Guild Chat - Episode 98
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Guild Chat - Episode 98
- Title
- Drakkar
- Host
- Rubi Bayer
- Guests
- Cameron Rich
Chris Burgess
Lee Bledsoe - Date
- February 21, 2020
- 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 98th episode of Guild Chat aired on February 21, 2020.
Transcription[edit]
Warning, the following text is a raw transcript from the youtube video, this has to be structured. [7:00]
'''Rubi Bayer:''' Hi tyria, happy Friday and welcome to Guild Chat, I'm your host Rubi and we're gonna be talking some more about the Drakkar encounter today. We talked about it a little bit few weeks ago and promised to you a little bit deeper dive, so we're gonna talk with some of the developers who worked on that. Why don't you guys go ahead and introduce yourselves and talk about what you worked on? '''Cameron Rich:''' Sure, so, my name is Cameron Rich, I was the game designer that built Drakkar. '''Chris Burgess:''' My name is Chris, I was the audio lead for the episode, so I told other people what to do, but I'm here to showcase what they did. Keenan Sieg was the sound designer and implementer, Stan LePard was the composer and I just worked to facilitate and do a lot of emailing for those people, yeah. '''Rubi Bayer:''' So you here for the shoutouts today. '''Chris Burgess:''' I'm here for the shoutouts, yeah. I'm sure leading other people's good work which is, I'm very proud of them. '''Rubi Bayer:''' That's fair. '''Lee Bledsoe:''' I'm Lee Bledsoe, the visual effects lead on Guild Wars 2 and that was responsible for maintaining the visual target and the overall budget and management of the team that created the digital effects for this encounter. '''Rubi Bayer:'' All right, so if you guys have questions while we're talking to the show, go ahead and drop them in chat, and we'll try to answer some of them at the end as we have time for. But yeah, let's start with, let's kind of go way back months back toward the beginning and talk a little bit about how the encounter evolved during design and development, and bringing all those teams in at the beginning and having everybody talk together. '''Cameron Rich:''' Yeah, ok, so man... '''Rubi Bayer:''' Way back, because there were, you had multiple teams involved working on this. '''Cameron Rich:''' We did, yes, and we knew that we were going, this was going to be a really really big project because we haven't done a world boss in a really long time, and world bosses in our game are epic and scaled, they're dynamic, feeling in terms of like the way that they impact the environment, and so we, we knew this was going to be a big lift and in order for us to really hit that, especially with the amount of time that we had, everybody had to buy into what the design of the encounter was going to be, so when we first got together with VFX creature art animation props, pretty much everybody just sat down and walked through, we call them tabletops of the encounter, where either we use like a sheet of paper on a table and draw out the encounter from like a top-down perspective, use figurines. In this case we used a whiteboard and just kind of like mapped out everything, because we didn't have anything in game yet, we hadn't really built anything other than prototypes, and so it was like hey let's use our imagination, and come up with some ideas for how this worked and I remember like I know we've talked about it before <!-- 10:10 --> but one of the biggest things with this encounter was your car and gw1 was frozen in the ice and so we we wanted to do something with that and so the idea came up I can't remember who had it but that he could swim through the ice and that started a lot of conversations with the art department on like how we're gonna pull that off yeah yeah absolutely there's from the animation team of how we're gonna make him swim and modeling can we actually have the physical model behind the ice or do we need you to leverage some other sort of shader trickery to create that look of him behind ice we ultimately ended up going with the shader trickery which ended up being a substantial amount of work from one of our shader artists and the gasher but at the end of the day it looked convincing and it worked really well with our attack and you went into the shader trickery a little bit a few weeks ago can you do a quick refresher on that yeah it was complicated and there's a lot of math wrong No so we started with a base ice shader that we've used in our game throughout the game and we took that and expanded upon it adding elements that simulated lifelike depth and movement but also allowed us the flux of ability to control jerk arse shadow position in the environment so that it worked with the gameplay demands that that were presented to us yeah because that position is significant yeah I mean it's the visual tell for where the most of it where he's gonna come out of an attack so there we had to deleverage some flipbook technology and some flow map math and a bunch of other stuff that I don't want to bore you guys too much about but at the end of the day it all came together and achieved that I think the final or at least it achieved the the idea that we all kind of had in our head from the very beginning yeah which is it's saying something because we were definitely convinced that it was so high scope that it was a high chance that we weren't going to be able to do it to the extent that we were talking about but man you guys really pulled out all the stops and delivered yeah it took it wasn't just one person it was the combined efforts of the entire VFX team across that production timeline I mean Nick did focus a lot on the materials but we had NAT another one over VFX artists doing all of the skill effects for Drakkar and then I was able to or my main primary focus was to sort of manage the delivery of what both of those artists were working on and making sure that it felt cohesive to the experience and that it played really nicely with what you guys were designing and also was hopefully inspiring for the audio team to work off of absolutely so you talked about you mentioned making sure those two artists working what they were working on was cohesive were there points for those two what they were working on felt like they were going to clash or did those two things come together pretty seamlessly no they those things came together pretty seamlessly I mean it's the job of any lead to make sure that you're maintaining cohesion within your team but more importantly the the challenge wasn't cohesion within the team because we sit right next to each other and we're right interacting all day every day and brainstorming and going oh that looks terrible or that looks great and you know we're pretty honest with each other the challenge was made cohesion across all of the art and design narrative an audio Department and so that's where early on like week one of the development we realized that it was vitally important that we all like you were saying come together and and understand what designs requirements were so that way art could express their concerns if there was some which there were many and then also more importantly come up with alternate solutions to the presentation of the art that worked with our technology and within the design constraints okay I remember we we spent some time thinking about how we were going to build the effects for the wall transitioning and everything and we were talking about whether or not it would be on the prop side or on the effect side I think it ultimately landed on you guys actually kind of doing a synthesis of the two where you built the effects and then baked it into the prop yep yeah so with that that is a great example of how we had to work with that team because usually the prop team would handle that sort of request but because of the complexity of the of developing the shader and then also manipulating in the shader on that prop the VFX team laid the the baseline on sort of the the hero props the arena walls and then the prop team took that foundation that we laid and applied it to all of the other areas that you see trocars shadow so the tunnels and and and that but that's that's kind of what we do is as a art team and design team you know we have to work together otherwise we're gonna come up with something