BAF 2011 - Day Two

Puss in Boots: Kinect - Blitz Games - Nick Adams

This presentation was given by Blitz Games' Nick Adams who talked to us about how to make a successful kinect game for children as his company had recently made 'Puss in Boots: Kinect'. He said that it all started with the player, kinect is all about the player and so they wanted to deliver a great experience for the player, Dreamworks, who requested the game, described the game vision as being a movie experience but in a game.

Blitz Games apparently came up with many ideas for the game that they thought would be fun and interesting for kids, but when they tested it on them, the kids got confused and frustrated and so a lot of ideas got binned. He stressed the importance of simplicity in games and that if a player doesn't understand or like something, it might have to be removed, even if it is an idea you really liked. This was some good advice for me because i know it is hard to be told your idea might not be appropriate for a certain assignment and it is hard to let go of it.

Nick also talked about how important it was for the game to deliver a hero experience where the player feels cool playing the character. To do this, the game utilises the Kinect's interactiveness and let the player control Puss' sword. However, a kid trying to use a pretend sword doesn't look very good in the game, with the sword going in multiple directions and looking very sloppy. So Blitz Games made it so that the sword would go into one of several animations depending on the direction the kids flung their arms in. This gave them the feeling that they were doing extravagant sword swishes when in reality they looked like a drunken pirate.

They also found out through testing that children didn't understand or think of a lot of the actions to do certain things (that sentence sounds like a mess i know) e.g. to shimmy across a ledge you needed to move your arms in a certain direction, whereas the children chose to do it another way which didn't work in the game. They overcame this by making the action requirements much more vague so the player could do whatever movement they wanted to overcome any obstacle.


The Getaway (PS2) - Team Bondai

Next up was Team Bondai who made the PS2 game 'The Getaway', which used real life actors to create realistic moving game character animations using magnetic motion capture. Magnetic motion capture at the time could have up to five actors on the screen at one time who would stand between two big magnets. However, this type of technology was limited and the PS2 couldn't handle much more than this game was already providing and so mouth performances were unavailable.

Enter L.A. Noire, a crime and detective game that was praised for its facial animations and voice acting. L.A. Noire used 3D camera scans and because of this were able to deliver very natural performances. They used sixteen pairs of cameras, so thirty-two in total to capture these very detailed facial expressions and faces, each character apparently needed 428 in game heads to give of believable mouth performances and idle animations. Here is an example of how detailed the facial expressions were:

Lots of famous celebrities make cameos in this game including Greg Grunberg, Vincent Kartheiser, Elizabeth Moss and Jon Cryer. However, even with these famous celebrities acting, the game had a problem, the same problem as a lot of other video game NPC characters, when you speak to characters they are full of life, but as soon as you stop, they become dead and lifeless and do repetitive idle animations (looking at you Bethesda). L.A. Noire conquered this problem with using lots of different idle animations similar to ones that humans would make such as biting lips, scratching noses etc. These animations are all included in the 428 heads I mentioned earlier.

3D Scanning - Ten24

Ten24 were the company behind the pretty amazing Dead Island trailer and the in game character models. They spoke to us about the different types of scanners they used to create realistic looking characters where every part of the body looked well finished. Even noses and fingernails look realistic whereas other companies don't bother with detailing those areas.

3D scanning helps to get this realistic look as it will scan the face and body in 3D so most of the work is done for the sculptors already. The only downside is that it takes a very long time to scan something and the target has to stay very still for long lengths of time. Here are some pictures of 3D scanning.

 Laser scanning is a quicker process that will quickly scan one face of a target and produce a fairly detailed, but usually unfinished look. This is more work for sculptors but is still a very useful way of scanning. The target has to stand very still for this type of scanning but only for about thirty seconds or so.

There is also a 4D scanner that scans everything from every angle, however this takes a very large amount of cameras and is incredibly expensive to do. This method of scanning (although called 4D) scans everything in 3D, and i mean everything, it even scans into the nostrils and ears to produce a very detailed final image that needs very little tweaking by sculptors.

Ten24 then showed us some character models of Dead Island and then finished with the trailer they made. It was all very impressive and pretty cool seeing a game you already own in construction and recognising faces and characters.

Overall, my favourite presentations were both of the kinect for Xbox 360 ones: Puss in Boots and the Disney game, bit of a coincidence but they were both very interesting and informative and gave good advice. Although a lot of the presentations were about the same thing- face recognition software and 3D scanning BAF is still well worth a visit and i will probably be attending next year.


One more thing! As a little extra, here are some of the pictures me and Stuart did on the way home with our left hand - it was a very boring trip home and we needed something to entertain ourselves... Enjoy!

The States of America game and some left handed drawings

Who's that Pokémon?