Special Case Animations
Jun 22, 2015
It's Monday so it's time for another Monday Thimbleweed Park blog post. For me, the past two weeks have mostly been taken up by my big move back to Seattle from the Bay Area. I first moved here in 1992 to start Humongous Entertainment, then moved back to the Bay Area in 2004 and now I'm returning to Seattle. I really love Seattle and missed it quite a bit. It's great to be back, but I don't feel like I've gotten a lot done on Thimbleweed park in the last few weeks.
I did do another pass on the budget. Gary and I did a pretty detailed budget pre-Kickstarter, but now that things have gotten rolling, we have a much better idea of the actual costs and the work involved. When you're doing a preliminary budget, it's all about guessing based on past experience. It's 99% hand-waving and 1% actual data.
As you leave preproduction, you have a much better idea of what you're building and how much time it's going to take and the resources involved. Some expenses were moved from one line to another, some grew and other shrunk, but the end result is we're actually spending a little less than we planned, which gives us a tiny bit of flexibility to bring on an additional artist to help with some of the animation.
In Maniac Mansion, the character animation consisted of what we called walk-talks. Four frame walks in three directions (left and right were flipped) and then talking. There isn't any other animation in Maniac Mansion. When someone uses the weight machine, the machine move up and down (two states) and the character just stands there.
When we started working on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, we decided to add "special case animations". These were animations that would be used in one place.
Having or not having them wasn't a work issue as much as it was a disk-space issue. Adding a single disk to the game would increase the "cost of goods". Add too many "cost of goods" and the "return on investment" (ROI for those without a MBA) would plummet.
At the beginning of a project were were given a budget of floppy disks. Monkey Island would get 5 floppies. As the cost of floppy disks would fluctuate like they were pork bellies being traded at the stock exchange, we would sometimes get "an extra floppy" added to our "cost of goods" budget and it was like Christmas. Sometimes we'd get an extra floppy added because we just whined and complained or maybe the game was looking really good and promising. Throughout production you'd have to keep a close eye on your floppy-count™.
Steve Purcell did the first "special case animation" where Indy jumps down into a pit. It was impressive to see a character do something that wasn't walking or talking. Seems quaint and silly these days, but it was pure magic back then.
The other thing added around that time were reach animations. Indy and Guybrush had animations to "reach high", "reach med" and "reach low". They were played whenever the character interacted with an object in the world. Each object was tag with HIGH, MED or LOW and the system would play the appropriate animation.
Magic.
The advent of the CD-ROM and later DVDs and now internet downloads have crushed most of the joy out of the floppy-count™, but there is still budget to contend with. Given the fidelity of our graphics, Thimbleweed Park has an unlimited floppy-count™, but someone still has to draw, animate and program it all, so we still need to be careful.
For Thimbleweed Park, we budgeted for a good amount of generic reach and special case animations, but doing larger cut-scene animations stayed on our wish-list. We don't have a lot of cut-scenes in the game, mostly because I think cut-scenes kind of suck. They are great for big infrequent emotional rewards or quick little scenes, but, let's face it, you're playing a game because you like "playing" and that involves interacting. I like to follow the "10 second rule". Don't go more than 10 seconds without some kind of meaningful interaction (pro-tip: pressing OK is not a meaningful interaction).
Besides budget, the other issue in doing special case animations is a tech one. How do we do them? If they are just special animations the character is doing (like using the weight machine), then it's easy, we do them in the same tool we're doing walk-talks in.
But if they are larger and more complex and require coordinating several elements, it's not as easy as just playing a canned animation. The animations might take place across several screens involving many separate images. I know some game devs use After Effects and then have exporters that export data used for playback, but that seems overly complex to me.
I've been playing around with Spine and quite like it. The problem with Spine is neither Gary nor I have used it before. I'm sure if we sat down and spent a week we could become proficient at it, but we're both swamped with work.
Which brings me to the real point of this blog post (is anyone still reading?).
We're looking for someone that is very proficient in Spine who could spend a few hours doing some (paid) tests for us. If Spine does what we need, it might translate into some more work compositing and choreographing our cut-scenes and larger animations.
