[Obsidian Entertainment] Под беззвёздными небесами. Глава пятая: Продавая мечту

“We said, ‘How are we going to make this classic-style model?’” Dimitri Berman, lead character artist, remembered asking himself. “We decided to prototype it quickly to see if this was even going to work. We put together a background that was functional way before the Kickstarter, just to make sure we could do it before we launched the campaign. We wanted to be able to say, ‘We're not BS-ing anybody, we just need a little bit of help.’”

“They put together a little demo of a pre-rendered image and a character walking behind part of the image. It was a little robot character,” Brennecke recalled. “I think it was one of Unity's little characters that they ship Unity with.”

“A couple of days later, we had dynamic lighting in the scene,” he continued. “The little robot man had a torch. There was a point light in the scene. The point light was illuminating the scene, and that was blowing my mind. I was like, 'Okay, I think we've got something here.' I felt pretty confident in that direction.”

“It was pretty early on, so we had to figure out a lot of the tech. It was pretty fast and furious, to be honest,” said Bobby Null, lead area designer. “It was one of those things that a lot of times happens when you're a small team. There were a lot of things to figure out, and we were learning pretty fast, refining as we went.”

“It was seen as the quickest way and the cheapest way, given that we would not have an engineering team to support us with the internal software and editor,” said Rob Nesler, the studio’s art director, of the decision to build Project Eternity in Unity as opposed to other engines such as Unreal. “Unity was the choice, and Maya and Unity are pretty well-suited to each other.”

“We had to build some scripts for Maya and render out the scenes, integrate them into Unity. That's when we did that initial experimentation and research,” Edwards explained. “The first thing we had to do was to take the output of Maya and make it work in Unity with 3D characters, and have them integrated so that you'd have proper occlusion, and they could cast shadows onto the world.”

“Artists were more involved in doing what in previous games you'd need a programmer to do because Unity exposed all these things to them, and had a really nice user interface,” said Tim Cain. “There were a lot more things going from [the team] directly into the game without needing a lot of programming intervention. That was new and exciting to watch.”

“The real advantage of rendering in Maya is it's a complete package that produces high-quality renders,” Edwards said. “The artists are limited by the number of polygons they can use to an extent, but not nearly as much as in a real-time 3D game.”

“The environment artist never has to think about how the game will perform,” Brennecke added. “They can go hog-wild on those and make them look perfect, and they don't have to worry or go back to it for performance or real-time rendering reasons. It's also nice because when making our areas, we can do whatever. We can mash stuff together. As long as it looks good from our camera angle, that's fine for us.”

“Ultimately there was a limit to geometry,” Nesler clarified. “We crossed it several times. We'd put too much geometry into Maya and create a monstrous file that was difficult to work in and would take forever to render, so we did have to learn ways of optimizing those things, using the layer system effective to develop art.”

“Once we realized we could have simple, 3D characters running around on pre-rendered backgrounds and interacting with a 2D scene, and being integrated without really any issues, we knew, ‘Okay, we can do this. We can make a real game with this,’” Berman added.

“We needed to do an image, something that would capture the imaginations of the people we wanted to deliver this game to,” said Hector Espinoza.

“It was a guide for [crowdfunding backers], but also for us,” Berman added. “It was like, ‘This is our target. We can do this, and we can make a whole game derived from this scene, and here it is.’”

“We almost had a full area concepted, and when we started building it out, we said, 'Let's just get one screenshot done. If we try to build out this entire area it's going to take us forever, and we really need to have something to show during the crowdfunding campaign.’”

“I think the drawing I made was of a much larger place, and the decision was to just focus on the entrance,” Nesler said.

“That was crucial to letting people know the level of detail and realism we were striving for in our environments: rocks and things that looked weathered, trees that were growing and had the right size leaves, grass high enough that enemies could be concealed in it, but not too thick that it looks fake and cartoonish,” Nesler continued.

“There were a couple of things that I wanted to do with this exterior environment from a high-level perspective, one of them literally being perspective,” he said.

“We wanted to recreate what we had done in the past with a lot of detail, and at the same time, make it fresh and new using the tools and advancements from the 3D software we had,” Espinoza recalled.

“We made a change early on that some people still find controversial, which was the internal angle of all scenes in Pillars of Eternity is about seven degrees lower than it was in the Infinity Engine games, and the exterior camera is fifteen degrees lower,” he said.

“For example, if you look at the camera used in Fallout 1 and 2, it's actually a fairly low camera,” explained Sawyer. “You can see the characters in a pretty good amount of detail compared to something like Baldur’s Gate. When you look at certain buildings in Fallout 1 and 2, you can see a lot more detail of what goes into the side of that building because the camera angle's so low.”

“One thing we really wanted to show off was those two large statues on either side of the cave entrance, those big marble statues,” added Brennecke, speaking to the scene being constructed for Kickstarter backers. “That was to showcase that we were using a lower camera angle. We knew those statues would show really well at that angle.”