that doesn't look like it belongs together yeah a lot of back and forth a lot of iteration just as you go out throughout development just seeing it kind of evolved over time there's always some new challenge some new obstacle that appears that we're like okay how do we solve this right and it's it's a lot of fun lastly so can you guys jump into you mentioned there were some concerns here there can you guys remember points where you had a concerning you had to back off and find a different track without being too scary so I remember at one point we asked if we could do the same thing that we were gonna do with the walls to the floor yes and that that you think that ok cool is just floor just turn it sideways it didn't work like that because our floors are different than our walls but we came up with another trick that uses decals that that basically paints the same sort of picture on that surface that the shadow wall material did so we achieved the same look cohesive look between the wall and the floor but we use an entirely different technique to achieve that look do you remember what the reason was that we ended up not being able to do the same treatment to the floor oh man I off the top of my head I don't it may have been a her thing because that shadow wall material is a costly material we're doing a lot of we have a lot of shader instructions in it so my it may have been partly because of that yeah that's oh I the there was an issue with alpha layer sorting where like player decals and effects if you put it on to a material that was translucent would disappear or also be translucent so you guys if we would have done that you wouldn't have been able to see any of the Telegraph's or anything that are going on right yeah did we do we end up doing anything for that or is that like a consistent problem that we have it's a fairly consistent it's not necessarily a problem it's just a fairly consistent thing that we have to work with in constrast yeah yeah so when you guys talk about decals that's pretty much exactly what it sounds like yep just translated the game design that's like a it's like a sticker on a surface and it gets projected on that surface it's a it's a volume it's a cube volume that because of the way that it works anything that is within that cube volume doesn't matter if it's a flat surface a terrain surface or or what it is if that surface falls within that volume the sticker gets projected on it now our decals do do some weird things in some cases where if it's a perfectly vertical surface and a perfectly horizontal surface and they're both within that same volume you get a little bit of texture stretching but that's consistent with a lot of game engines not not just ours it's just how it do yep but we do have in those instances we can prevent that that's stretching by flagging those vertical wall props to not accept decals and then if we really need to have a decal on that vertical surface we do a couple of other tricks with our decal volumes that allow us to protect them on that wall but there's sort of secret sauce tricks and and I remember as well the challenge of having the walls have to be flagged to not accept any decals meant that we had to think about how to display his shadow a little differently and that's what ended up leading us baking it into the proper yeah yeah exactly yeah really something else that you mentioned you were talking about how there's a lot going on on there and you had mentioned a little bit when we talked before about the challenges of how you had all of these stacking elements and all of this stuff going on yeah do you guys want go into that a little bit more so like when you have a lot of things on screen that everything that you have on screen impacts performance and so one of the terms that we use to describe that stacking of elements on screen is over draw and over draws basically at a high level the idea that multiple objects are writing to the same pixel or the same group of pixels so for an example if you have a window and you are looking through that window and you have objects outside of that window the the pixels that are being used to render that are rendering the window there the transparency that we know they're rendering the objects and and so you have two items right there drawing to the same pixel and the more objects or items elements that you have drawn to those pixels the more that begins to impact your frame rate and performance and so with an encounter like this there's there's a lot of stuff going on and we had to be really careful about when and where we use the big visual spectacle effects so those big impacts big impact moments where you slamming the ground and just a nice everywhere and and use those sparingly enough that didn't impact performance but then we also augmented it with other smaller area of effects that that continue to fill out the scene in a nice way mm-hmm yeah we had to be we had to try and stay conservative because player effects going on especially whenever you have so many people in the open world it's easy to forget about how much of those are in the scene whenever you're developing it in a vacuum and you're kind of doing it on the test servers which which meant that like for this encounter specifically we tried to get as many as people possible playing this as much as we could throughout development just so that we didn't fall into that trap of making something that looks really really good when you look at it from a 1/2 like 5 person perspective but then gets lost in the readability whenever you have just a massive group of people attacking the creature yeah you were you guys were play testing frequently weren't you yeah yeah I think once once every week towards the end and once every two weeks throughout development yeah yeah it gave us a chance to all get together and sync up because all of the different departments were kind of working in tandem with each other on their various aspects of the creature and when you've got this release going on alongside all of the other stuff that we're doing it's just it's tough to stay on the course yeah I guess yeah you've got that listen I know you've got this thing coming up but we really need you to come and I'll put this yeah and specifically like the the rest of the episode also needs a bunch of effects and everything so people get scattered and are working on different parts of the episode at a time so it's it's important to get everybody together and communicate as often as possible yeah and those playtests I mean you were bringing multiple teams working on that in there so everybody got to see their stuff in context and how it lined up with what everybody else was working on did you find that how helpful was that getting everything in there did it help affect some changes that would have not been seen otherwise I think so yeah I definitely think it allowed us to really get a feel of how well the implementation of everything together was actually visualizing mm-hm right yeah I mean in through those play tests you know one early on we had the conversation on the creature side do we need to model the entire Drakkar model from head to tail in full high-res detail or do we model just the front half and don't have a back half or you know what is that that look like yeah and it was through these repeated play tests and meetings with the entire teams that the our teams and design that we realized well you'll never really see the back half of your car in the encounter he's always either sticking out of a wall or he's swimming behind the walls and we almost made the call not to do the back half at all because we weren't going to see it but luckily Kate our VFX lead was very passionate about at least having the back half but maybe less detail and that actually saved our team the VFX team in the long run and when we created that shadow because if we had gone the route of just modeling the part they'd seen and not had anything else the shadow would have we wouldn't have been able to create the shadow on the wall the way that we did since she modeled the entire thing we're able to use a depth rendering process and have a very simple animation of jakar just swimming around and we had his full body at this point so we can capture that and then convert that into a flipbook and that's what made it look like