If you already know Spine (I mean really know it and have produced a lot of work using it), please contact us.
I'm also open to other tools readers may have used. Probably the most important issue is being able to tween animation movement over time and easy to parse file format.
Anyway. Long post. Thanks for reading.
- Ron
In addition, if I remember correctly, as soon as the timer expired, the cutscene would happen right then and there. Perhaps, the cutscene could have waited until the player left a room; or maybe a simple fade effect would have made those cutscenes feel less jarring?
"It's 99% hand-waving and 1% actual data." Just like Stan!
Then there's games like Devil May Cry 3 which has great over-the-top action cutscenes at the beginning and end of each mission, but the cutscenes also make for a really great story and great characters. They are completely skippable at the press of a button, so they do nothing but benefit the game.
One of the major appealing factors of rpgs, particularly old-school jrpgs like the Final Fantasy games is their stories, which have lots of cutscenes. I mean really the quality and entertainment of cutscenes is largely dependent on the type of game that they are being used in, and games that are very heavy on story such as the Final Fantasy series make intelligent use of cutscenes to carry the story on and expand on the mythos of the game's universe.
Going way back to 1989, there's the original Ninja Gaiden on the NES which wouldn't be as memorable of a game without it's cutscenes, which made for a rather simple but memorable and exciting story and would get players hyped for the next stage of the game. And again they are skippable with the press of a button.
Most games these days, especially those made by AAA developers do have awful and horribly long and boring cutscenes, and it does seem like the developers spend more time and energy on the cutscenes than the actual game itself, and unfortunately the gameplay seems to suffer because of this, so with that I do agree with you but there are times when cutscenes can dramatically improve a game and make it a better experience, it just depends on how well they are done and incorporated into the game itself. I just can't stand when cutscenes are unskippable or there's no way to speed through them, especially when they are long and frequent, that really irritates me.
And then there's games like Journey and Fez which actually benefit from having practically no cutscenes or story at all, it's more about just exploring and discovering the worlds inside each game, letting the player use their imagination and figuring out the puzzles.
I understand the huge amount of work involved in your game and that you would like to streamline, but I really hope you stay true to your original pitch and make sure the visual style of the game follows early point-and-click adventures. I'm still not convinced that the gorgeous and deliciously intricate new artwork provided by Mark is the way to go, and I hope your sprites don't end up twisting and flexing like so many Flash-based games of the 90s.
Your project is entering a critical stage now, but if there is anybody I trust can navigate the tricky waters of scope creep, is you. Too many Kickstarter projects are afflicted by the "we've got unlimited powah! we can do what we want!" bug.
Anyway, thanks for sharing your progress with us. I'm looking forward to this game. :)
-dZ.
Thanks for replying.
Regards,
-dZ.
I'd say, the 10 seconds rule should also apply for dialogues. You should be able to select a line or do something else every few lines at least.
Thank you guys for this great blog!
For me the stand out
Was going to say that for me the standout special case animation was in the fate of atlantis when Indy jumps over the desk and socks the Nazi. That got me fired up for adventure like nothing else!
With all this stuff it's all about moderation and holding things back to make the payoff that much more satisfying. Remember how excited you were when you'd finally clock an 8-but game like phantasy star or r-type, and the ending would just be a couple of pretty bespoke pics and a bit of text?
Magic.
Yes mate, more o' that please ron.
In fact, e.g., the ending in ZMKATAM and MM was just a tiny epilogue between replaying the game from start once again. :)
By the way, that period of the year (June with the beginning of the summer and the long awaited holidays from school) in tightly bound with both MM and ZMKATAM. It was in a distant (1989) summer that I first played them both. Love at first sight and endless replays for that fourteen years old kid! :)
Would you change that in retrospect? I thought they were all pretty good.
I'm glad you came to this conclusion AFTER making Monkey 2.
The scene with Guybrush pricking Largo's voodoo doll lasts at least 3 minutes if we include the following chat with the voodoo lady, and it's absolutely hilarious. I'd hate if it had been cut out of the final game.
