Subnautica: A game without guns, combat or killing

How Subnautica Succeeded Without Weapons

Ars Technica: Charlie Cleveland, design director for Subnautica, goes behind the scenes of the game’s development and explains how they crafted an exciting and dangerous experience without allowing the player to fight back. Charlie shows some early prototypes for Subnautica, and describes why they decided to create a game with primarily non-violent gameplay.

War Stories is a great series from Ars in which different game developers discuss what some of their biggest challenges were.

• Paul Neurath: How Thief’s Stealth System Almost Didn’t Work
• Glen Schofield: How Dead Space’s Scariest Scene Almost Killed the Game
• Casey Yano and Anthony Giovannetti: How Slay the Spire’s Original Interface Almost Killed the Game

See also: Other posts tagged ‘games’

Narita Boy

An incredible-looking game from Studio Koba, coming to Kickstarter soon!

You are Narita Boy, a legendary digital hero in an epic quest through simultaneous dimensions. The digital kingdom is under attack and you are called as their last hope of survival. Explore a vast world to find the techno sword, the only effective weapon against the threat.

The aesthetic of the game is inspired by retro pixel adventures (Castlevania, Another World, Double Dragon) with a modern touch (Superbrothers, Sword and Sorcery) and an 80s plot homage (Ready Player One, He-Man, The Last Starfighter), accompanied by the retro synth touch of the old glory days.

See also

• Animated GIF pixel art tutorials by Pedro Medeiros — 256×256 GIF tutorials!
• How Shovel Knight gets nostalgia right — “Some games are all about nostalgia – a reminder of how games used to be. No game nails this sensation quite like Shovel Knight.”
• Inside: surreal psychological cyberpunk nightmares as pixel art — A short film by Mattis Dovier.
• The best Logos from the Commodore Amiga Scene — A collection by Christian Kirchesch.

Tears in the Rain: A Blade Runner fan film made for just $1,500

Tears in the Rain

In a dystopian Los Angeles future, retirement engineer John Kampff hunts down suspected Replicant Andy Smith. As John soon learns, Replicant detection is nearly impossible without specialist equipment.

Christopher Grant Harvey: Making Tears In the Rain has been an arduous five-year journey. I had no idea what I was in for when I set out in 2012. A few years into the project I wanted to give up, I came very close, in fact, I gave up multiple times. I asked myself why this particular film was so important. At every stage, over the five year period, I sat with the project looming large and heavy over my shoulders. I would dedicate whole weekends in pursuit of perfection and wake up on Monday mornings only to be greeted by what I felt to be mediocrity. That said, there was a burning desire to succeed dwelling deep inside that didn’t entirely burn out.

See also

• Slice of Life — Another fan film set in the Blade Runner universe, currently in production.
• Fantastic behind the scenes photographs from the Blade Runner model shop

See also

“Slice Of Life” is an original short Science Fiction film set in the Blade Runner universe.

While I’m not convinced that this will be a succesful a tonal match for Blade Runner, it has certainly nailed that 80s dystopian look. Most interestingly, this film is being made using old-school special effects techniques, like miniatures, matte paintings and rear projections.

For the huge advertising billboards we wanted to use rear projections. In a way because that’s how it was done in the 80’s, but also because if you film something with a camera it’s going to look much better than if it was added digitally. So we needed to design and animate a dozen of different advertisements, and then we project them on the buildings. It can’t get more analogue than that.

The Croatian filmmakers are uploading video production diaries as they go.

(via The Verge)

• Fantastic behind the scenes photographs from the Blade Runner model shop
• Judge Minty — a short film based on a minor character from the 2000AD strip, Judge Dredd.
• Akira fan made live-action trailer

The Best Science Fiction Cinema of the 21st Century (So Far)

Plot Point Productions: Science fiction has the freedom to ponder the big questions in a variety of dramatic contexts, both in our world or a different one. The power of the genre has always been in its capacity for escapism, but also in its promotion of a conversation about who we are and what we want from ourselves and each other.

The first fifteen years of the 21st century have seen that conversation grow and splinter in many fascinating directions. A.I., cloning, conservation and the stewardship of our planet, societal alienation, space travel, love; the best sci-fi films of this century have tackled these themes and ideas while also telling stories that are rousing, unsettling, heartbreaking…and above all, human.

