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...

Beta Crunch Mode

So we've officially entered Beta Crunch Mode with The Dream Machine - Chapter 1. We're trying our darnedest to get it done for the Independent Game Festival, and so far it's looking good. Not great mind you. A lot of assets have yet to be delivered and whole chunks of dialogue has not been written. But for every placeholder graphic we swap for a real one, for every line of code we add, things slowly start to congeal into a somewhat coherent whole.

This might turn into a game after all.

A new trailer!

We thought we'd celebrate relocating to a new server by publishing a brand new trailer for the game! It's a rough cut, that we'll re-edit in the comming week, but tell us what you think so far.

Check out the TRAILER!

The music is a placeholder piece generously donated to us by the ingenious composer Anthony Lledo. Check out more of his work here:

http://www.anthonylledo.com/

Sorry about the downtime!

Our hosting server caught the swine flu and we had to take it out back and shoot it. Them's the breaks I guess. With a new server up and running, we're pressing on trying to get the game done.

We'll try to enter it into IGF this year and the deadline is Nov 1st. It will be quite tight, but work on the characters has progressed nicely. Now we'll just have to write a ton of dialogue and finalize design on the last elusive puzzle. And some other exciting stuff that we look forward to telling you about in the coming weeks.

The picture above is me working on the animations for one of the characters. It's a tedious, labor intensive process (that I'll post about in a few days). But once you see the characters moving around in the game world, it's definitely worth it!

A small token of appreciation...

We have received some positive feedback over the last couple of days since we launched the TDM Blog. As a result of this we´ll show you this sneak peek of one of the charcters you´ll encounter in the upcoming episode of TDM. Please let us introduce the girlfriend of Victor Neff: Alicia.

Right now our 3D (Maya) guy is rigging this character and we´ll soon be able to show some early animation tests...

We get really excited when you send us e-mails. Please feel free to send us those comments/questions if you have any...

Thank you!
-Erik and Anders

Designing Victor

We started designing the characters surprisingly late during preproduction. The reason for that was that we didn't really know how we'd get them into the game. We knew we wanted to retain the hand made clay look throughout, but the techniques at our disposal each came with a different set of advantages/disadvantages.

Stop motion animation would certainly allow us to keep the look of the material, and the animation would keep all the nice little quirky imperfections that comes for free when you do stuff by hand. But having to manually lay bare over 200 individual frames (per character), just seemed too labor intensive.

Lighting the puppet would also be a bit of a chance taking, since the main character has to travel through a number of very different lighting conditions. If we found out that the lighting didn't work once the character was in the game, we would basically have to start over from scratch, reanimating and relighting.

3D-animation solved both those problems but we weren't certain that it would allow us to retain the right material look we wanted. 3D has a tendency to look too clean and generically lifeless.

The two sketches above where both done by Mikael Lindbom from Dockhus Animation. They depict the games main characters Victor and Alicia Neff. Mikael did them early on, just to get the character design ball rolling. And though stellar drawings, the design was a bit too cute and cartoony. The themes in The Dream Machine have quite a dark slant to them, and cute characters with big heads would seem a bit out of place.

On a joking whim, he drew Victor to look like me (Anders). And though I have to admit, there are some similarities, I would never, ever wear a polo neck.


Wanting to steer away from the overly cute expression, we started toying with the idea that every character in the game wore a mask. We didn't have a rationale for it, except for the fact that both Erik and I are very fascinated by masks.

We were hoping that the players would just accept it as a rule of the game universe, that everyone wore masks. But that turned out not to be the case.

We wanted to go for an expressive, stylized look for the characters, reducing their features to bare bones geometric shapes. Erik (who did all designs for the characters) did the early test above, and though it has a lot of merits, it came off as too off-puttingly strange; its featureless face a bit too hard to relate to for this to be a suitable design for the lead character.

But we -- being of the opinion that it's better to err on the side of surreal and creepy rather than opting for something blandly cute -- felt that this was a step in the right direction.

These early designs, for some of the other characters in the game, where a lot closer to our intent. But ultimately came off as stylistically a bit too diverse, running a strange gambit between reduced expressionism to the comically cartoony.

Another one of Erik's early tests for the main character. Those of you familiar with 3D animation can probably tell by the pose that by this stage we'd decided to go 3D.

In order to retain the look of the clay material, the character would still have to be built and painted by hand. From a series of turnaround photographs our 3D modeler would try to faithfully recreate the shape of the clay figure and apply a UV map lifted from the photos.

Everybody we showed this early test render to had a similar reaction: "It looks nice, but why is he wearing a mask?" The mask, instead of being suggestively creepy as intended, ended up being a distraction for the viewer. And we soon decided to tone it down.

Honing in on a more final shape, Erik added more features to make the character a bit easier to relate to. The main character in the game, Victor Neff, is supposed to be in his early 30's, so the design just seemed a bit too young.

