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The Birth of Boost

August 20th, 2010 by

VANQUISH

Filed: Community, Games, PlatinumGames, Vanquish

Hi. Takeo Kido here again. I was in charge of effects on Vanquish.

For this blog, I thought I would talk a little bit about Boosting in the game.

One of the unique gameplay elements in Vanquish is the main character, Sam, and his ability to boost at high speed across the stage. Our original development name for this feature was simply “sliding.”

During production, it was said that moving across the stage wasn’t fun, and that we needed something both visually appealing, and relevant as a special gameplay element to spice things up. That’s when we came up with the idea…

“Why don’t we modify the big protrusions around the hips like this, then shove some jets out of the back and have him go flying around! That’d be cool. “

“And if we made it so that jets could fly out of multiple directions, it would be a great excuse to have Sam do some really unbelievable actions that would look visually stunning, don’t you think?”

And so it went…

The effects team went to Sam’s modeler, Hattori-san, who did a great job of adding on the little pluses that we were looking for, and the end result is the Boost function you see now. Making games at PlatinumGames is often like this, where the staff start rolling with ideas and don’t stop until they’ve made their way into the game.

Boost may stand out most for its enabling of high speed movement, but it is also integral when Sam is jumping over things, or when he does other, more subtle, quick actions. Moreover, they don’t stand out as much as the jets on his legs, but Sam also has the same jets on his arms, which allow him to put even more force behind his punches. Kind of like a rocket punch where the hand doesn’t go flying off! It looks like something dangerous enough that if he misused the function of the suit, Sam would end up with two dislocated shoulders.


There are tons of these little details in Sam’s ARS suit. If you are into this sort of thing, keep your eyes peeled!

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Shrapnel

August 19th, 2010 by

VANQUISH

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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