Visual Adventures on Sea of Thieves

[Music] hi hey so my name is Ryan Stephenson and I'm art director at the game studio rare and today I'm gonna be talking to you about the art of adventure on sea of thieves and I'm going to be covering some of the visual pillars that we made during the making of the project also showing you some of the early work around creating the visuals and some things that never been seen before so to begin with who in the room has actually played sea of thieves saying ah nice very piratey so well release day was actually yesterday brilliant thank you so to begin with I thought as a reminder to everyone is to start with the launch gameplay trailer [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so to talk about the Jew art journey of C thieves I need to tell you a little bit about the studio first and also about how we came to make this part adventure game so I joined the studio 17 years ago but that's nothing compared to rare who's been around for over 30 years now and we have a rich history of games with a wide range of themes so hopefully you're familiar with some of these games and as you can see that there's a wide variety of different genres and there's also different themes within it and as you can see we like to experiment and I think it also speaks to the fact we like to change what we work on and how we work at key moments throughout through the through the years and one of those interesting moments came in 2014 when we were just finishing the Kinect Sports rival series of sports games and we realized that the following year 2015 was actually going to be the 30th anniversary of rare so we worked on rare replay which was a collection of games of 30 30 games from 30 years and it really those games really speak to the history of the studio and the character and the charm of this year I think but so we will have this eye on the past at the same time is looking at the past we wanted to think of what the future was going to hold for rare so small group of us came together to define that future to try and think out what was going to be our next game and project Athena was born well kind of so when we first started project Athena we had no preconceived ideas what it could be it could be a anything from a racing game to an RPG but what we did have was a design vision and that design vision was for a group shaping our narrative so a group shape narrative to us is a game in where the experience of player changes depending on who they meet with in the world and the interaction between those players a game where natural conversation was going to be key and also with all that would cause a wider range of emotions as they played the game and also so we would did all that but we still didn't know what the game was going to be so we did have that design vision but we still didn't know what to do so to solve this we actually created a whole bunch of one sheets that went upon the walls around the studio and these one sheets were one-page design documents and this is the one that we produced for sea of thieves and we had hundreds of these upon the walls but it wasn't until this one went up that we realized that we'd found our muse the idea of a group of players and working together and communicating to sailor ship and meeting other crews within the world was just perfect for a shared world narrative we also realized that gave us a world where the players would be able to understand the tools and the world quite simply so what do you do with a compass or what do you do with a treasure map it's pretty obvious and it plays into all those genres that and films that you've seen over the years and there's one other thing that we really liked about this idea and that's the game show that's rare so we're actually in the middle of England nestled about as far away from water you possibly can and the thing we really liked about this idea is that it's no secret even though we're about as far away from sea as you can get we love pirates we've managed to crowbar pirates into most titles that was made over the years my particular favorite is the fact that we've got a zombie pirate and grabbed by the Ghoulies no that's a haunted house game there is no reason why pirates should exist in it but we still crowbarred it in so yeah so that's the reason why and we just loved them so we had a vision and we had a theme that we wanted to go after so the project could really begin so at the start we separated it into two different streams one was going to be creating a low fire gameplay prototype this prototype actually was this rich experience that would feature all of the the features that you actually see within the game that you've been playing today and that actually stayed with us for a long period during the dev and the other stream that we created was the visual development stream so in my area and whenever I start like to start a project I like to start it by defining some art goals and challenges so right at the start we realized we had two main goals that we wanted to go after with C of these goal number one was to create a modern rare game so we wanted to create a game that spoke to the magic and charm of the studio the playful nature of where we make games and also we wanted something that would redefine visually what Triple Aim meant to us as a studio so a rather lofty ambition and also from a gameplay point of view we knew that see if these would be a game where there's going to be a lot of humor we wanted to capture that old rare kind of humor within it as well so and the visuals needed to match the tone the second goal which is really important was to create a timeless visual art style so the idea was a timeless visual art style would avoid being outdated by advances in technology and it would scale quite nicely over different platforms so we're going to be making a game that would be on PC and Xbox so it'd be low spec as well as high spec PC this approach is actually something I've used before in the past for Viva Pinata so and if you look at the screen shot I think it's aged really well this was taken in 2007 so and I think it's part of the fact that it's a strong visual stylization to it that's meant that it's aged nicely and