[Dev Diary] Condemned 2: BloodShot

[Tami]

Pushing to Alpha – Condemned 2: Bloodshot

Senior Producer Dave Hasle, [url=\"http://www.lith.com/home.asp\"]Monolith Productions[/url]

The butterflies start to grow in my stomach around this time every project cycle – and it’s a good thing. It always happens with every project – no matter how much planning, schedule updating, and iteration on features has been completed; time is rushing quickly by when you’re ‘pushing to Alpha’. If any Producer says they’re not feeling any butterflies, or strain for that matter, during this time, then they are either lying or don’t care about the game they are producing…so I’m glad to feel those old familiar flutters.

The halls tend to get rather quiet as everyone starts to get their ‘focus-face’ on. We’ve just recently completed our internal Engineering – Content Alpha. This means all primary and secondary game systems have been implemented and a primary amount of content has been created to allow the Level Designers to create their core gameplay experiences in the levels they own.

We’re now pushing forward with our Game Design Alpha. It’s at this phase that we’ve turned our attention more closely to the specific needs of the Level Designer. All the models, animations, engineered systems, audio files, world art prefabs and environments are now coming together to hopefully give us that gameplay experience that we all want so badly. If the Level Designers find themselves with a blocking issue (i.e. an animation doesn’t play properly or an engineering bug prevents a feature from working properly), we all do whatever we have to so they aren’t blocked. There are occasional verbal blurts as a blocking bug may pop up or a final implementation of a sub-feature isn’t quite working out and a decision is needed quickly – but the focus remains strong and people continue to move forward as we all know our dates can’t, and won’t, change.

Keeping the balance in the tasks on everyone’s plate becomes very critical. For example, Michael Drummond, the Lead Level Designer on both Condemned: Criminal Origins and Condemned 2: Bloodshot, had a last moment request for two thrown weapons to help further flesh out some gameplay on a garbage scowl: a skull with a skull pile and some metal trash balls for any AI type. Of course, once the skull is created, there is a push to have it as a player-side weapon. Even though, as a Producer, I want everyone’s final weapon requests to have been done by our Engineering-Content Alpha, there is always going to be needs for assets and iterations for ongoing gameplay creation and tuning. It really becomes a balance between ‘art’ and ‘business’… The ‘Art’ is finding that compelling, beautiful, strong gameplay experience that is fine-tuned and enjoyed by all and the ‘Business’ is keeping it on track and within budget – and many times these two goals collide. So this means trying to leave some schedule room for iteration and evolving the gameplay experiences – even though usually the schedule is tight already at this phase.

As we move into Alpha, and then through Alpha into our final Beta, we’re going to give you some ‘inside views’ as to what each team is working on here at Monolith Productions and how we strive to bring it all together into one product. We hope to give you some insight as to some of the common issues that creep up and how we deal with them.

Here’s a breakdown as to the various disciplines that work on the Condemned 2 team:

• Character Art
o All game character and enemy models plus numerous weapons and the evidence movies are created by our Character Artists.

• World Art
o All environmental shell work and nearly all the prefabs (i.e. individual models of items such as desks, lamps, posters – nearly any objects that are found in a level) are created by World Artists.
o We’ve also outsourced some of the prefabs we need for this project.

• Level Design
o All level layouts, gameplay implementation, combat encounters, performance and optimization. This is an immense task as nearly every component of every discipline comes together in a mission or level in a game.

• Animation
o Every single animation you find in Condemned 2: Bloodshot has been created by the animation team.

• Principal Technical Art Lead & Art Director
o The Principal Technical Art Lead maintains the workflow for all visual content creation. He knows the engine inside-and-out from a creative and technical standpoint and is essential in keeping production running smoothly.
o The Art Director is completely responsible for the vision of the game: what does the main protagonist look like, what do the enemies look like and potentially act, the weapons, the UI, the environments – they all fall under the domain of the Art Director.
• Engineering
o All primary and secondary game systems are created by the team’s game engineers. They also help ‘evolve’ the game by iterations and suggested changes that come back from playtest sessions.

• CTT
o We have a Core Technology Team at Monolith Productions. Our large internal Engineering team updates and supports our engine and tools that we use to create our games.

• Audio
o Nearly every piece of audio comes from our internal audio team.
o Most of the voice-acting is recorded by an outside contractor with direction from our Game Designer and Audio Lead.

• Game Design
o The complete game design is created internally. Our Lead Game Designer pushes forward with design concepts that are fleshed out by the various teams and the game designer as they implement the various gameplay scenarios and features.

• Multiplayer
o The Multiplayer team is a subset team of the C2 team. This team has engineering, level designers and production support. The level designers in Multiplayer have some different responsibilities than the Single Player level designers. There is a different gameplay focus on multiplayer levels and the MultiPlayer Level Designers also do the environmental art for their levels.