it's like he was swimming and so having that his tail there and the front half at the end of the day saved miss a lot of headache on the on the shadow side yeah been a different kind of horror it would have been a different gun earth yikes yeah without it you guys would have had to come up with what the back half of his model look like yeah yeah I'm sure I mean luckily we had concept art that described what his overall shape looked like but we would have had to somehow fill in that negative space if it wasn't there was something else yeah I'd maintained from last night we've just been a horrifying puppet on a stick did your mags just back there it early on in development because we needed to make sure that we were really starting to visualize the encounter from his early on as possible creature team actually gave us a really really early model that did very much look like a puppet but because it was just like huge and bulky there were no details it was all blue and everything and it was just hilarious okay I want to see that at some point yeah I said I think we actually have some behind-the-scenes pictures from one of our last yeah I want to peek at those here in a little bit but talking about your car swimming around and moving away around reminded me that I want to talk about some of the audio stuff because attaching jacquards audio to the movement was a cool thing that I wanted to make sure we touched on yeah it was a cool thing I'm very impressed again so well there was the whole creation of the the gutter rules we call them forger car all the creature sounds and then we knew we wanted the ice swimming sound and Andy Martin was a vendor we worked with who's a sound designer and he actually created all the sounds but then Keenan got them back and he implemented them into the build so that we could actually hear them and when we went to hook up these specific ice swimming sound we realized that the sound was playing from the shadows swimming around the room and the sound was playing from the center of the room because there was no nothing to attach the audio emitter to so he had to go I'm not sure who it was but he had to go talk to somebody in design or and get a bone we call him a bone offset added to the shadow so the sound would actually move and that was super important because players need to hear and Telegraph where it is it was a cool sound on its own but it doesn't enhance her support gameplay if it just sits in the center of the room and plays um and there was a hot second we're like well will we just fake it and kind of have it fly around the room real quick and you can't tell but Keenan's very smart and collaborative and he went and got it figured out and the the recordings for that was a combination of the guttural Zandi made but also we had Andy and I had done some recordings back in like 2017 at Lake Diablo and he had those signal oh there's some pictures that I took on my Instagram but where it was very cold and we suffered but we got some great sounds and they got used they got used furniture car swimming through the ice so that was that was cool so what were the sounds how did you capture them right there freezing to death Andy stood on a log like a really like 30 40 foot log that was half submerged in water and it was all semi-frozen and he had a boom microphone that he was holding like this for hours and I was sitting on a dock throwing rocks at and this was Andy well near yeah because he's holding the microphone it's pointing at let's say the desk is the thing and and was so if anybody hasn't heard this if you look up you know throw a YouTube you know rock on ice pew pew pew so we were gathering rocks and I was throwing them and we were trying to it was weird because we were trying to go in the lake was not completely frozen over because if you throw something on it then it just goes clunk you know it doesn't do anything boat is slightly melted so yeah I was throwing rocks at him on the loose ice to try and get all this movement and we did that for several hours and then and then went home yeah so you've had that waiting since 2017 yeah I mean you know we're we're sound people were always gathering interesting thing and no that's cool and then you you record it and you put it on a shelf and then someday you see you know this cool ice dragon and you're like I got I got a sound for that because when we're in development there's not always time to say right let's blue sky what sound this should be and let's go record it it's like well we don't have a lot of time so what have we already recorded and so it's kind of like the you just kind of be in diligent when you have free time just recording whatever you can and a lot of that goes into the planning the release where it's like it's gonna be a lot of ice and ice caves and it's like okay audio team let's record I see things and build our backlog of our library and even beyond the the encounter itself it helps with the ambience of the arena and the place that he's into because you can hear kind of like that sound of like ice cracking around you glacier moving oh somebody was playing with their headphones on I always do yeah yeah exactly exactly do you want to talk about some of the other audio work that you did that we are not going to have people listen to because we like you guys yeah yeah we can't nobody should have to hear that in the raw well when we talked about your car I keep wanting to say Drakkar cuz I think the text-to-speech oh yeah yeah dragger Jack it's fantastic so Jack our just had this wicked look when it popped out of the ice and it just like to me seems like you should scream and be really sharp and just cut through the mix of everything else happening and I kept thinking of the Nazgul from the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings and I knew that they had done some wine glass scraping and so we knew we were going to outsource the creation of these sound effects but we basically recorded some source - hand - Andy Martin and say if you can use this great if not use it for reference as kind of what we want which was actually one of my favorite moments was I went to a store up here and purchased a bunch of wine glasses and I got like one champagne glass and the way the person at the check out thank you he's like tired they were like just one champagne glass and and I was like the the brain cycles of explaining why I'm only by I'm good I was in my brain I was like I'm gonna destroy this in about 24 hours but I'm not gonna there's a lot of what how do you a lot of audio personally exactly I was like I was like yes sometimes just yes and there's like a whole monologue in your head and just work things out is yes yeah so joseph clark one of our other senior sound designers here is excellent at performing the sound and what i mean by that is so we took the glass and we scraped it on metal it's the reason we're not playing that because it is like the worst sound in the world I sent it to Ruby and I put in like big bold letters three times turn down your headphones because it'll take your head off in red font to read it was an alarming email yeah but I appreciated it so much I call it mustard text it's red font yellow highlight bold yeah I appreciated that nobody should ever have to hear it again but so so you can record that just gonna rain rain but Joe gets in there and and he was scraping this hose and he would get these crazy gestures and so we sent that to Andy Martin and he didn't end up using the sounds for whatever reason probably for the obvious ones it's terrible to listen to but he was like oh this is so cool I know what you guys want I know what the gesture is of the sound its baseline for what what it felt like yeah it feels it already feels like a thing a living thing and so now it's just up to the sound designer to kind of realize that a little more and flush it out so yeah glass will use it for something that's in our library but it didn't get it got used only as reference for this and Andy did a great job what do you sent us back we iterated on that and then plugged it in and tested it so that was the sound effects side of it then there's the whole music side which I don't know if we want to come back to that or go for it because I really like that story is okay so that's the sound effects Stan is amazing yeah so so early on we