팟캐스트 5: 다크니스 II 의 시각적 스타일

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ELIZABETH: Welcome to the podcast series for The Darkness II. I'm Elizabeth Tobey, and for the fifth episode of our show I'll be talking with Sheldon, Cliff, and Ron about the distinctive visual style in the game, and how the team struck upon that look and feel.

SHELDON: I'm Sheldon Carter and I'm the Project Director

CLIFF: I'm Cliff Daigle, the Senior Lighting Artist

RON: Ron Davey, Lead Environment Artist

ELIZABETH: While a podcast isn't the most natural place to discuss visuals in depth, we're going to try this time. So how about we start with an overview of how you would describe the visual style of The Darkness II?

SHELDON: I'll open. Okay, we call the visual style Graphic Noir and the reason why we do that, I guess when we all started the project and we got all these Darkness compendiums, and we're flipping through the comic books and you start noticing, I mean you look at the images, and there's a high contrast of lighting; the colors are kind of popping at you. Obviously when you look at The Darkness comic there's a lot of red from the blood and gore and obviously the deep blacks. It's also obviously hand-drawn so you have this hatching on all the panels, so we just tried to emulate that and at least that was the starting; that was kind of the impetus of the idea. I don't know if you guys have something to add to that?

RON: I come from an illustration background so I was sick and tired of doing realistic-looking games for the past nine and a half years. So yeah, what Sheldon said about basically piggy-backing The Darkness look--I know that me and Matt Tremblay the Art Director also looked at artists like Tim Bradstreet, Alex MaLeev who did Daredevil who had still a really gritty kind of look but still had a lot of color. A lot of video games today seem to be, if they're gritty or real, they have to be colorless; a lot of browns a lot of neutrals. Where these guys were doing a great job at bringing a nice palette into these comics with a nice hand-drawn, gritty look and as Sheldon said, we tried to emulate--anywhere from an illustrated, hand painted look because I just think we were all tired of the realistic, everything's bumpy and kind of shiny look.

SHELDON: Yeah, you finally have an opportunity; I mean you know this is the game—right? Where you can do that. It's not something that can necessarily fit with every game or every shooter, but the source material kind of asks for it to some degree.

ELIZABETH: The color palette is actually something that when the first screen shots came out some people commented on. A lot of people really liked it; a lot of people were very thrown by it. One of the comments I did see was that it felt bright. I think that color, brightness and happiness sometimes go together, but this game is dark and it's fucked up and it's gory. How do you bring together so many colors and still bring that theme and that tone?

RON: This one's for Cliff.

CLIFF: I think it's colorful but it's not cheerful; it's more visceral was what we're going for, more intense and vibrant. One problem with a game that takes place mostly in the dark is that there's the danger that everything will just be blue; which is something we constantly fight against. And while it's somewhat attractive to make the game look like the Underworld movies which look really cool, it gets boring and fatiguing for long times. We were working with Matt a lot to try and find ways to make the game still look dark, still seem it's at night time, but have as much---when there is color to have it super-saturated and the color's very obvious. That's kind of what we're going for and that tied in nicely with the illustrated look; because that's how the comics work as well. The comics—if you look at the color palettes—have greens and blues, but then have very intense pops of color. So in creating environmental art and also in the lighting, we tried to do that.

ELIZABETH: Taking a comic look and turning it into moving images, and especially stuff that needs so many visual effects and dynamic lighting to it is a challenge. How did you guys tackle that?

RON: A lot of experimenting. We tried a lot of different things. We tried a procedural way of doing it…

SHELDON: Which looked terrible.

RON: Which looked terrible. It looked good on some things, but large surfaces it didn't look good. So, what it came down to was, we were hand-painting right onto the textures a lot of the illustrative look you see. You see a lot of the hatch. Yeah, it's a lot of experimenting; because we were really worried about two things: one, that it would look cel-shaded and people going, "Oh, it's Borderlands," which some people have mentioned, but I think it certainly differentiates itself from it quite a bit. But yeah, it was a lot of experimenting. We have a couple of great texture artists on our team that have been slogging the majority of the art direction; like the applying it to the textures so we've been lucky in that case but yeah, experimentation.