• QA
o The QA team is always essential but their word becomes stronger, their decisions more final as we approach critical dates such as Alpha and Beta. Their core responsibilities are keeping the team up and running with stable builds and to continue finding bugs that will prevent our game from not only shipping but running properly as well.

• Production
o The production crew includes myself, a Senior Producer, an AP (spell out title name) and any support staff I can get my hands on. We’re focused on removing any roadblocks that come up for the team and keeping them set up to succeed with realistic schedules and milestone dates.

• Playtest
o At Monolith Productions, we’re blessed to have an internal playtest group and playtest lab setup. They’ve already done some extensive Mission One playtest sessions as well as some playtesting on our forensics systems.

• Publisher
o No team is complete without the appropriate publisher support – in our case, we’ve got the long arm of SEGA around us, giving us the support we need. The publisher not only usually pays development costs but they also bring distribution, marketing, hard-core testing and all forms of external playtesting and PR support to making the game sell as best as possible.

There are quite a number of individuals who comprise the teams to ship a next-gen game across two platforms, Xbox 360 and PS3. My job is to keep the schedule real, keep expectations where they need to be, keep the people focused, maintain the publisher relationship (making the Milestone dates with quality drops helps immensely) and support the overall team as much as I can.

With our next posting, we’ll take a closer look at the position of the Art Director and go over some of the types of feedback that he provides and why. We’ll also touch on some of the multiplayer testing that has been currently going on and give you an ‘inside peak’ at what we’re doing to make sure multiplayer is a big part of the Condemned universe.

****

The Alpha to Beta Push – Condemned 2

Senior Producer Dave Hasle, Monolith Productions

I work with a Primary Lead Artist, Matthew Allen, who is pretty much a hardcore fire-fighter for anything content-related. An issue pops up – technical, pipeline, aesthetic, whatever – Matt will jump on it and put it out quickly and efficiently. As a Producer, I don’t close out games at Monolith unless I’ve got Matt Allen helping keep it all under control and fitting in memory.
One of our issues was with the production schedule of cinematics. We had a certain quality bar that we wanted to hit but the schedule wasn’t allowing for it to happen. In stepped Matt to establish the pipeline and help render out the final frames. Of course, our cinematics could not have been done without Rocky Newton, our cinematic director, and Nick Kondo, cinematic guru, being as dedicated as they are as well.

Matthew Allen, Primary Lead Artist: My job has covered a whole range of things, but my major focus over the last three months of the project has been getting the final cut-scenes into the game.

One of the things we identified as needing a lot of work at the end of the first Condemned game was the cut-scenes. We had spent a good amount of time developing a new process to get them into the game with consistent movement and camera animation, all controlled by the animators. However, as it was our first real console title we ran into a couple of issues; the biggest two being memory and frame-rate. As we were working with a limited amount of memory, and the cut-scenes needed to be rendered real time in the same streaming region as the rest of the game, we were forced to cut back on both texture resolution and animation fidelity. This led to some of the camera cuts and positions, which the animators choose based on how well the models looked in Maya, to look very pixilated and 'last gen'. Frame-rate also became an issue. Since all of our lighting and shadows are dynamic, being generated real-time, our frame rate is greatly affected by the amount of lights we have in a scene. So, we were severely limited by that factor also.

Early in production on Condemned 2, our cinematic director, Rocky Newton, and I sat down and brainstormed possible solutions to these issues. For the greatest flexibility form an animation standpoint we decided that we were going to pre-render all of our cut-scenes in Maya, using Mental Ray. This solved a number of our original issues, but created a few more – plus, for a number of folks it was disappointing. We all know that our engine can do some pretty amazing things, so there was some push for us to figure out a way to get the cinematics back in game.

Regardless of the final "how" of the rendering, Rocky Newton was able to move forward with storyboards and animatics. He used a very early draft of the script, along with pickup voice acting from the Yeti team and various Monolith employees. This was the first time we had ever done full animatics and storyboards for our game cinematics, and Rocky's unique drawing style was perfectly suited for the task. Very early in production the team was able to see a number of very high quality timed animations, and the excitement level was high. At the same time, we began exploring mental ray and the pipeline for moving things back and forth between the game and mental ray. While we did get some excellent results, it was a very cumbersome process and both the mental ray rendering time and turnaround time for game assets became problematic.

Around the same time, a number of folks seemed to have a “Eureka” moment. So why not use the engine to offline render the cinematics? This way we don’t have to worry about frame-rate, so we can add as many lights and as much shadow casting geometry as we want… and we also don’t have to worry about memory, since we were rendering it on a beefy PC. The memory stuff allowed us to up the resolution on all of the textures so even close-ups on people’s eyes could look good. Our Lead Engineer Brian Legge worked with John O'Rorke, our Principal Software Engineer, Engine Architect, and very quickly implemented this for us and the results were very strong.

