Guild Chat - Episode 30
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Guild Chat - Episode 30
- Title
- Creature Feature
- Host
- Rubi Bayer
- Guests
- Brian Walter
Ben Phongluangtham - Date
- February 5, 2016
- Official video
- YouTube
The following is an unofficial, player-written transcript of the episode. The accuracy of this transcription has not been verified by ArenaNet.
The 30th episode of Guild Chat aired on February 5, 2016.
"Host Rubi Bayer is joined by developer guests Brian Walter and Ben Phongluangtham for this episode of Guild Chat. This week’s episode will give you a closer look at some of the wild and weird creatures in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns™."
Transcription[edit]
Below is the raw unformatted transcript from Youtube.
[Music] happy friday everybody and welcome back to guild chat i'm your host ruby if you're here for the first time welcome uh we're gonna be talking about creature design in heart of thorns today i have a quick update for you though we've been talking about scribing costs the past couple of episodes of guild chat and just in case you missed it there's an update in the guild wars 2 discussion forum on our official forums uh that goes into some specifics about recipes and costs of items so if you are interested in what we're up to with scribing costs and adjusting those go check that out um that's our update on that for this week but now we have two of our guys from the creature team um i'm going to let you guys introduce yourselves and then we'll get into what you've been doing and how you're doing it all right i'm ben pong tom i'm a game designer on the creature team and i'm brian walter and i'm an animator on the creature team yeah thank you for coming back brian yeah welcome for the first time um why don't we go ahead and just talk about how how you even get started because to me before i really got to talking to you guys and learning more about this it was just yeah you can make a thing and put it in the game this isn't that hard but it turns out there's a lot more going on one of the things that we talked about that i found especially interesting was how you use existing rigging to save some time in creating something and so we don't just create an asset from the ground up and throw it away and be completely inefficient about it so do you guys want to talk about how you've used existing riggings in heart of thorns first uh yeah sure so for people who don't know a rig is kind of the digital um it's the digital puppet we use to animate the character um we have a picture here that shows off on the loved quaggan so you can see the little lines throughout the character those are his joints those are the bones that drive the character and then all the little lines on the outside those are the controls i grab to move him around and make him do cool poses and stuff okay so the lines that are extending out from his body are where you can actually control him and make him do yeah so i'll grab those rotate them move them around to kind of get the pose that we want for the animation all right so what do we do what do we do with him so like you're saying we do share since building rigs it takes a lot of time and a lot of effort and we do a ton of animations on a rig it would be a waste to then not repurpose that on other creatures later on so i put together this little video which will show off the way we use the quaggan rig okay here's your quaggan down here oh so the bristleback was actually based off using the quaggan rig and so for a while in development bristlebacks were actually running around doing little quaggan animations before we updated the animation all right how weird did that look i was pretty funny yeah oh man i forgot about that you mentioned that the other day and then i forgot now i kind of want to see that so yeah let's talk later if you have some of those lying around all right so that's where you can take those like those purple lines we were talking about that's where you can take those and start adjusting and make them not just pointy quaggins yeah so basically the bristleback is an example of one that we use the quegan as a baseline but then to make the creature have its own unique personality and stand out we went over because he's a larger creature and wouldn't really work with the same animations we had to do a whole new animation set for him and if you notice on that picture we had all those extra spines that were added so yeah we added on to the rig um to make it the character we needed so having that building block is actually really important as far as saving time it seems like if you had to build every single thing from scratch we'd have a lot fewer creatures yeah all right so we kind of took the quaggan rig turn him into a bristleback and can we take a look at the other one yeah so i have another example oh here's that image i should have clicked too earlier but didn't all right so okay so we had the bog scale and he's his rig is shared with the vampire beast and heart of thorns nice so you just like took off his tails yeah so there's there's a lot of creatures who may have tails and then versions of the rigs won't have the tails but that's an example where the creature used a majority of the animation set of the bog scale oh yeah okay you get a variety of looking creatures but also you still have a full library of animations he can use and it still works nice and then the only animations we need to do are the skills that ben will come up with yeah all right so if we look at that if we look at the vampire if we look at the vampire beast versus the bug scale his rigging has it's not just like purple lines there's a lot more going on there so what are those because i'm assuming it's not just for pretty oh yeah those different colored lines in there work so he's got um those joints control them but based on the rigging he has there's like different ik chains and stuff that um basically just change the colors of the