David Braben on the science behind Elite Dangerous

David Braben is one of the most influential computer game programmers of all time thanks to his groundbreaking work with the Elite series in the 80’s. While I haven’t played the new Elite Dangerous yet, I really appreciate the thought that has gone into the designs and the respect for science that is evident.

David Braben interview, part 1 & part 2

See also: Audio design in Elite Dangerous

The Last Bastion

Overwatch Animated Short: “The Last Bastion”

Explore the origin story of Overwatch’s inquisitive transforming robot in our fifth animated short: The Last Bastion!

The fonts of Star Trek

If you’ve ever tried to find the fonts used for a particular Star Trek series or film, you’ll have found that there are thousands of poor imitations on free font sites everywhere. Thanks to Yves Peters at Font Shop, now there’s a guide to the original fonts of Star Trek!

What’s interesting about Star Trek is that it has a number of typical alphabets that are immediately recognisable, and have become an integral part of pop culture. While many fan-made fonts exist based on the logos and title sequences of popular movies and television series, Star Trek is one of the very rare franchises which at one point had officially released fonts. In 1992 Bitstream introduced the Star Trek Font Pack featuring four digital typefaces – Star Trek, the signature face of the original television series; Star Trek Film, used for the credit titles of the Star Trek movies; Star Trek Pi, a collection of Star Trek insignias and Klingon symbols; and Star Trek Bold Extended, the lettering of the name and registration number on the hull of all Starfleet space ships. The Star Trek Font Pack has been discontinued long ago – possibly over licensing issues – yet individual typeface designs are still available under different names. We will run into them in this article, plus some others.

In celebration of the upcoming release of Star Trek Beyond and the 50th anniversary of the franchise, Paramount had a poster created that mirrors Bob Peak’s beautiful artwork for The Motion Picture

See also:

• ITC Serif Gothic: What connects new Star Wars, old Star Wars, and even Star Trek? This typeface
• Designing the end titles for Star Trek Into Darkness
• …and other posts tagged ‘Star Trek’.

TRANSMISSION, on Kickstarter

You find yourself deserted on an unknown planet, with little indication of how you arrived. Armed with your trusty plasma cutter and your ship’s sentient artificial intelligence computer, you must search for a way home. During your journey you will uncover secrets and challenges beyond your imagination, along with a hidden past that this strange planet holds. As you discover this hidden past, you will ultimately have to confront your own…

Backed!

See also

• How Hello Games created the lore of No Man’s Sky — “Hopefully everything you find has a reason for existing. When you see a building, we’ve tried to think of who might have built it, and why.”
• Video: The art of Firewatch
• ILM’s concept art for Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Lore of No Man’s Sky

How Hello Games created the lore of No Man’s Sky

Sean Murray: With a universe as open as ours – with a near infinite number of planets out there to see – we want players to discover everything on their terms. We don’t have huge cut scenes or a traditional linear story.

There is, however, a real lore in the game. Hopefully everything you find has a reason for existing. When you see a building, we’ve tried to think of who might have built it, and why. It’s something we’re excited to see fans uncover as they play, and put their own interpretations on.

See also

• Exploration in games — Exploration appeals to basic human instincts, and the basic joy we get from discovery makes exploration a key element for many games.
• The Witness — You wake up, alone, on a strange island full of puzzles that will challenge and surprise you.
• The Art of Firewatch — Campo Santo artist Jane Ng delves into the process for creating the art of Firewatch!

See also

BB8 concept sketch

Industrial Light and Magic’s visual development portfolio for The Force Awakens has some fascinating pre-production artwork I hadn’t seen yet.

X-Wing attack run at Starkiller Base

Some of the images are quite familiar while others show variations of events we saw in the finished film.

An early take on the climactic lightsaber duel at Starkiller Base

Early concept art of Finn watching over a captured Poe Dameron

Some of the most interesting images are of places or events that I can’t quite identify…

An earlier version of the standoff that took place on the Eravana?

Early concept art for Takodana?

Early concept art for Takodana?

Unknown location. Perhaps an early take on Starkiller Base?