that's the same thing I wanted to do we see of these so we had our two goals we also had our challenges as well I think these everyone gets these with making games you get some challenges that are just come along the way but the first one was to capture the magic of a rare game now that sounds strange that I've just talked about capturing that magic and also had is the art challenge but the reason why it was a challenge is at the start the project it was going to be without any of the normal rare elements so we we thought we weren't going to have MPC's we thought we weren't going to have a have a story behind lots of elements within the world and so I needed to work out how we were going to get that charm and that character within the within the players and also the world surrounding them the other challenge was it was going to be larger than any game we hadn't made before right from the get-go we knew that Daluz was going to be a massive open world and something we hadn't done and it was going to be a style of game we'd never made in an engine we had never used so for this we use the Unreal Engine and it was the starting point and so we needed to do some learning as well about it let's start the project as well did a lot of research so I've watched probably every single pirate film you could possibly do it's not very easy to go out and pretend to be a pirate so I've decided that was probably the best way to understand the theme because we wanted something that embraced the tone of the world and once that we digested all that reference we started work on the artwork itself so these are some early examples of the concept that was done for the very inception of the project so my background is that of a concept artist so it's always my go to the start of a project with most development it is and we've also got a great team at the studio that just jumped at the challenge of creating an adventure game so we explored the islands and the weather those volcanoes there was an early idea of what the edge of the world could be like and they here's some early explorations into characters as well so we were really trying to find the the themes well we're trying to find what kind of pirates these were going to be whether we're going to be heroic or the when they were going to be dirty or on pirates which we ended up leaning towards or how characterful they were going to be whether they're going to be really cartoony or whether we're going to be fairly realistic through all this work and all this concept development we started to create the art pillars so the art pillars we with projects there's always the overarching pillars of the project there's always the design direction the gameplay the engineering something that ties all together but I also like to create individual art pillars for the art team that sits alongside it and supports all of those themes um and I like to create the art pillars based around the goals and the challenges that I've already mentioned so and I also like to create the rule of three so like with anything three is always good and if you're an artist you know aesthetically three things together is a nice balance so this is the first pillar that defined the look of sea of thieves so visual Polly number one is an illustrative approach so and see if these we wanted to suggest structure and detail rather than define it and granular noise is removed and replaced with a more expressive approach to textures these are combined with simple construction to create a rich and very vibrant world so this pillar was created to create that timeless art style that I've mentioned earlier so the simplification I'm talking about is a good example here is where the the silhouette of the forms are kept quite clean something I'm a big believer in is that you can get nice visual complexity through combining simplified forms one problem that I've seen over the years and I've done it myself is a concept artists you'll create a nice image and then you'll start extracting all those elements out and working up the design for each of those individual elements and you end up pouring tons of detail within those elements and then sticking it all back together and the the final image is nothing like what you started with because you've just added so much noise into those individual elements when they recombined so here's an example of the do's and don'ts so obviously that palm tree over there was over on the Left it's very noisy it's got lots of detail within that within the bark where on the on the right it's far more simplified there was something that I was we were aware of as well is that by simplifying the form we would end up with surface detail that could and looking very tube-like or quite quite bit too simple really so what we ended up doing was looking at how we could add faceted surfaces within those details as well so from a distance the form would be fairly simple and then as you get closer you'd see a nice surface within the within the objects themselves we also from the simplified forms we also wanted to capture an interesting aesthetic within the textures so it was inspired by concept painting where it's where you can get very brush marquee and very expressive with a lot of the different elements within it it's a way of making sure that the the world is simplified but never flat because those textures have that detail level within it another aspect to the inspiration for this was by I'm gonna attempt to the name Kazuo Sam who he's a renowned painter of background and layout for Studio Ghibli films this one's from spirited away I think a lot of people find Ghibli films quite inspiring and take a lot from it the thing that I thought was really interesting was how the surface of the wall has lots of different values and hues within it and there's also these brush marks and rounded around the door there's some nice really defined called areas of wear and tear and this was something that wanted to try and capture within sea of thieves so for this we did some early tests on texturing so an expressive texturing approach you can see that the the rock at the top and how it is at the bottom and also how we're removing detail from the leaves these were really