joints so you know what the controls are okay so i already made you do this yesterday but i want to hear you need to take us through what ik is the other one ak fk fk ik and fk so in animation 3d animation there's fk and ik and so an ik is like on a foot control where you want the foot planted and you move the character around and keep the foot planted in place and so that's an inverse kinematic okay and then uh fk forward kinematics is just like an arm where you move the lower part and everything just follows in the parent down the chain so all right so changing the color just helps you identify what you're looking at yeah i think my just uh automatically does it so yeah you can tell if something's running on it or not there's a lot going on with movement in there yeah all right neat so that's kind of where we start from you've got the building blocks and once you've figured out all right what rig do we want to use do we do we have an existing rig do we need to build a new one then what's the process i mean how does this evolve from concept into game so kind of once we get um once we've decided on the armies we want like usually that starts with a big meeting of you know everybody getting together deciding what armies we want deciding what they want to do once we choose some monsters and decide which rigs will fit them best we go into uh prototyping um but before that we usually get some pictures from concept art so this is yeah this is an example of the axe commander this is one of the earlier concepts and you'll notice they put a lot of material treatment on there will they'll get real world examples of what they kind of expect the skin to look like and that's just for the benefit of the modelers of when they're putting in the details they can kind of see and then you can see here's a later one once it's been refined a lot uh once a lot of feedback has been given then we kind of refine the the concept again and this is the the final concept so once the concept is finalized they usually will get sent off to a modeler and they will model the monster based on this sometimes it'll change a little bit but this one got pretty close so this is again this is the x commander and we got both an armored version and an unarmored version of him i love that you can see the real world examples and i think i'm cheating a little bit because i read the notes on you know well here's some bark and that's that's where that should go and here's here's like the material for his torso but you can see how that translated into game and you can see the different pieces and the different parts and how they all fit onto the creature so once uh yeah we get actually kind of during this modeling phase we'll usually get what we call blue model which is a an untextured version that just has the basic shape assigned to a skeleton and everything so i can start prototyping skills a lot of times the skills we prototype i'll work closely with brian to actually get or another animator to get the animations we need we'll go back and forth quite a bit on okay we want him to have a heavy swing you know what are the timings on that swing how much warning should the players get before he does that that kind of thing and then an example of some early animations for this guy here's a with an actual green model this time instead of a blue model but yeah that walk actually i don't think ended up making it into the thing i think we were trying out some different postures but eventually it just didn't work out with how he would need to blend into other animations so here's my question looking at this animation you were talking about like if he has a heavy swing and how he moves and meshing all of that stuff together because right here it almost looks like he's just swinging something that weighs six ounces how do you how do you give weight to how do you give weight to these things and the movements um well a lot of it comes down to timing so if you want to really sell weight then you gotta like kind of add in a bunch of anticipation get ready for the swing and then you do this strong hitting my dodge key really hard yeah yeah so i mean that's also a cool thing to help designers because you know they can come up with a skill idea that's like okay we want him to show it's this powerful attack and we want to show the powerful attack and we need that time also all right that makes sense and trying to build this thing and mesh what it looks like what he does how he moves and what his skills are is it's way more than just you guys yeah i mean once the skills in place along with working with the animators we have a group of effects artists that will make effects to try to reinforce the skills we do um you know sometimes we'll want the monster to glow as he's charging up to give the player a chance you know more indication that they need to move and there's pretty much just a lot of back and forth the whole time a lot of iteration um usually you know for the axe commander i think i probably did like eight skills or something at one point for them but they only ended up with a hand you know we don't use all those skills because too many skills ends up being you can't can't figure out what the monster is going to do yeah um and sometimes they just they're i won't ever get to a skill if we have too many skills on their list um and then just goes through once we get them all put together it goes to play testing we play test it with you know a small group of people just on the team and you know we'll get feedback from colin and our team leads and all that kind of thing and our other other designers it kind of goes through probably i i won't even guess the number of iteration phases because it just goes back and forth with increasing groups of or increasing larger groups of people until we get it to where we feel like it's a solid design oh wow and that it sounds quick on here but over the time it's probably several months before a monster goes from you know concept