22 / wfmag.cc
When games look like comic booksInterface
and you felt like you were inside a comic,
I was doing sort of my job with this game.
It also takes a lot of pressure off the rest
of the development. If the audience is
only expecting to see a comic, they don’t
expect to see extremely fancy graphics.”
Shedworks’ efforts require a similarly
firm hand on the tiller. For Kythreotis,
learning to help a team of artists maintain
Sable’s aesthetic is part of a larger shift
that Shedworks has made as it’s moved
from developing for mobile to making
a larger, premium game for PC and
consoles. “My job at this point,” Kythreotis
says, “is about coherence and making sure
the world fits together and the art style
remains consistent, and also makes sense
within the world
we’re creating.”
Fineberg had
to learn the
same lesson.
“Managing other
people is hard
- we’ve literally
never done it before,” he says. “We hired
another programmer a couple of months
ago, and up ‘til now I’d written every line
of code in the entire game. And I just
know what all of it does. [There are a]
million things that I just know and have to
explain to him. I never had to think about
it before.”
IMPLEMENTING 2D ART IN 3D GAMES
Here’s a major concern the art director
for a game like Void Bastards needs to
address: how do you create a game that
looks like two-dimensional art while
offering an explorable 3D world?
“You can use Unity to build 2D games,
but 2D stuff, these days, is generally done
in a 3D perspective – like you still have a
camera,” explains Void Bastards’ Jon Chey.
“Our 2D sprites are drawn as flat objects
that are actually placed into a 3D world.
I wouldn’t say that Unity is really designed
to make a game like [Void Bastards].”
The Sable team had to address similar
issues. “We were just solving these
problems as they came,” says Fineberg.
“If you’ve got two rocks, and they’re both
the same colour, and one is close to you,
and one is quite far away from you, how
do you know which
one is in front?
How do you know
how far away
they are? How
do you deal with
these things?”
Over at Arc
System Works, Yamanaka spelled out a
laundry list of challenges, ranging from
the readability of a character’s silhouette
and movements (“Is the character’s
visibility compatible with the setting and
atmosphere?”), to the usage of lighting
and shadows, to the way the comic book
aesthetic impacts the game itself. That’s
a lot to consider, but there are also ways
to cheat, according to Fineberg. “The
anime that we draw on [are] all about
framing and composition,” he says.“IF YOU CAN MAKE
IT LOOK COOL,
YOU SHOULD ”
“And in a third-person action-adventure
[game with a] third-person camera, there
isn’t very much that you can do as the
designer to get nice shots.
“An obvious trick is in Shadow of the
Colossus. When you’re riding on your
horse, it puts the horse in the bottom
corner of the screen, so it looks like you’re
riding toward the distance and it’s framed
in thirds. And that looks pretty cool. But
it only really works because you don’t
have to do very much. You’re just sort of
sitting there and letting the horse move
forward. I think mostly when the player
is exploring they need control over the
camera. Gameplay has to come first and
if you can make it look cool, you should.”TRIAL AND ERROR
Generally, the process requires (what
sounds like) an exhausting amount
of trial and error. Kythreotis first
determines if a piece of art – like Sable’s
hoverbike – is a good fit for the world
Shedworks is building. Then he sketches
it out on paper, a process that helps him
determine what problems the design will
potentially create or solve. From there,
he moves the drawing into the digital
space, sketching it out on his iPad Pro
using Procreate and an Apple Pencil.
“Every drawing you do is useful even
if you’re just tracing over older drawings
that you did, because when you doFATAL FRAME
Yamanaka says producing Arc System
Works’ style of fighting game has gotten
substantially easier over the last decade.
“Technical hurdles have fallen in recent
years,” he says. “The most difficult aspect of
our 2.5D expression is the animation aspect.
Our animators don’t rely on [keyframes]- instead, we painstakingly create 12–16
frames of ‘sakuga’ [or drawings] per second
using 3D models. It’s very hard work. Ten
years ago, franchises like the BlazBlue
series were mainly developed using 2D
sprites, but since 2014’s Guilty Gear Xrd,
2.5D cel-shaded fighting games using the
Unreal Engine have become mainstream.”
Sable is Shedworks’ first
non-mobile title, and the studio’s
first game to include buildings – a
big change for Kythreotis, who
studied architecture at university.22 / wfmag.cc