Elysian Shadows

Eskil Steenberg goes deep in to explaining the technology and design behind the game "Love".
This guy is a genius.
check the vid out->
http://vimeo.com/6010060

Edit:
This post seems to fit better into the "Game Development" category.
so moderators, please...

This is awesome! nice find, I'm finding it highly informative and interesting. This guy really knows what he's talking about.

Halo 3 has a pretty amazing engine from a technical point of view but...I think [it] is a pretty bad looking game

Lol! I have to agree. I think his blocky environment looks better. It has more warmth. I find my imagination was doing a better job of filling in the details than Halo's modeler's did.

yeha but what a douche..
went to his site. then there is this alpha download where you can participate in the game. it says. install this. then run it to make sure it works then go to this link.
then the link says if you dont wanna pay 3 euros pissoff.. i might have paid it if he was just like alpha cost this much, but it felt like he was being all shady about it..

anyways.. on a different note... i dont know if he is american.. but if so... and he would rather take euros than dollars... not a good sigh for the dollar.

Wow, and I thought Jonathan Blow could sound cocky sometimes.

MedicineStorm wrote:

Halo 3 has a pretty amazing engine from a technical point of view but...I think [it] is a pretty bad looking game

Lol! I have to agree. I think his blocky environment looks better. It has more warmth. I find my imagination was doing a better job of filling in the details than Halo's modeler's did.

While I agree that the visual aesthetics are nicer because they're more unique, simply dismissing the game as bad-looking because it doesn't follow your artsy style is just ignorant, not to mention arrogant. I'm not a fan of the Halo games by any stretch of the imagination, but I do think they have their place in the direction of more realistic graphics. His comment is the equivalent of saying "I think the game design of the Forza Motorsport series is poor because you can't shoot people." Just because you're going in a different direction (and his direction is out of necessity, mind you), doesn't make other people's efforts bad.

This isn't just from that one quote, I'm talking about that whole part of his talk. Am I just misinterpreting this? He just comes off as really arrogant to me. The first five minutes or so of him talking is basically saying "professional game designers do stupid things, you can do something better by yourself if you're smart".

Disclaimer: I think Love looks amazing, and I'm definitely going to play it. I even love Eskil's blog, and all his thoughts on game design. I just can't stand the way he talks down about everyone not doing it his way.

aamesxdavid wrote:This isn't just from that one quote, I'm talking about that whole part of his talk. Am I just misinterpreting this? He just comes off as really arrogant to me. The first five minutes or so of him talking is basically saying "professional game designers do stupid things, you can do something better by yourself if you're smart".

Yeah, I got that, too. Although I preferred the artsy feel of his game over the uncanny valley of Halo graphics I was a bit wierded out when he was saying stuff like "If you do things in a smart way you can make a good game. For example: I'm smart. Do things the way I do." and "Game studios these days are stupid."

Despite his arrogance, I think he does have a point. Sometimes game studios overcomplicate things.

aamesxdavid wrote:Wow, and I thought Jonathan Blow could sound cocky sometimes.

MedicineStorm wrote:

Halo 3 has a pretty amazing engine from a technical point of view but...I think [it] is a pretty bad looking game

Lol! I have to agree. I think his blocky environment looks better. It has more warmth. I find my imagination was doing a better job of filling in the details than Halo's modeler's did.

While I agree that the visual aesthetics are nicer because they're more unique, simply dismissing the game as bad-looking because it doesn't follow your artsy style is just ignorant, not to mention arrogant. I'm not a fan of the Halo games by any stretch of the imagination, but I do think they have their place in the direction of more realistic graphics. His comment is the equivalent of saying "I think the game design of the Forza Motorsport series is poor because you can't shoot people." Just because you're going in a different direction (and his direction is out of necessity, mind you), doesn't make other people's efforts bad.

This isn't just from that one quote, I'm talking about that whole part of his talk. Am I just misinterpreting this? He just comes off as really arrogant to me. The first five minutes or so of him talking is basically saying "professional game designers do stupid things, you can do something better by yourself if you're smart".

Disclaimer: I think Love looks amazing, and I'm definitely going to play it. I even love Eskil's blog, and all his thoughts on game design. I just can't stand the way he talks down about everyone not doing it his way.

yeah i agree. he does convey that his way is smarter and better. he did come off as arrogant. but maybe its founded, i dont know. i dont like the jagged edges on everything. but i do think it looks very nice. i played around with his model editor.. lets just say... its definitely made by one man for one man. im sure it powerful, but not easy just to pick up and use.

omg, the tools are even more impressive than the game.

i played around with his model editor.. lets just say... its definitely made by one man for one man. im sure it powerful, but not easy just to pick up and use.