to completion and then even after that we'll be tweaking it even you know before launch based off of player feedback you know once something goes to the alpha play tests and the beta play tests all of that just putting it through all of those iterations and through spaces um we talked about i mean you know we're looking at the axe commander and we talked a little bit about the mordrem maggot was one that we pulled from an existing rig and is a good example of this iteration yeah um grosses me out but you know so the mordrem maggot uh was based off of the grub rig we just wanted some kind of mordrem worm um i actually have this set to oh yeah half speed right now this is an amazing testing lobby yeah we do stuff in kind of an empty area so we could just focus on the monsters in a lot of cases so one of the cool things that brian and i wanted to do with the mordrem maggot was we decided you know his standard skills he was not wasn't meant to be a super hard monster or anything he's kind of a baseline monster but we wanted to have him a little unique thing so we gave him the ability to split himself when he dies this is not my favorite feature you guys yes and that actually just kind of came off of you know okay what do what do worms kind of do well one of the things i don't i'm not sure how scientific it is but we always heard you know worms if you cut them in half they still you know they become two worms so you know if we're gonna go down the science road i call down fire from this guy in the game so you know so one of the interesting things about this guy is that we started off using the model as the missile so what's happening is when he dies he actually spits two missiles off of him and when they land they spawn a smaller version and we just used his model uh as the missile as a instead of getting an effects and then brian just did some special animations for him yeah so i had to do a couple unique animations one of him rolled up in a ball spinning and that would be the missile animation and then there was a second animation of when he hits the ground to have him like pop out and be ready to attack you so even just that tiny little split second thing you're still having to think all right how does this move what does it do and why is it doing that yeah and how can we get it to work how can we communicate through all the pieces of animation yeah we didn't want to make it look like it just appears out of nowhere when it lands so you know we get effects that kind of cover up the spawn uh to some degree and we try to get the unlurk what we call the unlurk animations to match the the animation of when it hits the ground just to make it look somewhat smooth yeah kill some more of them yeah kill some more of them please so unlurk is is that when they're spawning yeah unlike is one it's not a not every monster has an alert though uh monsters going forward as a matter of polish we kind of want them to all have on lurks from now on basically just makes them so they don't fade in they get the traditional mmo fake the monster fades in when it spawns we would rather have them like come out of the ground or you know fly in from the sky that type of thing it just it adds a little a level of polish that it does yeah um as a player it's something that i've noticed where something's crawling out of the ground and it gives you that moment of oh no or oh yeah xp yeah okay how many times does he split i forget the only thing yeah what is like a hydra or like they they'll split once into smaller ones and these guys will split and then the last smaller guys oh my gosh stop it they just die and yeah the one thing we had to do is i think the first time i put them in i forgot to make the smaller ones uh not worth so much xp i think there was some actually this and one of the other bosses i did that spawn monsters like people were were actually purposely not killing them the boss so they can get infinite funds so we usually oh my gosh when additional ones spawn we try to we try to make them worth a little bit less yeah the other example we wanted to show i love these little guys this is mainly an example of iteration we had so the mushroom bombers the early phase the mushroom bombers they actually just spawned like their thing is they spawn small spoilings that run at the player and explode [Laughter] so the early version it just spawned the guy in place and he'd run um but the feedback we had during play testing some internal play testing was that the people at ranged had no felt no danger yeah he's just like plinking away at it from far away so yeah so uh to combat that i decided to make them actually throw a few of their mushrooms at the player and then they would spawn one there they'd throw one at range i love them so much their little feet and then yeah my little uh that's the maggot again oops let me spawn another mushroom bomber okay so my little secret is that i use the same trick i had before yeah they're finding each other we actually use the model as a missile shrunk down and it's kind of hard to see in these cases but let me change let me spawn another one and lower the uh i think we need to do a show where we just pit monsters against each other and say stop fighting you guys we're trying to look at you so all right yeah i set the time in half you'll actually see the uh all right the spoiling do a little uh cannonball sometimes like he'll tuck his feet in at the end before he hits the ground what and that was just you'll never see that it's probably too difficult to ever see in game but i know it's there so it makes me happy can you go in first person view so we can see it better oh and please tell me you're like first person view key uh go into your options yeah i never go i never play first person uh options up top oh options uh no you had it yeah okay i always go into dev menu now see where it says first person camera there's an actual camera blocking my view so i can't see where it is but first person field