early on so we did evolve slightly from this but it shows you the initial that was that the next image is when they started to all come together so this is actually an image taken from a game capture with rend renders added to it and paint overs to try and stop pulling together that vision to really try and define what it could look like here's some call-outs for those areas within the brush mark say the way the the brush marks are on the palm or the palm tree trunk and also the rocks another aspect of the simplification we were looking at was how we could reduce noise within blocks of color so what I mean by that is that the for instance if you look at the palm tree you've obviously got that very big green top and the trunk itself is made mainly from brown brown notes and colors and the same thing with the grass it's got a quite a purity to it the idea around this is that you get a clean color read from each of those objects so we're not spreading lots of different colors over a trunk of the tree it's not got green moss going up it's not blurring altogether so the idea would be that if you actually do blur the image and below the internal detail it still gives you that read of that environment because it's it's saying pure to it so as an example of these rules in action our shape going to show you two images so this is the first one so that's one of the many chests that you can find in CFE so those of you who have played the game will have probably found this in the world and run around with it and here's another version of that that image so for the keen eyes amongst you you'll realize that the first one is a concept art and the second one is a 3d model so this was the really kind of high-five moment for his in the game we really managed to achieve the ability to get that textures the simplified look the separation of the colors within the object so that was quite a key moment when we realized that we could do this and this was the right approach another important part for me about creating illustrate that an illustrative approach was that way we treated lighting so I like to think of his painting with light so it was such an important part of the world we wanted the world to be vibrant and expressive and we wanted the world to have to heighten the emotions when you're on the sea so those storms that were dark and moody and those beautiful sunsets they were all derived to make you feel those emotions when you look at them and the inspiration for that came from looking at color keys found within 3d animation movies just love the way that the push the vibrancy within it and also where they're not hindered by overly realistic lighting they they do heighten it to make them emotion of that moment within the film these images are from my favorite eye one of my favorite artists which is Nathan folks I really recommend you go and look at him he's got amazing charcoal work and he's cool he's a phenom or so the ones down in the corner here so there's two of the images are from Rio the one in the bottom right is from post and boots and the top one I think is from spirit but yeah that it just loved the way that that work and we wanted to capture a bit of that within the world so here are first tests doing that so we were looking at the way that the light could change one environment how by having those different colored keys within the world we can make the mood change so these were the first early tests of that and here it is applied to a three dimensional environment so this was taken from my diorama and you can see that we were playing with the colors there again and we were also looking at the way that weather changed is a location by having it rainy you could get a different emotion I've looked out in the crowd there was at one of our tech art directors was just smiling at me because you can remember this from back in the day and this leads me nicely to what I'm going to show you next which is the engin visit or getting to unreal so obviously we needed to get to know unreal as a studio the art team had never used it before maybe some of them had used in passing but a lot of us had not used it for it to make a main game so we decided the best thing was was to create a small diorama or a little chunk of land where we could test out all these theories that I've been talking about we could test the texturing the simplification and just some of the text that we were playing with it at the time so I'm going to let that play for you now [Music] [Music] so that was our first test to prove this all out as you can see it contained a lot of interesting things within it with its simplification that talked about but it also create had two elements that turned out to be really important for the game and also leads me quite nicely to my next art pillar which is pillar number two a sea of motion so in see if the eaves clouds form and waves crash and also sails billow in the wind the plants would sway in the Bruges breeze as well from the swell of an ocean to the swinging of lanterns below deck the world was never still this is especially prominent in the water and also the sky weather and the passage of time so this was really important to create that sense of a living world and that drama of being on a pirate ship sailing through the waves and it became quite obvious when you look out a screenshot of what the game looked like and we could see this within the prototype early on that there is a lot of water there is a lot of sky so that was going to be our world it was a world where you could go to Islands but the player would see this a lot of time so there's a big chunk of boat as well but if the player was to look to the right or to the left they'd end up seeing this so again more sky more water so we knew that this was going to be a really important part of the game so the sea was going to was going to be this big powerful character within the world we wanted it to be dynamic and also feel like its own entity it had a power to force the player around in the world so as that boat is crashing through the waves triggering these emotions as you ride over the crest and it also became one of our highest visual bars within the game and it varied from appearance