SHELDON: Yeah, it was a long process. I mean, we knew we wanted to do it pretty early and then it was just like month after month of trying to get something right. That's definitely like getting this art direction to where we were happy with it, where it is now. That took us the longest of anything else on the game; I don't think there's anything else. We had the gameplay, we knew what we wanted to do gameplay-wise pretty early and we knew what we were going to do with the story. We knew a lot of the stuff much earlier than the art and how it was going to look.

RON: I bet you it was a year-and-a-half or something like that.

SHELDON: Yep.

RON: Because a lot of things looked great on still images, we could paint over all we want, but as soon as we'd apply it, it was like "Good God that looks like shit." And we just, reiterated and we finally got it; it was the tech.

SHELDON: It's just funny now, because our Gold Standard were like all these still images and I still feel that now the game looks way better in motion than it looks in stills.

RON: It's definitely not cel-shaded.

ELIZABETH: So technically, what goes into creating this kind of look? You can get a little nitty-gritty here.

CLIFF: That's Ron again.

RON: Technically, there's a shader we use for the outline of the objects, the characters; that is really all the technical aspect of it. The rest of it is really blood and sweat, kind of like this hand-painting on diffuse textures on the actual color texture and testing it out; saving it out and checking in game and bringing it back out and just revising it, until it looks good.

SHELDON: What did you guys do with the ramp? Remember the ramp on the characters, how did that work?

RON: The gradient ramp. That's again part of the shader. There's a gradient ramp texture that we use that kind of gives it that comic-y kind of look with the hard graphic shadows instead of the smooth gradient folds that you see in every other game. We actually were trying not to make it look super-realistic, but yet…

SHELDON: Yeah, you opened up saying it's hard to talk about visuals without---it's like imagine a character and now it's imagine a tech. It's hard.

RON: But yeah, there was actually more just basic 2-D traditional skill involved more than I would say even technical, because we came to a point where what we wanted wasn't able to be produced by a programmer, really when it comes down to it. Which was nice, to know that it's a lot of traditional aspects of these textures are in the look of the game; you know, composition, lighting, the illustrative process of the color and cross-hatching. I mean we're using cross-hatching in a game, which I don't think I've ever seen.

SHELDON: And lighting. You just put some lights in and then flip a switch…

CLIFF: Yeah, that's what I do. I finished lighting the game months ago. I mostly just surf and walk around.

[LAUGHTER]

SHELDON: Yeah I see you on your iPhone, you're just talking to those banks.

CLIFF: Yeah, I'm busy when I'm doing nothing, which is beautiful. A perfect job. Yeah technically, for the lighting, the biggest challenge with the lighting is lighting a game that basically takes place largely in the dark and your character wants to be in the dark because that's when you have all your powers and stuff. In general, we had to make it seem dark but you have to be able to see everything; and not just see everything, but also still look interesting and compelling.

We kind of lit the levels twice because we'd have to light the levels so that the general ambience with all the lights shot out or destroyed looked good and was fun to play in; but then re-light it on top of that so all the other lights looked nice and dramatic, and colorful and stuff too. That's a bit of a challenge and still continues to be, I guess. Massaging that, I guess, because playing in the dark wasn't really that much fun so we had to make sure that it was beautiful and was fun so that you wanted to be in the dark, in the game. I don't know about the technical challenge, I guess it's just more a procedural challenge and the task we took on.

Technically we used Autodesk Beast middleware with our engine, so we get a nice, global illumination look, so we had lots of bounce light and interesting stuff like that going on, because you have to be able to kill as many lights as possible in the game. Then we have an indexed lighting system that allows our lightmap lights to be shot out, which is pretty cool too. What other fancy tech do we have?

RON: Spherical harmonics?

CLIFF: And yes, we have this spherical harmonics.

SHELDON: That just sounds awesome.