of view all right now this is hard oh enable first person camera right there above restore defaults to above restore default oh there he is thank you and then i think you just zoom in now just get rid of that and zoom in yeah there we go all right now we can see better i forgot to ask you about that earlier and then i was like oh i can't remember where it is let's see if we can see him shooting the guy out he's funny there he tucks in i don't think we could have planned that anyway yeah oh but yeah something so he does a little cannonball with his knees tipped up and that's kind of an example of the iteration we usually try to do based off of feedback i don't know people are asking the important questions mushroom butts who did that that was a an artist uh gym who's actually like i don't know why you chose to give them butts yeah i think i mean it's funny i think yeah i mean it's their anatomy they got two legs yeah you got you got a butt i mean what do you yeah what do you call emotion i mean there's no mushrooms and two legs to with two legs to kind of so i think that's the that's the end of the sentence there's no mushrooms with two legs in the room they don't have a butt yeah i can't prove it yeah the other weird thing like people i don't know if they know that the mushrooms are based on the skirt rig you know what i talked about yeah we mentioned that so yeah one example of how we try to stretch those rigs as far as we can go yeah okay like you guys heard what marcus said really you guys really mark's in my ear going to players want to see the mushroom butts let's see if i can respawn him again we need another mushroom i have the i have the things the commands if you need it no megan yeah what was the number for the mushroom don't have them memorized there [Laughter] fungus butts yeah all right so there's this i wanted to see another little candle okay they're fighting with the mortar maggot again yeah that's hilarious that they went in there and started yeah we actually try to set up um family like we call them families but each family of monster will have an affinity set that says really who they can attack and who they can and who they're aggro against and the mushrooms in the mordrem don't like don't necessarily always get along so we made them fight yeah we do that for a lot of the monsters will have the same ones um but a lot of them well all of them um but we yeah we try to do a unique one for every family of monsters so when i'm running through hard thorns and there's like a raptor fighting a random warthog yeah their families don't get along it's like the hatfield's mccoy's here but i appreciate it because then i can get to where i'm going if i don't feel like stopping and fighting that raptor i'm like thanks just leave me out of it i'm just going over here there's an air ship cargo and i need it wow okay so they all have things that they'll fight and things that they'll just bypass pieces yeah sometimes they won't care or sometimes they're allies you know that type of thing wow all right that wasn't in the script but i'm so glad you said it awesome happy accident nope i'll take it i like it um let's see what else do we have we've got the mushroom bombers um we were talking about the vampire beast i was like i know there was another thing the vampire beast and the bat mother were just good examples of how many teams are involved in yeah together the bat mother was kind of a thing so we that was like a special boss request that we got from the content team saying we need a boss in this area it's in a cave i'm like what can we do that we haven't done a lot of in hot and yeah i know bats are fairly common in other parts of the game but we haven't used a lot of it in hot so we decided to make a bat boss that was another one brian and i worked on quite a bit together yeah um getting the animations for it because it spawns a little bat lanes we were like well first of all we're like what what should a bat boss do and i'm like brian what would it look like if a boss had a sonic attack and what was your response it was like i was like you mean like a zubat yeah zubat from pokemon i'm like exactly that's what i want and it turns out we can't just take that thing whole wholesale and stick it in our game so we made the other thing that content wanted the boss to do was to take advantage of some mushrooms that were in the area some of the mastery mushrooms so the masteries in the area i think were the the poison clearing uh mastery where you can use like the this thing to clear off that effect so one of the head hacks that the bat mother ends up doing spits these poison pools all over the place that just put a whole bunch of bad things bad conditions on you so if you have the mastery the mushrooms are nearby to clear those off but you have a little tougher time if you don't have the mastery and then the funnest i think attack we did for him at least for us to make was the one for or actually i should say for her actually it was to spawn the uh her bat links um do you have the number for her uh yeah here it's like all the way down below the questions i'm sorry that's okay i have to scroll way down that mother it's bat mother that's literally the the command is bad mother let me kind of scale back to one actually what's the there's a command for her skill too uh where'd it go yeah and this was one screw up the other way a little bit this way yeah oh batman there we go oh okay and this was one that was kind of a challenge for animation how to how do we make how do we make a bat spawn other bats yeah and so i kind of had the idea like a vampire maybe she like puts her wings up and like like fantastic motions you should see him at his desk sometimes i love that hey well as an animator you have to like feel what it feels like yeah get it on the creature all right so can we do her can we see her summon one more time yeah or will we just wind up with like a million battlings and everything's terrible we could