Let's not forget about Physics

Today we released a little video that show of the physics in Amnesia: The Dark Descent. You can find the clip right below and below that I will go through the various parts a bit more detailed.



As you can see, this is pretty much the same things that we used in Penumbra. But I also hope you noticed that it is more streamlined and intuitive. Allow me to explain.

Grabbing stuff
The grab mode is what is used when interacting with objects like books, chairs and pots. In the first versions of the game, we actually had something more like in Crysis, where the object travels to a certain position when interacted with. This did not feel right though, so we want back to more like in Penumbra. We then added a lot polish to this and especially the rotating mode (when holding down a button, moving mouse rotates object). Even though the object is still moved 100% by a physics simulation, it is very smooth and you can be very exact when placing. In Penumbra there was lots of lag, but that is all gone now!

Opening doors
I think I spent a week or so tweaking how the door opening physics works. In Penumbra, you had to make sure to interact with the door at the right place to open it properly, which made it hard to close / open doors in stressful situations. Not so in Amnesia. Here you can click anywhere on the door and it will easy to control it. The way this is done is by estimating how to convert 2D mouse input into 3D forces. As you will never be able to get perfect correlation between mouse and object (you will always loose a dimension), this took some time to get right. The end results feel very nice though and the things learnt for other interaction types such as levers.

A further improvement is that doors will now stay closed / opened. In Penumbra they sometimes bounced back at you, but in Amnesia that is all fixed saving the player from many virtual/real headaches.

Desktop simulator 2000
Opening drawers is a common interaction and another area where improvements have been made. Drawers will now react faster to player movements and it is possible to have more control (in Penumbra drawers could continue sliding after you stopped moving). And just like doors, the drawers will get stay open / closed, without any annoying bouncing.

Spin round, round...
The one interaction that we got most negative feedback on in Penumbra was the wheels (valves, etc). There was the problem of where to interact as interacting at center zero leverage and made it impossible to turn. Also the actual turning movement could be hard to get right. For Amnesia, we have remade the whole system. Now it is possible to interact wherever you like and the movement required is far more intuitive. There is a special system that analyzes your mouse movements and can quickly and correctly determine which way you want to rotate. It can even approximate the speed and there is as good as no lag involved.

Closing notes
We are very proud of the physics interact we use in our games, and it is something we have worked with for almost 5 years now. It is also a very unique method, and as far as we know we are alone at using it. We will not stop at where we are now though, and hope to take physical interaction even further in the future.

Also, I'd like to mention the fantastic Newton Game Dynamics, the physics engine that makes all of this possible in the first place!

Amnesia Demo Is Out!

Finally, you can get a small taste of the Amnesia: The Dark Descent! We have just put up a demo of the game, that will guide you through a few of the earlier levels in the game. To get it simply go here:
http://AmnesiaGame.com/#demo

The demo is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Check the site for system requirements and other helpful data.

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Make sure to up the following links:
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Thanks for all support so far!


Now while you are downloading I would like to discuss some of the thoughts that when into this demo. Creating demos for adventure games is hard, and more so for horror ones, where build-up and foreshadowing is so crucial. In a more action oriented game, the purpose is simply to show of the game's main mechanics (shooting, matching blocks, etc). However, in an adventure game, there is no such mechanic and it is the more holistic parts, like story, mood, etc, that shapes the experience.

There are other problems besides showing off the game in the best possible way. It is also important to not have too many spoilers, so when starting the full game the player should not know too much. There is of course also the sale angle, you want people to be eager to buy after playing the demo.

It was clear at once that we needed to start from the beginning of the game. The opening is crucial for understanding the game's story and putting the player in the right mood. The problem is that our opening is quite long. Amnesia is not very action filled from the start and slowly builds up the mood. We felt that it needed to be shorter in the demo, so player could get a grasp of the game quicker. To fix this, we remade the first level a bit, so crucial items and information are found a bit earlier. This shortens the experience, but contains the essence.