I also played around with his model loader a while back, and agree. I love all the realtime updates between editors/users though, I would love to integrate that into a game of my own sometime.

Will Wright talked about the same thing while he was making spore (algorithms to generate content rather then artists). There is definately a trend towards more and more asset creation in big industry games, little desire to branch out too new technologies for graphics seems to be making a lot of modern games look so similar it hurts. When you keep seeing the same thing over and over the faults become obvious (which is why he was pushing away from the sharp polygon look towards soft an painterly forms). For the last few years I have seen so much 'make this game look super realistic' with the same bump/normal/relief mapping techniques. It has become so common that I'm tired of it, the specula highlights make everything look slimey and often destroy what the material is meant to look like is a pretty common description of just one of the problems.

When you think about the cost to get artists to make 100's of assets in order to "keep up" with other games it does make the game developers look stupid in many respects. Although I would be reluctant to say that it's soley the developer fault, I'm sure marketing plays a big role in keeping to this fastly growing "developing standard" of game creation. The games industry seems to becoming more and more business based then fun based it seems, so risks such as approaching a new way of creating art seems to be shunned more and more even though it can result in cheaper costs of creation. I'm sure the fear is that new art styles will 'scare' mainstream game players, as they like games that look like game A.

That said not every developer/company is trading innovation for profit. I mentioned Will Wrights talk, also Nintendo has shown alot of clever use of graphical techniques to create both appealing and unique imagery for their games. If you look at Zelda Windwaker or Mario Galaxy you see a push away from the mainstream 'ideal' look.

yeah the idea of procedural content has been around for quite some time.. its only now with more powerful computers that its really feasible.
the spore comments just reminded me of what a let down that game was. :[

im pretty sure most of oblivion is procedural aswell. im sure all the organic matter is.

avansc wrote:yeha but what a douche..
went to his site. then there is this alpha download where you can participate in the game. it says. install this. then run it to make sure it works then go to this link.
then the link says if you dont wanna pay 3 euros pissoff.. i might have paid it if he was just like alpha cost this much, but it felt like he was being all shady about it..

That's probably where he got those black eyes from.

Anyways, I do like how informative he is, he really doesn know what he's talking about, plus I really like the graphics style and how it goes from day to night like that. Must have been really hard to do.

its only now with more powerful computers that its really feasible.

... depends how far back you are looking.
I mean you can make something like a heightmap with a very simple noise effect with only an O(n) cost, that's not exactly something you could only do recently and it certainly is procedural. In-fact the cost of making this map is equal to loading a heightmap with an equal number of vertices in a time-complexity sense if not cheaper, as there is no file reading overhead. The problem with this of course is it would look pretty ugly if not done right. So really the problem has been finding clever, cheap algorithms to do things that are actually appealing and practically useful.

the spore comments just reminded me of what a let down that game was.

Yes it was but I still appreciate the game from a technological standpoint and am impressed at how different it was.

zeid wrote:

its only now with more powerful computers that its really feasible.

... depends how far back you are looking.
I mean you can make something like a heightmap with a very simple noise effect with only an O(n) cost, that's not exactly something you could only do recently and it certainly is procedural. In-fact the cost of making this map is equal to loading a heightmap with an equal number of vertices in a time-complexity sense if not cheaper, as there is no file reading overhead. The problem with this of course is it would look pretty ugly if not done right. So really the problem has been finding clever, cheap algorithms to do things that are actually appealing and practically useful.

the spore comments just reminded me of what a let down that game was.

Yes it was but I still appreciate the game from a technological standpoint and am impressed at how different it was.

i was talking more about things. like mechanics/animations based on geometry, the way trees grow based on how much sun it gets. what kinda terrain its on. erosion.

Damn, this guy looks like he hasn't sleep in years and sounds like a coincided Aspie. Interesting stuff, though. I'll have to watch it when I have more time.

edit: Goddamn, the guy basically wrote his own version of Maya. He has a pretty good statement at the end, too.

Really impressive what that guy is doing.
But I've had to laught when he said something like "Most of the game developers from big companies are stupid" ^.^