have we can have a few bat links nice the other uh interesting thing we did about that was their unlurk animation yeah we utilized that unlurk thing again with the um the maggot where i created two special unlurks so they would swoop in counter circles and have a little bit more dynamic entrance and not just pink here's one yeah oh wow all right so that was our bat mother what was the other one uh vampire beast yeah we can talk about the vampire beast a little bit because otherwise we're going to talk about the bat guano hero point and we're going to have some arguments do you have the number for that one too there's too many bat vampire beast mods vampire beast crawler there we go i like when they're things that make sense and not just random numbers because you all confuse me when it's like here's seven numbers to memorize and some of the thing so yeah uh when coming up with these vampire beasts we kind of wanted to do something a little bit different with them and so i actually we created a new condition that unfortunately can't be cleared we called vampire vampiric infection which is this is the thing that gave people a lot of trouble because it actually heals the boss for the damage it does to you um and it puts it out in a cone sometimes so there's a if you're all in there it can get a lot of healing at once and i i did right after launch i got into a group that did the one at the mastery point so when he scrolls up to legendary or champion he gets a lot harder and we had a probably group of four or five people that did it we were able to maintain damage the whole time but we couldn't get them down until you know people figured out to get their pets out of the area and you know watch out for the attack and it was pretty rewarding experience watching people struggle and not they were able to beat it but you know as a designer you're kind of both you kind of want your monster to kill somebody every once in a while but as a player you know you obviously you want to win so it was yeah it was a rewarding experience watching us beat the you know the the challenge but it wasn't a pushover yeah the fact that it was a challenge yeah so i found that out the hard way i was running around with a minion master that that didn't end well and then people yelled at me and it was not it was not cool uh your one hp is like really hanging in there yeah i made it up no death yeah it does it always is really gratifying when i do that on a dev client like just go ahead keep hitting me but that what that last hp is not going away i don't you didn't work on the animations for him no i didn't that was uh that was mayhew yeah oh thank you scott i like it all right so do you guys feel like taking some questions or do you want to go through anything else let's tackle some questions i have questions for you right all right and all right so the guys told me i have to be the one to figure out how to pronounce these names so i would like to thank rf darko for submitting a question let me start with something easy yeah um what if any other games did you look to when designing the new jungle enemies either in terms of combat mechanics or art design we already know pokemon yeah that was one i mean for me there's not like i can't it's hard to point at a specific one because you know i've been gaming for 35 plus years at this point and now it's that level of they're stuffing your yeah it's in your head and sometimes you pull stuff out they i'm sure it's been used somewhere but it's just stuff that was in your head from playing a game when you're a kid or playing a recent game i've been thinking about skills for stuff from like triforce heroes now because we've been playing that a lot and um so every once in a while think of i wonder if i could turn that into a skill in our game so these things kind of just come up that way i don't know what brian yeah i have a different answer for me when we were making hot i was playing a lot of monster hunter 4 and that game has super awesome animations for their creatures that you're fighting and something that i borrowed is they do a lot of like during the fight and the struggle when the monsters get stunned you really feel the sense of struggle in the monster yeah so for the chalk gerund when i when the break bar happens i have his stun where he's like clawing and trying to climb out of the hole that you knocked him down into and that was kind of inspired by that game so you can have there are like single games where a particular element made an impression on you but it's a lot of that just growing up as a gamer and having a fee having a feel for things yeah i mean that's a the way it comes down to a lot of it most of the skills like for the monsters are usually um i i look at the monster model like what do i think this guy could do sometimes i've even googled like real life equivalents of monsters and said you know what do i think this monster might do if it was or this animal would do if it was a monster type thing yeah that's valid yeah so there's the inspiration comes from pretty much all different sources yeah and you know taking taking from real life i remember a story i heard ages ago from one of our artists and i can't remember who it was it was at the old office um before we moved out here and they were talking about how there was like a dead crow in the parking lot and they were out there drawing the feathers to pull inspiration i remember from the first guild wars where there was like they were like the crow wings and they were kind of a little bit broken and battered that's if i remember correctly that's where the inspiration for that came from so taking it from real life is happens a lot yeah is something that has a huge history oh yeah because i mean with art we're making imaginative stuff but you won't believe it unless there is that element of realism in there so that kind of goes back for me to the work you're doing on the and lurks where they're actually coming out of coming out of