzle here a fight space here and will actually go through

and meticulously you know spreadsheet this stuff and figure out where are wow moments what is the time breakdown of our Wow moments where our fights what are the time breakdown of our fights and create a kind of a spike chart for the entire game what is it delivering to the player from beginning to end and so as you can see that's very effective for us and we can literally run through the whole game essentially in shell form from getting to end and say here's a Vista here's a fight here's an epic well moment well some of its very TBD but it gives us a good understanding so in addition to that our design philosophy at Santa Monica Studios to expound on that and this is worth sharing I hope is that we value experimentation and iteration over documentation and we do not document yes we will write things in like Microsoft Word to pitch in to share we will brainstorm in that fashion we will do things in Illustrator we spend most of our time doing we spend most of our time building we don't find that tying ourselves to documentation is very helpful and in fact or documents always come last you know or we don't write game design documents we define mechanics etc after they've been

designed after we've iterated on them and our level design Docs are the same in fact we don't even create those anymore we just do video run throughs and we find that we don't we don't marry ourselves to anything because I don't you know looking at God of War from the outside before I started working at Santa Monica studio I thought these guys would like insane mad geniuses I was like well because I came from a world where you design maps on paper and then you have to get it right and you have maybe one shot to do it and that's not the case you know we have the luxury of being able to have the time to let things come together and that's very important you know you know there's a commitment that you know in our studio that you things need time to come together you know it's not you can't make a sequence like Chronos or any of our elaborate puzzles or Pandora from God of War one in a week two weeks a month even three months you know oftentimes our boss fights take six months to design our high action moments and our games can take years to build you know and it's just about giving at the time and what's you know valuing what's important and figuring out where to where to spend it additionally you know you know Tim moths are essentially our tech director and Krista Erickson our

tools director are very good about giving us strong tools it allows us to iterate very quickly you know like I said before we can basically build everything in my ourselves and the in fact the entire studio works within Maya there's no an artist will use the brush but everyone is actually interfacing and working within my ladder ectly so it gives us kind of a unified platform to develop from within and that allows us to iterate very quickly and to build things and we don't have to go back and forth it's art and have them essentially build our Maps we build the maps and then they art on top of it also worth noting is that in our studio desire designers are really encouraged to think for themselves it's just like I said before it's not a one-person vision studio you know it's not one guy thinking of all the ideas and making them happen and telling people what to do you know obviously there's you know people make decisions but we all think as a collective unit and we find that that's very important for us in terms of getting a lot of ideas and just doing it down to the best ones possible and then it's also about getting the right people on the bus you know the the interview process at our studio is very painful you know we have a we have a gnarly test that takes forever

four people will give them a week to do that and if we get to past that stage you probably have you know they're greeted with eight to ten hours of interviews in a day and they go through pretty much every department and it's very brutal it's very agonizing but we feel they would if we can vet vet our designers and bet our staff within our studio then we know that we have people that can handle it and they can do good work that can be entrusted like I said before to think for themselves and we don't have to manage them you know over manage them and they can create content and they can really just build and do what they do best the next thing is only knowing your philosophy and sticking to it whatever it is whether you're the vision of your game forgot of war for example you know it's a high it's an action-adventure game with combat puzzles and platforming and that's our game you know we're not we don't build things that deviate from that we don't you know we don't try to build like social networking components within the game we don't build playstation home hubs we don't do any of that we stick to what we know and we and we continue with that and that works not only on a grand scale for our games but also on a on a small scale for what our levels are you know so for designing the labyrinth levels you know we knew that these are mechanical contraption rooms that essentially hazards and we don't you

know we don't do anything unique in there we don't have there's no water in there something crazy and so we stick to the vision and you know philosophy of whatever that is and we keep that going and the last thing you know is that we really valued that strength in numbers and like I said before we have we have a lot of people we have a lot of people that are really you know passionate about what they do and they could contribute and you know I've worked in a lot of levels at Santa Monica studio and I know that you know they've always always always worked out better in the long run than what I originally could have conceived and had I built my initial vision of what I thought a map could be in isolation it never would have been as good as what it ended up being in the long run once you have other people looking at it you get the feedback from other designers etc etc and the leads come in and you know you get a lot of insight from different places and it's very important in abused for us to be you know kind of communicative and reciprocate if as far as sharing ideas and being honest I just wanted to quickly touch on the art philosophy you seen this example so this is a shot from the announced trailer for God of War three and this was all a

trailer that was developed in-house we were we did everything in the indie engine it was sort of a way for us to to kind of test our new engine and see what we could pull off so we had this moment in the game on the trailer and it sort of kind of set a goal for us to push towards for the final game and although that moment didn't really occur at the beginning of the game on Gaia we were able to get that moment into Chronos so it's sort of that that's that that goals that we set for ourselves that we want to make sure that we delivered on the promise that we had established with that trailer also you know pushing ourselves forward you just want to make sure that the character of our Chronos was the most detailed that we could do so Tyler brown did a great job on detailing everything from the veins down to two other fingerprints so definitely our most complex character we have we're done the next slide shows sort of like a progression first is the cinematic model

