Driving Art Features in Video Game Development

Some things come naturally to all of us.

Driving initiatives and pushing a vision forward is something I’ve always done in my life, through example, passion, communication and clarity.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have helped and driven small and large features in AAA studios/games, such as God of War and The Callisto Protocol.

First and foremost, having a solid idea and goal in mind is crucial. The target will always be somewhat a moving target, having to adapt to either production schedules, project needs, unsolvable problems, questions and so on, but I need to reiterate how important it is for the driver, and the strike team associated with the effort, to understand the mission.

I use the word mission very deliberate here, because not always a full description will be given or composed right away.

On my 2 last big projects, I can put two of them into perspective. On God of War 2018, me and Rupert Renard (engineer), with support from other teams, wanted to build a Dynamic Material system, that would allow snow, poison, blood, dust, etc, built and manipulated at runtime, but cheap enough that not only all the characters would have them, but also cinematics and combat could leverage the same system.

With that goal in mind, we sketched different ideas and solutions. What we ended up building had a lot of compromises, but those were easy to identify and choose since we knew what we were striving for. We wanted to focus on realtime gameplay feedback, scalability and moving pixels, rather than high fidelity and really bespoke visuals.

When we started designing the Gore System for Callisto Protocol, me, Kelvin Chu and Jorge Jimenez followed the same structure, but we had different goals. We wanted to build a very robust system that could be also leverage by gameplay and cinematics, but we wanted to raise the bar and fidelity across the board.

We started by looking at other competitors and seeing what they were doing and later on became clear which features we wanted to purse and which ones had the best ROI for our case.

We had to make strong decisions right away. How do we cut the characters ? How do we handle the multi extra drawcalls ? How do we handle the rigs ? How do we activate/branch anim states ? How do we scale it across all characters ? So on and so forth.

At that point, the development of the feature started, and I was fully driving it. By that I mean I was holding the vision and handling all the communication across the different disciplines. We rapidly identified one engineer to own the feature - Jon Diego Martines, and we started developing the entire system. The vision didn’t only had the visual part of the feature, how I wanted it to look and feel, but also how I wanted it to behave and connect with different departments. The experience from GOW really allowed me to bring ideas to the table when it comes to designing a system that empowers animators, artists, designers to utilize very simple flags or tags to expand their repertoire of possibilities.

Working with Fabio Silva and the VFX team, and the Spain Rendering and Art team, we were able to create dynamic blood across all enemies, activating region masks based on capsules mapped to universal uvs, neighboring system for better transitions, cool dynamic effects like hanging limbs and spawning chunks, mutations and regrowth of limbs and many more. We also added a really cool Scalable and Promotion based Wound system, that not only changed based on angle of hit but also generated different visuals based on material properties.

With that being said, we also cut a lot of features and simplified a lot of them during the production.

My production partner Eddy was also a key contributor to managing our time and efforts on this endeavor, so thanks for putting up with me :)

The main point I want to make here is that make sure whoever is driving the feature, has a solid reason why the feature is being created and designed, and its use. Also, adapting and playing by ear is essential. Feature creep is real and people will always ask - but can we do that or does that feature handles this case etc. These are the key moments where experience and good sense of MVP / ROI comes in play, and it’s the difficult part.

Being a champion for the feature during different endeavors, aligning the team and keeping them motivated is also crucial, but these are more of global responsibilities of leaders IMO, and I strongly believe that holding a vision and pushing things through is tough but probably the most important thing.

Having an idea is great, but executing that idea is what makes it real, I tend to believe.