the ground or swooping in from the sky yeah it's the same thing all right um how about the swede well thank you guys for having easy names i love it uh will we see more enemies with more specified roles from here on out i love the fact that there are so many different kinds in hot that focus on different things like floppers menders healers punishers and i hope you keep going down this route yeah i think that's something we definitely want to try to do maybe not for every single monster like some monsters will have a wider variety of roles but a lot of them especially when they fit in with a larger army we'll want them to have a you know a specific role in their army so when we group them together you know they'll complement each other to some degree yeah and i think it adds a cool element of character to giving them a specific class yeah to kind of be so it's it's a place you want to keep on going yeah definitely can we talk about the more dramanders because oh my gosh you guys none of us i don't think either worked on the menders that was kevin immediately absolve all responsibility i did not do it all right i like it um how about from orpheo oh hey will we see more creatures from the first guild wars maybe that will return to the world of tyria i can give a strong maybe thanks we can't really talk too much about future plans but we definitely look uh whenever we're pulling new monsters in that's something we know we have a large backlog of monsters in our you know ip that we can pull from and we definitely use that for inspiration we might pull monsters and tweak them to you know what would they look like in our time frame but yeah i wouldn't be surprised if we see some more guild wars 1 monsters in the future awesome uh stand the wall is it hard to design an npc to react effectively in most situations because with when you introduce the human element you've got all these players in there different things are going to happen yeah there's always a really difficult line we have to walk between what's fun and um you know what you'd want you'd expect a monster to behave intelligently like making a monster that dives out of all your aoes and tries to kaii the whole time might sound a lot more fun than in theory than it actually is in practice i think for standard mobs we're not going to make them get too horribly more intelligent we tried to get them harder and hot and i think we came to a pretty good level of difficulty though i think we can do better of making some of the more unique monsters like the boss monsters and stuff maybe have a little bit more intelligent ai and we definitely have some new tools that we might be using in the future for that nice sounds like a conversation we'd want to bring an ai guy in foreign we're out of chairs right now and we didn't plan on that so let's see ben k seriously you guys thank you for having easy names i love it if you're making a new pet what do you have to keep in mind for game play considerations and what do you like to do to give it character since we had some new pets in hot yeah a lot of the pets and hot were taken from just creatures we had already done and spent a lot of time on it's kind of another one of those hey we did all this animation work and creature work on this guy hey maybe he's cool enough yeah the uh pit the class team several of the pets were definitely just direct monsters and then they would just modify the skills to be appropriate for a player class yeah we don't make those specifically but they definitely you reuse a lot of our work yeah we were close yeah we're close with that team they sit right next to us so yeah there's a good reason for that evidently cool um oh man okay might be shoji might be show guy i don't know it's g-e-i but they want to know when an swings a club at you oh i love this question when an swings a club at you what is the size and shape of the damage field hold on because we're not done is it tight to the club is it a tube around the club a moving box or a cone in front of the creature that simply activates when the atom swings the club through it how do clubs work there's actually not really a simple answer to this well okay the complicated answer is we can actually do we have a lot of different options for how we apply the the the damage in most cases though it's just gonna be a cone in front of the creature um that we try to make match the animation and the model so we make sure the damage cone doesn't go too far outside of where it's like nine feet on either side um yes i mean usually it's just a cone but we we actually have a lot of different options for how we wanted to do the damage field okay we could do in a circle around it we could do it in a you know a square rectangle in front of it um but we usually go the easiest route depending on the the skill however makes sense like like a simple cone will you know will do pretty well for a a club swing yeah so you don't have to worry about okay now it needs to move with the club it's just here's where he can go here and they don't usually move well some of their animations do but for a simple swing they probably will stand in place and swing so we don't have to worry too much about the damage area moving and it usually goes so quickly like it's usually less than a second you know at one point of when the damage occurs so if you're in that spot when he swings you're pretty much gonna get hit you're pretty much done okay oh gosh okay this question came up so many times ultima stanza i think i got this right we should do like a betting pool on how many of these i mess up now because they're getting harder in regards to creatures have you given any thought on possibly creating an in-game bestiary yeah so many people ask this yeah i really did like this question it was a cool idea but unfortunately it's not something that our team would actually ever be assigned to make that's uh it would be a new system if i was assigned to it there's definitely a lot of cool things