depending where it was in the world so from calm lagoons to big storms to just the open sea so there is an action so interesting enough I spent quite a long time thinking about water and how stylized it should be within the world I did experiment with with creating something more stylized but realize that as soon as you start removing some of the essence of what water is from it it just didn't feel like that element anymore and you actually see that with again in animated 3d films I'm a big fan of them and you can see that water within it is often treated as a realistic water and the reason for that is because it just doesn't feel right if you if you change it but we did add stylization to it so it's fairly realistic in the way that it moves and acts but the way that the the light cascades through it and also the tones and colors that we added to it each of those things are hand done to create that sense of an expressive painterly kind of quality also the seafoam as well has got a very defined pattern within it that we repeat to crop kind of mimic the paint marks of the that you find within the textures as well so there's water and now I'm going to show you another video which is just focused on the water so enjoy our lovely waves everyone always says they're beautiful [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay thank you very much we have got a great rendering team that brought that all together but it was really was a huge effort from both the rendering team also the tech artists the lighting people and there were so many people involved in in creating that so going back to that image we'd sorted the water with obviously that's in the bag but we've got the big sky above it and we also knew that that wanted to be a character as well as equally as powerful as the water so for this we looked at a lot lots of reference to try and get inspiration and through looking at this reference it became quite obvious that we wanted this guide to be these have these big bold forms within it and them to almost have a sculptural quality they should grow and change and dissipate and even cache shadows across the environment this guy needed to not only create a want a sense of wonder but also fear the moment that you sail into a storm how does that really feel so with that we decided we needed to try something a little bit different which was to create large geometric geometry based clouds so this was early concept for for how that could look and the idea was that painted all these different big shapes out and and looked at how they disappeared into the horizon also how that they would be really nice as you as you sailed underneath them and they pass overhead this was how that they should look in the game in the sense that there were more fluffy and more kind of like expressive so that was the the early exploration into that by having large Jim geometry based clouds we also realized that we could do some quite interesting things maybe we could make a skull up here in the clouds which would be quite an interesting thing and this was an early idea for Skull Island we realized that we wanted to put a Skull Island in the game it has to be in every pirate trope but rather than have a big island carved out of a skull we thought how about having a big cloud above it this was an idea early on actually got used later within the development for something else who's attacked ask le fort they no wonder that so for those of you that don't know you if you sail across the waves you can see a big skull on the horizon it's the sign that asked le fort has beard within the world and you can go and battle the skeletons within it and maybe steal their riches so again I've got another short video to show you which is the clouds in action [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Music] we even had some really interesting fun tact tests of putting the shape of a ship in the sky as well so we really did just throw lots of things within it to see what would happen this was again the tack our team put this together it was a phenomenal piece of work alongside the those clouds the clouds the water I also wanted a world in which there was just that sense of movement within it so I've mentioned those big bold things but also the little things are important this the world needed to have a sense of of life and I think through those small moments it just shows you how how I'm just it's peaceful to watch it just move there was one moment where we didn't have the trees swaying in the breeze and they just felt like concrete and as soon as we turned it on and we actually got it in they just started to really move and it just felt so beautiful you almost kind of realized how much you've missed it when it wasn't there so I'm now gonna as this is playing I'm gonna talk about something else that I'm going to share with you next which is something we've never actually shared outside this year before which is the art CG trailer so right really early on and we'd obviously were developing the art style and we had this prototype that was going to be rich with gameplay that was developing and really powering along but we needed to prove out more of the of the art style we weren't actually building all of the world at that point so we test it out on the small island we created the rules we've done a few art tests ourselves and we needed to test those theories more so for it we decided to create a CGI trailer and we actually worked with a partner we've used several times in the UK which is real time and to begin with we started by just exploring more areas that could exist within this trailer so we looked up Islands we looked at the clouds again we looked at what it would feel like below the ship so how it's kind of cozy and warm and also close feeling compared to the outside we looked at moments of finding areas of interest such as a a pirate captain that would be sitting on a throne we also started working on defining our characters even more so this is the first three characters that really started to get that sea of thieves style and I'll talk a little bit more about why they have a sea of the--of style in a bit and through making this trailer we were able to test things out such