Brink Q&A

(badman) #21

You’re misreading Richard’s report slightly. Paul was concerned with it looking good at E3 as people wouldn’t actually get to play the game themselves, but rather watch a real time demonstration on a screen.

(tokamak) #22

He added that the he didn’t have the experience to make it look smooth on the added timing challenge. Just like he entered some cheats to display Quake Wars, without it he couldn’t show as much as he wanted to show.

It still amazes me that you guys got so much control over the game that you can tweak the ‘smoothness’ of the smart button on the go. Sounds very promising.

(Bezzy) #23

[QUOTE=Rahdo;462968]
So I hope that gives you guys a bit of an idea of how we’re approaching things. Let me tell you, the guy in charge of all our movement stuff (Aubrey, aka Bezzy) is actually a real life parkour practitioner and is very much invested in supporting the “easy to pick up, hard to master” approach to kinesthetic design, so I think you’ll be happy with how things turn out in this regard. Knock on wood…[/QUOTE]

I’m equally scared of Hessel (who, incidentally, is holding half my surname hostage), but I’m guessing I should just clarify in the hopes of full disclosure: Although I was an active free-runner for a couple of years, in the last 3 or 4, I’ve done very little.

Note, I can’t tell you anything about the game itself, but I can probably give you a bit of perspective on the approach to its design.

The experience of doing parkour has helped make me more mindful of how to address the movement systems in the game, but ultimately, my first passion is game feel.

Any techniques and understanding of human motion I’ve picked up doing parkour are, to some extent, slightly irrelevant when approached with a videogame adaptation. When freerunning in real life, I have hundreds of degrees of articulation. Feedback comes from the five senses and proprioception (intuitive understanding of your limbs’ relative orientation). Situational awareness is maxed out. Compare that to a typical computer game: Your interface is boiled down to a few axes and a few buttons, and feedback is in the form of a blinkered camera and some sound. The two just don’t match up at all, sensorally speaking.

To confirm this point, I did a few tests in my spare time to see what first person parkour really looked like. I strapped a camera to my head (looked like one of the Borg) and threw myself around my parent’s garden. In numerous cases, I practiced falling rolls and break falls. Now, during those moves, I felt completely in control: I knew where I was, where I was facing, and which way was up, thanks to proprioception. The footage, however, was incredibly disorienting, like a mid nineties youth oriented TV show shot with a shakey-cam.

If I don’t feel disoriented when actually doing vaults, rolls, tumbles etc. but the camera footage IS dizzying, that implies that using raw head movement to imply ninjary movement is misleading at best, and disruptive at worst. It represents nothing more than the end-artifacts of movement. It doesn’t consider intent. It doesn’t consider the rest of your body’s articulation. It certainly doesn’t consider usability. It disrupts your 1:1 control over the camera*. It definitely does not capture the feel.

What the footage highlighted for me is that there’s a difference between creating a faximilie of parkour and the feel of parkour. I’ve always said that quake 3’s movement is more in line with the spirit of parkour than most parkour games are: strafe jumping, plasma-climbs and rocket jumps open up a palette of expression through kinetics, allowing poetry in motion. When you nail a tricky set of jumps in quake 3, you’ll absolutely appreciate what it feels like to flow in parkour (mentally, at least).

Contrarywise, some excellently animated parkour-inspired games don’t maintain much of a sense of control, trapping you in locked animation windows (we call this “animation soup” here), and very often come hand in hand with a change of controls (locked camera, limited verbs), which can feel uncomfortable and disruptive if the rest of the game gives you indiscrete control of your avatar.

So there’s these two conflicting approaches: That which looks like parkour (often very rigid motion), and that which feels like parkour (very free “maleable” physics, but unconvincing looks). A narrow intersection of the two exists, and it’s a space we are aiming for. We won’t compromise useability and consistent sense of control for the superficial hallmarks of parkour. We’re also not treating it like a system unto itself, but that’s a whole other thing I can’t talk about.

*Which, incidentally, I reckon is and extra part of the reason for motionsickness in games - implying someone has full camera control, and then taking it away momentarily, ontop of presenting them with an undulating scene while their body and sense of balance remains static.

(dommafia) #24

This thread is full of win. Thanks for the insight @ bezzy & rahdo!

(tokamak) #25

Awesome.

The camera/vs real sense is something I can really recgonise whenever I watch any movies I made while snowboarding, it’s just totally different then what I thought it would be.

(SockDog) #26

Cheers Bezzy, it raises some very interesting thoughts I’d never really considered before.

I have to agree with the Q3 though, I used to play with some heavy defrag gamers and despite the lack of skills on my part watching them move around a level was spookily similar to the awe you feel when watching a parkour video.

This feedback and commentary is what makes SD great, you make not only stonking games but the insights and communication are priceless, please never ever give that up.

(DarkangelUK) #27

Great post Bezzy, that gives me huge confidence that I’m going to love the movement style in Brink. Is it not 2010 yet?! :frowning:

(tokamak) #28

It makes you wish humans could hibernate doesn’t it?

