In the Valley of Gods

“The development of the scenes for the trailer was a way for the people working on art, tech, and rendering to figure out how to take the concept paintings and make them a reality in-engine, and they really ‘knocked it out of the park.’ Now we’re busy taking all of those learnings and improving on everything even more. We’re working with Unity fairly closely on much of this, with the hope that what we’re doing will make its way back into the community, and hopefully Unity itself – if not our literal code then at least our discoveries.”

And while the hair was hand-animated for the trailer, if you look closely, you can also see a preview of the simple physics spring system in Zora’s earrings, which will eventually provide a more realistic and dynamic bounce to those beautiful locks.

Even sequences eventually cut from the final trailer were beneficial to levels planned for the final game, including one that had the two characters wading through waist-high, fully simulated water in a flooded underground tomb. “It was one of the most technical pieces of the trailer but it didn’t really fit with the story we wanted to tell at the time so it was cut,” says Rodkin. “It’s something we’re very excited to evolve as we go farther down the development road.”

Sometimes it’s the simple things

High-end ambitious visuals are nice: Pretty places, detailed people, and lighting and shadows so realistic they make players want to melt into the environment. But much of the time, success lies in the smaller, less sexy tech features. Such is the case with Campo Santo’s beautiful character animation. They’ve transitioned from the giant animation state machine they used for Henry in Firewatch to localized state machines, single animations, and timelines, based on the Playables API, which was slowly rolled out through 2017.

“With Henry in Firewatch, our animator really wanted the full body experience all the time, which meant when you looked down in first person you’d see a whole person walking around, climbing a rope, picking up objects, etc.,” explains Rodkin. “Firewatch was one big contiguous space – there aren’t load screens or opportunities to flush parts of the game just because you’ve walked across the world. And at the time, this meant a giant bird’s nest of a Mecanim state machine to account for every interaction that could happen at any point in the game, which was hard to read and harder to manipulate.”

The Playables API, for the uninitiated, provides a way to organize and share data sources across multiple functions. Gameplay scripts, animation and sound can all be visualized via a graph to keep things organized between functions.

“The way things work now, it means characters can carry around much less data. It means world organization is easier. It means objects can share data quickly and efficiently. Animations can still all be blended together but that data can now be tied to specific objects.

“For example, if you want to sit down in that chair, the chair animation blend can be shared as the character interacts with the object itself. Thankfully, this means much smaller animation state machines instead of a giant tangled web where the threads are hard to follow. We’re still working on organizing the details of our pipeline, but early exploration is very promising!” concludes Rodkin.