It was a pretty wet start to the day it rained off and on most of the day I got a little wet going between things but not too bad I was inside most of the time.
Started the day off with a panel by James Spafford community manager at media molecule (the little big planet people) about how they made their excellent vita game Tearaway. He went through the history talking about how the vita because of it’s weird and wonderful input systems front and back touch sense camera gyro gps inspired the original idea for the game. If you’ve not played it the game involves a paper craft world where you interact with the world by touching with the top screen and when you press the back touch screen your fingers can go through into the world. So a lot of it involves moving things about with a combination of back and front touch making things with paper by drawing with the front touch onto different sheets of paper and having the game cut them out. Everything looks like paper and folds and bends and the sounds are all paper. The story involves a the main character either a boy or a girl who is a messenger delivering a message to you the player by reaching you (you show up in the sun tellytubbys style down to a wonderful use of the front camera) in the game world. They set out to make what became tearaway partly down to the unique hardware of the vita and to make something different from the little big planet games they’d been making for quite a few years.
The game went through three different prototypes before becoming the game it is today. Originally it was a sort of dungeon crawler that you would access through cracks in the real world then your finger was the player character. This turned out to be difficult to play so they rethought it an came up with the second game prototype a procedurally generated papercraft world that linked the gps to generate locally themed areas to explore. The world explore worked well but the gps procedural stuff didn’t so they canned that and the third game prototype was born which was basically tearaway a defined world you explored with your paper pal the messenger.
They then had a load of stuff on the look and feel of the world how they got it to look like paper. Early prototypes were shaded simple shapes but they realised while we thing of papercraft as essentially low poly it’s actually not it has wrinkles and folds and things so they dumped most of the textures and tried to make all their models in paper to see if they worked as they designed they added things like paper layering deforming as you moved over it legs and things had to fold concertina like rather than stretch since paper doesn’t stretch. The whole thing became like something made out of paper that had been cut and layered and glued together folded up to make shapes. It gave the game the distinctive art style it has today. The sound also came from paper all sorts of sounds were added in odd places like the pig noise was a board game box having the lid put on so it makes that odd noise as the air is forced out. The wendigo’s roar was a nail running down the edge of congregated card.
It was all fascinating stuff and the ended by showing the new re imagined version that’s coming to PS4 it doesn’t have all the same stuff that was in tearaway as it’s just not possible without that hardware but it looks like some of the same flavor will be in it.
After that I wandered the floor for a bit it was even more crowded than yesterday. I saw a bit of Dragon age inquisition and the new sonic game. Tried this tablet game called Ember which I didn’t get the hang of it seemed diablo esq but I couldn’t work out the attack mechanic all the hot bar did was things like maps or inventory. I queued up for a go at Double Fine’s massive challis but had to go to get to another panel. It looked interesting I only saw a bit of combat will need to circle back there later.
Then went to the Orcs Must Die! - An Afternoon of Fun with Robot Entertainment panel. We got some swag upfront a nice bag with tshirt buttons a poster. Then had the panel which was really interesting it went into the history of Robot Entertainment and the fact they have a Biergarten. The studio came out of Ensemble when they were shut down and most of the guys worked on the Age of Empires games and then Halo Wars. They also were involved in Project Titan which was a Halo based MMO that was canceled. The studio then tried something different and developed a tool to make games that lead to a serious fantasy game called Saber. Gradually that mutated into Orcs Must Die which is a great little tower defense third person action hybrid, one of the first of that kind I think. They went on to do a sequel that was also very good and then took a break to try some other things but eventually came back to OMD and made a new version that’s currently in Beta called Orcs Must Die Unchained that now included PvP. The showed a lot of the concept art for all the OMD games and the changes for the new one and at the end everyone got beta codes for the new game which was nice.
After that I grabbed some lunch and had a brief break before heading down to the Benaroya hall for Grim Fandango: Bringing the Dead Back to Life. Grim Fandango is one of my favorite games I still try and play it now and again assuming I can find the discs and coax it into running on modern hardware, so hearing they were remastering the game for PC PS4 and vita was great. The original was a classic lucas arts game though an early 3d rather than point and click. It was a fabulous story set in a world inspired by the mexican Day of the dead but mixed with aztec and other influences as well as film noir and old detective film references. It had a distinctive visual style and sound with a really great story and fun characters wonderful puzzels and I just love it. It suffered a bit due to the limitations of the time but this new version will remove those compromises. It was great to hear the people who worked on the orginal Tim Schafer of Double fine who was the game designer Peter Chan who did the concept art Peter McConnell who did the music. They had some great stories to tell about it and it was a fun panel. They also talked about how they were remastering it taking the original files and trying to keep as much of the original stuff as possible but removing some of the things like compression and 16bit colour that were down to technical limitations of the time and adding things like full orchestra for some of the music.
Also they are adding rts elements … I hope Tim was joking about that.
I headed back to the hotel after that to have a rest I wanted to catch acquisitions inc the live d&d unfortunately it filled up an hour before the thing started. I’ll catch it on twitch instead that’ll give me a chance to grab some food beforehand rather than spend a hungry hour plus queuing.
I grabbed a sandwich and then watched the live D&D on twitch they had Jerry, Mike, Scott Kurtz, and Morgan Webb initially then Patrick Rothfuss made a surprise appearance. They were attacking some dragons and they had some lovely props a diorama of the dragon castle and a model of their steampunk airship crewed by beer keg robots (that Rothfuss’ character turned up on repelled down onto the dragon and attacked unfortunately abandoning the airship with anti dragon weapons). It was a funny session with some awesome role playing like using the body of cultists as cover for a fireball coming from one of their own party. Much fighting was done then they flew off in their airship and battled dragons in the sky. They ended on a cliff hanger with Omen/Jerry’s sister getting nearly killed by Binwin/Scott as they arrived at Baldurs Gate with a mere 58 seconds to spare. It was pretty epic :)
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