other that lighting that I've mentioned and also take some of our early block out models of the ship and really work them up so for example like this ship here and we also looked at early aspects of what our first Kraken could look like so there's some of the exploration about what tentacle would look like through this process I found it immensely useful and we're able to prove out lots of different ideas and and also give a lots of different feedback play around with the different approaches to things look at the way we're treating decks of the ship look at the way that we're building the world look at the detail even the angle of the ship and the twist of the ship the way that it was made to feel a little bit rickety so I'm going to play that video now but I'm not actually going to show you the full trailer what I'm going to show you is parts of it and also some of the tests that were made through it because I think that was the important part it was proving out these theories [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] always end on a bank so yes so that that was a really really fun thing to do and I feel mentally lucky in my job to be able to go and explore visuals like that so now we're going to come to one of our last pillars which is a world of stories so as I mentioned before we were going to be making this character full rare game but it was going to not have any NPC's in it and it wasn't going to have any of the normal rare thing that we were going to have we did get it we did actually start adding it and we realized how how important it was to it but right at the beginning we needed to work out how to make that feeling come across through the entire world so we knew that the Pirates we're going to have these really full adventures and they were going to have really nice locations to go to and explore that would have this sense of story have this sense of history within it but we also wanted to make that that character and that story and that rare charm sing through every single aspect of the game so for this we made it so that every single item has its own story so you can see there's a there's a shovel and a blunderbuss and the way in which it has a sense of history to it and this was applied to every single item within the game and every single part that we actually built so nothing was new as well so this is a fairly fine a shiny sword but it has a sense that it's got chips in it it's got dents in it it's been used before the idea was that you'd have stolen it from another crew or found it within the world so everything in see of thieves is second-hand the idea of see of thieves is this bubble of pirate adventure so no Nooh no one's making a lots of new swords they're fixing a lot of swords and bringing them in so the three important aspects of creating this life story that really sang through and that was wonky with logic I will explain that wear and tear and patched and repaired so wonky which turned out to be kind of a cornerstone of conversations around the art direction is this so Wang keys a general term to cover distortion and disruption of surfaces that have been caused by its history so they can be poorly poorly built damaged or even walked with age there's an example of what what it is and what it isn't so it's amazing when you're doing stylize games how quickly it sometimes can just turn into quite quite trophy - what in a better words of car - next cartoon stylized forms so you can get a lot of stylish pinches or distortions and what I wanted to make sure was all of this wonky feel wasn't through just ask you items it was through the fact that there was a history within it so here are some examples of that we have the deck of the ship while the the stairs down so the Rayleigh's warps with age and it has this slight bow in it and the steps even and worn another example within the world is there's a crate this is an example of it when it was done wrong so the crate you can see on the left there it just no one would make a crate like that it just feel you couldn't stack them they were just to fall all over the place it wasn't wonky it was just cartooning cartoon Distortion the one on the left is a more sea of easy crate in the sense of it was it's been made out of mismatched pieces of wood it's got the wear and tear within it so they're the two examples of done right and wrong here's some more examples of the deck of the ship the way that there's chips and inks and these are really an example of how much care and love we put into every single item within the world another example is the the beam of wood that's around the the post that's around the captain's door so rather than if it just went in and it was flat geometry it would feel overly clean but as soon as we started knocking corners as if someone's ran through with a treasure chest and not not sit around a few times or even where there's a cut mark where a sword has been have been / - gainst it these things all give a sense of history so the wear and tear even expanded to the characters themselves so no matter how smart the clothing would be so the character on the on the left there she's got like an admiral can clothing but it's still patched and repaired it's still got areas of dirt and wear and that continued within all of the clothing through the game so we had holes and rips and torn edges so again this pillar tied into all of these everything for within the game so more examples of it this was a term that we ended up using all the time as well so there was one key there was Dinks if something now that didn't look see if these we'd normally say make sure it said a little bit wonky and add some Dinks and it worked every time so I loved it as a system so again you can see the chips and the Dinks within the thing so a skeleton's head to the clothing to the swords it really was something there just kept working another aspect of creating this sense of history within the world was patched and repaired so if you look at the deck of the ship there are actual kind of like planks of wood that right angles to what they should be now I know as every sailor would probably tell me this is not how you fix a ship and I did have a conversation with someone on the