were also scoping what we want to do for the music for this and I think I had just penciled in like three Kombat loops intro middle and the ending where it's really high intensity and we worked with Stan Lepard for this track who has worked with us quite a bit he's a great composer and you know composers want to know well why are there three phases what's happening what's justifying that and I was like well there's the intro and then there's the second phase where's your cars kind of sneaky sneaky shadow and then your car comes out so and then there's the burn down at the end where you just blast 25% health and so we're like okay well there's four stages and at some point in development somebody had talked about your car popping through the ice through the floor and they kept calling at this jaws moment I don't know if it was somebody in design or I think James Richter was saying it one of the producers and that just stuck with me is like well jaws is scary because it's that like you can't see what's happening and it's really uncomfortable so it was cool about Stan a couple things many things but I'm gonna highlight a couple things he's done a lot of work to my knowledge with like kind of procedural generated and textural music so he started sending us all these really wacky textures which we were playing in the intro and it just had this super uncomfortable vibe and then when your car would pop out of the ice we play what's called a stinger which is the orchestra gone but in a big whatever some thing and that covers up the transition which is happening from that yeah that noodley stuff to something that's a little more combat oriented which has drums ticka ticka ticka ticka tah and so cuz that transitions kind of rough well yeah so transitioning music requires some like it requires the game engine to be musically literate and what I mean by that is it knows where the beat is if I'm you know if I'm conducting in 4/4 down is always the one one two three four one and it needs to know where those beats happens so that it can look at the music that's playing and say we're gonna transition in a musical place we can't do that just because our tools don't support it and the other thing that's really cool about Stannis he's very creative he's a great problem solver and so he looks at those limitations and he figured out well you know we can go from a combat piece that has a beat boots and cats and boots and cats and and we can get to another piece of music but it has to not have a tempo so it goes to something that doesn't have drums if we try to transition from one piece of music that has a beat to another piece of music that has a beat it usually happens very unmusical II or we leverage the stinger to just try and it's basically playing something that's louder than the transitioning that's happening so you can't hear the transition and it sounds better than if it wasn't there so a lot of creative problem-solving a lot of a lot of planning of emotionally how should the music make you feel but also technically how are we going to implement it because we could hire a composer and say go write great music but if we don't know how we're gonna plug it in it's basically useless so having that all having the the blueprint all planned out before we even Commission a note of music has been super helpful and I think helped us ship some more adaptive music experiences that hopefully heighten the emotion because we were in development on that music and we were like is this working is it weird and then we got in a play test with a few of the designers and somebody was like oh my god this feels the music feels great it's like yes it worked so Stan did really great writing that music and sort of designing the implementation scheme and the emotion of it and then that was all handed off to Kenan and he implemented it all and I would just come into the room and say like this is amazing you were all great yeah and this saga so far has been has had a lot of like really musically intensive in terms of implementation moments like we had the big concert and the the prologue and then for the this fight you know we needed to have dynamic sounding music that didn't sound too dissonant whenever a transition so I'm sure that's a valuable set of lessons and and obstacles to overcome especially for the future yes yes we love music we love what it brings to the experience and and it's always a joy problem solving the creative implementation schemes and truly it usually is fun to figure out how are we gonna how are we gonna do this so yeah I it's funny you said that I spent some time I spent the long weekend playing around in Gotham are you catching up on achievements and we're at the concert I don't know how many times mm-hmm it's so fun I'm trying to get my bouncer achievement so I was like I yeah that's been on my mind anyway and I just all I can hear is Joe yeah yeah Joe Clark and Keenan and no Vera everybody involved with that whole experience it's just it's so amazing it's it's such a testament to the I think the the talent and the passion here that was another one where I feel like I was just standing back and saying like you were all amazing yeah that's awesome okay so but your car distract me with metal Legion because it's way too much fun too so back to all of these teams working together because you guys all did work extremely extremely well bringing all of the teams in super early getting the sinks and the tests in there once you ramped up to once a week for playtesting and everybody sinking in together how well was did you feel like you had pretty much ironed everything out pretty well or were you still running into dissonance here and there and feeling like different teams needed to pull things back and change things as you kept playtesting um honestly I feel like it coalesced pretty well yeah I think the only thing that really was still the question at that time was is this shadow tech gonna work and if not what's our acceptable backup plan but yeah by that point all of the teams knew what they were doing and how and more importantly how what they were doing connected to what all the other teams were doing yes it allowed us to really focus in on the Polish of the timing of the effects and you know when things happen how things transition away from each other we came up with some creative solutions for just using some color shifting to get more out of be like when he puts his hands to the ground and he's pulling up the spirit of the wild energy you know we were able to kind of tackle those Polish tasks a lot without the stress of knowing that there was a bunch of other things that needed to be done because of the amount of play testing beforehand yeah speaking of different skills and Drakkar putting down you had talked some about creating a consistent language of telegraphing to try to to try to help them understand yeah so early on we we knew that especially for this saga we wanted to start using mechanics in the open world that were usually reserved for like dungeon encounters or raid encounters fractals because like that's where people are going to be more comfortable kind of like practicing things and it's not necessarily failure if you yourself don't do the mechanic correctly because do you have all of your friends that are out in the open world that'll help you and so early on in the saga we had the the ice giant and he has this attack where he slams his fist down and it creates this shock wave that goes out and you jump over the shock wave in order to avoid it and we knew that you know that is a that's a cool mechanic it requires you to actually be moving around to be aware of where it's coming from and watch your surroundings and we knew that we wanted to reuse it forward your car so mechanically we try to ramp it up a little bit so that you you see it happen and the strike mission and it slams down you've got one and that's just kind of your introduction to it and then and the ox Rhine you see it happen whenever the orbs like come down and they hit the ground and now there's more of them that are going off but they have like kind of a cadence to them there's really still when we one at a time and then enter a car it's like he's slamming down one slamming down another the first thing he does is he slams down - so like you have to jump over kind of both of