CLIFF: Yeah, it does sound awesome.

SHELDON: We've got spherical harmonics, what do you got?

CLIFF: That sounds like an audio thing, not a visual thing. But yeah, that allows us to have really nice real-time lighting on our characters without spending the horsepower to have a million real-time lights in the scene.

ELIZABETH: Particularly with a game where light and dark has such significance, how does that play into your job or do you really just think about it in terms of "This is a game that's mostly in the dark and I need it to be interesting"?

CLIFF: Well that's kind of where it starts. The designers have the challenge of trying to make that super interesting, but then that also fights with the artistic goals of the game, as well because it's not like I can go in and just light a level and make it look pretty and that's it. It has to be---Design will want certain places light, certain places dark and certain things in play a certain way. So to give them what they want, then we have to--between environment and lighting--figure out clever ways for that to happen so that it seems natural and looks nice, but plays the way they want. I guess that's probably where I was affected the most by the light vs. dark thing; aside from just making things pretty.

ELIZABETH: The look and the feel of this game are drastically different from the first in the series. What did you take from that game, in terms of look and what did you grow from, scrap—good, bad, ugly? What were the lessons you took from that game and then tried to apply it to this game?

SHELDON: Ooh, that's a tough question. Looking at that first game, what was kind of neat about it, I guess was the texture quality in The Darkness 1 was pretty amazing but I think for us to do….you know I have no fucking idea how I got started on this question…

[Laughter]

It was just a total departure, really. We didn't hold up the first game… we didn't feel like we had to emulate the first game artistically. We felt like it's a great game, we love the way it looks, that just wasn't the way we wanted to go.

RON: And because it was what….three, three and a half to four years ago the game came out, it was almost impossible to not make it look better. Not to disrespect the first game, obviously just because tech has advanced so far. We could have done the exact same thing and it still would have looked better. And yeah, we wanted to put our stamp on it and we finally had a chance to do something and it was like, "Hell, let's try this" and 2K dug the look, and we went with that. The first game was awesome, looked great and had a great mood to it which a lot of people like—including a lot of us here—but we just decided we had a chance and why copy something when we don't need to?

SHELDON: We didn't feel that was the signature element of the game; the look wasn't the signature necessarily. Even some of the character models, when I think about some of that stuff, and I feel if we would have tried to be a hyper-real as that game for just the amount of exposition we have--I think that even that game comes close, I'm not saying it goes over, but Uncanny Valley. The way we went with our art style and our animation quality, I think you've got something that feels a lot better. You don't have that same feeling.

CLIFF: Yeah, I think they kind of went with on the first game, "We're adapting a comic, but as if it was a movie" sort of. We kind of went more the other way. We looked at the comic source material and wanted the game to feel a little more comic-y.

SHELDON: That's genius, Cliff.

RON: That's exactly it.

CLIFF: It's what I'm here for: Pithy nuggets of wisdom.

ELIZABETH: I will let you guys go soon, but before you do I want you guys to talk about some of the things that you're the most proud of in your work and also the what you found the most difficult. It could be a small thing or an over-arching problem…

SHELDON: Difficult's easy.

[LAUGHTER]

CLIFF: Ron and I share an office. The most difficult thing was that and I'm most proud of not killing Ron, heh.

RON: I'm most proud of the look of the game. Like I said earlier, I'm an illustrator at heart so to have a game that actually looks like it's been illustrated, that it's been hand-painted, that it hasn't been just somebody taking a snapshot and "there's our sidewalk texture" kind of thing is awesome. There's sometimes where I'm playing the game and I stop and I'm like "that looks like an illustration." It's f-n beautiful kind of thing. I get stoked when I see the game now. In the early stages it was hard to visualize because a lot of it still had that realistic look and there wasn't a lot in. But now that we're getting near the end it's pretty cool and that's what I'm most proud of. And I had a part in defining the look.

The hardest part was finding that look was the hardest part and getting over the technical humps in how do we do it, but yet, not make it look like a couple of the other big games out there; in particular Borderlands. I'm confident that we've done that and even though it was the most difficult part, it wasn't all that difficult. I mean the end result was pretty awesome so it was worth going through it.