I agree with the fact that I want to play and not watch a movie, and that's something "modern" adventure game makers seem to have forgotten.
But sometimes a longer scene is needed: the Monkey 2 scene I just mentioned is one of the many things that make that game so special.
So, well, please don't follow the 10-seconds-rule as a mantra, exceptions can be done.
Thanks for sharing these tidbits with us, more posts like this one please!
Best regards,
Andrea
Here is some great information about the visual art in the early Lucas Arts Games:
http://newsradiofanfic.angelfire.com/Making_Fate.html
"Lucasfilm Games’ art department presently employs eight full-time artists and four to six independent contractors. Each artist contributes a unique array of skills, experience, and talent to the job. The credit for assembling our group of highly talented artists goes to Gary Winnick, who was my predecessor as Art Department Manager and is now a Project Leader. He helped in the design and implementation of our early adventure games like Maniac Mansion and Zack McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders. His latest project is a Nintendo game called Defenders of Dynatron City. Thanks to Gary’s expert eye and great artistic sense, our group of artists is the absolute best in the business.
In the past, only a few artists were needed to create the artwork for a game. For our early adventure games, the artists were responsible for drawing backgrounds as well as animating characters and objects. Now that VGA has become the marketplace standard, and prices for machines with large hard drives have dropped, our games are larger and more complex than ever. This means we must create significantly more art for each new game. As a result, we use more artists per project, and we’ve divided each team into two groups: background specialists and animation specialists.
Adventures in DPaint
The background team on Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis used Electronic Arts’ graphics program Enhanced Deluxe Paint (DPaint) to draw scenes directly on the computer screen with a mouse, pixel by pixel. One of our biggest challenges when using DPaint is trying to make computer art look more spontaneous and organic. For Fate of Atlantis, lead artist Bill Eaken and his team used decorative textural patterns and translucent colors to soften backgrounds, so they’d appear more natural and less computer generated. Bill discovers new ways daily to trick DPaint into doing the impossible.
Bill worked closely with background artists Avril Harrison and James Dollar to create a tantalizing panorama of backgrounds that set the tone for the entire game, which consists of just over 95 screens. From the lush jungles of the Yucatan, to a dusty Algiers marketplace, to Atlantis’ fiery lava maze, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is a visual treat for the eyes.
Back to the Drawing Board
For Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, we tried a different approach to creating backgrounds. Instead of using DPaint, we used a scanner to import original, painted artwork into the computer. A scanner works a little like a copy machine, but instead of creating a paper copy, it creates computer images that matches the original drawing, painting, or photograph.
We tried scanning in artwork created with several different techniques, including gouache, acrylics, colored pencils, and colored markers. The technique we settled on for Monkey Island 2 involved drawing a scene with colored marker pens, overlaying it with layers of paint to accent and enhance, and finally using colored pencils to sharpen any soft edges. Using this method, a single background can take anywhere from a half a day to three days to complete. After a background is completed, it is scanned into a Mac II using Adobe Systems’ Photoshop, a program developed by a group of programmers from Industrial Light & Magic. With this software, we are able to manipulate and enhance the image, using various filters and adjustments, to create effects not easily achieved with traditional painting methods.
Steve Purcell and Peter Chan were the lead artists on Monkey Island 2. Sean Turner also helped with some of the backgrounds. Steve, who had been lead artist on the original Monkey Island game, assisted Peter and Sean in keeping the overall look of the two games consistent. Peter went on to create most of the background images for Monkey Island 2, and had developed a wonderful technique using the markers that takes advantage of the scanner’s color and texture sensitivities."
It seems to me, that it would be necessary to work with dPaint to create the original Atmosphere of the old games. Maybe it is possible to find a dPaint Emulator. To creat the "look and feel" of Monkey Island 2, it is necessary to paint everything by hand and to make a scan and some additional paintings, filterings and effects with Photoshop (like for a Comic Book).