them at the same time and keeping that language consistent while still allowing for the effects to evolve it was really important to us so that we could teach our players better how to play the game and not create kind of fake out mechanics where it's like oh I've seen that before but it did something different we did we actually ended up doing that a lot with some of the effects for further car didn't we yeah the so it's sort of like a win-win scenario right we we anytime we're given a scenario like this make the drug our encounter there's dozens and dozens of initial requests and we have to vet those all of those requests against the time that we have to do the production and not everything makes it through that vetting process and so in this case we knew okay cool Drakkar is still a jor Meg champion and the ice giant from prologue and then in Episode one that expands is part of that Jorm egg army so he's using Jorm egg fax and so it made sense that forge a car you would also use some chore Meg influenced effects and we knew that the shadow wall was going to be a massive time suck and we knew that there is a couple other hero skill moments that were also going to be time sucks and so not everything not every skill request could we make a one-off hero effect for and so we have to be smart and reuse mechanics like you're talking about but also effects and animation and creatures in in the appropriate ways that maintain continuity and reinforce the the game play stuff that you're talking about and so we had a just a small handful of reusable effects from the ice golem that we use as a baseline and then made a couple of small tweaks to to just give it a little bit extra car flavor and then that saved us probably three or four days just on those AoE skill effects yeah and we were really we were able to get those and early on whereas like sometimes the designer puts in a very prototype version of a skill that uses really prototype effects to make sure that we know that hey this isn't final and sometimes when we do that the the mechanics need to kind of evolve when the effects get involved with it but because we were building off of an existing thing that we had shipped before is very easy to just be like okay and this girl goes here and it goes here and then that's it we're done we can focus on other things now yeah and it's exactly like what you're talking about with your audio library you know we we began over the course of the saga build a library of assets that can be reused in similar and different ways and so the theme for this saga obviously is ice and snow spoiler alert and so we knew going in that we have a whole bunch of stuff that we have to make and and we're gonna also have the whole library of stuff that we can reuse that way we can focus the majority of our time on the really spectacle awesome moments and and not have to do these small little coverage yeah exactly a spice rack exactly yeah that's a good way of putting it yeah not my term Damian cast Bower okay all right I'll take it that's that sounds like a good Damian thing too yeah but yeah to have those two have that backlog of assets like you have been a clogged up sounds to not waste time making going out and okay we're gonna get this new thing just for the sake of saying that we did a new thing yeah so you can focus your time on the content and I don't know that I would see it as a waste of time like because we would love - like if we lived in a world where everything was this artisanal crafted thing like that would be awesome it's just like infinite time and resources yeah yeah of course yeah but but you know than that yeah like you said we're we're scoping and triaging and how can we leverage things as efficiently as possible but still make it great and meaningful yeah five seconds to think about the world of infinite time and resources No so after we got your car shipped he's out there he's stomping everything you got the chance to rout that all by yourself but the team got the chance to work on an update yes and yeah so we we knew that balancing world boss for the open world is is very very difficult to get fine-tuned with the internal playtests that we have because everybody plays the game differently and so damage output is different depending on who like what class you're playing what elite spec you're playing how you're playing it what kind of role you're doing and so we we wanted to ship this guy with tools in place to be able to watch the data of how players were going and what the participation rate was what the average encounter length was what the success rate was and use all of that data to then fine-tune him on live to try and really dial in on the the right experience that we wanted and so across the board we made some changes just to like normal balance things like his health and his break bar a little bit but in addition to that Connor Fallon and I talked a bit about hey we've got some of these mechanics that we have that aren't really punishing the player for failing the mechanic too much and we we started to think about like what are what are some easy ways that we can within a really quick time span create incentives for doing the mechanic correctly without having to create an entirely new encounter with a new mechanic and have players go in and have to relearn an entire fight that they've been doing eight weeks surprised everything's different yeah which you know it's it's a little difficult because you have to be very cognizant of what changes you're making and so we added in a couple of extra mechanics for when jobbies like in her shield if you're not out if you're not inside the shield for a short period of time before going out into the area where all the ads are spawning you'll actually start taking damage from the snowstorm and in addition to that we also added in the failure mechanic where a lot of people were saying you know hey something something cool could happen when the group fails so that it doesn't feel like you know like such a complete failure right and so really how do we make failure fun and Connor Connor looked at me and was just like what if Connors are like stroking his evil cat immediately I was I was almost like no but he's like what if players were all turned hostile to each other because it's your car and like and and it's jour mags whispers and requires the mouthpiece of jour mag so the true strength of what jor mag can impose upon you should be present here right and so immediate reaction was like whoa whoa whoa no no this that's that's crazy town and he's like is it though and we went back forth back and forth for a little bit and eventually he whipped up something that I think is both really thematically interesting without feeling like super uber punishing because you when you go down you come back to your senses and you're no longer hostile to players and so it's a bit of this like kind of narrative moment where your car has now turned everybody rageful against each other and it creates a fun little moment where you get to do something you don't ever really get to do in the open world which is try and survive the massive players that are all hitting each other and from a design point of view there was eight it seems like there was a lot to think about like okay so how far does this extend how long does it last and because some of the concerns when it was first discovered because I know like as soon as Connor told me I'm just like logged into game and I'm just waiting for somebody to find out and Connor and I were like messaging back and forth that first day I was like nobody's found out yet nobody's failed it yet Connor do something I I'm watching - man I can't I can't make this go any faster but as soon as players found out there was concern like okay is this is this like map wide is this forever and I just what if I don't want this and those concerns I mean I know you guys thought of that ahead of time absolutely you know one of the one of the pillars of Guild Wars 2 is you're always happy to see another player and so at first this seems like it goes way against that yeah but we also which are trying new ways of telling the narratives that we have and so we put on some restrictions if you leave the fight area before failure you're not going to get turned if you leave it even after the fight is failed as long as you're