The Making of Donkey Kong Country & Killer Instinct / Pre-rendered graphics

in the late 70s using computer generated graphics for entertainment purposes was a field for only a small group of dedicated pioneers thanks to their efforts along with the following boom of microcomputers and ever decreasing cost of hardware cgi really started to take off to cater to this growing market companies started to develop specialized tools and hardware the company's silicon graphics had top-of-line systems for image processing the toronto-based alias research incorporated known for their 3d software established a partnership with silicon graphics in 1985 their software package gained traction in the industry and was put to use on high-end commercials broadcast animation and academy award-winning movies in 1990 the package simply known as alias was rebranded to power animator for the entertainment market pioneers in the video game industry were also eager to start using these tools to create and render visual assets a style that would become known as pre-rendered graphics [Music] in the home computer market titles like mist and rise of the robots were under development using desktop packages like 3d studio sega had invested in a silicon graphics system and put it to use for the opening sequence in sonic 3. over in the uk the innovative studio rare had been experimenting with early 3d desktop software on a mac they wanted to push it further and invested in a power series silicon graphics workstation setting them back 55 000 pounds rare was owned by two brothers with a true pioneering spirit chris and tim stamper they had already achieved great success as one of the first western third-party developers for nintendo creating hits like battle toads and rc proam tim stamper would familiarize himself with the 3d software power animator he knew that if they used it to create graphics for a video game it would look miles better than the competition the growing video game industry had become a viable market for silicon graphics in dedicated press events held around the world they would demo their new line of powerful workstations among their selling points was their reality engine graphic system designed to render massive amounts of texture mapping and anti-aliased polygons per second a perfect fit in combination with the high-end 3d packages available a significantly down-scaled system for use in a video game console was also in the works and pitched to several console developers nintendo showed interest and in august of 1993 their partnership would be revealed under the name project reality a slick promotional video consisting of pre-rendered video and real-time high-end reality engine scenes built hype in the industry [Music] while companies were experimenting with 3d software virgin and disney were hard at work on their ambitious aladdin game for the mega drive they'd taken a completely different approach by developing a process that allowed them to incorporate hand-drawn animations in a video game aladdin was first revealed on the ces trade show in june of 93 and managed to get the attention of nintendo's development manager tony harmon the game's smooth animations faithful to the movie made him realize the need for nintendo to step up harman had already advocated for the idea of developing games with western studios alongside their own team in japan something sega had been doing for years however nintendo's direct connections in the west were limited to a handful of studios most notably rare and software creations nintendo's tony harmon visited rare to see what they were up to the stamper brothers happily showed him their progress in using 3d software to create graphical assets for games a young designer at the company kevin bayless had been given full access to their powerful workstation the past months he became experienced in modeling complex 3d characters and started fleshing out ideas for a 2d fighter utilizing these graphics under the work title brute force impressed by these efforts nintendo readily entrusted rare to develop a state-of-the-art platformer to rival aladdin using this technology tim stamper and nintendo discussed potential characters to star in their game ultimately settling on the iconic donkey kong brute force was put on the back burner the coming months as they started gearing up for this ambitious project donkey kong country the task of redesigning the iconic character of donkey kong was assigned to kevin bayless the original creator shigeru miyamoto had faxed them some of his own sketches as a starting point bayless had previously designed the battle toads and so it was no coincidence that the new look for donkey kong shared some of their signature features like their eyes the approved character design was drawn from various angles and used as reference in the 3d software there are several techniques to build 3d geometry for donkey kong primitive shapes like spheres boxes and cylinders were used as a starting point and deformed to create objects and body parts the next step was to apply textures and shaders to the model and add lights to the scene power animator's render engine would turn the data into a high quality 2d image the final step involved rigging the models for animation this involved building a bone structure and linking it to the model so that body parts could be animated animators would set keyframes at specific points and the software would interpolate the remaining frames to produce a smooth motion making the run animations for donkey kong was a long process that went through no less than 15 iterations until they found the one with the right dynamic and speed a small creative team would start to sketch out ideas for game mechanics animal buddies and think of an overall storyline greg males would be responsible