Fatherdale: The Guardians of Asgard is an intricate RPG/Adventure for the PC where the battle between the Gods and their eternal enemy unfolds in the true medieval world of AD 1072. As one of the few immortal Heroes who protect the ancient artifacts of knowledge, you take on the reins of a warlord in a secluded northern valley of Fatherdale just days before it becomes the Battlefield of Fate to experience a story-driven multi-genre gameplay focused around RPG, RTS and Adventure. With over hundred and fifty unique characters, thrice that much in hand-crafted inventory items, more than sixty locations in steppes, woods and swamps, on plains, river banks and even inside the wooden Keeps of the Guardians, you have a whole world to explore, protect and die for -- and seven full-fledged Episodes to play through a number of styles and genres before you face your real Enemy.

Sergei Klimov, lead designer for Fatherdale gives us his views on things with this series of development diaries. In this fourt part he discusses the difficulties of making short ingame movies. Some images of this process are included as well.

"Game Movies"

About a week ago our web master demanded that we either return to regular updates of Fatherdale's site or he starts uploading current build. Because the build at that moment was rather unbalanced, we couldn't allow that to happen and decided to make a new feature: every week we would make available one brief ingame movie showing parts of the current build, i.e. simply ask content designers to capture a few brief moments while they're testing, compress with Bink and upload each Friday another 1Mb of footage.

This is what I have been doing earlier this week -- with our character artist, Mike, we went over wood cutting to improve the sequence and animation. While it was quite a lot of fun and twenty or so incarnations of the same character is surely something unique to spot in an RPG trailer, the team said I shouldn't make that a main theme of the upcoming movie. Maybe they think that players won't quite understand the idea? I don't know. It's kind of exciting, to see them cut. And cut. And cut. And cut (and cut, and cut, and cut :))).

Today was the day to make the first movie, and so quite enlightened me and Anton, our content programmer, took the coffee and went capturing. Should be done in ten minutes, I remember us saying. Alex, the RPG designer, laughed and said we should go straight to some battle scene - because it's what most of the other developers like to show anyway. Well, I must admit it's already over six hours and I still hear the screams of pain from the design room.

The first problem we ran into was the problem of context.

Given the 10-20 second limit of the movies to keep them small, we couldn't plan on showing any long dialogues and neither could we show how Reinar discovers new items or explores new locations - it would be impossibly large even when compressed with high ratio. Okay, so we concentrate on some of the shorter scenes that we think could be fun to watch - we travel to Yavid's House and approach a lone hunter living there (who at that moment was carrying water from the pond and into his house) to capture the greeting dialogue.

"Glad to see you", -- says the hunter, -- "The day is young but already strong. Now you can ask your questions." Ouch! I suddenly remember that by game terms, we've met this character the night before when we were sleeping in that part of the valley, and then he didn't have the time to converse - simply sent us away until next morning. Now, with the night gone, he refers to that encounter. I know this. Anton knows this. But people who will watch this movie don't - and they could be confused about the style of the game if they assume such is the first dialogue between Reinar and new character. They simply wouldn't understand why it's "now" and to which "questions" he refers to. Oh well, so we decide to stick to the scenes that are not so context-tied and move on.

Then I went on to see the final model of my favorite cooper's wife. To do that, Anton and I cloned her character and urged the resulting clones to engage in a conversation with each other. The model looked good, but again the team went against me making a movie out of that. "What kind of impression about the gameplay people will carry away form that?" Beats me! We've spent almost two days looking at the lady and improving her style, so why the players can't look at her for at least two minutes? :)))

Having my best intentiones misread, I traveled across the valley to Charred Logs and skipped time to arrive at night. The smoke, the burnt log house, the atmosphereood... Lovely! However, nobody got excited the way I did because they kept saying a mood can not be the only thing to be communicated through a gameplay trailer. When I got violent, though, they had to admit it's not entirely bad, all I needed was "to add a little action". Hmmm.

The second problem we ran into was the problem of chance.

In the same location, there's a boar roaming around the yard. The poor animal was nearly dead when the hunter saved him, and there's a whole story with proper quest attached to this. The idea is simple: we lean on the fence, the boar notices us and comes near to investigate, we wait until the hunter passes near and ask him the question about who this boar is and how it happened he was hurt in the first place.