i think we could do with be shari but that would usually be a completely different team's function to do that seems that feels like more than one team they would take our monsters i'm not even sure what team would do that maybe the rewards team depending on how they wanted to do it like if there was rewards for you know finding new monsters or unlocking different tracks for killing you know specific i mean there's so many things you could do with that i guess it would depend on what we decided the end design would be depending on what team would implement it but it could definitely go a lot of different ways so in my head i mean when we went through these questions i was thinking oh these are good questions you know you guys you guys picked out the questions you liked and oh i'm going to be interested to see what they say and now i'm sitting here going oh my gosh that's like that's like the reward stream team and that then there's a ui element yeah and then there's lore team it would be a lot of different teams combining to make one thing i don't know which team would own the final design yeah yeah that got complicated super fast but yes it is a cool idea um and that's kind of all we have on that particular question i wish i wish we could say yes yeah i wish it was that easy if only okay um how about mickey mickey mighty mike mike i mighty could be when creating new monsters and creatures that have some reference in the first guild wars how strict how strict do you stick to how they looked and how much freedom do you have to update them i think we do have a lot of freedom i mean we have hundreds of years of evolution here yeah i mean a lot of it comes down to you want to stay true to what it was but that guild wars one was made so long ago you got to update and you just want to make it cooler and look more modern day game there's a common trope in game design that whenever somebody else takes the same they're gonna if you you hand one monster off or one design element off to a new designer they're gonna want to put their own stamp on it as much as possible it's valid so a lot of times you know we would take an existing monster but we want to see you know how can we ramp this up or you know how can i put my own spin on this yeah would not just take like the old work was great i mean there was a reason it's there and the reason why people loved it but what how can we stay true to the spirit of the monster and you know make it fit in guild wars 2. while at the same time making maybe make something unique about it that didn't have before yeah so you're still staying true to it it's not like okay these things had two legs now they have six right what would they look like in modern day in guild wars 2. and then you know our our our spec is higher than it was for guild wars 1 so we can do more you know than they could back then in terms of you know poly count and all that stuff so that's gonna be so much fun all right this might be my favorite question oh yeah pocket raptors let's talk about pocket raptors where did the inspiration come from why do you hate us that last part might be from me and what are the statistics i'll answer this one first because we went and found the answer what are the statistics of player deaths to pocket raptors pocket raptors have been responsible for one million two hundred and eighty six thousand eight hundred and seventeen player deaths probably more now because that question answer came yesterday uh i don't know if there was a specific uh inspiration for them but they did end up being very close to uh jurassic park the little dinos and jurassic park that swarm um i kind of liked the way they we kind of knew that they were going to turn out that way because then they killed a lot of people internally before we actually released the game but we decided because it was something that you can combat pretty as long as you see them first then you you take the initiative and don't try to run through them you're generally fine yeah once you learn how to fight them yeah you can't do bad aoe is your friend yeah very much so yeah so trying to run through them is a thing all right i want to say that i had learned the hard way except i still haven't learned i'm still like i'm a guardian it's fine you know save yourselves was it like super deliberate to make sure we couldn't run through them or was it just a happy accident i think that was somewhat happy accident because they're so small they're hard to see and the way the way the uh um the content designers spawn them they spawn them in a lot of shadowy places just happen to be shadowy places so like you'll i've i've experienced the same thing you'll see like oh there's little there's two little guys right there that's no big deal i'll just go there and then you go there and oh my god they're everywhere they're like 500 of them usually even if i see one i just i play an elementalist as my primary character and i i'll start dropping aoes on them as soon as i see them because i know there's more in there whether i can see them or not i know they're there flush them out with fire pretty much oh my gosh all right so here's one from gamelteer probably right currently i am doing a 3d arts and animation school here in austria my big goal is to suddenly work in a major game studio and what are some good hints you can give to a newbie character creature artist well go this one comes up a lot and it's kind of a simple answer but it really is the most accurate just find that thing you want to do if you want to be a character creature artist then just make characters and creatures just go do it i mean i didn't become an animator by not animating i spent all a lot of my free time animating stuff i thought would be cool and then going to school and learning animation also and it's the combination of having the passion to want to keep improving yourself and working on it and for some training that makes you i feel like a good artist animator whatever you