The Dream Machine is a point'n'click adventure game made out of clay and cardboard. This blog chronicles the production of the game.
I can't talk too much about the purpose of this strange contraption, but it will crop up in Chapter 2, and will be even more important in Chapters 3 and 4. The base for the dial is made out of a Swedish 1 krona coin. I'm not entirely satisfied with the above paint and design. I'll await Anders' final decision.
Monkey Island 1 & 2
Sanitarium
Loom
Another World (known as Out of This World in the US)
Space Quest III
Just wanted to wish you all a very merry christmas! We've made this special X-mas version of Victor just for you.
If you're following the blog, you'll be happy to know that the outstanding people at Nordic Game awarded us funds to continue development of the game. This really helps out a lot and gives us the financial stamina to keep making this game the whole-hog full-blast unforgettable experience it deserves to be.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Almost final result above. Better? Any comments?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And voila! Some work on the detailing and a nice coat of paint later, we had us our leading man!
We (the core team of TDM) feel that we have to shed some light over our present situation.
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...
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 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.
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.
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.
Going for a bit more realism, we ousted the stylized placement of stones and added a rougher texture to the island.
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.
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.
