Filed: Community, Games, PlatinumGames, Vanquish

Hello everyone. Thank you all for reading the blog here. My name is Takeo Kido, and I was in charge of the special effects for Vanquish.

Many of you may be wondering what I mean by effects. Simply put, effects can be something in-game that we render to represent explosions, crashes, fragments, smoke, fire, sparks, jets, lighting, bullets, shell casings, missiles, beams, etc. Basically think of something like that, and you are probably thinking about effects.

So now on to the effects in Vanquish.

At the beginning of the project, the director of Vanquish, professing his absolute hatred for crawling along slowly in games, declared, “We aren’t going to let the player get away with hanging out in cover as long as he likes. We are going to force them forwards.” He added, “The enemies are robots. When you kill them, they blow up. We are going to put as many of them on-screen as we possibly can, especially the grunts.” Those words made me feel like we were going to make a game, that graphically-speaking, would be far flashier than the normal human versus human shooters on the market.

We wanted to have maximum amplitude, so when the bullets are flying everywhere, you’d want to say, “Somebody save me!” Explosions would be booming around you, and shrapnel would be flying everywhere. Alright. Let’s just keep it simple and hit them over the head with volume. Let’s make that the calling card for Vanquish’s special effects. At the risk of causing a misunderstanding, we were going with quantity over quality because in the end quantity would be quality. Of course, if we just went simply with quantity the graphics of the game would suffer, and that would mean abject failure, so we had to aim for a baseline quality level and then open the valves.

I figured that it would make things a bit hard on us, but I’d make due. Once the direction we were going to take was decided, actually doing the work would be the easy part, because any time you’d find yourself against a wall, you could just chose the path of more volume.

However, if I just turned off my brain and increased the number of effects carelessly, the graphics and processing would both take a hit and it wouldn’t let us make the kind of action-heavy game that we were after. It would be up to the programmers and designers in charge to show their skill/combined efforts in figuring out how to either make really expressive effects that were ‘cheap’ to compute, or how to get the most out of the processing budget by making scenes as cool as possible.

As a result of all this scheming and planning, we were able to put really substantial effects into Vanquish. It appears that there is tons going on, both small and large, and in reality, there is a ton going on. Things are flying all over the place.

I’m probably the only one interested in this, but I think the shrapnel in Vanquish is really good. The huge slabs of concrete are nice, but I can’t get enough of the small, pulverized shrapnel flying all over the place or the dirty that is floating through the air.

Even when I am watching a movie, I will say, “That’s some nice debris.” Of course, those around me will say, “I have no idea why you are talking about debris.” But I’m living my job, so I see nothing wrong with it!

So there is a glimpse into how we created Vanquish. If you are interested, definitely give it a play, and get wrapped up into the craziness of everything happening around you. If you get used to Vanquish, other shooters are going to seem downright peaceful in comparison. And of course, when you see all of the little individual sparks, if you could think about our work as effects designers, even if only in your imagination, we would be incredibly happy.

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Tagged: Effects Design, PlatinumGames, PS3, SEGA, Shinji Mikami, Shrapnel, Special Effects, Stuff Blowing Up, Takeo Kido, Vanquish, Xbox 360