“Each artist began to explore his individual response, and collectively, we began to answer, with our words and art. Out of our brainstorming sessions emerged visual imagery of where we might want to go and what it would look like when we got there. We were not merely illustrating scenes that already existed: we were initiating storytelling concepts through the visual images themselves.” Rick Carter, co-production designer, Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Han Solo

Luke Skywalker

Portraits of our old heroes, and new villains…

Kylo Wrong

Kylo Ren

Early concept art for Kylo Ren, and a dramatic artist’s impression of his finished design as it would appear in the first trailer.

Kylo Ren’s shuttle approaches the Finalizer

Kylo Ren’s ship, the Finalizer.

While there are undeniable similarities to Tatooine, Jakku is a world with its own history and industry, explored in these location concepts.

X-Wings arrive at Takodana

Star Destroyer hangar deck

Starkiller Base interior

Finn tries to catch a ride on Jakku

The Millennium Falcon on Luke’s hideaway planet

Various other scenes from The Force Awakens, as imagined by the art department.

The Millennium Falcon crashed on Starkiller Base

• The visual effects magic of ‘The Force Awakens’ — fxguide’s John Montgomery sits down with Industrial Light + Magic in San Francisco to discuss their stellar work on The Force Awakens.
• How the BB-8 Sphero toy works
• ILM ‘Behind the Magic’

State Zero

A post apocalyptic short film by Andrée Wallin:

In the near future, the capital of Sweden has turned into a post-apocalyptic wasteland. We join four soldiers on a routine mission in ‘Zone 3’, with the assignment to investigate an old surveillance tower that just went offline. That’s the setting in first-time director Andrée Wallin’s short film, who also wrote and production designed it.

Behind the scenes video…

The Verge

Inspired by this fan’s tribute to Rendezvous with Rama and 2001: A Space Odyssey, Lightfarm Studios in Rio, Brazil created this detailed digital image. (via)

See also: Wanderers — a vision of humanity’s expansion into the Solar System, based on scientific ideas and concepts of what our future in space might look like, if it ever happens.

See also

fxguide talks to the visual effects artists who worked on Star Wars: The Force Awakens

fxguide’s John Montgomery sits down with Industrial Light + Magic in San Francisco to discuss their stellar work on The Force Awakens. Hear from senior visual effects supervisor Roger Guyett, visual effects supervisor Patrick Tubach, animation supervisor Paul Kavanagh, environments supervisor Susumu Yukihiro, compositing supervisor Jay Cooper and asset build supervisor Dave Fogler as they run through key scenes from the film.

The Force Awakens has been heavily marketed as a move away from the synthetic CG-fest that the prequels were and as a return to the spirit of the originals with practical effects work being used whenever possible. However it is pretty clear watching the VFX breakdowns in this video that computer generated effects were used extensively throughout the film.

“I’m very happy if people honestly believe that a lot of this stuff is done in-camera and they believe all of those things are really happening, but the truth is it’s just a massive amount of work.”

Update: ILM just posted these VFX breakdowns onto their YouTube channel.

• On fxguide: The Art of Deep Compositing
• How the BB-8 Sphero Toy Works
• Pixar in a box! Animation lessons from the masters
• Are computer generated visual effects really ruining movies?
• ILM ‘Behind the Magic’
• Around 75% of all IKEA’s product images are computer generated

Star Trek fan film ‘Axanar’ sued by CBS

Prelude to Axanar

Axanar is the independent production that proves a feature-quality Star Trek film can be made on a very modest budget — approximately $80,000 in the case of the short film that you just watched — and outside of the studio system.

This 21-minute short film, Prelude to Axanar, premiered Saturday, July 26th, 2014, at San Diego Comic Con, and features Richard Hatch, Tony Todd, Kate Vernon, JG Hertzler and Gary Graham — Gary reprises his role of Soval from “Enterprise.” The makeup and hair was designed by Academy Award winner Kevin Haney and Star Trek veteran Brad Look of Makeup Effects Lab in Hollywood. Top that off with the amazing visual effects of Tobias Richter of The Light Works, and sound by Academy Award winner Frank Serafine, and the result is Prelude to Axanar.