Then it was the problem of what to show next. We wanted the demo to contain creature encounters, but as these are too slowly built up in the full game, they did not fit the demo. So after completing the first level, the player is transported about 2 hours into the game, where more stuff happens. It was then possible to let the demo go on from there and then end with a little cliffhanger. This also worked well from a spoiler viewpoint as the maps are more about atmosphere and most events have already been shown in videos.

To further give the demo a good feel of the full game, we made the sanity mechanic be a bit more aggressive. This means that if will be easier to reach an insane state of mind than during normal play. The fear of going insane is a crucial element, so we felt we had to show it off somehow.

I think the demo represent the full game fairly well and contains most of its major features. However, it is still in some sense a hacked-up version of the "real thing" and misses a lot of the atmospheric build-up. There is also no time to show of up any of the story either (except for the initial setup), and we only focused on atmosphere for the demo. I guess this is just the way it is with demos and the same really goes for trailers and any sort of promotional material. The good thing is that if you enjoyed the demo you should like the full game even more!

Hope you all enjoy this vertical slice of nightmare! Only a few days left until the real beast is unleashed!

What could possibly go wrong?

Now that we are so close to the release of Amnesia, I would like to talk a little about all that stuff that didn't go so well during the development. I cannot talk much on behalf of my mates here at FG, so this is gonna be a pretty personal post (but can surely apply to others out there as well).

What can keep a project from getting done? Well, there sure are tons of different causes for this to happen, but I think we can classify these in some simple categories, which I am gonna list right away:

Bad (or not so good) design
This is a big source for issues, issues and more issues. Think about it, if you are just patching your stuff up for your current needs, you are really gonna need a big amount of luck to be able to keep that if further additions need to be made. Also, that is bound to fall apart at some point in the future. All these generally lead to rewriting stuff from scratch, which means time in which the project is stalled.
For example, at the start of the project I made an object management design that worked perfectly with the 3 types of objects that we had. A few months later 2 more types needed to be added and guess what, the old design did not work! Scrap the old one and make a new fitting the old ones. Then suddenly another type is needed and of course is totally unsupported... and so on. Fortunately I got to do something that nicely fixes this now, but guess what... it's asking for a rewrite now! Not to mention how transforms are handled, which works for now, but I really want to get it done some other way.

Rule #24923 from the Gamedev code: Learn to facepalm you will have to

So what to learn from this? Summing up, lazy design is something to avoid at all costs, and you have full control over it, so just don't let it happen! You have been warned. Also, if you fall into this one too much, it can actually lead to...


Lack of motivation
This is a dangerous one. You know, it is reaaally non rewarding to wake up right next to your workplace, being all alone there, with temperatures over 35ºC (lovely summertime in southern Spain) and having to hunt down a random bug through over 1000 lines of code. You eat, sit back, hours go by and then you go to sleep again. I had these like everyday in the last month and a half. I looong so much for a vacation now, just in case you are wondering.

I see no inspiration in this painting. You can get melting watches everyday in august here in Seville.

Anything that can be listed here is no good on its own, but it can also lead to issues in the above category. When you work while being in this state, you are very likely to make mistakes, often minimal, but horrible-bug-creating ones too. In addition, when working like this, even the simplest of tasks will become time consuming. Trust me, it is not good at all.


Force Majeure
Fancy frenchy name for the funniest one. Think Murphy's Law: anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. These are generally external interferences, as in stuff happening around you over which you have little to no control at all. This includes:

• Power cuts for a couple of hours.
  
• Electrical failures with firework-like sparks and lightning and risk of fire.
  
• Having water from a neighbor above flood your apartment.
• Network screwups.
  
• Laptop breaking down (twice).
• Buying a replacement computer for the dead laptop that turns to be faulty itself too.
• Being pointlessly called to court, senselessly accused of swindling.
  

These are fine examples in this category that happen to summarize the last 5 months in my life. While it might sound like a joke or exaggerating, all of the above are true stories that are actually too long to describe here (I might give details on demand). I lovingly coined it "the Frictional Curse", and it seems to affect FG core team members living outside Sweden only. At least I didn't lose any of my work. What can I say...