We also wanted to subtly hint Victor's belonging to the electronic music scene by giving him a nice synth hair-do.

Adding a few years and reducing the overall shape of his face to the simple geometrical triangle, landed us very close to what actually turned out to be the final design for Victor.

Now the only problem that remained was: how do we paint him?

Both Erik and I are huge fans of the movie Blade Runner, and having just seen The Final Cut at our local cinema, it struck us that Harrison Ford wears just about the best looking shirt ever made in that movie.

Not so sure about the tie, though...

And voila! Some work on the detailing and a nice coat of paint later, we had us our leading man!

The Dream Machine

This is a blog about game The Dream Machine.

We've been toying around with the idea that it might be useful to have a little news feed about the development of the game.

Play the demo here:

http://www.thedreammachine.se/

We live in Sweden!

We (the core team of TDM) feel that we have to shed some light over our present situation.
Both of us are from Sweden (gasp!), but we don't live in the same town (see picture).
Anders lives in the south of Sweden in Malmö (close to Copenhagen, Denmark) and Erik in Gothenburg, 300 km north of him. This means that we spend a lot of time talking on the phone...

Creating the world of TDM

Most of the stuff in TDM is handmade. The materials we use are: modelling clay, super sculpey, mdf board, cardboard, plaster, acrylic paint etc etc. The character I´m working on above is Mr Morton (the landlord). I´ll show more of him later on (with Anders permission).

Look how neat and tidy!!! If you can identify the three most imortant items for anyone interested in building miniature sets/props/characters I´ll... ehh... give you... a special prize!

This picture shows the set up for Neff´s bed room. I control the camera (canon 400D) from my computer and it usually requires 20-30 test photos before I´m satisfied. Then I´ll send it to Anders and hopefully he approves my creative effort and the Photoshop magic begins...

and Ta daa.... Final result. The god rays from the window is added as well as all the boxes scattered in the bed room. We can show/tell more of the process described in this post if there´s any interest. Please let us know in that case. Next post will reveal how the characters of TDM are made and animated. Stay tuned...

Finding the look

This is usually how it starts: a simple vector drawing illustrating the basic layout of the scene and the props involved. In the best case scenario, this is the stage where most changes occur, since redrawing is a lot easier than rebuilding/repainting/relighting etc.

The vector sketches I make usually aren't this detailed either, but since this was the first location we made, a bit more effort was spent during the planning phase.

The little grey box character got reused from another game to provide a rough scale reference.

The first couple of mock-ups we built followed the tone of the original sketch quite closely in that they tried to retain the reduced, faceted look of the vector drawing. We soon decided to oust that in favour of a more painterly, textured look.

The island was made out of styrofoam, given some rough love treatment with a sandpaper. It proved hard to light and didn't take to painting as well as we'd hoped.

The rest is made out of painted pieces of super sculpey clay.

Swapping the styrofoam for a layer of Super Sculpey immediately improved the look of the game. The various dents and rough spots proved more interesting to look at and with a coat of paint, turned out to be a far better approximation of the sandy beach we were going for.

Still, the surface lacked the volume the styrofoam added, and squinting, the dirty yellow color kind of made it look like cat sick on a piece of cardboard.

The happy compromise: a base made out of styrofoam with a coating of Super Sculpey on top, provided the best of both worlds. We retained the volume of the foam, while still providing that nice look of hand sculpted clay.

We also decided to lower the camera angle so to be more in the eye level of the characters. This in order to get a bit closer to them, so the player could see what they did and looked like, and hopefully relate to them more easily.

Going for a bit more realism, we ousted the stylized placement of stones and added a rougher texture to the island.

Up until this stage, we hadn't actually decided on how to do the water, but building it and animating it by hand just seemed a bit too labor intensive, compared to doing it in post-production. So we added the blue base to the island to make compositing between the built/digital elements easier.

The first rough composite we made: the elements were all in place, but we weren't happy with the tone of the image. The gradient ocean proved too clean and digital looking for what we were going for.

This image is an example of the technique called vignetting. By placing objects at the edge of the screen, we hint that the world continues beyond the frame, without actually having to build it.

Wanting to open the game on a slightly off-setting, portentous note, we added storm clouds to the background. Though we tried to tweak it, the gradient ocean still stood out like a sore thumb, ruining the illusion of depth.

The final shot. A tighter crop in order to get a closer view of the action and a lower horizon for added drama. Replaced the crappy gradient water and switched the vaguely stormy sky for a moodier more tempestuous one.

We did some experimentation with animating the water using Ken Perlin's famous noise algorithm, but applying a displacement filter on such a large surface proved a bit too much for Flash to render in real-time. The effect can still be seen, albeit on a much smaller scale, in the reflection of the shipwreck to the right.