The visual effects in this are very impressive in this short — especially the stuff in the last half — though I wish they had upped the tempo a bit. The talking heads documentary format works surprisingly well too. I would totally watch a film like this, if they can get it made…

Samuel R. Delany’s 1977 review of the original Star Wars

This contemporary review of the first Star Wars movie for Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy magazine by Samuel R. Delany is fascinating.

I’m posting this about five hours before I go to see The Force Awakens, which if nothing else I expect to be a blisteringly fast film based on director J.J. Abrams previous two Star Trek films. So it’s really interesting to me how Delaney describes the original Star Wars as “about the fastest two-hour film I’ve ever seen”. By modern standards — and even by the standards of the other Star Wars films — the first installment seems quite slow.

It’s also assuring to see that from the very outset critics like Delaney were calling Star Wars out for it’s lack of human racial diversity and gender equality.

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Star Wars:
A consideration of the great new S.F. film

by Samuel R. Delany

My first reactions as the final credits rose on the screen? “Now what happens?” – which is to say George (American Grafitti and THX-1138) Lucas’s Star Wars is about the fastest two-hour film I’ve ever seen: I thought I’d been in the theater maybe twenty-five minutes.

THX, if you’ll recall, looked like it was sired by Godard’s Contempt out of the space station sequence in Kubrick’s 2001 – i.e. it was basically white, white-on-white, and then more white. What is the visual texture of Star Wars?

Two moons shimmer in the heat above the horizon, and the desert evening fades to purple rather than blue; into the starry black, huge and/or hopelessly complex artifacts flicker, flash, spin, turn, or merely progress with ponderous motion; indoors is all machinery, some old, some new; while plastic storm troopers and dull grey generals meet and march; circus-putty aliens drink in a bar where what appears to be an automatic still gleams in the background with tarnished copper tubing; some of the spaceships are new and shiny, some are old and battered (and you get pretty good at telling the difference between the two).

Wire Cutters

A chance encounter proves fateful for 2 robots mining on a desolate planet.

It’s like a grittier Wall-E.

Boing Boing: On Reddit, filmmaker Jack Anderson explains that the making of his film involved a “$0 budget but thousands of hours of love and about a YEAR of rendering.”

See also: Wanderers, a vision of humanity’s expansion into the Solar System.

Blade Runner: The B-Roll Cut

45-minute version of the film made almost entirely from unused footage (via waxy.org)

This includes what I assume must be the entirety of the awful voiceover that they made Harrison Ford record. It’s worse than I imagined it would be. The Holden scenes are pretty bad too.

See also: Blade Runner: The Final Cut and these fantastic behind the scenes photographs from the Blade Runner model shop.

Star Wars v. Star Trek

The Carbonite Maneuver

An amazing Star Wars/Star Trek mashup by SonOfSpork.

(via kottke)

Audio design in Elite Dangerous

Matthew Florianz, audio designer for Elite Dangerous

Recorded looking through the roof of a slow spinning Eagle. Highlights dynamic environment ambiences for outpost, star, galaxy background radiation and planet as objects come into view. Additional audio includes ship flyby, gui notifications and ship internal cockpit ambiences.

(Game audio was gained 12db in post-production for this video, recorded in Full Range mode.)

(via Andy Kelly)

Here’s another, less subtle video about the sounds of the Elite Dangerous universe. I particularly like the space station ambience.

See also: Other Places, A series celebrating beautiful video game worlds by Andy kelly.

Blade Runner returns

Blade Runner: The Final Cut

The version that’s being released theatrically is the 2007 digitally remastered Blade Runner: The Final Cut, which is different to the 1982 original in a number of crucial respects. For example, it lacks both the tacked-on happy ending and the controversial Deckard voiceover (regarded by many as clumsy and unnecessary).

Blade Runner: The Final Cut also features myriad other changes, including tweaks to both edit and soundtrack, a dusting of new shots, and a number of “fixes” and upgraded visual effects, executed primarily by The Orphanage, supervised by Jon Rothbart, with additional shots supplied by Lola VFX.

“In order to get aerial views of some of the cityscapes, the miniature structures were tilted sideways and aligned individually at varying angles so as to appear correct to the barrel distortion of the camera’s wide-angle lens. Numerous in-camera passes were required to balance external and practical lighting.”

