Blog 4

On our lecture on Monday, we had a look into the visual techniques employed in the game Brutal Legend. As the GDC talk was quite lengthy, I will mention what I thought was interesting and could be added to our game.

Brutal Legend has an art style focused towards looking like the cover art of the heavy metal albums of old. This art essentially looks apocalyptic with stormy environments and very dramatic scenery. To create these environments, Brutal Legend uses a lot of particle effects. To light these particle effects appropriately, they use “center-to-vert” normal. Center-to-vert normals have every triangle’s vertex normal facing the direct opposite direction to the center. This creates the illusion that a particle (2d plane with texture) to have a volume; appearing to have depth that is spherical. Using this technique, particles such as smoke, which would almost have a flat billboard like appearance, looks realistic; three-dimensional.

The sky in Brutal Legend is very dynamic, constantly shifting, changing and blending with many factors such as weather, time of day and location. The difference from the conventional method of using sky domes/skyboxes was not used here, instead giant particles emitted far into the distance was used as substitute. Layers of these sky particles were used to create the appearance of a realistic sky (layer for stars, moon, lightning and types of clouds.

In order to match the dramatic sky of the game, Brutal legend took to creating equally dramatic environments. It is interesting to see how sequentially, a dull looking environment is step by step enhanced by adding in the elements of sky, fog, shadows, lights and post-processing effects.

Development Progress 

This was quite a hectic week; a filmmaking and animation assignment due. I toiled away into the night working on the pre-visualization (prototype cutscene) that may ultimately be finalized and integrated in-game. I also took the effort of using textures and actually models rather than just blocked in primitives; as a result, created a scene very close to what we want our finished game to look like.

Other than that, there has been little progress as far as our game goes. Having to upgrade our first level from the dull maze, I needed to implement terrain. As you can see in the video, we have a map all ready for importing into our game; the issue is of course how to do collision with it. Using a height map will work though there is a cave in the map. We could also try to use ray-casting from the character to the terrain. Another option would be to use shaders…

This reading week, I plan to drudge deep into development and not idle; to work on integrating the new map, and doing a few homework questions in the process.

Demoreuille, P., Skillman, D. (2010). Rock Show VFX - The Effects That Bring Brutal Legend to Life. Double Fine Productions. Retrieved from http://gdcvault.com/play/1012551/Rock-Show-VFX-The-Effects