CLIFF: Yeah, definitely, the look of the game is what I'm the most proud of. I mean we're in the art department so that's our job to make things look sexy, so I think that we've delivered on that, but it was a pain in the ass for sure. It really took a long time and it was really painful. Lots of times it didn't look like it was going to come together at all and we were going to have to just abandon it and just do something more pedestrian and just kind of do the last game plus one. Nobody wanted to do that. We really wanted to do something different.

For me personally the most difficult thing was what I was talking about before in the lighting: Just trying to light dark, ambient-lit spaces in an interesting and compelling way. There was a lot of back and forth and different things we tried; messing around. It eventually came together and I'm pretty happy with the way things look now.

SHELDON: I don't have really too much to add, I mean, I guess the same thing. The struggle, or the thing I'm most proud of, was we pushed through it. Like, it was month after month of all kinds of doubt of whether it would come along from all angles. I think everybody on the team at one point or another had that kind of feeling, like this isn't going to happen.

RON: I, for sure.

SHELDON: Yeah, right. I can dig up your emails…

CLIFF: Ron was steadfast.

SHELDON: I remember when the email was just, all-caps: "REALLY? WE'RE STILL DOING THIS?" Ron was a believer for sure. That's what's so awesome. It was awesome that we kind of had it in our heads and we just kept going and yeah, that's pretty exciting. What was I the most proud of? Same thing. That's what I'm the most proud of.

ELIZABETH: Is there anything about the game in particular, any specific aspect of it visually that you want to talk about that you think I've missed? I know that's hard. Think about your entire game and then pick something specific.

SHELDON: The gameplay is pretty violent. We gradually ratcheted up what you could do to people in the game with the Demon Arms. That, visually, was neat because our art style allows us to do that. I think the more hyper-real you get the more that stuff goes into anatomy and sickens you, but in the context of this beautiful graphic novel that you're playing through, you can rip apart guys and it could still be a gory beauty.

ELIZABETH: Yeah, I guess that's a good question in terms of making it believable, but artistic. How do you do things like tear a man in two, or rip off his head, or to decide what eviscerating an enemy is like?

CLIFF: I think it's like a good horror movie. There's disturbing violence and then there's sort fun, over-the-top violence and I think by going a bit crazily over-the-top with it, it's in the vein of a good horror movie or a comic book where you don't really take it too seriously. It's not disturbing.

SHELDON: Right. You can't take it seriously when you…you can get the visceral part of ripping a guy in two, but then the Darkling comes a long and pees on him, right?

CLIFF: So it's almost funny right? The level of violence is kind of a joke; it didn't affect me. Maybe I'm too desensitized or something's wrong with me, but I like horror movies for the same reason. Like torture-porn horror movies I don't like as much because they don't have that sense of fun. Whereas a lot the great ‘80's horror movies like "The Thing" and stuff like that which are way over-the-top are fun to watch. I hope that that's the note we're hitting. I hope that we're not cartoony but in that fun, horror movie over-the-top.

SHELDON: We're not hoping that your…we're not looking it at it like the violence isn't...is intended to enhance the overall experience, not necessarily to be the distraction.

CLIFF: Well it's not exploitative violence or disturbing violence. There's tons of fodder bad guys and you're chewing them up. The same that happens in an action movie or a good horror movie.

SHELDON: When you throw a javelin or, like, a parking meter at a guy, and it hits him through his mouth and it pins him to a building, you kind of laugh.

CLIFF: Especially when you then cut his legs off.

SHELDON: Yeah, exactly. There's a humor there.

CLIFF: Actually, did you see that thing today on "the longer the project the more desensitized you get to the level of violence in it" and yeah, I can see that happening. It's like what's shocking three months ago isn't any more.

ELIZABETH: Thanks for listening to today's podcast. Stay tuned for next time, when we'll explore more about the influences in designing and writing the narrative for the game.