A New Life in a New Town

Though we want you to discover the story for yourself, we can at least give you a brief idea of the backstory and setting for the game.

In the game, you play as Victor Neff, a guy who's just moved to the big city with his wife, Alicia. They used to live in a smaller town, but with the economic recession, job opportunities started to dry up and with a baby on the way they really couldn't risk unemployment.

Though caring and outgoing, Victor isn't exactly an ambitious guy. Up until now he's led a pretty comfortable life. He's long nurtured a dream about making a name for himself in the music industry, but aside from buying a guitar and learning a few chords, he hasn't actively tried to pursue it. While waiting for the "timing" to be right, he's been working in the office of a company manufacturing farming equipment. A job he got since the boss was a friend of his parents.

Lately the company has been having financial difficulties, and when Victor got an advance notice about his department possibly getting axed, he and Alicia decided to move to a new city -- with better prospects -- and start life anew.

The game begins the morning after they arrived to their new home. While trying to get settled in, they soon discover that all is not as it seems in the quiet, unassuming apartment building...

Character generation

Finalizing the design of the character was only the beginning of the process of getting the characters into the game. After Erik had built and painted the finished clay figurine, the characters had to be processed through quite an array of steps before you could actually interact with them.

In order to transpose the nice hand painted texture onto a 3D mesh, we photographed each character from a number of different angles.

From these reference pictures our modeler, Anders Dahlström, created a 3D approximation of the figurine, using a composite of the various photographs as a texture map to wrap around the mesh.

With a complete model, he could then start animating the character. Since we largely plan on distributing the game online, file size budgets forced us to be quite restrictive when it came to animation. Basically each character had a still pose, a walk cycle (double step), an interaction animation and a pick up animation. That's it. These then had to be rendered from 5-8 different camera angles depending on how symmetrical the character design was.

Victor's little funky brush hair made him completely asymmetrical and therefore we had to render him from 8 different angles, but for most other characters 5 proved sufficient.

Since the characters have to travel through a large number of different lighting conditions, we had to experiment quite a lot with how to blend the different render passes. In the end we settled on the four layers you can see above, but starting out we had a few more. They're each blended with the underlying layer in unique ways, and finding the right way to mix them required a lot of trial and error.

To help us out with this, we posed the different variations in a number of different lighting conditions to see which one worked best generally. Just glancing at them they look very similar, but if you study them carefully you start to notice subtle differences in how they're lit.

Compositing them together required a combination of After Effects work and Photoshop. We used After Effects to blend the different layers and crop the images as tightly as possible.

Sometimes the rendering left some edge artifacts, but that could easily be removed with a Photoshop batch process that also reduced the characters to their final size.

Once all the rendering work had been completed we moved on to the exceedingly boring phase of editing all the 300 separate images (for each character), before chopping them up into the 8x4 animation slots we use in the game. But once all this was done and the actor system took control, seeing them walk around and interact in the game was a pure joy and we soon forgot how trite and laborious the journey to get them this far had been.

Cheers,

- a

PS: I'm not entirely up to speed with 3D lingua franca. If you spot an error in the post, don't hesitate to point it out in a comment and I'll stare at it sternly until it goes away.

Business As Usual...

After the intense experience of completing the first chapter of The Dream Machine for the IGF competition our workload has reverted to a more agreeable pace. Right now we're re-working some of the features in the first chapter of The Dream Machine that we always felt needed a bit more love & attention.

This post will briefly describe a typical situation where we decide to change some graphical elements in order to make the world of The Dream Machine more coherent...

We had some challenges early on in the production trying to find the right look for some of the areas in the game. In order to get everything up and running, we had to build quite a lot in a very short time span. At the time we didn't have any detailed design documents, and built most of it by ear. Most of this worked out fine, but we had to rush some of the environments in order to be able to build others. The kitchen was one of these environments that we felt was a bit too rough.

We couldn't re-shoot the entire set, since pieces of it had been misplaced while moving out of the old studio. Instead, Anders suggested that we only redo certain parts of the image. The floor, for instance, could simply be overhauled using a single 4x4 tile piece (see picture above). This single piece was then duplicated in Photoshop and replaced the old kitchen floor, which felt bland and disproportionate to the characters. We went with a more classical look for the kitchen using black and white tile.

Furthermore: During our playtests we noticed that every player would try to interact with the fridge. Which stands to reason, since if you present a large interactive looking object in a room, people will expect to be able to do something with it. Not allowing them is kind of like placing a piece of candy in front of a child and say that they can't eat it. Our first fridge was cut out of a single piece of Styrofoam, and couldn't be opened. Re-dressing the location, I had to build a new fridge with an inside and a door that could open (see picture above).

As much as we loved the green fridge, it had to go in order to allow for more interactivity.

Almost final result above. Better? Any comments?

There are some elements yet to be added to the foreground and Anders will probably work his magic with Photoshop tweaking details here and there, since some stuff would be very difficult to do in an entirely analogue way. But when you mess around in Photoshop too much you risk losing the all-important hand made quality, so we try to keep the re-touching as low-key as possible.

OK, that's it for now. The development is progressing in a very promising way, and hopefully we'll have some good news for you in a week or two.

Thanks for your comments and input! Tell us what you think! Take care and stay tuned folks...

- Erik

PS: They mentioned The Dream Machine in diygamer.com last week. You can read about it here.

Hell Week Survived!

If You're following the progress on the game, You'll be happy to know that both Erik and I survived the beta crunch week. Sitting on our hard drives is now a feature complete, fully playable version of the elusive Chapter 1.

In the coming week we'll playtest the crap out of it, before moving onwards to the aptly named Chapter 2. Hopefully that'll go a hell of a lot smoother, considering that all the heavy lifting, programming-wise and story-wise, is now established.

As a little teasing morsel, we leave you with the full line-up of characters in Chapter 1. Standing in the middle is the lead character, Victor Neff, and to the far left is his wife, Alicia. But what about those vague blurs next to them? Could they have any significance or are they just a random assortment of pixels? More will be revealed soon.

Stay tuned...