Everything works fine until the moment the dialogue starts - at exactly that second the boar gets bored and runs away to the opposite corner of the yard, which is not visible at the screen - and we can't scroll because we don't want to increase the size of the movie. I say let's make another take. Or two, or how many it takes to actually have that boar in the right mood during the dialogues. Anton says the rule was that we don't stage anything specifically for these movies, but rather take what comes along and so to carefully position the characters and wait for the appropriate moment would be to stray away from the pure gameplay concept. I think he's right. If we decided to make more takes, the next thing we know is we'd be making behaviours specifically for the movies. Oh well, so we decide to go on and try to capture a scene that would not require extra staging work.

The third problem was capturing only one narrow side of the gameplay.

That one was simple. I was chasing down the quest, testing language and asking Hunter Yavid to tell me about everything he knows, opening up each available dialogue topic. I remember the problem of context, so I capture the one that is almost self-sufficient.

With this in mind, I sent Reinar to River Village -- there's always a lot of folks hanging around, so some "action" is guaranteed. There was this nice girl sitting at one of the yards, tavern keeper's daughter.. Also rumoured to date the young and quite straightforward son of a local merchant. Mmm. Under the circumstances, who could blame me for having a little chat about the wheather? :) Having properly captured this scene, I went to Anton to help me compress it and it turned into 10Mb. We tried to cut and keep only the first part -- but then the intrigue of the conversation was broken, what fun is it to see two characters -- even as good as mine were -- saying "Halo" to each other? Argh. Time was getting short, so I had to re-track to Charred Logs and skip until evening to catch two vermin practicing in this remote place.

This one everybody liked. That is, everybody but me -- on our Russian forum, I'm known as the anti-PK person with little tolerance towards slash and kill. Since this is my own column and Mythos probably won't maim me too much for raising another issue here :), I'll say that if I've spent three years of my life creating a deep, believable ingame world interwoven with relationships, bright emotions and diverse strategies only to have the players start killing each other as soon as the situation permits, I'll quit doing games to return to short stories -- the pay is good and the readers appreciate the story, not the bloodbath :(. Anyway, this one at least is a decent one -- the vermin use the place to get some practice (and improve their skills) and there's a lot of funny dialogues involved as Reinar approached them and tries to get into the training.

For me it is fun because it gradually fills me on the story and gives a fair chance to understand why I can't use the main road to the valley at night (or, rather, why I can - but that would be my last trip in this game). Yet for others, it stretches only as far as a well-lit picture of two characters standing across each other with voice boxes dashing above. When the conversation scene adds to my experience of travel, fight and role-playing - it's a balanced mix. When the conversation is the only thing at display, it's not really fun beyond the first five seconds (unless you're a die-hard fan of ingame dialogues :). So what do we do? We curse, we pound the tables, we threaten to make a 40Mb movie to showcase all genres, but at the end we shut up and, remembering advice from Alex, go to the battle scene.

The battle scene is what finally made it onto the site this Friday (and will go online on Monday I think) because it was fun to watch even without understanding the context, had the right amount of action and, given the nature of combat, didn't suffer from random chances in characters' behaviours.

Putting the screams aside, I must admit the experience taught me a lesson, and the lesson is that an ingame movie would rarely communicate a good playing experience unless it's a composition from several takes.

Finally, at the end of the day we also made our friends at the Russian games magazine happy by sending over the screens made during another combat test. It had the mood, it had the action and it had little staging as at that night I was testing the pre-combat things, i.e. how characters notice each other and what choices they have, what is "patrol", what is "suspicious", what is "report" and what is "stealth perk". There's stil a lot of work to do there, so expect more nice screens. But some day, some day you will have to watch one of *my* movies -- I just need to choose between a long, boring conversation and a lone, quiet, stealthy exploration. The size of that piece of art would be probably equal to the size of game itself, so those without T1 can sleep safely :))).

Every day we read MCV or CTW and ponder on the question of different mediums - why some things make it and some don't, why certain rare books translate well into games and why the majority doesn't. The key, as was noted by many designers, is in the nature of experience: to watch and to play is to be an observer and to act as a co-creator. The nature of games is such that we play them in our minds by stretching the possibilities and opening up the imagination.

While it would be easy to make a nice trailer movie out of Run Lola Run or Lethal Weapon, I wonder what would fit into the one-minute limit if we were to make a trailer for The Insider or One Flew Over Cuckoo's Nest - where the story builds up and the tension starts to shape hour by hour...

Anyway, next week we would be more careful about selecting the footage and we will try to find another way of keeping the updates regular. In the meantime, I must admit there is still a way to deny the fate of passive observer no matter how boring the movie or game trailer - just pound on the table or throw beer cans at the TV :))).

Best,
S.

Sergei Klimov
Lead Designer/Fatherdale
Snowball Interactive