Since we were now using the engine to render the cinematics, I could now use the latest in game art assets for rendering, including effects. This freed up a lot of time in our schedule which allowed us to focus on some of the cooler animation stuff. Most of my time could now be spent on lighting and tweaking effects rather than moving things into mental ray and trying to replicate our in-game shaders. We could also now do a bunch of stuff that the engine can handle, but modern consoles can't - like turning up the real-time velocity based motion blur, and running with 30 to 40 lights per scene. We can also use a ton of our in-game special effects together: things like depth of field, full screen color mapping, film grain, sharpen, and a whole host of others, that the console aren’t powerful enough to use together in real-time.

There is still a number of workflow issues that we will need to solve for next time, but for the most part our experiment has been a resounding success and has really allowed us to produce some of the highest quality in game cut-scenes I have personally ever seen. It has been very exciting to watch this whole process unfold, and to bring to life all of Rocky's initial storyboards, while being able to highlight the great amount of talent of both our artists and our engineers here at Monolith.

****

The Beta to Cert Push – Condemned 2

Senior Producer Dave Hasle, Monolith Productions

Our Beta was originally due on December 3rd, 2007 but we didn’t complete it until December 21st. We’ve been running about 3 or so weeks late since October but we’d reached that crux where making cuts to pull the schedule in by three weeks would have created more than three weeks worth of work (a true paradox) and would have definitely added more risk to the ongoing project than us just sucking it up, moving forward and getting the game done.

One of the areas of high risk in the development process was the user interface. Before Condemned 2, our UI system was our own creation. Even though it was sufficient for past products, we needed something that would allow for greater artistic expression and would be able to be updated more quickly and efficiently by artist types. We eventually settled upon the Flash-based Scaleform solution. We also expanded our UI team to include 2 Flash-based UI Engineers, 2 C++ UI Engineers and we had our Art Director cranking out assets for the UI as quickly as possible.

An area of concern was getting enough of the core gameplay locked down so we could focus on the UI support. One of the new features of the game is the Attack Chains. When we first worked on the UI, we wanted to get Ethan’s rage across so we tied the meter into a face graphic of Ethan. Once you hit a new Attack Chain level, you’d see the second face and have a 2-part meter. Once you hit the third and final level, you’d see the face on the far right and you’d have a 3-part chain attack meter (see image 001) It was a bit large and sucked up some screen real estate – but was quickly ignored by the player as they were more focused on the action on screen.

001.jpg

We then tried to find a way to pop the face further through a colour variation (see image 002). We had hoped the player would see their progress made by noting the updated coloured graphic. Again – the player didn’t seem to care.

002.jpg

At this point, we decided to make some fundamental changes. We moved the icon out of the player’s way to the upper-right corner. We also wanted to use Ethan’s iconic chest target icon as the basic design element (see image 003). We found a much stronger success with this image. The rings would pulsate to let you know that a meter section was full and we’d add more rings based upon your Attack Chain level status. We also ‘dirtied’ it up more. We also included this grunge pass to all the UI elements.

003.jpg

Another HUD element that proceeded through a similar iteration pass was our Weapon Stats box. This is a carry-over from our Condemned 1 days. Going inline with our first style, we tried a clean but loose interlacing approach. It not only felt too clean but the 1 to 3 pluses or minuses per stat had the playtesters counting them. We needed a new method of showing the amount of disparity between weapons.

004.jpg

So this time we tried using a size and colour value change. This worked well in usability. But the style still wasn’t sitting that well with us overall – and we really liked the ‘dirtied-up’ approach…

005.jpg

So we brought not only the ‘dirt’ but we also brought the blood splat mess that we’ve incorporated elsewhere.

006.jpg

So here is a quick mock-up of the original UI. It looks pretty strong, visually clear – adequate… But then it does feel too clean, too techno – and also too large.

007.jpg

Here is the final UI style. As you can see we repositioned and resized nearly every element. The player’s health went to the upper left corner. The weapon and stun gun stout scions were reduced dramatically in size – plus we bloodied them up. The attack chain icon was reduced in size but is more realistically visable now. Also you see representations of nearly every icon that can show up – breakable weapons, liquor timer, spectrometer alert, and a holstered weapon status icon. There is also a radio communication icon that pops up when someone is speaking with you.

008.jpg

Overall, we’re very satisfied with our final HUD. It actually took 4 to 5 iterations to get to where we are today – and this was over the course of 5 to 6 months. With a completely new UI system, new resources and a new approach, there were some major challenges to face – but we pulled it off. We hope that you find the HUD and menu system in the game to be a strong improvement in Condemned 2 as we feel it is.