Wait, is that my apartment over there?

Sadly, all the above is nothing but just a glimpse of the many forms mayhem can adopt. At this point, I got no real advice other than learn to live with the fact that there is chance things can go bad, and in the worst possible moment. Once you accept it, that won't make it less likely to happen, but at least it won't take you by surprise!

Puzzle Tweaking - Tale of a Wooden Stick

Once upon a time there was a wooden stick, a stick so firm, a stick so stuck it could not be seen upon without the touch of many small, busy hands.

And so this tale beings.



Today we released a new gameplay video. Keeping to the Amnesia tradition it is one single clip, showing a sequence from the game. This time it's about exploration and puzzle solving. It is the puzzle part that this blog post will discuss, as it took quite some time for us to get that puzzle right.

The puzzle is that the hatch is too heavy to lift by hand, but by using a crank and pulley contraption the player can open it. Unfortunately something is wrong with the crank/pulley and the player has to figure out what it is. It turns out that a small piece of wood has been jammed into one of the pulleys, making it impossible for the crank to pull the rope going through the pulley.

This particular piece of wood took quite a lot of tweaking in order to make it noticeable. For each test session we found that there was always one or more testers that got stuck on this puzzle. They simply could not find what was wrong, most important, they did not notice the wooden piece at all. Over and over we tweaked the puzzle, we added descriptions and interaction messages, we changed the texture of the wooden piece, we added some faint light to show it clearer in the dark, there are some particles coming down from the wooden piece when you pull the crank, we made the model larger and we changed the angle it is stuck in. We even added an alternative solution to the original solution (not saying what the solutions are, in-case you like to solve the puzzle in another way than what is shown in the video).

Finally, we hope, for the love of all puzzles, that this puzzle has been tweaked to perfection and that none of you will get stuck on it*.


*If you watch this video, it would be very strange if you did. :)

Commentary on Commentary

Since you people were nice enough to help us reach 2000 pre-orders of Amnesia: The Dark Descent earlier this year, we have been forced to record some commentary. This was not something that we had done before, but thought that it would be a really simple task. As always, it turned out to be a lot more trouble than we had first assumed.


Adding Commentary to the Game
Our design was inspired from the kind of commentary that can be seen in the Half-life 2 episodes and Riddick: Escape from Butcher bay. Essentially, it consists of icons that are scattered throughout the levels and when interacted with you hear a developer ranting. I first just wanted to have some kind of text-billboard that you could click on and that was it. Simple and Effective.

Then Marc, one the artists here at FG, put a really nice looking model instead. Now that we had a nice model we of course wanted more! So decided on giving it some kind of nice gold shader and started to experiment with this. We went through various versions, but it did not turn out that well. Unfortunately we could not have the gold shader as it was not visible enough in dark areas (something Amnesia is filled with) and we went with a more flat-shaded-thingie, that made it stand out more, instead. Now I also felt forced to add some effects to this and put an hour or two into making a part of the icon spin and radiate some "Waves" (that Marc made) when activated.

Final icon design when crosshair is over it.

Now, further complications happened. When playing commentaries, they could be drowned out by other sounds, so we had to find ways to lower this "background noise". Some of the functionality for this already existed, but a few new effects had to be added before it worked like it should. In the final version all background sounds/voices are faded out and the commentary is faded in on top of that. It actually turned out quite nicer than I thought it would and makes it extra fun to listen to the commentaries!

So that is how something I thought would take 5 minutes, ended up taking a full day.


Recording Commentary Voices
Before recording could be begin we had to find a some interesting stuff to talk about and this was not always that easy. We wanted the commentary rants to be short, connected to where the icon was and not require images or similar. So there was a bit of discussion on what to talk about. When that was done everybody were to write scripts and to read from these when talking. We had set a Monday as "recording day" and assigned all day to fix the recordings.