team where they were going he just wouldn't do that but it speaks to the fact that I felt he spoke to the fact that these pirates were didn't really care they were just slovenly dirty pirates that were just sailing around the world so these ships needed to feel battered and worn and this started to give it a little bit of that character within the deck of the ship itself also the patch them repaired expanded to things like the sails where we have patches on the sails and we used a lot of wraps within certain items to show that it was sure not for stability so the idea of that was that you could apply that to it and it would have that sense that it's been broken and a pirate picks it up wrapped it up themselves rather than take it to a blacksmith and they've fixed it so it had that sense that it was out on the ocean waves having an adventure of itself so these were the visual plant pillars to write from the goals so from the the illustrative approach that we took to the world in motion and a world of stories these were the three things that detail the entire game and really guided a vision these these came together fairly early on within the development and they just kept helping us through everything so every time we put something new in the game that we weren't sure about a new material or a new substance and we were able to look at it and apply this thinking to it every single time and it would instantly just feel like sea of Thieves I've included this picture of world of stories because this thing I didn't mention earlier on but I thought it was quite interesting is another aspect of all the stories that we had is we actually put our players into the game so when a player's done something particularly noteworthy on our forums in the world on Twitter within the game we often immortalize them within it and this is the Georgian Kraken so there's a character called clumsy George on the forums and he shows one of our players and he wrote a story about fighting a Kraken with a broom and so we turned him into a tavern so he got his own tavern in the game so again so we're adding history too to the world all the time so you can see that even from the smallest element within the world these rules are applied so from the way that these small bolts that nails that gotten knocked into the wood and the way that they split the wood as the Dinks that's the wear and tear that's the story the way that the items all have that sense of history from broken hurdy-gurdy to a tankard to a blunderbuss it applied and to our characters as well so here are the characters so we were knocking teeth out we were adding scars through them our system actually able is enabled enables you to create heroes within the world but also dirty rotten pirates and the idea was that I think there's enough lantern-jawed heroes and games and so it's nice to be able to show the other side of it from the skeletons that you fight as well that you've seen early on with it with have brakes within the face and the Dinks and also those hidden moments of exploring within the world like finding the secret of a sunken treasure treasure ship and the interesting locations like one of these ports which it has a sense of story to it like how did that ship get up there it was obviously a big wave or I'll crack them through it so I'm going to finish it by showing you something interesting then in our moments that I talked about the prototype and so I'm going to show you some pictures of the prototype and actually what it what it looked like in game so the prototype continue we continue work on the prototype for quite some time in the game so it ended up where we were putting box models back into the prototype to represent certain of the game world elements so this is one of our ports that you can explore and this is what it looked like in the prototype and this is what it looked like in game and there's another one so here's an island within the world and this is what it ended up looking like this is shark bait Cove with an interesting shark statue in the middle and you may get eaten by sharks if you're going to water and also the deck of the ship of course important and that's what it looked like in game so it was really fun doing all these things and a really fun thing that I don't know if any of you seen the prototype within some of the videos that we've actually released the world was filled with Tic Tacs for a long period of time so they always get a laugh very populated everywhere the mermaid if you've ever seen the mermaid in our game she pops up at the water when your ship sinks and she comes to your rescue the mermaid form of it is truly frightening when she pops out of the water this massive buoy of a character pops up in front of you but that's what it looked like in game so a few of the tic-tacs have been hidden and finally there's an island there next to next with a ship and here is ingame so this was a really interesting journey for us making sea of thieves see if these it's a game about a pirate crew and a shared world adventure with the freedom to choose their own adventure that speaks to the charm and playfulness of rare so that's the end of my talk and I'd just like to say thank you for coming today and if you have any questions at all [Applause] [Music] [Applause] any questions hi Ryan I like you very much and congratulations for this release thank you I have a question about the lighting yes in your video we see that the Sun is almost on a vertical trajectory is it still like that in the game and yes is it a deliberate choice related to after a technical issue we played around with with the way that the Sun I would have to think the the technical artist did it we did that too let's explore different configurations of it and we decided that just worked for us really it was as simple as that wicked thanks okay hello hello um I just wanted to say this game looks absolutely beautiful thank you very much um and I was wondering because you talked so much about putting history into like the items characters I was wondering what your process was for that when it came to conceptualizing the islands because there's so many different islands did you like create an individual history for each