Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Maker Camp 2015 – Field Trip Friday Double Fine Productions”.
Hey campers: it’s field trip friday. Why are you screaming? Because we suddenly become aware of our own mortality? Wait! That’S not right! No! You said the special phrase. What phrase i just said: it’s field trip friday, yeah, okay, okay, it’s field trip, it’s a day where we go. Do something awesome outside of this magical box. We’Re gon na meet those rad people over at double fine productions where they’re gon na show us a thing or two about making video games. Let’S head out to our suspiciously, familiar and allegedly not magical correspondent in the field. Take it away, paloma thanks paloma, and might i say you look lovely today? Oh so unexpected, you too, oh, stop it you’re! So great! Well, today, we’re here at double fine productions started by tim, shafer they’ve made some awesome games like psychonauts, costume, quest and broken age. We’Re here to find out what it takes to make a video game awesome, let’s go check it out. Hi, i’m paloma hi, i’m maurice nice to meet you nice to meet. You too welcome to double fine. Are you here for tim all right, i think he’s waiting for you over that way. All right, awesome, hi, hi, i’m paloma, oh hi, welcome to double fun. Thank you for having me. I’M really excited to learn more about broken age and also how you make fantastic games. Yeah fantastic games. Well, um! It’S making games a lot of fun.
I want to do it all my life i used to play video games. I still do like every day, and now i get to make them and one of the fun things about it is that it takes a whole bunch of different kinds of people to make games. You you collaborate in a group of artists, animators. You need audio people um, i mean you also need actors, musicians, production, people, a whole bunch of people come together and they all collaborate, and you work in a big group to make something that um you maybe could have made by yourself but of it and not As much fun and now you come together and you make it all together and it’s a real collaboration, wow, that’s awesome. Yeah i’ve always played video games, but i’ve never known what it takes to make something from behind the scenes.
I’Ve always just assumed that somebody has an idea and then magic, and then i have a video game to play. It is like magic, the magic of collaboration well, dramatic enough, that’s beautifully dramatic. So can you tell me what it is we’re looking at here, because i recognize this character because i have seen this game before, but i want to know a little bit about this setting and and what it takes to make this kind of a scene happen. So this is a game we just made called broken age, that’s our main character, vela who’s walking around in her world where she lives and it’s a point-and-click graphic adventure in this style of game.
You point on the screen point and then you click where you want. The character to walk or what you want her to interact with, and here maybe this mailbox lights up, but something interesting and you can click on that and she’ll walk over and she’ll open it up. Maybe and she’ll talk about it and there she is coming back and um.
We put those situations together to form puzzles and to tell a story, and one other thing i wanted to ask you about, is because for for maker camp there’s a lot of campers out there who are young, who love video games and who want to get started. So do you have any tips for how to move from doodling in your sketchbook, like we made this week, we made some sketchbooks and we’re starting animations. How do you go from there to starting to realize this amazing dream, yeah um uh? The first piece of advice is to play a lot of video games.
All the time play video games and it sounds like chat done. Do that um? It’S easy to forget to do that because you get thinking you’re so busy, you’re too busy to play video games, but if you’re gon na do it, you got ta play. That’S where i get inspired a lot. I get ideas of like if, when something fun happens like i want to make something that fun, um and then uh talking to other people about your ideas is important, because that’s often where you get your ideas even from yourself, just by talking to somebody else, it’s Where it clarifies it in your brain, you realize, oh that’s, that either that sounds kind of dumb or that actually yeah, i’m getting really excited. As i talk about that – and you know it helps you formulate your ideas or the other person might give you another great idea. So, let’s, if you don’t mind, i’d love to check out the the process for going through and creating a whole game.
So where should i go first? Well, uh, i think a lot of times. Uh games start with an idea and me, or someone else, will think of this crazy idea, and then we try to explain it to people as best we can, but it really helps to have an artist, take those ideas and put them down on paper. Like a concept artist to to take that crazy idea and now show it to people on on paper, so i’ll start with art, okay! Well, let’s go check out the art. Thank you.
So much yeah great have fun all right, i’m here with emily johnstone. So, let’s find out who she is and what she does uh, i’m emily johnstone and uh. I am a concept, artist cool. So what does that mean? It means that i am in charge of the visuals of a game and i do backgrounds and i do characters, and i do props pretty much. I start drawing just like doodling. Essentially, it doesn’t have to be necessarily wonderful or great drawings. They just have to like. Just throw out a lot of ideas and you start like figuring out what the who the character is and what they’re like and sort of like poses that they have during the process, though people will be like well, i really like her hairstyle, or i really really Like her eyeballs and you start um like refining the character yeah, it seems like this. Is this character like in those last few images has really started to take on a specific personality, a specific body type and and really get get something really cohesive together? Let’S, let’s go into a final painting: wow, that’s impressive! All right! I would uh end up breaking out the character to to these parts, to make her like a paper doll and um like every like little little part will move so so, once you have this final product, you send it over to the animators and they make magic Happen they do make magic. They are magic.
Awesome, hey, hi, i’m paloma, hi paloma nice to meet. You emily told me to come talk to you about what it is and what you do here. So who are you? What do you do? Okay, uh? My name is ray crook um. I am an animator here at double fine productions and i basically move little dolls around for a living in the computer. What i do is i take that that painting that emily did and then what i do is i build. What’S called geometry and that’s kind of like as if, let’s say it was a paper cut out, you took a piece of paper and you cut out these pieces and then you did the painting on top of on top of that paper.
What i need to do is i need to actually animate uh vel. I need to move her around right. So if you look at like a puppet like this puppet here, if i didn’t have any controls on it, i wouldn’t be able to move him around right, and so what i’m going to do is i go in and i attach controls to each of those bones. Just like this, this stick here is attached to his hand, so that i can then manipulate it.
