Filed: Community, Games, PlatinumGames, Vanquish

Hi, everyone. I’m Vanquish art director and lead background designer Naoki Katakai. I haven’t worked on a Shinji Mikami directed game since a certain horror game you might have heard of, so this project definitely carried a feeling of nostalgia for me.

Designing Worlds

I’ve been designing backgrounds for games for over 10 years now. That may be a long time to be in the game, but it is still something that I love and it certainly hasn’t gotten old. In fact, I am proud to say that I have an awesome job. But as hardware has advanced, those of us making backgrounds for games have seen our job descriptions change. We’ve arrived at an era where people crave reality, cameras can be moved around freely, and enormous stages are the norm. Simply put, we are pushing towards replicating the real world in the game world. I believe that in the future, what we can accomplish in the real world will be taken for granted as doable in the game world. I also believe in the inverse; that which cannot seemingly be accomplished in the real world will be possible, and even seem real, in the game world. Background design will play a big part in this moving forward, as it is an incredibly important, and thus interesting, job. While I am interested in and find important both replicating the real, as well as creating new realities, I think that as a professional, it is really the latter that keeps me going. Vanquish was a project where I was blessed with creating one of these new realities.

The Space Colony

I’m curious as to what everyone sees in their heads when they hear the idea of a space colony. It seems as if this changes generationally. I’m in the latter half of my 30s, so for me, when I hear the words space colony, the only thing that pops into my head is Gundam. Like one of those things you’d see at Side 3 or Side 6 (Gundam space colony locations). But to be honest, I’m not that up on my Gundam, so I’m worried about screwing up if I try to write too much about things. However, if even I know about the colonies in Gundam, it should show you how much impact they had – human-made colonies in space, situated on the gravitationally stable Lagrangian points between the Earth and the Moon. Just writing that is cool. (A quick aside: I also designed the Vanquish logo. I modeled the Q in the logo around the idea of the Lagrangian points.)

Famed scientists have proposed many different types of colonies, and colonies have taken many shapes, but the day after we decided to base Vanquish on a space colony, I 3D-modeled and presented a cylindrical space colony much like the one that appears in Gundam. (I’m pretty fast when I’m having fun at work.) I think we were really quick to agree on this design because there are so many people on the team that are of “Gundam-age.” I also believe that the cylindrical design is the most exciting type of space colony design you can go for. The visual look of the interior space, and how it expands out, has a very SF-vibe, as the next town or city over could actually be above you. It is an impossible spectacle.

Yet when we got to the point when it came to actually make things, I realized that there really aren’t that many works featuring cylindrical space colonies. How would the people living inside see the world? There wasn’t really anything that I could reference, so my plan was to turn on the imagination and make sure to keep things “colony-like.”

Rolling the Dice

However, when we tried to actually make the colony, we ran across a number of problems. We couldn’t use many of the visual tricks that recent games have implemented. It would expose too much. It’s not a stretch to say that recent games look so good because of the liberal use of post processing on the backgrounds, and optical effects, to make the graphics look better. Games are using tricks to force the human eye into perceiving something as looking real. Furthermore, games going for realism make their distant backgrounds (sky boxes) by either using high resolution photographs of the sky, or by compositing a sky by projecting the “god rays” of sunlight that shoot between the clouds, then finishing it off with the details – shadows and bloom lighting that would be cast by the objects in the scene. Yet, the truth is that you don’t really need to draw that many objects in the sky, so you can reduce the draw load on the hardware and increase the quality of the graphics elsewhere, essentially killing two birds with one stone. This is one of the reasons why you see so many games on this generation of HD hardware that have stages with bright sky boxes.

However, the setting for Vanquish is the interior of a space colony. We weren’t able to use the standard methods for creating a sky! Of course, the colony has an “atmosphere,” so having a sky wouldn’t be outside the realm of possibility; however, we went to all the trouble to make it a colony, so clouding it up with thick atmospheric elements would be getting our priorities backwards. There had to be a better way.

My first idea was of rendering the entire colony in 3D. If I could devise some sort of trick, we would model the whole thing without putting too much strain on production costs. We would cram the whole colony, 6.25 miles (10km) in diameter, with models. Of course, you’d end up with a ridiculous amount of objects and polygons… Which means we would have to customize the engine to draw everything out.

Renovating the Engine

The Vanquish engine was created by making improvements to the existing Bayonetta engine, but to be honest, it ended up being entirely its own beast. We found new approaches for how we had previously handled areas such as lighting, shading, rendering, collision, and model construction. One reason was because we now needed to deal with a vast number of objects. We needed to handle, and process at high speed, large groups of objects used in the backgrounds, such as ones used for the colony itself.

Another reason for the engine rework was because we had to improve our development processes. While this is my first time making a shooter, I envisioned that creating the maps would rely heavily on a process of trial and error. How could we produce levels at low cost? In my experience up until now, the first level that you make never survives that way until the very end, and we work in a wonderful (?) environment where our teams have a crash-and-build style. We may even toss out and rebuild levels from scratch if they aren’t fun to play. It’s pretty legendary.

Due to this, we started by creating an environment that would support these kinds of requests. If we would have taken the currently accepted route for content creation on HD machines, we would not have been able to mass produce the high quality levels we needed for the game. That is why we changed our production environment; however, due to this change, we had to face harsh, new difficulties that this change created in regards to technical issues and art pipelines. We used a collaborative style where multiple artists could access and work on the same level at the same time. We also allowed game planners to design their levels directly. (Note: In traditional Japanese development practices, a game planner (designer) will usually create a level design document, which is then implemented by the level design artists.)

Personally, I love new challenges; however, I feel like I went into full production on this game full of doubts, still wondering if we could really overcome what was in front of us. Thankfully, we had a really talented staff, which made things easier on us. Good job, everyone.

A Dream Job, A Hopeless Idea

As a background design professional, the Vanquish project, especially creating the cylindrical colony, was an especially creative, original, and challenging job that I found very fun. I think there are a few games where a space colony plays host, but I think that the colony in Vanquish is the most “space colony-esque” game in the group. I also think that visually speaking, it is a world that you’ve never quite seen before. I think we accomplished what we set out to present to people, from the pitched battles in the foreground to the giant, expansive colony interior that spreads out behind.

Sometimes I think that it would be awesome if it all actually existed, but realistically, I don’t think there will ever be a way for someone to make a real space colony. It would just cost way too much money. If we had the money and time to make a space colony, it would probably be faster to just terraform someplace. At least, that’s what I felt after making a space colony in 3D. Kinda hopeless when you think about it.

Try the Game

Making a shooter required that I really play, and reference, a variety of TPS and FPS games. If we were going to put a new title into the pantheon of shooters, an especially full pantheon in the West, we couldn’t just put some half-baked product out there. I hope that you all give the game a try. I think you will find the experience of playing Vanquish to be unlike any shooter you have played prior. I really believe there is nothing else with the speedy, fierce battles you will find in Vanquish. You might find things a bit difficult at first, but give it a try. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

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Tagged: Background Design, Gundam, Japanese Game Design, Naoki Katakai, Playstation 3, SEGA, Shinji Mikami, Space Colony, Vanquish, Xbox 360