On the second day of the BAF trip we arrived a little late to Creative Assembly's talk on their 'Total War' games. Total War is a strategy, turn based game set in famous battles through out our planet's history. The series started with 'Total War: Shogun' back in 2001 and has since included medieval, Roman and Napoleonic versions of the game.
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| Total War: Empire concept art. |
Creative Assembly mainly talked about their 2011 release that would breathe some new life into the Total War series: Shogun 2. Apparently a long awaited sequel to the first and it sounded as if they pulled out all the stops. They talked about how they created armies, the amount of revision they had to do to get the costumes accurate and how they had to take thousands of reference photos for the in game environments. Although travelling to exotic countries to take photos of famous places sounds more like a holiday than work :/
Overall this was not the most interesting talk as the speakers seemed to lack passion for their product, perhaps it was nerves or it could be because the game was still in development at the time, however it was interesting to learn that their is a huge variety of jobs in the industry including photographers, historians and costume designers.
Assyria- Starting Your Own Company
Our next talk was from a guy that had just come out of university and had started his own business creating games for the iPhone. He had started his own company Assyria and managed to break into the market with iPhone games such as The Glowing Void, Picnic Panic and Mirror Maze. I know how popular IPhone/ Ipod games are as i have friends who often download them and so it was good to see that a company that was quite happy making these small games was thriving.
It was inspirational listening to a guy talk about creating a company, pitching his ideas and making tons of money- especially when he made it sound so easy, although it sounded as if he had had a hard time at some point as he seemed incredibly adamant about not going into business with friends because they can emotionally blackmail you. Since he was probably speaking from experience, I will try to follow his advice.
Lionhead Studios- Fable III
The next talk was by Andy Brunton, head animator for the whole Fable franchise. Andy showed us a behind the scenes look at Fable III being made which included how they made the audio fit the video, a look at character models and a brief look at how the animators animated the characters. He also showed us some extras which included unused character models, unused death animations and the many different dog designs they played with before deciding on the border collie (for anyone that doesn't know the main character has a dog companion that helps him fight and digs up treasure).
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| Character Models |
Apparently Brunton had to fight for the dog to stay in the third installment and so had to find a way to realistically animate it without it having the same problems as before. The main difference in the characters was purely cosmetic, making them more realistic and less gangly.
Overall, I enjoyed the first day more than the second, although both gave me an insight into how many jobs are available in this industry, how much effort goes into creating a game and how fun it can be to work with other like minded people. The best three talks in my opinion were Splash Damage, Ninja Theory and Lionhead Studios as I took away the most from them and the speakers for each were clearly passionate about their product. BAF is a really good festival and I'd be happy to attend again next year, if you're interested in games or animation I would definitely recommend going.
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