So i’ll show you how she moves see, see how her arm can move. Now her body can move i’ll show you really quickly how we do animation with a character like this. Let’S say i want to move her, her forearm okay, so i select the controller i set. What’S called a keyframe okay, you can see how it turned red, and then i want her arm to move up like this okay and then i’m going to move a little bit farther in time and then i’m going to bring her arm back down. So now it goes up and down so the computer is doing the work for me of the arm going up and the arm going down.
So let me show an example of a walk, because that’s the request that anna would give me. Okay, it’s kind of a kind of a quick walk. We call it trot.
Okay, yeah that wow there’s so many things working together at once there, so there’s all the different parts. You know that have to move, and you know when you when you’re walking down the street your hair is bouncing. Maybe your dress is bouncing your body bounces a little bit so theoretically, someone like in their own house could cut up a paper doll and actually very slowly, create very similar motions of things bouncing you know, addresses moving yeah and then, if you just have an old, You could even just like an old iphone or something if you wanted to use, you could just click to take an image and then move it. A little more take an image in this particular game. When tim designs it he wants vella to walk over and open up the mailbox, okay and so and then, when she opens the mailbox he’ll write some dialogue that he wants. He wants her to say, you know when she opens the mailbox so that dialogue gets recorded. It comes to me and then my job is to then have vela in the position and have her actually open the mailbox and say what she’s supposed to say, and so i have to animate sort of that performance.
This guy hasn’t gotten mail in a while. Oh so so, if you want to see i pull out here so you can actually see what this what this world actually looks like that’s so cool. So if you rotate around, you can see all the different layers but they’re just flat. There’S nothing really fancy about them right, they’re, just totally flat and they’re, just paintings and they’re just layered, and what that does is that um that can give us what’s called a parallax, and that is when the depending on how far back your image is. It will it’ll move at a different move at a different pace.
If you move like this, you can actually start seeing how it’s like a 3d world yeah. It gives it depth um and then so so this still isn’t in the game. This is still only in maya and then um. What i have to do next is once this is done.
Is i then need to take it over and give it to anna and then anna’s the one? That’S going to hook it up in the game and get it ready for players to experience. Okay, awesome, so it sounds like i need to go and talk to her. You want to go talk to her. Okay. Well, campers! Let’S go check it out! Hi! Oh hi! I’M paleo hi told me to come, talk to you so who are you and what do you do? I’M a senior gameplay programmer double fine. My name is anna kipnis and i just received uh some animations from ray, so i’m checking them out. So here is what you know: this is the editor view of this art that you just saw, and here is um here’s how the art separates out. You see there’s like these little holes in between all the pieces. Now we want the character to be able to walk between all of those areas right and so to do that we have the system where we can define where the walk areas are.
So you see these blobs here, these green blobs. This is on each and every like little segment of you know the path that you can walk on and then in order to connect these big holes. Here we have these like we’re.
Recalling layer, bridges, um and all it is is like this is that this defines exactly the path the character will take between each of those things up here. So she’ll end up, so she you can’t quite see it, but there she is she’s following the line and it just looks like she like, ran down the downhill, because, even though you can’t see her take sharp turns the camera’s following her. So you can really feel like you’re going down a hill so much that goes into each little step. Yeah, it’s surprising! I mean you have to be very specific with computers because so, like you know, everything is possible right, so you have to be like.
No, i want this particular thing to happen, and actually you know what like there are times when it’s really hard for me to put stuff together without hearing you know without having sound, and sometimes you know it takes a while before we can get the actor into The studio, so i was wondering if you could help me out – oh yeah, yeah and record some of the lines that i need to use. Well, i would be happy to so. I guess we’re gon na have to go and uh record some sound. All right.
I’Ll see you later hi, i’m paloma, i was told to come talk to you about everything, audio hi, how you doing so! Who are you and what do you do? I’M camden camden stoddard and i am the sound supervisor for double fine. So i’m in charge of doing all the sounds in the games, voices and music and everything you hear one of the things that we do before we have the actor. Who does the voice we’ll have some of our people at double fine, actually say the line so that the animators and i can kind of get an idea of like what that’s going to be like. So she has a line.
If you want to say it, i can give it i’ll record you saying it: this guy hasn’t gotten mail in a while professionally done. That’S what i do very good. This guy hasn’t gotten mail in a while um a lot of times.
We do this before professional actors come in, because we have to get a sense of like how this game is gon na flow and how the actual dialogue is gon na feel in the game against animation. And then we can kind of tighten up everything before the real actors come in and do all their voices because she’s in a forest like um, you would hear a lot of wildlife. You’D hear like the leaves going that wind going through the leaves of the trees, and things like that. So i have a couple ambiances that i’ve brought in like just sounds of the forest, so that it kind of gives like a background like here’s, some birds and a bunch of wind going through and then the final element that we add is some music. We have some wonderful music in this game, so we’re going to add that in this guy hasn’t gotten mail in a while wow that really does round it out and makes it feel like an adventure all together.
Oh yeah music’s very powerful, but now we have uh vella sounding like she’s checking them out all right. Thank you! So much for your time, all right, all right. It was nice to meet you and, let’s get wow other paloma sure had a fun time at double. Fine productions, my favorite thing was anna’s custom game engine, it was so cool and the best thing is that you can start building your own game at home.
Using free software, we’ll put some links in the community page where you can find out more yeah. The possibilities are really endless. You can take some of your sketches inside of your sketchbook, cut them out and arrange them in that game engine i mean be creative, see what you can do. Definitely i can’t wait to see what you come up with see.
You later campers .