Ridley Scott: “The Final Cut is my definitive version of Blade Runner, and I’m thrilled that audiences will have the opportunity to enjoy it in the way I intended – on the big screen. This new trailer captures the essence of the film and I hope will inspire a new generation to see Blade Runner when it is re-released across the UK on 3 April.”

• Cinefex: Blade Runner Returns
• See also: Blade Runner model shop

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Fantastic behind the scenes photographs from the Blade Runner model shop

Above: The full-size prop, decals and miniatures for the Spinner

Above: The Tyrell Corporation pyramid building plus a look at how the vast ‘Hades’ cityscape vistas were accomplished

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Trek Core: Enterprise at the Smithsonian: Preserving an Interstellar Icon

In this exclusive interview, TrekCore sits down with Smithsonian Air & Space Museum curator Margaret Weitekamp and chief conservator Malcolm Collum to discuss the ongoing conservation project to preserve the original “Star Trek” USS Enterprise filming model for future generations.

This video, and the gallery on Trek Core, contains some of the best reference material I’ve seen of the original Enterprise model. I’m suddenly itching to try my hand at building another CGI version of this classic starship.

See also: this incredible 1.5m USS Enterprise made from LEGO and other posts tagged ‘Star Trek’.

Anomaly

Set against the space-race canvas of the 1960’s, Anomaly is inspired by the traditional Christmas Nativity and explores, through a modern-day lens, the events of two-thousand years ago. It is a story about relationships that intertwine around an unprecedented astronomical event, as a couple navigate life’s realities at a time of unfathomable significance.

• Framestore: The making of Anomaly
• Behind the scenes video

ILM ‘Behind the Magic’

ILM has some fantastic videos up on their YouTube channel:

The Visual Effects of “Captain America: The Winter Soldier”

“Pacific Rim” Hong Kong Battle

Journey to the Red Planet for “Star Trek Into Darkness”

Wanderers – a short film by Erik Wernquist

Wanderers is a vision of humanity’s expansion into the Solar System, based on scientific ideas and concepts of what our future in space might look like, if it ever happens. The locations depicted in the film are digital recreations of actual places in the Solar System, built from real photos and map data where available.

Without any apparent story, other than what you may fill in by yourself, the idea with the film is primarily to show a glimpse of the fantastic and beautiful nature that surrounds us on our neighboring worlds – and above all, how it might appear to us if we were there.

This is the view from a spacecraft in orbit around Jupiter, looking down at the huge anticyclonic storm known as the Great Red Spot.

This scene shows a group of people hiking across the icy plains of Jupiter’s moon Europa.

This shot follows the cabin of a space elevator descending on a cable towards the northern parts of the Terra Cimmeria highlands on Mars.

What we see here is the inside of a hollowed out asteroid, pressurized and filled with a breathable atmosphere.

(via @neilcocker)

Solus

SOLUS

A short story of loneliness, life, and sacrifice.

Lovely.

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Wired: The Warped Astrophysics of Interstellar

Kip Thorne is an theoretical physicist who helped developed the concept for the movie Interstellar.

“The story is now essentially all Chris and Jonah’s,” Thorne says. “But the spirit of it, the goal of having a movie in which science is embedded in the fabric from the beginning—and it’s great science—that was preserved.”

The film put so much effort into the appearance of the black holes that they actually made some legitimate scientific findings…

“We found that warping space around the black hole also warps the accretion disk,” [Double Negative senior supervisor, Paul] Franklin says. “So rather than looking like Saturn’s rings around a black sphere, the light creates this extraordinary halo.” That’s what led Thorne to his “why, of course” moment when he first saw the final effect. The Double Negative team thought it must be a bug in the renderer. But Thorne realized that they had correctly modeled a phenomenon inherent in the math he’d supplied.

The Great Martian War

The Great Martian War

Archival footage from World War I with added Martian tripods from The War of the Worlds for, of all places, The History Channel.

(via Laughing Squid)

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The Meat Popsicle Fan Art Book is a book of illustrations and comics from 80 artists in tribute to The Fifth Element.

For more artwork see fifthelementbook.tumblr.com