Alice in the Metaverse — development blog #1
I just started working to my next videogame. I will share the entire creative process, from the early stages (tools and tech selection process, gameplay definition, artistic direction of the project) to the release of the videogame.
I hope this blog can inspire you, either if you have already worked in the video game industry or if you are just curious to learn how a videogame is made. If reading this blog has some impact on your current or future game development process or your life…please let me know, I am curious!
The beginning
I do not know at the moment how the final game will look like, I just have a few ideas that I need to test and iterate in order to create a beautiful and entertaining videogame to release. When you start working on a project, whatever that is, you need to have some ideas about what you want to build. What kind of game? What style? Which platform?
Here are the 3 pillars the whole project is based on:
Kind of game: Alice (same famous Alice we all know from the Alice in Wonderland book) is falling down into the rabbit hole. She is trapped in this apparently never ending fall. She will have to collect items and avoid dangers.
Platform: mobile devices
Style: 3d, psychedelic cartoon, metaverse, Miles Morales Spider-Man kind of.
Research phase:
Here we are in the research phase and we will be stuck in it for a while..same as Alice in the rabbit hole. It is really important to spend at least 10% of the overall project development time with some sort of preliminary research. In my experience the chances to successfully complete a project and the quality of the final result are strongly correlated to this initial phase.
The research for now will be focused on:
- Understanding how to achieve the visual style thatI have in mind (and if it is even possible)
- How much fun is the gameplay idea
- Which tools or technologies I need to use
Visual styles
I was definitely blown away by the visuals and the style of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and now I dream about being able to be inspired by it. Let’s do some style decomposition to learn more about what I need to research further.
Lights and halftones: I love how lights, highlights and flares make use of halftones!
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Check the following image:
The car lights have a layer of white dots to underline the light brightness. Dots fade out with the distance from the light. I find it brilliant because:
- cartoon style is far away from photorealism; it is clear that the scene has been designed and not recorded with a camera
- at the same time lights have a flares and halos, optical effects caused by bright lights getting scattered by an optical lens. It adds some sort of realism to a cartoonish scene. But this means mixing an hyperrealistic style with a non realistic style…weird right?
- To bring the hyperrealistic effect in line with the style of the scene an halftone effect has been used on those flares to make the effect consistent with the style of the scene….I find it amazing!
In the previous image halftones are used on the highlights too. It gives that printed magazine style kind of effect that I would love in my game.
Chromatic aberration:
In the following image you can notice clearly that the main character outlines have some sort of distortion on the left side:
The same distortion is almost everywhere but is absent in the very center of the frame. This effect is another lens distortion called chromatic aberration. Again here the idea is to add effects and distortions typical of the real word where a camera is used to record a scene. It gives some realism to a scene that is clearly not real..and for some reason it all makes sense in my brain!
Edge detection + halftones + highlights + color shifting?
I don’t even know what this effect is:
I cannot even describe what happens in this frame, if some of you reading this blog know more..please let me know :)
Hand painted scenes
Sometimes the style turns into a shading that seems reproducing oil or crayon paintings (usually when the story gets dreamy or emotional)
Conclusion (for now...)
Do I know how to implement those effects? No.
Is it even possible to have an approximation of those effects on a mobile device? I have no idea!
The good news is that now we know what do. The bad news is that the artistic direction of this project depends on the answers I will have to those questions.
Making a videogame means creating art while confronting with many problems and variables that sometimes are completely out of our control.
The final result will be at the intersection between the original idea we had in our mind, and the the reality of what is possible to achieve with the current hardware and technology. Sometimes there is no intersection at all and the project gets cancelled. Let’s find out together if Alice in the Metaverse one day will be reality, or if she will remain only a dream…