“You don't want a jarring transition from the exterior [camera angle] to the interior because the interior had a shallower angle, which allowed for a better gameplay experience. That's what we were trying to fine-tune: What camera angle would work best for both situations so that transitions wouldn't be too jarring,” Espinoza explained.

“We iterated on that back and forth until we hit on something that felt like, ‘This is a good gameplay space, and it also is aesthetically very striking,’” continued Sawyer. “When you went inside, the camera angle did change to reflect that it was more cramped, because interiors are always, by their nature, more cramped.”

“Visually, you misremember what those games look like,” said Tim Cain. “If you go back and play those games, they're much jankier and low-res. In Eternity, you can zoom in on your characters and see their hairstyles. It's much more immersive than those older games were. It was familiar to people who had played Infinity Engine games, but anybody who hadn't played those games, it still appealed to them because the UI was modern, the graphics were modern, the take on the classes were modern.”

“There's a lot of really cool structural elements that go into those that we could show off. And, frankly, the area art being beautiful is one of the big appeals of this style of game. I said, ‘If we're going to put all this effort into building these life-and-death, death-and-life sculptures, I want people to be actually able to see them, and feel that they're on a grand scale.’”

“We spent probably two months on that. I sat the leads down and said, 'Hey, guys, this isn't turning out like the IE games at all,’” Brennecke recalled.

“I said, 'If you look at the interior screenshots of Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2, there's no geometry on the front-facing walls at all. It’s just black,’” Brennecke said.

“Once our artists made that, we all evaluated it and it looked like something that could be in Baldur’s Gate. I think we were all pretty happy with that approach,” Brennecke continued.

“The difference with Icewind Dale and even with Pillars was that everything was pre-rendered, so we had a lot more freedom to make something that was really detailed and intricate,” explained Espinoza. “In Dungeon Siege III, we were limited by the real-time, 3D aspect of it. We had to be really good about asset management, area densities, textures sizes, things like that that are very restrictive.”

“The largest reason was for character customization, and knowing from the hell the IE devs had to go through, like on Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2,” Brennecke explained. “Three-dimensional characters offer a lot more flexibility with what you can do in terms of, you can equip different helmets, different heads, hairstyles, all the armor can swap in and out if you want to make hundreds of different armor sets and weapons and [show them] with high fidelity.”

“To place items, we needed to output little waypoints, points in 3D space that we could snap to in order to easily blend things into a 3D world,” Edwards explained.

“What we needed to do was use a similar approach to what we'd done in some other games, which was deferred rendering,” he said.

“A depth pass is the most impressive, because that's what gave the engine an idea of where things lay in the world: where rocks are, where water intersects, what lighting being cast would interact with,” explained Espinoza. “These were all things that artists had to wrap our heads around. At the same time, the material that was specific to the rendering engine we were using, mental ray, that would allow us to do that. Trying to figure all that out and fine-tune it was challenging. Over a few months, we had to figure out how to do it all in Maya. There was a lot of research, a lot of cramming of information, to get the best results.”

“It's almost a completely different domain of art,” Brennecke added. “All the stuff we're doing is really, really high quality. Some of our scenes have fifty million polygons in them, just lots of geometry, tons of high-res textures.”

“A lot of our scenes had problems early on where we had a city or a town that would take three or four days to render,” Brennecke admitted. “The iteration time on that is just awful and not really acceptable, so we had to figure out how to get render times down to something more manageable, hopefully under a day. That was one of the big challenges we had with working with pre-rendered backgrounds.”

“I don't like names that feel overwrought. I think it's good when a name evokes something in the mind of the person hearing it, but I think it's easy to go too far with a title and wind up with something silly and overdone. I sent out a list of criteria to the team. I said, ‘Here are some rules. There can be no colons or dashes in this title. This is going to be a title without a subtitle. You can't use any of these words: shadows, black, storm, vengeance’--think whatever bullshit cliché words go into titles.”

“We went through a few meetings where we discussed all the names,” Brennecke remembered. He didn’t want to see 'dark' or 'darkness' in the name, or any '-ing' [words].' So, no ‘reckoning’ or any of that stuff. He also didn't want to have a colon in the name.

“We didn't want to change the name completely from Project Eternity,” Brennecke explained. “I think Kaz might have come up with 'Pillars of Eternity.'”

“We were trying to nail down a name, and it was Something-Something of Eternity,” Kaz said.

“'Pillars' just happened to be in it. I guess in my mind, that title painted a very mysterious picture of old ruins, which I felt would fit our RPG setting,” Kaz said.

“I don't know that Kaz was thinking of adra pillars at the time, but that's what I was thinking of,” Sawyer recalled. “I decided, with the lead team, on Pillars of Eternity. It had PE, for Project Eternity, and it tied to the adra pillars, which were central to how reincarnation worked in the world, so I thought it was a really good fit.”