Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/77744
n n n n Gaming Art Style The team had a great deal of artistic inspira- tion for Journey, explored through concept art and illustrated styles. "We didn't want to go with realism because we are a small team with just a few artists, and realism is so hard to achieve. Instead, we wanted to come up with something that was achievable and, more im- portantly, would stand the test of time. Some- thing you could look at in the future and it would hold up," says Nava. In fact, that has been the underlying strategy of thatgamecompany since it was co-founded by two University of Southern California students—Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago—in 2006. After seeing Chen's Flash game Flow, which he did for his master's the- sis, Sony Computer Entertainment contracted thatgamecompany to produce three titles for its PlayStation Network: Flow in 2007, Flower in 2009, and Journey this spring. All the titles are unique, prompting the player to figure out the games' parameters and goals. In all three games, the narrative arc is based primarily through visual representation and emotional cues, not dialog. Journey enabled the team to spread its de- signer wings, so to speak, and come up with the studio's first "semi" humanoid character. As Nava points out, designing such an atypical character for the studio was quite challenging; the character had to reflect the studio's core ideas and appeal to its customers. The final character design was inspired by many dif- ferent sources—from Native American rugs 42 June/July 2012 Custom simulations were used for the characters' long, flowing scarves and for the sand throughout the game. and symbols, to Japanese kites, to Egyptian hieroglyphs. using Autodesk's Maya, while the textures were hand-painted with Adobe's Photoshop. In fact, there are no realistic textures in the game; rather, all the imagery has a painterly quality to it, giving Journey its unique style. One of the most identifiable objects in the game, and one of the most complex to gen- erate, is the character's long, flowing scarf. To achieve the movement for this signature object as well as the clothing and even the sand, the artists used custom simulations developed in- house by lead engineer John Edwards. "When you are developing for the PlayStation 3, it is very useful to have your own tools, like the cloth simulator, because they can be optimized for the PS3. So we can make them run faster and smoother than we can with commercial simulation software," says Nava. "Also, if they break, we understand the code behind them, so there are no mysteries for us in the develop- ment process." The characters were modeled and animated The simulation is dynamic and happens in the code of the PlayStation 3, notes Jessie. If the group had used Maya, for instance, they would have had to bake the simulation, which would have negated the animation occurring dynamically in the game. "Instead, now when the wind increases, the cloth dynamically re- acts accordingly," Jessie adds. Having key tools developed in-house also lets the artists and developers communicate with the engineers who are writing them, so the tools can be customized for the gameplay experience during development. The flowing cloth was a major feature of Journey from the start, and iteratively refined throughout the development process. Particle systems also played a big role in the title, and are used for all kinds of effects in Journey. Those, too, were mostly written in-house. The Journey game engine was also an evolution of the in-house engine built for Flow and Flower, which extended Sony's own PhyreEngine technology. Aesthetics Another special feature of the game is the lighting, achieved by Jessie and Nava using special texturing tricks. "For this game, we tried to simulate the lighting ourselves us- ing texturing and other approaches to make it look like there is a sense of light direction, without there being one," says Jessie. As Nava notes, the team did not use a dynamic lighting system with shadows. Instead, the shadowing is based on other systems and technologies, which made the imagery less costly to render. "If you are doing a real-time game, the shadows are usually low quality because they are expensive; you can see aliasing in the edges. It really detracts from the visual style of the