not in combat then you can go back to a friendly team we put in a lot of fail-safes to make sure that people can grief each other this was just supposed to be a like a fun little thing you can down your friends you can be like and then you know get all your rage out from failing the events and then come back and try it again and you know hopefully succeed yeah is it's definitely something that is a balancing act yeah because there was a version of this where we just allowed you to be hostile to everybody until you were killed and we didn't we didn't end up actually putting that into the game because we were immediately like no no no people are gonna like go to the the town and they'll start like killing all the NPC's or kill all the other players that are just like warping into the map so yeah we we definitely have to stay aware that we want it to be an enjoyable experience and not a Greek sudden mental image of just way pointing into jours keep and being immediately murdered exactly what that would be like so thank you for not I appreciate it so well do you guys want to look at some of the behind the scenes stuff that you brought yeah sure okay and then if you all have questions we will answer a couple of those there at the end all right the remote control is all yours mmm let's see on it's on yes yes this is this is the product of not having conceptual art time all of our teams on every given release they have budgets and schedules and and availability and for this encounter we had a challenging skill that the channel the spirit of the wild channeling skill and the concept team unfortunately was busy they were fully booked and so being the lead VFX artist I had to take it upon myself to try to I was failing at verbally communicating the idea that I wanted my my team to execute on and so I had to take some invest paint drawing lessons and come up with this to visually describe what we were trying to describe with words I finally figured out I just happened to glance over the preview monitor while Cameron was talking earlier and I finally figured out what it reminds me of his head looks like one of those old Christmas lightbulbs it totally does what it's been on the tip of my tongue yeah and this is actually a paint over front end game we took a screenshot of him in that channeling pose and then just painted right on top of that I'm not kidding I wanted as my phone background alright well we will email it to you after this thank you so this is early very very early prototype testing for the shadow material we knew that we wanted this material to have flipbook support so that we can control how the shadow moved and the directions that it faced and so this is our very early test using like I said from the beginning that this is our standardized material and we're injecting that flipbook logic to it we're injecting layers of parallax and depth to simulate that this thing is actually behind the ice not rendering on the surface of the ice and then also giving us the control ability that we needed from the designs perspective for a gameplay and we just to prototype this material we grab assets that already exist in game and and and we do that because we don't want to create new stuff until we know that the material is gonna work and so we had this flip book of one of the scarabs and we use that as our shadow stand-in and that stayed in the encounter for a number of weeks until we finally got the shadow tech to work just right which was really awesome oh this is the next evolution of the shadow and this is us going cool we now have the depth and the parallax working really nicely now let's start making it look like trocars shadow and so this is testing the flipbook logic and the ability to move from one state to the next and we did that with simple spheres and it needed animate so we just squashed and stretched a sphere and that was you know that's the next evolution from that previous image that we saw and then that leads into this is the first realization of the entire shadow shader coming together with the flip books the rough trocar model like this is the first moment where all of the art teams and the design teams narrative we can go holy cow this is actually going to work it's good the five weeks of effort that this has been into this point was is paying off that was such a cool moment too and that came online at the plate was just such a big win and you could see the flipbook control here that we have he's he's facing one direction when he's sticking out of the wall and then he backs up turns to the right and swims to the right and then turns again and faces to come out and that's that's all done with sixty-four frames of flip book animation that had to felt like such a huge victory after all of the work that went into it that yeah we've just been looking at a tiny little slice of that yeah it was I was super proud of the entire team the VFX team and the greater Art and Design teams because this was this was the one feature of the entire Dakar experience from the very beginning that I was very concerned about and I knew would be in an exciting moment and and something that really stood out in our in our saga but it was certainly a concern from the perspective of how can we pull this off will we be able to pull this off and if we don't what's our back-up plan but you know we work through these iterative steps we we don't just start making that final asset that you saw from the very beginning we do these steps we go through the evolution and that allows us the opportunity to pivot early if we need to right it's it's such a good look at everything that goes into what seems like a simple little moment yeah yeah and I'm from the player's perspective it is a simple you know 20 minute encounter but from the developers perspective this is like four months worth of development time yes I still remember the first time that I saw that in game I like freaked out and grabbed everybody around me it was like yeah yeah this was this is early skill testing of the smash or the stomp skills that you're talking about where we started with just this decal on the ground and we're like wait we can just reuse some of the icicle effects here to really enhance this and so that was that this is just another view of it as well well kind of go through some of these fast this is this is the the now you're seeing the culmination of like like this looks really awesome and it didn't really cost us that much to put in the game because this is an asset that we already had and it visually matches Drakkar and joram egg and the theme of this episode of the saga so why not leverage it that way we can put our time into the the more questionable assets like the shadow hall not questionable this concept art the piece cost effective you know at the very beginning this was the this is what we had before we were before we came up with that piece of art this is the the very first appearance of him channeling that spirit of the wild energy and and I love this image particularly because it looks like a troll doll hair ever since the first time you said that's me I'm like yep there it is yeah and this is also another good example of like our overdraw challenge there's a lot of effects going on here you see smoke just in the environment you see those tornados you see this the the red troll hair on your car all these things are occupying the same pixel space and this is where we have to be really cognizant of how much visual effects and and creatures and all the things that are being displayed in the environment so that we don't kill performance and everybody's framerate drop stands like that and then it evolved into the final implementation that you see here it's a little more refined there's less of the troll hair going on and you see that channel the energy being channeled from the lake the frozen lake bed now at this point it's starting at his hands and it's moving up his arm and and culminating to around where the the player can see which is at this point is the head and so we had to have the the big visual tell beyond the areas where the the players interact mist so it's the head and the feet and then you know this is an example if we had a white dragon in a white and blue room with a lot of white and blue effects so how do we make our effects stand out and in an environment of sameness