So if you've gone a while without a lot of emotional content of any kind, or and maybe you've been going the wrong way, when the game determines that you're now starting to head back in the right direction, the game might give you a piece of music right there to almost subtly suggest to you like, ‘Oh yeah, you're doing the correct thing’. It's keeping tabs on your route through the world or your conversations, and it's looking for opportunities to inject music at times that are going to be both appropriate and also encouraging. So one of the ways that music works during the game is that it's tied into that same narrative system tracking every choice you make, so it's essentially waiting for moments when the player is that kind of a low ebb. “And so that meant I was able to both compose the soundtrack, but also implement the soundtrack into the game engine myself. “I had done story on games before, I had done music for games before and I had done game design before, but I had never done them all at the same time,” Remo says. Since Remo oversaw story, game design, and soundtrack - including playing all the instruments himself - he was able to create a sense of “warmth and human feelings” which allowed him to mesh story direction with the beats of the soundtrack. That's part of why the game is in first-person, so you really feel that scale when you're looking up at the trees, instead of sort of looking across or down at the trees from a third-person perspective.” But even that, we thought it was really important to reflect the fact that most of the things that happen are kind of out of their control. Some people certainly found the ending of the game to not be as big of a pay off as maybe they would have wanted it to. I think that ended up being reflected a lot in the story of the game as well. And so the things that represent the player, whether it's the footsteps you make, or the soundtrack, I wanted them to almost surrender to this to the majesty of this place, because that place is so much bigger than this character is. But the player is this little thing inside. “The environment itself gets to be big and huge and bold and overwhelming and magnificent and majestic. “Even though the game takes place in this massive, beautiful environment - and it's a huge credit to Olly and Jane, for their translation of that into into this incredibly convincing game world - Henry is a very tiny, almost infinitesimally small part of it,” Remo says. “It's a very intentional and constrained colour palette, and has a stylised component to it that I think really prizes economy with a strong palette.”įirewatch’s soundtrack could also be described as being constrained or prizing economy, and Remo explains that was also a deliberate choice to reflect not only the art or the environment, but the tone of the game itself. Swen Vincke, Creative Director & Founder of Larian Studios explains how the team plans to overcome the challenges of giving multiple players pen-&-paper like freedom in a story-driven RPG.ġ5.00: Rock, Paper, Shotgun presents: The Art of FirewatchĪrtist Olly Moss and animator James Benson of Campo Santo and internet fame explain how they recreated the great American landscape of the Wyoming wilderness from their homes in England to support story and exploration in Firewatch.While Moss had worked in video games previously, his main experience was with movie posters, which Remo thinks might have translated to Firewatch’s instantly recognisable look. Pawel Rohleder, Director of Research & Technology Development at Techland, discusses how technology can affect the experience of gamers along with the pros and cons of developing and maintaining in-house tech at a dev studio.ġ4.00: Rock, Paper, Shotgun presents: Evolving CRPGs - Divinity: Original Sin 2 Learn about the inspirations and the steps taken to accomplish this new vision from DICE. Run free in a massive city with a fluidity of movement and combat in first person. Join Erik Odeldahl (Design Director) to hear about the upcoming Mirror's Edge Catalyst. The entire session programme will be streamed on the EGX Rezzed YouTube page.ġ2.00: Mirror's Edge Catalyst: Inspirations will host a select group of streams from the event, all of which can be found below. The two-day programme of Developer Sessions - which can be found, in full, here - starts at midday with DICE design director Erik Odeldahl, who will detail the inspirations behind the eagerly awaited Mirror's Edge Catalyst. EGX Rezzed starts at Tobacco Dock in London today, and this year sees some of the industry's most innovative developers grace the stage.
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