Have you tried grafx2? http://pulkomandy.tk/projects/GrafX2
I still love old school pixel art, but not before 1990. The best Pixel art quality started since 1990. Every studio tried to produce the highest quality like Psygnosis, Team17 or Lucasfilm and Sierra. Now I enjoy to improved to art instead of go backward. :) or at least make the pixel art at 640 pixels range, which brings up more details.
http://www.pixeldam.net/images/blocks/2509.gif
Since SCUMM file formats are quite well documented and ScummVM also supports Simon it's at least possible to look it up...
Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-jFZEhKfnQ
Has somebody experience in LISP?
https://youtu.be/nyND9HrzhOM
LINKS:
http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/Coding_Conventions
Language features
ScummVM is written in a subset of C++. Due to limitations of the C++ run-times on various platforms, the following features cannot currently be used:
C++ exceptions (throw/catch): Not all C++ compilers support these correctly (esp. on embedded systems), and exception support incurs a noticeable overhead in binary size.
C++ RTTI (run-time type information, as in dynamic_cast<>): This incurs a (to us) severe overhead in binary size, since the static tables used for objects will get bigger.
Global C++ objects: Their constructors / destructors will not be called on certain targets, causing all kinds of bad problems and requiring ugly workarounds. (The GCC option -Wglobal-constructors helps finding code doing this.)
Furthermore, the standard C++ library is a big no-no. Besides usually heavily relying on the above mentioned features, it also sucks up rather more resources than we would like to, so we have our own replacements for various container classes etc.
We are reviewing these decisions from time to time, but so far, in our estimation the drawbacks of using any of these outweigh the hypothetical advantages.
Moreover, Ron answered on why he won't be using the "old SCUMM" for Thimbleweed Park in one of the first blog entries.
Peter #2, you'll want to read this:
http://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/tool_names
and this
http://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/wimpy
and this
http://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/roadmap1
more stuff can be found under the "Archives" tab at the top of this site and some things may have changed but that should give a good amount of info.
Will you be able to get someone like Peter McConnell and Michael Land?
I think, what comes closest to what I've got on my mind about the music is that in Day of the Tentacle. It has a very emotional bunch of themes that ooze ... a kind of mystery. The game is funny, but the music of DOTT isn't -- it's more ... subdued. Mysterious. Even dangerous.
Please let me give you two examples. One is from DOTT, one is from Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.
These two are, if you ask me, just perfect scores for games like this. They have that sense of wonder, of puzzles.
If anything, I hope that the composer for Thimbleweed Park can capture these feelings all anew.
On http://retrotracks.net/music/301
The track "Crab-like Raft"
The other is, when you explore Dr. Freds House in DOTT, with Bernard, in the present. For instance, when you're in Dr.Freds office, next to the library. It's very toned down and slow but... interesting.
https://youtu.be/m6r5iWfbjlI
I would also prefer Peter McConnell or Michael Land and Steve Kirk only for the main themes, maybe also for the "cut scenes". Why not programming music back in MIDI, like in old days. By the way: The music could also be programmed in C, there is also "Csound", which was invented at MIT... (http://www.csounds.com/)
But in general, it has to be MIDI, to recreate the old atmosphere , because the rib bone is connected to the arm bone, the arm bone is connected to the head bone, the head bone is connected to the leg bone... (etc.) :D
https://youtu.be/h-4XCZ-qQs0
http://www.gsoundtracks.com/interviews/land.htm
I played that game with my brother and we went back to that scene (I think it we even had a savegame of it) several times, because it was so one step ahead of everything.
I remember vaguely that I wasn't sure I saw additional animations when I installed MM2 on hard drive. Was there a difference when playing from diskette or was I drugged on sugar? I remember at the end of MM2, that LeChuck's head came flying towards the camera in the installed case. Please clear up that eternal mystery for me please.
Regards,,
Pedram
There are differences between several MI1 versions (EGA, VGA, CD, ...), but non animation-wise that I can remember of and I also don't think there was a difference between playing from floppy or from hard disk.
Note: Not every white powder is sugar! :-)
Have you considered using Maya? You can rig everything up similar to what you can do in Spine, but there is a much bigger user base for Maya.
That being said, Spine does look pretty cool and I will have to take a look at a trial.
Matt