where everything is blue yeah exactly and so we the creature team identified very early on that what has happened between jacquard and Guild Wars one and two and he's kind of decayed over the years he's been asleep but slowly decaying and so we took that idea and ran with it in some of his visual effects that's where we get this really viscous goo like rotting decaying flesh sort of like just gross Ness and that helps our visual effects stand out against the environment and and the creature model and also is just kind of like hooky and it's fun it's disgusting to think about they I hadn't thought about it that way yes yeah thanks for that it's what we do we like to you know nothing fun with disgusting things time to time now it's coming directly at the camera yeah I mean you can see we really liked his goo so we showed it a lot this is again very early what does the channeling look like we still have the troll hair here but we're now starting to put that a visual tell on on the arms again because this is where the players are interact with with the most on this guy and the last thing we wanted to have happen was have players missed the visual tell and have that screw with gameplay yeah and that actually that effect ended up inspiring another attack where that looks like a bad place to stand so we ended up turning that into a damage field so if you're standing on his feet you're actually taking ticks of damage from that energy yeah okay when I'm playing the jakar encounter I'm usually throwing heals stop standing there sorry carry on yeah exactly and then kind of see the final imitation here of the effects on the ground and how they transition from the surface of the the lake up his arm and up through his body lots of tricks going on here from decals and particles and mesh effects NAT did an that was the primary visual effects artist for Joe Carr skills and having a singular artist sort of focused on all of his skills allows us the strong continuity between all the skills and that just really did an amazing job with the treatment up your car it made my job easy which is a psyche hey like you that looks cool let's ship with that yeah yeah it looks fantastic and this is another great example of the overdraw that we're talking about it looks simple like there's a bunch of smoke and stuff but all that smoke is drawing on top of each other and this is our first chance of seeing what it looks like winter car sucks back into the ice we wanted to really kind of one of the nice to feel alive and and and magical but we didn't want to feel totally like just a wet water puddle and so we played a little bit with what sort of textural elements go into supporting that so you do get a little bit of that surface water tension [Music] distortion feel mixed with more physical elements of the snow smoke and and bits of ice and and and those things that all come together to create a cohesive effect that looks like he's just sucking back into the ice mm-hmm that's just another view of it it turned out so well yeah this whole encounter I like this shot because this is like this arrangement like the kool-aid man I can't hear it no and actually that has a funny little gif that we had shared around internally of basically ripping that yeah ripping off some audio and putting that in and time to perfect that it's really funny amazing oh this is the the shadow that you were talking about that's on the ground it looks visually the same as the wall but we're using different technology or to achieve that yeah ended up working really well as a it starts very subtle and then it gradually becomes more apparent that this area is not where you want to stand which is exactly what we wanted because we didn't want it to be too for whelming and to like here's a red ring and I think it really hits that that mark anytime that we can use the environment or the skill affects to indicate the size of the area of effect versus just the red wearing the more that that makes me happy and hopefully the players happy because we're you know coming up with creative artistic solutions for gameplay mechanics it'd be kind of a boring game if all it was was red rings and and stuff like that the pings and the growing shadow is it's not just ok here's a red ring here's where you go but it's that growing stress it's that it's that jaws something's about to happen yeah I don't know what it is but I know I need to run and we actually ended up getting rid of the the pulsing rings after looking at this effect and just being like you know what I think the shadow is enough it's scary enough yeah it increases the attention because it's it's less likely that you'll notice it unless you're sitting right on top of it yeah and that's a nice win also because one of our challenges is balancing visual noise and things that are on the ground like that warning ring on top of the shadow contribute to visual noise especially when you have 80 players in a space and they're all firing off player skills and then you have enemies that are in that same space doing skills as well it gets really noisy really quick and so having a getting to the point where the shadow described the area of effect too well enough that we didn't need that red ring just cleaned up the visual nicely oh good this is this is another example of effective Rhys we that burst coming up out of the ground that came from the foundation of the eye skull the eye skull and bursts up out of the ground and we took that and we used that as a base we tweaked it a bit added some jakar elements to it just so that it wasn't exactly the same and you know is something that initially took us four or five days to make for the ice golem in this case it took us a couple of hours oh wow can I say that previous one was are my favorite animations because in the animation editor you didn't see any of you didn't see the bubble and it'll lower bought his body wasn't animated so we always thought it was him sitting driving a car his legs were just out well that's just that's what it is forever now well that's a lot of snow Oh a lot of snow yes that was that was actually that environment zone was what we had before we ended up shipping it's so bright it is incredibly bright and so we this is an example of we dialed that back a lot thank you to try and pull back the visual noise because while it looks really like you're in a blizzard which you know always has low visibility yeah it just it really did make the gameplay a bit more difficult to read yeah a little yeah so luckily it's not like this anymore yes a lot of this is is just different views of the the same stuff that we've seen but it's showcases you know the detail that we put into this and the the things that we have to consider when we're creating these for the design team yeah and hey that last gif actually is a it's a bug but it showcases what you're talking about earlier Oh with the decal yeah yeah where it's a it's actually just a volume and since he's in the volume that since your car is a mesh that can be rendered upon you see blue stretching on half of him and that's the size of the decal volume that's drawing on the floor you see that sort of stuck away but because he's inside of that volume it's also drawing on top of them so we have to have the prop artist and the map artist go and flagged your car did not accept decals because that doesn't look good great but these are these are good looks at some of the things that you have to catch ahead of time wait yes this is why playtesting is so important yeah for sure yeah like that Blizzard wasn't great but that was it's good that we caught that beforehand and we're like hey it was a not white screen for everybody and then you guys played the encounter you've seen this this is these incredibly angry yep got to melt that wall to get your car yeah I mean this is pretty much what we got I love by the way in that encounter she does that and she's you know she's just just like taking everything out of her and she was like see it's fine it's easy yeah it's great they really got such a great read for her we in the audio hall we were playing that we're like oh my goodness like jeez we all our view is great but like they really she had the mood and the energy it was such a great read as Debra right I don't know I was about to ask I know I know it's I know it's actually Williams