(shirosae) #29

[QUOTE=Bezzy;192197]What the footage highlighted for me is that there’s a difference between creating a faximilie of parkour and the feel of parkour. I’ve always said that quake 3’s movement is more in line with the spirit of parkour than most parkour games are: strafe jumping, plasma-climbs and rocket jumps open up a palette of expression through kinetics, allowing poetry in motion. When you nail a tricky set of jumps in quake 3, you’ll absolutely appreciate what it feels like to flow in parkour (mentally, at least).

Contrarywise, some excellently animated parkour-inspired games don’t maintain much of a sense of control, trapping you in locked animation windows (we call this “animation soup” here), and very often come hand in hand with a change of controls (locked camera, limited verbs), which can feel uncomfortable and disruptive if the rest of the game gives you indiscrete control of your avatar.[/QUOTE]

It’s great to hear this, because you so obviously get it. I’m quite optimistic about the smart button now.

It’s a shame that the previews all seem to focus on the things that this smart system allegedly takes away (need for timing, awareness of surroundings etc), when it seems to be the case that your goal is to streamline the additional awesome that trickjumping provides. You’re not taking away movement skills (so it seems), you’re adding a dedicated trickjumping system instead of relying on engine quirks to provide for physics-bending movement.

Can I make a suggestion? Do more of these posts. This isn’t a demand for a wall of text from Bezzy every day of course, but every so often just have someone tell us what it is that you’re trying to do. No need for specific game details; the stuff above is incredibly interesting and encouraging.

(SockDog) #30

Feel free to post in the Collectors Edition thread. I’d REALLY love to get a printed developer’s diary with a Collector’s Edition of the game. These sorts of insights into the development process (especially when it’s a game/developer you’re invested in already) are golden.

Although, that said I also want lots of stuff in the forums too. :slight_smile:

(Bongoboy) #31

Well, it’s early days yet. We only announced the game title on May 29th, we’ve had an awful lot of information to put over to an awful lot of people, so it’s only natural that not everything is entirely clear quite yet. Rest assured, we’re not <b>not</b> going to tell you about stuff that’s cool in Brink, or correct any inevitable misapprehensions and misunderstandings. To be honest, considering the ridiculous deadline pressures and turnaround times those journalists were under (and how much we hit them with, how suddenly), I’m pleasantly surprised how much they managed to retain and pass on. This is an ongoing process: don’t worry, we’ll be boring the trousers off you all with ever more excrutiatingly detailed explanations and descriptions of Brink’s workings, flavours and aromas as time goes by.

And crikey, I nearly forgot, many and much thanks to everyone who’s expressing an interest so early on in proceedings. There’s much, much more to come : )

(tokamak) #32

It does sound a bit fanboyish but hey, that’s what I am, I’ve never been this interested in such a specific developer, it feels like waiting for your favourite band to release their next album, you know it’s going to be good or at least in the direction you want your music to be, hopefully a few surprises here and there, and you just can’t wait for it to be released.

Another big thing that makes the whole thing interesting is the level of individuality SD has. From Blizzard you can always expect pure quality, but because they’re so big, you won’t have to count on anything quirky or extremely innovative.

(Bongoboy) #33

*is raging, blazing Blizzard fanboy.

Dude, when you invent the genre…well, I dunno. I guess I’m permanently in the mood to cut Blizzard as much slack as anybody requires, given that they deliver such stunningly polished bar-raising/setting games.

And as for SD being individualistic, well, I dunno about anyone else, but I’m not.

(m o n s t r o) #34

[QUOTE=Bongoboy;192368]*is raging, blazing Blizzard fanboy.

Dude, when you invent the genre…well, I dunno. I guess I’m permanently in the mood to cut Blizzard as much slack as anybody requires, given that they deliver such stunningly polished bar-raising/setting games.

And as for SD being individualistic, well, I dunno about anyone else, but I’m not.[/QUOTE]

What genre?

(Bezzy) #35

Didn’t Tower Defense originate in StarCraft?

(m o n s t r o) #36

No. Rampart was the first TD game.

(Bezzy) #37

Ahh, good call.

(Floris) #38

I would like to know what SD will do the accommodate the “real” competitive players, with that I mean league play, not general MP. SD is building this entire story driven system around the game, but competitive players want to be able to just hop in a private server with two teams and play a clanwar on equal grounds. You guys did a great job with your official competition mod for ET:QW and that clearly shows SD’s ability to do this.

(Nail) #39

Why does every game have to be a 4 v 4 ego shooter ? A very small percentage of gamers play in leagues, as far as ET:QW goes, no one uses SD’s comp mod, they use Hannes ProMod.

(Floris) #40

You misunderstand what I want, which is exactly the reason why I mentioned SD’s competition mod and not the ET:QW Pro Mod from hannes. I don’t want to play a different game in competition, neither do I care what format the game is played in, I just want the options to make clan matches fair and balanced and easy to get into, that’s all. I don’t think that’s too much to ask for.