for the gameplay side while bayless continued the work on the initial character designs the design team had to greatly expand the donkey kong universe with a dozen new characters among them was the young chimp diddy initially named donkey kong jr his new design was so far removed from the original junior character that nintendo had requested he be given a new name as for antagonists rio decided to use the crocodiles from a cancelled point-and-click adventure game these creatures were adapted and softened up to fit donkey kong's world alongside designing the main cast the initial focus of the project was to define the art style and make the rendered 3d graphics work on the super nintendo a few months into the project lead programmer chris sutherland began building a playable prototype consisting of a mock-up jungle themed level modeled by tim stamper audio was usually one of the last elements in the production chain but tim felt that music would help to define the mood early on and boost morale david wise composed the jungle track for the demo that would be a mashup of three different ideas a jungle level up and running tim stamper and game designer greg males flew to japan to present their progress to nintendo's team leads overall they reacted favorably and the project was officially advanced into production ken lob from nintendo of america helped to facilitate what rare needed and work out a budget all the high-end workstations and software budgeted for the full production would mean a huge investment for this single game nintendo's solution was to sign raron for two more projects to spread the cost for the first of these two they turned to their prototype of brute force early design documents for this project specified some unique ideas like a system whereby players could store their character progress on a custom barcode card ken lob already had ideas of his own for a combo based fighter he sat down with a couple of the staff members at rare to flesh out the core fighting system in the initial months [Music] the warrior monk jacob was the first fighter to be implemented and used to test their game concept character designer kevin bayless left the donkey kong project and focused his attention to flesh out the full cast the new features added to the 3d software proved to be influential for the fighters cinder and glaciers game designer chris tilson took a leading role in creatively stirring the game's production like many of his teammates it was his first project at the company we are controlling transmission tony harmon suggested a fitting name for this arcade fighter over at the donkey kong country team a young rare designer steve males was in the process of mastering the 3d software himself he was appointed to the game and with some guidance turned most of the character sketches into 3d models at the start of 1994 donkey kong country swung into full production a handful of artists were assigned to the project they had to master the complex 3d software while the game was in production tim stamper directed the team shared his ideas and was on the phone with nintendo regularly he was able to handle most ongoing negotiations behind the scenes allowing the team to focus on the work at hand nintendo shared their own ideas but their involvement was minimal especially compared to their earlier joint effort with the western studio on star fox the decision to allow a western company to develop the new donkey kong game resulted in a fresh take the rare team added their british sense of humor to the game to breathe new life into the classic gaming icon game designer greg males envisioned a fast and snappy pace for the game he designed the levels such that skillful players were able to speed through the stages without having to wait for barrels or fines to take position it was common in these days to draw level maps on paper first unique for rare however was their tool for level layout planning post-its these famous sticky little papers made it easier to make quick changes and rearrange sections without redrawing the whole level the general theme and the main gameplay features were decided on first variants of the game mechanics were sketched ranging from easy to hard forming the basic framework of a level when it came to gameplay super mario was a big inspiration for example most mario games don't feature a life bar the player's hit points are telegraphed directly to the player through the sprites in a similar fashion the character of diddy kong was a clever way to give the player an extra hit point keeping the on-screen status information to a bare minimum as well as giving a sense of companionship between the main characters what posed the biggest challenge was the secondary attack of the kongs an array of moves were tested but the one that ultimately stuck was the roll attack it was fast responsive and could take out multiple enemies at once so it perfectly supported the snappy gameplay [Music] with nintendo's investments rare had seriously expanded our workstations and invested in dedicated challenge excel render servers the lower end indigo models served as workstations for the 3d artist they could send the more demanding render jobs to one of the dedicated render servers with two games in development the render server crunched frames around the clock render cues were sometimes so long that artists had to wait for hours to see their results it was not uncommon that an impatient artist would give his own render job a higher priority late in the evening the imagery for the snow level was especially time consuming for the render server rare was housed in a 300 year old barn house situated in the warwickshire countryside the company used so much power that people started to question what was going on in this countryside barn power outings