from Mass Effect that's what I don't know yeah she really brought a lot to this performance or a lot of her performance brought a lot to the encounter all right you guys might answer some questions yeah sure all right are there plans to have more world bosses liked your car in the future so not any solid plans right now I mean world bosses are really fun and so they're always something that we're considering I think based on how popular your car is we can consider that for the future as well was there any tech develop for this episode we're excited to utilize further in the future yes the shadow material the underlying tech that we developed for that can be used in a whole bunch of other ways not just for shadows behind ice walls because at the primary core what we did is we made we create a shader that allows us finite control over flipbook animations and and their position and and speed within the flipbook so we're gonna be using this tech a lot more throughout the rest of the saga in vastly different ways than shadows on icy walls yeah that's one of the cool things about when you guys put all of that work into something like that is all the ways it can be realized in the future yeah yep you would think that it's only going to be used for ice but we've got some big plans for it in the future yeah quick talk about something else how did you come up pardon my reading level come up with the music theme the musical theme of your car it is really great well the short answer is we threw a lot of money at someone very talented there's been a great collaborator and they're great but they're a better answer to that is around the episode the pro metal bound by blood what was the episode named prologue non blood blood we I sat with narrative and said like where are we going for the saga and we outlined the major beats and jour mag so somebody keep an eye on me if I think we can talk about jour meg yeah okay all right everybody jour mag is a thing so we knew jour mag was a thing and we when we actually did the announcement trailer for the saga that was that like gag we spent the time with Stan and said we need a theme for jour mag it needs to be manipulative and all these things and he wrote something and surged your car because they are the the amplifier for the voice of jour mag it wanted to be related to that so again Stan worked his creative juices and and melded the structures of your mags theme which is kind of complex and and kind of tone clusters and all these things and then mesh that with the function of the situation which is combat music which mostly means big drums if you sorry it to like as far as the design of that Bhangarh our villain right now he's very if you listen his the the themes are designed with a lot of intent and his is very simple it's very percussive and warrior oriented and jour mags we kept saying was very cerebral because tour mag uses magic to influence people so it's very musically it's much more complex and sowed your car's music leans into that complexity if you will from a harmonic point of view so we money and a lot of planning is how is how we came up with that yeah so we'll Drakkar continued to receive balanced updates as the saga progresses so one of the things that we did with this guy as we are using some new tools to be able to balance him adjust his balance a little bit on the fly as we get in more data so if things start to see or if we start to see that things are getting like crazy hard or crazy easy then we have those knobs to tweak when redesigning your car compared to gb1 where did the inspiration for the new look come from that is a really great question and cater creaturely could go into great detail about that but from a high level we in DB one you only saw her car from kind of far far away and you never really got a good look at the detail of its form and and what it was made of and really what it fully looked like and so we had a bit of leeway to play with that to a degree and so the two main inspirations that I recall was that they played with forms of whales so you see a little bit of the jaw shape of a whale and in your car and on and also the tail which you don't ever see dinger cars model but you see on the the shadow and then Kate really wanted to play with the idea that this her car had been in the ice for a very long time between gb1 and and now and so that's where they played with how did your car decay during that time what did Joe makes influence how did that influence the way that the decay was treated and so you saw sort of shaggy fur like like almost like shag fur that was left out in the rain and and you saw like just blubber and this like just that was a big inspiration yeah a lot of goo okay I have one that I hadn't meant for us to talk about and I forgot until just now so if people saw the let's play with that Clayton and I were doing at the end we were messing around after the fight and put out a bubblehead tonic yes and that was just for fun I didn't know this was going to happen but when you put out a bobble head tonic at the end of the joke our fight what happens yes depending on depending on where you're looking it's not easy to first yeah it's not easy to miss he's got a big ol head and it just kind of sticks out right which kind of allows you to pull back the curtain a little bit and yeah so jerk ours is interesting he's a complex encounter the way that we ended up building him was that every single position where jerk are can come out and be attacked or do an attack with the jaws attack from the ground or the one that comes out of the wall those all have to be separate props separate versions of him and so the encounter with your car is is mechanically a bunch of them talking to each other and telling each other hey my house at this point so you're next up on the block and so make sure your health is at this point and when they deactivated they're really really far back they like play their animation to come back and then the the the asset is still there the prop is still there so to get around making sure that like you can't see him when he comes back we actually bones scale him down really really really small but the bobble head tonic seems to override this bone scaling and so it takes the Drakkar that is deactivated that's supposed to be hidden and you know smoke and mirrors and just Boop shows this head like right there it's quite hilarious yes so my question when we talked about this the other day is that you said what you think might be happening is that the rest of the body is still bone scaled down yes but the head is filling the entire chamber were you able to confirm this I I cannot confirm or deny it I'll let your imagination run wild is I will say that the truth is far more interesting than you might think but I'll have to get a screenshot in order to actually show you we have to go right now you know but if you haven't yet use a bobble head tonic at the end of the trokar encounter because it's amazing it looks like his giant head is mounted on the wall it's fantastic yeah so did your man create your car or only corrupted is more of a narrative question I don't think that's anything any of us can really I don't think we've answered that in-game that's yeah that's not sure if that's some narrative question yeah well the audio guy seems to have an answer well I know in the instance the whispers inside mm-hmm your car so that's the thing yes yeah but it's like that's as close as I feel comfortable venturing to the to the mall okay well that's yeah yeah it does beg the question of Westrick are a natural creature that was then inhabited by the voice of jour mag and that's why the corruption like transform the body or anything that is an extremely interesting question that I like a lot yeah so all right we are approaching 1:30 it's getting late thank you all very very much I appreciate it thank you all for spending some time with us if you would like to spend some time with us in person and you are on the East Coast we are heading out to PAX East next week we'll be out on the show floor we would love to see you guys if you're heading out to PAX East swing by the guild wars 2 booth on the show floor and we will see you there otherwise we will see you next time on guild chat thank you all thank you all yeah thank you all right [Music] you [Music] you [Music] you