from God of War two and as you can see the character didn't change too too much but there was definitely a progression that you can see here we lot of iteration a lot of fine-tuning a lot of detail you know that added got out of overtime as well as you could see some some height changes and it's also worth noting that uh this is anatomically correct and Tyler definitely got into some hot water of this is a point of contention on a project he was told not to do this he did it anyway and then and I'm making into the game because it would have been weird because you know as you fall off the creature there's been a lot of crotch shots and we just would have been kind of bizarre and it is a bit ironic for a guy so big he is not so big somewhat and someone that I think about one point they were talking about like sex minigame and all the stuff I were just like no way we just can't figure out how to make it work we didn't know it I'm if you guys have any ideas talk later so at this point in the development we had basically created a

shell Nathan Gary had spent time working with the team you know mangu our animator etc and you know basically building this for us with with Tyler and you know working from the very beginning to establish the show and what we were able to do was put this together as you can see in this video from kind of beginning to end so this is six months into development on the creature we were at this point and three months after the the tools our technology had been developed and at this stage you could play through it it a lot of the major beats it wasn't exactly fun yet but you know you could see the kind of the spectacle there there was no connective tissue really bill and it was all really kind of mock Dan and to be determined there was really no art at it and it was very basic there was still a ton of work to be done but at least we had kind of a nice starting point and as you can see here that's our hot box sequence and you know we kind of have these like weird CollegeHumor names that we attach to all of our sequences in order to kind of create like a nomenclature so we can easily reference them within our team and we feel that's helpful rather than being like yeah it's the thing where he's like holding the hand people say

yeah it's the hotbox everyone knows the hotbox you know so and you go through that and we basically do that for everything that we have in our game it's kind of big and requires you know a lot of conversation so it's pretty close I'm getting strangled right there and so where are we now so now we have to do it for real so Nathan Gary moved on to a different position within Sony and I was exciting for him and I left a vacuum in order to see who was actually gonna finish this thing off because as you can see it was kind of there in a shell the idea was intact it kind of made sense we actually had to do it now and how are we gonna do it so I was actually brought in for better or worse I was super excited in the beginning and you know I quickly turned to dread what to talk to everyone who worked on it to figure out how gnarly this was and we just got to it now it was really no option so we just jumped in and I started working on it with the team and you know I was initially tasked with with a few things and one of them was to figure out we'll play through it and figure out what works and what doesn't work and I felt initially the things you know a lot of it was working and in fact I think it was quite cool already but I felt we were missing some things you're missing the dynamism we were missing a lot of

kind of those big moments that talked about where the character transition States etc and we really needed to shore it up we do they also needed to really create a kind of a fight sequence between the character and an kratos and really you know selling that experience and we feel like we didn't really have it at that point so we had to figure out what we were going to cut what we were gonna keep and what we were going to improve upon so you just want to share with you a couple of the cut stuff so this is say a part where Curtis is actually going across to each one of Cronos eyes and just ripping it out and then just having having Adam we kind of figured out that by the time that you reach his face he was pretty incapacitated Kratos is a baroque character but he's not necessarily sadistic so we felt that he should just go for the forehead and just finish him off but and on top of that we just had too many eye ripping that scenes already in the game so yeah the next thing is this attack that you know we we have

four Chronos early on yes criticism of an aunt compared to Chronos but this attack was just way too literal and it's just didn't work out for the character at all but I just thought you know want to share this with you guys and so the first time we decided to tackle was that's well let's just nail this from the beginning to end you know it just fill it in from start to finish and you know we decided to start with the right arm and this is kind of the right arm and maybe I want to say like the pre-alpha stage and we were we were kind of figuring out what we wanted to do here and what worked and we spent about three months working on this one section and it was the most challenging for us because this is where he really really wanted to sell the actual even though it's not like a real boss battle but you know our version of a direct fight between the two of you so you know we have you know we have Kronos screaming at you we have you running over to him and like attacking him and we had out we really struggle with this for a while you know we were struggling with the transition state from this point to the belly and you know one day I was just we were sitting there and cut out of frustration and he said well why don't we just rip his fingernail off thinking people were gonna be like oh

that's a bad idea or whatever and everyone was like actually that's kind of cool let's try that and so Jason Hall mock that up that day the animator and we just we tried it and it instantly sold itself people were like that's that's really that's terrible actually it's free it's weird how would you do that man I'm like you know you're ripping people's heads off and you're all this other stuff which is really kind of unrelatable but everyone can kind of relate to like having your fingernail ripped off and it just is really evocative you don't really see that here but you know if you play the game it's it's pretty gross of the sound and the audio and everything is pretty nasty and so where did that leave us that I left us at the point where we needed to solidify the progression of the whole experience and I liken kind of Kronos to you know like a classic car you know if anybody who has had a classic car knows about him you know everything will kind of work when you get it you know then like a week later the windows went rolled up and then the sunroof won't close and then like you know you need like a new oil pan and like what happens is that you can never get everything above water everything something is always submerged something is always now functioning and that was the case at this it took us about it I would say you know nine months is to get it to a place