plagued the development crew frequently they had to rely on mobile generators to keep the downtime to a minimum [Music] converting the high quality rendered images to super nintendo compatible assets was a different matter altogether all artwork had to be down scaled in resolution and drastically reduced in their number of colors the artists used a high res render of each character and manually picked colors to build a suitable 16 color palette in a batch process all frames of a given character were subsequently downscaled and converted to files using this palette but there was no avoiding touching up the images by hand to retain the most detail the backgrounds were the biggest bane of the project 16-bit consoles were built around the concept of tiles tiny repeatable images that were used over and over again to save memory super nintendo background tiles were typically 8 or 16 pixels wide and very restricted in their number of colors traditional pixel art was made with these limitations in mind as opposed to the full color 3d rendered backgrounds produced by rare the background artist had to break these complex renders down into as few tiles as possible a time-consuming process done by hand designed to make sections repeatable while also retaining the most detail although the game was assigned a massive 32 megabit cartridge fitting all the detailed graphics onto it still demanded a ton of clever optimization the artists handed their discs with super nintendo compatible assets over to the programming team under the lead of chris sutherland they had developed tools like a banana editor to speed up the process the programming team also implemented a number of impressive weather effects that would breathe life into the computer graphics [Music] over in a small separate space of the barn house the audio department was hard at work on the game's score coming from nintendo's 8-bit console composer david wise first had to familiarize himself with the sample-based audio chip of the super nintendo he would continue to code his music manually instead of relying on a midi solution besides giving him more freedom this also kept the footprint of the code inside the console's audio ram to a minimum the limited audio ram of the chips was one of the biggest bottlenecks and restricted the number of samples and thus instruments in a single composition a workaround was the swap samples inside the ram in real time at the point they were needed in the audio track latin percussion and synth music were a big inspiration for david wise during the project combined they would make for an interesting sound with both the rhythm and deep atmospheric feel of the jungle the korg wave station in particular would be a big influence for the track ambient aquatics this synthesizer of the early 90s had a signature wavy sound while a note was played waveforms with varying pitch or duration would crossfade into each other to simulate this effect david wise recorded a short sample as a starting point and constantly changed its pitch up and down during the composition three of these synth tracks were layered on top of each other to create this pulsing effect the soundtrack was further enhanced with ambient sound effects that blended together nicely with the music most of the base samples for the game were recorded from synths like the wave station and roland r8 as well as various sample libraries when used right music can so powerfully convey feelings whether it's the cold isolated feeling of a snowstorm a dreamy underwater world or the liveliness of the jungle [Music] with the game nearing completion nintendo was ready to make a public reveal giving it the spotlight on the ces trade show their press conference showcased their strategy for their next gen system the ultra 64. the attendees were shown the first footage from arcade games cruisin usa and killer instinct as well as donkey kong country this gave the crowd the impression that all three were running on next-gen hardware making it a surprise when nintendo revealed that the game was actually running on plain super nintendo hardware and would be in stores before the holidays the trade show was a big success nintendo managed to sell millions of copies to retailers by the end of the show a game breaking the one million barrier during its run was considered a mega hit so donkey kong country was already on the way to massive success even before its launch the crew at rare continued to refine the game and work towards the final build over the summer the heat generated by all the equipment inside the barn became a growing problem for the crew all cooling devices were directed to keep the machines from overheating over at nintendo of america marketing shifted their focus to consumers over the coming months the game would be hyped up in magazines nintendo produced the special promo vhs tape showcasing some of the cutting-edge techniques that were used labeled with the marketing term advanced computer modelling when fall of 1994 arrived the final build was signed off and ready to be produced and shipped a strong marketing campaign ensured consumers that the super nintendo was still relevant in an era when next-gen systems were looming on the horizon the end result of all the tireless effort by rare was an immersive platformer in which our two kong heroes battle king k rool to retrieve their stolen bananas the game features 40 levels and countless bonus rooms to add to the replay value while donkey kong country flew off the store shelves arcade goers spent their quarters on the brand new fighter killer instinct along with sega's virtua fighter 2 it was one of the earliest uses of motion capture in a video game character designer kevin bayless played a pivotal role in testing and implementing motion capture but had to deal with