want to become but doing it is actually animating is the thing not just okay i'm going to wait until i'm perfect and i've learned all of these things and then i will start animating oh yes do the thing you're going to do some things that you then just throw away and then you're like all right well that project is done it maybe didn't turn out how i wanted okay let's just do the next i've learned my lesson i can approach it differently this time and you just keep getting better and learning ben uh well for the design side it's kind of weird because i actually have a business degree i didn't go to school for game design i didn't go to school for this either but they didn't have like game design schools didn't exist you know when i was in college in the 90s so i kind of got my experience with muds starting out like being a mud a wizard on a mud programming there and then just sticking with it uh i started i started off in like cs and then kind of went from there but in terms of how to get into the industry from the design side i would just there's so many tools available now that we didn't have back in those days that now if you want to make a game you can make a game there's there's no shortage of options out there and so i would just like make mods um you know make your own skins for games make your own just make your own games even if it's just on pen and paper like we all look at that kind of thing when we're looking at new candidates like you know what do they do what how did like what are their design ideas so like make your own dnd modules just like if you want to design the same thing design um and then hopefully eventually you'll get recognized for it and you'll get a shot yeah and recognize maybe that you're not going to be absolutely pro right out of the gate like you have 20 years of experience it's a learning process yeah and i think the cool thing nowadays with the internet is there's so much community and sharing that you can do some work put it out there get feedback from other people and then improve yourself yeah just see what people think about them yeah so it sounds like camel's off to a good start he's asking the right questions and he or she i actually don't know asking the right questions and going to school so start designing make creatures design things awesome all right we have one more question that i deliberately saved for last and what is your favorite heart of thorns enemy and what is your least favorite to fight oh that's from safan saffin saffin stefan um well for me one of my favorite it's like an event monster is the gold guzzler just because i think it's really fun to stand on top and just throw those rocks on you told me about that the other day and i haven't gone to find it yet but it's actually called the gold guzzler yeah and it's it's an arrowhead it's a champion arrowhead somewhere in the game that i haven't come across yet yeah but okay so what are you you're just throwing rocks on its head you're literally i just like his name and he's just got a fun little mechanic of throwing frogs on him i love it and if i'm not mistaken you can do it from on high so he can't roll over you yeah that's amazing i gotta find you have to show me where this is or i'll just ask nelly she knew about it she made it um all right so what's your least favorite uh least favorite to fight i don't know we can freeze it most infuriating if that will help i think yeah for me the mushrooms i think what is it because they swarm you too much yeah there's too much swarming i always get knocked down and just killed play daredevil get that third dodge bar it helps makes a difference about you ben um my favorite is mainly because i worked on him so much as i really liked the axe commander he was just fun to create and fun to make the animations for and the fact that he's kind of a prominent boss monster is kind of fun so watching him march down the lanes in uh dragon stand is really really fun because he he stands out so much he's also killed a lot of people and that makes you i don't know the exact number but he has killed a lot of people yeah we should have got those stats too yeah i should have so that's like that's why you like him that's one of the reasons i like have you met peter freeze uh i think so probably i do like the kill players that's part of my job description though right yeah um and my least favorite i probably get annoyed by the chalk because of all their missile shields and missile reflects i've killed myself more than i'd like to admit because i'm not fast enough on hitting the escape key from [Music] stop my auto attack stop hitting stop hitting stop hitting yourself yeah [Laughter] can we get an anime can we get a skill called that stop hitting yourself the class team should do one like that all right guys get on that yeah awesome all right well i am giving a totally opposite answer the mushrooms are my favorite they crack me up to watch they are so funny and i can't believe neither of you said that the smoke scale was your least favorite that might have i thought about that one because getting him out of that smoke screen is kind of a pain oh my gosh i am like immediate as soon as i see him start coming at me i'm mad i mean like he's not even here yet and i'm angry about this guy's pretty quick if you can get him out of the smoke screen you know it's mostly just running and screaming for me and trying to find a cliff to jump off of so i can glide away all right well that was our last question thank you guys really for coming and showing us behind the curtain of animation and showing us the rigs for all of these things so now you guys know bristleback used to be a quaggan but he got different anime that was my big takeaway yeah yeah all right we will see you guys next week i'm gonna let the two of you get back to work thank you guys don't forget to follow our channel here on twitch so you don't miss our future live streams and we will see you next friday on guild chat bye [Music]