of them or so we did yes we did create a theme so to begin with the within the prototype that were just designed to create the feeling different feelings within it whether it's a big valley or lots of different islands together and then once we had those configurations of the landmass we started to look at what we could do to create that sense of history so for instance there's an island called snake island and we started adding lots of cave painting style things within it and also little artifacts and areas within it so yes it was each the artists canopy were given an island and tried to come up with a theme that the rain could dress it we've also got a riddle system when you're solving adventures within the world so you have to go around with the map and solve riddles and those riddles all tighter those moments within the world at you can find so is key as part of gameplay and as well as the lore of the world thank you okay hello hello um sorry I'm losing my voice that's all right so I wanted to make it known that me and my group when we first got in we like immediately lost our ship and it was so we saw the Merman and we named him Marmon the Merman so I want to make that cannon to Isis okay so I want to know how you decided that there wasn't going to be a tutorial because that was like my favorite part of the game yeah that there wasn't a tutorial oh yeah yeah that that was born out of the fact that the prototype okay so interesting story so yes so the prototype was made and we were just concentrating on main mechanics and there was a big debate over how much of an onboarding that would be but there was a sense of trying to get discovery so in the trailer in 2015 for e3 I think it was we actually invited our whole bunch of rare fans that well people that entered competitions to come and play the game and we've got this test labs at the studio and we put put them all in a lab and we didn't tell them anything we didn't know it was a pirate game they they didn't know maybe they didn't know it was partying yes the newest part game they didn't know what the mechanics were or how to play it or anything and we just put them in the room and then we all stood watching the fit feeds go are they gonna work this out and they just started to work out they started to come together on the ship they started flying and it was think it was that approach to creating tools and objects in the world that you could just understand to interact with so the hope is that with a light bit of gentle prodding and it in the general direction people will discover it themselves and that was from talking with the designers that was a key part that they wanted to try and get across okay and so like how did you decide that that would be better because there's the risk of like people immediately getting bored and like oh this game has nothing in it when like there's really no I think it's a thing cos it's good we're gonna look at feedback obviously from from players as well to see what what actually happens and but I think there's a there's a lot of people that appreciate it as equally needed so we're gonna weigh that up and I think that's the thanks first off I just want to say your implementation of HDR is probably the best I've seen in any game so far it is gorgeous on my big 4k TV : great rendering team it's fantastic I did have a question about transitions of the weather and the sky between biomes yes fairly instantaneously you could be a green sky then it goes perfectly Blue Lake yeah ten seconds later is that an intentional whole decision or is that something that's gonna still be worked on in the future I think there are areas where it goes quickly so it depends hat it really just depends how big the the transition between the zones are so we've actually shrunk some of those transitions down for gameplay so we've actually brought the islands together and those zones together so for those of you that don't know see if these is separated into three zones and there were three of those actually four different lighting zones within the world there's a central neutral one and we squashed those together so that's the way it is at the moment in the world but we're continually improving so now you've said that I'm definitely gonna go and check that out you'll be sailing and it's like you're just coming out of a storm and then it's like the sky is all green and then like a split second later it's like perfectly blue skies it's like nothing dissipated it just yeah Brian I'm gonna look at that yeah sounds like a burden or thank you very much northeast side of me alright well have a look at that yeah thanks for the talk it's really inspiring I'm curious was the timing of the launch just a coincidence with GDC it was just coincidence see and I did debate whether I was gonna do this I was Jeff actually I'm inviting me to come in and do this talk and I did see this you know girl like launch week GDC but it was an opportunity to be here and actually and talk about the game so close the launch it felt like a fun thing to do and how did the launch go exponentially hugely well just massive so we've got more numbers than we ever dreamed of coming into the game there's some ridiculous numbers like 5,000 people a minute trying to enter the game it's just crazy so yeah so very good awesome congratulations thank you I think there's no more questions so that's it if anyone was got any other questions for me I was actually told to remind you of one thing which was the questionnaire that gets sent out an email to you if you could fill that in it's really helpful to the GDC organizers because it'll know what talks to put on next year if you found this interesting hopefully you did if you didn't come and talk to me I'll take the feedback anyway and I'll be outside if anyone wants have a chat with me about anything okay thank you very much

Channel: GDC

Views: 31,758

Rating: 4.8903036 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design, sea of thieves, art, graphic design

Id: BzppoQTG3m0

Length: 51min 3sec (3063 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 09 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/JohnVonWells]

A lot of good ideas already, why not in the game?