all the hurdles that come with using cutting-edge technology as a martial arts fan he acted out a number of the moves himself the game's backgrounds used a mixture of real-time 3d and pre-rendered movies to add a true parallax effect a full camera pan of the stage was pre-rendered to an image sequence the game code would display the right frame corresponding to the player's position alongside the visual accomplishments the soundtrack also had a contemporary feel to it two new recruits to rare's audio team composed the score and had to make numerous iterations of each track donkey kong country programmer chris sutherland would demonstrate that he was not only a skilled coder but voice over artist as well killer instinct was a successful game in the still booming versus fighting market and one with its own strong identity sporting a cast that seemed to come right out of the latest hollywood blockbusters killer instinct also managed to give a face to the still mysterious ultra 64 system available for your home in 1995 although in reality it used custom arcade hardware by chris stamper and midway using an internal hard drive to store the massive amounts of pre-rendered footage in the span of a year rare's work became an important part of nintendo's identity and marketing for the next generation in a multi-million dollar investment in early 1995 nintendo purchased 25 stake in the company the deal stipulated that rare's future output was exclusive to nintendo's consoles following this deal was a recruitment drive to expand the workforce from 84 to 250 over the span of two years before donkey kong country hit store shelves the core team had already started work on the sequel in a risky move the crew at rare completely ditched the lead donkey kong and made way for a female chimp to join diddy the rare creatives kept lists of possible names for characters but coming up with the name dixie kong proved to be the most difficult while developing the first game they had to learn the new tools and set up a workflow with this hurdle out of the way rare was ready to push the quality of the sequel up a notch they felt that the jungle theme was well exhausted by the first game and thus a completely new setting was suggested pirates had been a lifelong obsession of game designer greg males and thus came up early in the process stepping away from the jungle allowed for more creative freedom overall the designers would think outside the box to come up with interesting themes for levels thanks to the growing knowledge of the 3d software the quality of models and renders could be pushed even further the background artists at rare could build from a growing library of 3d assets with some slight tweaking they were able to repurpose some of the older models composer david wise added a different yet fitting sound to the game being inspired by russian classical composers the soundtrack would have a different overall sound that perfectly complemented the visuals the pirate theme was a perfect fit to expand the adventure elements in the game via an unlockable world the developers were anticipating that most of their audience had some experience with the first game thus they upped the challenge the boss fights especially were more compelling compared to the original the sequel diddy's conquest hit stores a year later and was again a massive success making way for a third game in this super nintendo series the highly successful donkey kong country series had been a blessing for nintendo to extend the life of the super nintendo in a time when competitors were launching their next gen systems the launch of the ultra 64 had been postponed as nintendo and silicon graphics were working out the details of the hardware and software was still in production two years before its launch silicon graphics started distributing the first dev kits running on their high-end onyx stations worth a hundred thousand dollars the emulation software capped their performance to the estimated specs of the ultra 64. nintendo also made a multi-million deal with alias to develop custom software tools for use by developers the console was finally revealed in japan in november of 1995 and renamed to nintendo 64. the hardware was built to produce real-time 3d graphics and thus the look of its games would ultimately be a great contrast to the pre-rendered graphics produced by the high-end systems for donkey kong country meanwhile silicon graphics and alias power animator had gained momentum in the video game industry rare's work was often used as a showcase in their brochures by the mid-90s many of the high-profile game developers had invested in their workstations and 3d software for instance sega made a 50-seat deal with alias wavefront and square even topped that power animator's use ranged from 3d modeling for mario kart 64 to pre-rendered graphics for final fantasy vii competition in the 3d software market would be fierce the following years desktop package 3ds max claimed its own share in the market offering a great set of tools for a fraction of the price alias began work on a successor to power animator with their new partner wavefront under the title project maya all these powerful tools and workstations aside in the end it's still the individual artist that makes the difference not only were the artists tasked to produce graphics unseen in the video game industry at that scale they also had to master the complex tools in a relatively short time span pre-rendered graphics added a new but temporary aesthetic to the gaming scene in the mid-90s and a fine example of how the advancement in technology and progression in art often go hand in hand [Music] [Music] hmm [Music] you

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Length: 24min 57sec (1497 seconds)

Published: Sun May 30 2021