where we could play through the whole thing from beginning to end with progression and that was really our goal was can we get through it and it took forever you know it kept crashing or you'd fall off and that was gnarly and very disconcerting and then that took us into the next stage which was the play testing and kind of iterative process stage of the whole experience and I liken this very much to being attacked by a shark while you're riding a helicopter under the Golden Gate Bridge and it for all of you have done it it's awesome or if you haven't done it you know whatever let's check it out but as you can see here it's wrought with peril and it tests a lot of your assumptions and it can be very taxing and time-consuming and and frustrating ultimately so you know we went through that process we figured out and the people were responding well to this they were following and dying a lot but they were responding to the grand spectacle of the whole thing which we were very happy about and that opened it up for us to figure out well you know as game developers you know we're we're you know oftentimes it's you know it's not what you add to an experience it's what you take away from it in order to create the better experience and what to subtract and that was certainly the case with the sequence but in some respects we had to

find things to add to because we felt like you were still missing things at those later stages like the sequence where you saw earlier where he grabs you off the belly and holds the hand out and those dynamic state changes that he really wanted to sell those so he had to get those in and there are a lot of eye rules about that when I suggested to do that because you know we were already pretty much screwed and seemingly unable to pull this off in the time we had but we felt if they were gonna do it at all we had to go big so now that we trimmed the fat and we had everything working we had a progression that was time to really turn up the volume and polish this thing out and get it out the door so that's when all 35 members all-hands-on-deck everybody jumped on board to start polishing this thing getting it together so team members like Mac Sankar who's the lead visual effects artist you know did a great job on Chronos carry Gavin are the technical artists that worked he can tell you some crazy stories about working problems but you know they they pull together everybody together so this is a shot of pre-alpha Kronos and here's a nice transition to

what it actually in being so this is the moment that was most exciting for us we're starting to get the visual effects the sound everything's the new updated animations the the the final character models in place and the frame rates becoming more stable it was really really truly an exciting moment for us at this stage and so at this point it's pretty much alive and I think that for us and for me this was a big this is a big experience to have it all come together this is the hardest thing I ever worked on and it was it was a situation where every day it seemed impossible everyday people didn't feel to be able to do it in time or people couldn't see the vision and it was very challenging it was like looking into a dark abyss and his game developers we all know that working to create a medium with time constraints you know you don't you can't see the end result necessarily that you operate on that daily faith that if you guys work hard as a team and you try to be as work as smart as possible you'll be able to pull it off and that was you know that was it was very rewarding for us and to work with something like this was really why I got it to games it was to work on cool things that I was excited about and

passionate about with really talented people and to me it was very satisfying you know professionally emotionally personally in order to work on this and pull it off and I see it all the way in the end and I remember you know everything set this up for a year and a half I went through this and I played it after we got all the vo in and and everything I remember playing through the whole thing and its really being blown away in the end you know stabbing him in the forehead and he's like pleading with you not to kill him and I actually felt bad you know which was weird because if anyone's like The Wizard of Oz on this it's me because I set the whole thing up over the last year and a half but I actually felt that we had achieved what we set out to achieve which was delivering on the believability and the spectacle and selling the experience for me it was kind of like a unique experience to be able to work on this because I kind of had sort of like I was able to step back I wasn't actually doing the day-to-day animation on the character but I was able to sort of supervise and see it born all the way from that you know got over to cyclops previous animation to the gray box man - each iteration and I could really see this character growing and slowly coming to life so I just you

know I'm very grateful that I had that opportunity to kind of have that that perspective on on this on the sequence and we're wrapping up now but I'll just we'll just jump and do an outro clip and this is kind of how it ends

and so lastly I just wanted to give a lot of thanks and credits everyone who couldn't be here that worked on this like I said it was a massive team effort and these are just the hand you know this is a list of everyone that worked on it directly and we just wanted to thank them personally and then if you like money watchings mansions and cars like we do and you want to like what you see we're hiring you know so you can check us out at the career Pavillion if you're interested you know check us out come on down and join the team that's something we have a future projects we need help with and then lastly if you want to get in contact with us if you have questions about any of the stuff that we've done this is our contact information and yeah it was great we don't unfortunately have time for questions I think we ran the full schedule but you can meet us outside after the meeting if you have any questions you like to talk about it with us please remember to fill out your speaker feedback forms and then you make sure I got everything else yeah that's

it that's it all right thanks a lot thank you so much for coming guys thank you very much