On September 17th, Sidd was in Albany, New York visiting Vicarious Visions Studio where he was given a tour of the studio, spoke with members of the development team and got some more hands on time with the game. In the next few days we will be featuring some articles taking a behind the scenes look at the next game in the series and have some more hands on impressions. This article will cover how the concept of Swap Force came about, the game's technology, and the process of how the writers create an engaging story. Part 1: How The New (Swapping) Feature Comes About
Skylanders Swap Force still supports all the old Skylander figures/characters, but introduces sixteen new characters. These new characters have top and bottom halves that can be separated from each other and recombined with the halves from other characters. This allows for 256 total combinations.
The top half controls how you fight, while the bottom half controls how you move. This was an idea that was presented early on to Activision CEO of Publishing Eric Hirschberg. Immediately he latched on to the idea and loved what it could mean for the third iteration of the game. As the developers described it, it was their "Aha!" moment.
What they presented was merely a wooden action figure that looked purely functional with no room for aesthetics. It was an idea that the developers spent a lot of time fine tuning and tinkering with. It wasn't until one of the developers went home with some Skylander action figures and came up with the idea for using magnets to connect the characters top and bottom halves.
Magnets had come up before as an idea to connect the Skylander characters, but the developers initially had some apprehension as magnets could have their technical limitations. Even if "swapability" would work, the animators had to work meticulously to make sure that the tops and bottoms would perfectly mesh together for each combination and that the movement would be fluid. The animation system had to be completely redone.
Once the developers were able to get the magnets to work, they started to create more characters and multiple versions of characters to see how subtle changes could impact the game. At the same time, the developers hadn't yet nailed down whether the swapability would be split diagonally, vertically or horizontally across a character's body. At one point the developers toyed with the idea of having three swappable body parts: a head, upper body and lower body, but focus testing proved that kids were a little freaked out when they removed the characters heads.
In the end, the Development Team decided to keep it simple. The top determines how you fight and the bottom determines how you move.
Part 2: The Technology Behind Swap Force
Our next presentation was with two Engineers working on the development team.
From a technical perspective, the Engineers wanted to bring a visual experience reminiscent of an animated movie. We were walked through some concept plans that the Engineers received from the Concept Artists that would form the basis of the look of the game. We were shown a PC build of the game running at 1080p while the Engineers discussed some of the technology in Swap Force
Swap Force will feature interactive environments, so little things such as water and grass move and react to your character movements. The Engineers showed off the game's design tools and were toggling between the day and night time levels to show how easy it was for developers to change the lighting on a particular map.Something exclusive to next gen consoles is parallax occlusion mapping.
Parallax occlusion mapping gives textured surfaces a more 3D look and makes them feel less flat. For example, a sand surface will have some depth to it and shadows will actually bend around different surfaces and appear more realistic. According to the Engineers there wasn't enough juice left in the current gen systems to support parallax occlusion mapping.
Motion blur is something the team worked on extensively as well. The Engineers were showing the game with and without motion blur and the difference was quite noticeable. Motion blur gives the animations a much smoother and dynamic look.
Swap force is set in the Cloud Break Islands where a magical island volcano erupts once every hundred years and sends magic all around the islands. The volcano is about the erupt and the game's villain, Chaos, is trying to make it the volcano with his new device called the evilizer, which will turn the whole mountain evil. If he succeeds, the volcano will spread darkness amongst the Skylands. A similar threat had occurred previously, but the Skylanders were able thwart the attack. However, at the same time they were captured in the magic of the volcano which gave them the magic ability to swap.
The team wanted to tell the story in a way that was similar to a full length animated feature film. The developers used inspiration from children's TV shows by sometimes having the characters talk directly to the camera so the player feels engaged with them.
The Cinematics Lead walked us through the game's story development. The first part of the process was coming up with scripts for the game, which would then be broken down into shots, compositions and layouts to visualize each scene. From there, the team would create panels with rough sketches showing each scene and members of the development team were used as temporary voice actors to help the artists and story tellers with the pacing of each scene. This would then be followed by an iterative process that was fine tuned until the developers were happy with the scene created. It wasn't until the rough concept art was approved that the team would move forward with making each scene in 3D.
We were shown how a cutscene was created, by first showing us what the original concept art looked like. The original concept art was a dozen or so slides with hand drawn sketches showing the sequencing of events. Following the concept slides, the actual in game cut scene was shown and it was interesting to see the concept go to completion.
The one common theme I heard from all the developer interviews and stories was that this was a game that was thoroughly tested with kids to ensure it was something that was simple, appealing and fun. An interesting fact that Vicarious vision revealed was that all the kids who have play tested any of their games appears in the game's credits.
Our next preview article will go over the sound design, toy development and character creation.
- Sidd Masand
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