Campo Santo においてストーリーテリングが最優先されるのは不思議なことではありません。Telltale、Irrational、Double Fine、Lionhead などから来たメンバーで構成されるチームは、場所と登場人物とストリーとが交わる十字路に立っていました。「私たちを駆り立てていたものの 1 つはプレイヤーを虜にするゲームとは何かを明らかにしたいと思う気持ちです」と Campo Santo の共同創設者、Jake Rodkin は言います。「単にストーリーを語ればいいというものではなく、ゲームのキャラクターやそこで語られているストーリーとの繋がりをプレイヤーに実感させられるかどうかが重要です」
実際、Campo Santo の主要なデザイン哲学の 1 つは、プレイヤーにとって主人公のスキンがしっくり来るかどうかです。キャラクターの身体を意識することや精緻な手のアニメーションなどはプレイヤーをゲームに引き込み、キャラクターの視点を自分のものとして受け入れるのに役立ちます。
The self-described “scrappy” Campo Santo team in San Francisco
Campo Santo learned a lot developing their first title – the award-winning narrative adventure Firewatch – making them confident embarking on the even more ambitious In the Valley of Gods, where they’re introducing an AI-controlled actor who has many adventures. And while their focus is currently on how the story unfolds, Campo Santo is taking steps to ensure it’s truly compelling with plenty of meaningful character interactions.
In the Valley of Gods tells the story about the challenges of friendship, placing players in the boots of Rashida, a documentary filmmaker in the 1920s who is trying to get her career out of a slump. Though her boots are covered in Egyptian sand rather than the dirt of Firewatch’s mountainous Wyoming forests, the character still brings all of the rich and complicated history and baggage you’d expect to find in a real person’s life story.
As with Firewatch, character development is central to In the Valley of Gods
With this, their sophomore effort, Campo Santo is hoping to refine and improve the techniques developed in Firewatch to connect players directly to Rashida, while introducing even more complexity via Rashida’s companion character Zora, a former friend whom Rashida had vowed never to work with again.
The revived relationship progresses as players interact with Zora, who responds based on player choices. “In Firewatch, Henry’s relationship with Delilah was really great and fun, but having a disembodied voice along with you for yet another story could wear thin. There are probably only so many times you can get away with that,” remarks Rodkin. “We knew the next big step was introducing a fully animated, emoting NPC that reacts to player actions. Zora isn’t just there to staunch the feeling of loneliness, but to offer a more impactful way to express the story and the characters’ relationship.”
With In the Valley of Gods, Campo Santo has spent the majority of the game’s early development in preproduction: Fleshing out the story and characters, building out visual style, and developing the unique tools they need to deliver on their aspirations, which you can see in the trailer released during the 2017 Game Awards.
This is different than the approach they took on Firewatch, where all phases of development happened more or less at the same time. Once production got underway, most of the gameplay and level design was built side by side with story and dialogue. “Though that was partly just a necessity. A big reason we developed Firewatch that way was because the simpler design of that game allowed us to.” For In the Valley of Gods, the team has aimed its sights at achieving lofty goals, which tend to require meticulous planning.
“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.”
Most of what we’re looking at in the trailer, while already running in real-time in Unity at a high frame rate, is merely a first pass that allowed the team to work on the look of the game and explore new technologies and shaders.
The companion character Zora was particularly eye-catching. Not only for her smooth animation and memorable silhouette, but also for facial animation and her dramatic hair, which looked as though it had real volume thanks to some custom shaders and interesting baking techniques to get the rim light to look exactly right (you can read about it here).
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.”
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.”
Like Zora, the team has its eyes on the horizon
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.
The development journey of In the Valley of Gods has only just begun. Keep your eyes on this page for details as the game progresses, and we’ll also share how Campo Santo is using Unity’s new features to make this already stunningly beautiful adventure come to life in 2019.