The first recording problem was getting the microphones ready. I sounded like a the captain of an airplane in mine and had to run down to town to buy a new one. Others did not have stores nearby and had put their faith into Jens to do some sound magic. To make sure the voices where free of smacking sounds and similar, we used the old trick of putting socks on the microphones. A set up that looked quite stupid and when my girlfriend came home she thought I had gone crazy, sitting talking to a sock-puppet (after all the crunch-time I put in this was not that implausible and I was already talking to myself from time to time).

¨Marc's attempt at creating a sound studio

..and here is Luis's (other rooms were too noisy)

When the voices in the microphones finally sounded good, only the actual talking was left. This was of course not easy at all. I think we all learned to appreciate the work our voice actors have made as we tried to talk make good commentary voices. There is so much to think about: Speak at the right range from mic, speak slowly, say the right words, do not spit into the microphone, do not make silly noises, avoid external interferences, etc. Whenever any of these errors popped up it was retake time. I think the last voices was recorded something like 1:00 in the night, after having started at 08:00 in the morning. Who stayed up that long will remain an internal secret.

Despite this rather strange workday, the voices actually turned out pretty nice. I know I do not sound perfect all the time, and there are some sound bytes, where you clearly hear I had not had water for a while and my voice sound like some deranged drunkard. I guess that is part of the fun though and most of the time we should be very comprehensible.

Final results
To learn how me, slightly confused, talking to a sock sound like, and other fun stuff you will have to wait for the release of the game! In the meantime Mikko, our extremely talented musician, made a little video where you get taste of some of the stuff we will talk about:

Why I hate "Cinematic"

"Cinematic" still seems to be a kind of buzz-word for videogames these days. Often scenes that are extra emotional or involving are called "cinematic". I do not really like this word and its usage expose many of the problems videogames have today. I guess some explanation is required. My two major reasons for disliking the word are:


1) Movies are not rolemodels
It means that videogames should strive to be more like cinema, that there are really important lessons to be learned by doing things like "in the movies". There is so much done in games the past 20 years, based on cinema, that has kept videogames from evolving. Linear and strict plots being one of the biggest. Because movies rely so much on being extremely specific in what the viewer shall see, it has standards that are direct opposite of what a videogame is. By having these "cinematic" goals, we have gotten things like cut scenes where all the "fun stuff" happens, quick-time-events and annoying camera angles. Games would have been far better off if these things did not become the design standards they are today.


2) Movies are not better
It implies that film is a superior medium. I would like to say that it is actually reverse. Film is probably the lesser of all story telling media. It leaves less to imagination and is the least fulfilling. Films do not require any real effort and leaves very little to the imagination. Sure, there are films that are hard to get and with very subtle imagery, but these are far between, and in my eyes does not live up the fantasies a great novel or piece of music can conjure up. In my mind games take all this a step further. While all other media gives us a prefabricated descriptions, videogames places us in living breathing worlds. I feel the difference is like reading about climbing Everest and actually doing it. Videogames as a medium is not inferior, I would say it is far superior than any else.


Does this means that the best games of today trump the best films, music and books? Far from it and quite the reverse. But videogames as a medium has an awesome potential. It would be very bad to let catchy buzz-words such as cinematic to stand in the way of fulfilling it.

We just turned into gold!

Today we can proudly announce that Amnesia: The Dark Descent has gone gold! So what does this mean? Well, it essentially mean that the game is done! What is left for us now to do is to send it away to our Russian publisher and online retailers. We will also start to focus 100% on doing PR and make sure people know about the game. In less then two weeks it will be released to the world!

It has really been a long journey and Amnesia has been the focal point of our existence for quite some time. With all that work behind us it now feels very nice to be done and we are extremely pleased with end result. I actually enjoyed testing the game until the very end, something I cannot say about Penumbra. I feel we have bettered ourselves on all accounts with Amnesia and are very excited to hear what all of you think about it once it's released.

Thanks to all who have supported us so far! And please continue helping us spreading the word.

Below follows a brand new gameplay trailer about water, doors and being hunted. And if you are interested in seeing new environments from the game check here and here.