- 2 giorni fa
Prima parte del videodiario con il Making Of di Deponia Doomsday.
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00:11It must have been roughly February 2015
00:14when Karsten and I first talked about the idea of a new deponia.
00:21We also did get a lot of feedback in the past from the community
00:24who very much wanted to see another Rufus story.
00:29And then we basically just sat down and said, yeah, let's do some more.
00:37And of course, we had to achieve certain things with the game
00:40because we already released three games.
00:43So we definitely wanted to up our game here.
00:47I think Poki wasn't really into the idea to create a new deponia at first.
00:53Well, sure, after a trilogy you ask yourself,
00:57should I do a fourth part?
01:00And the definite answer to that is no.
01:03That's a particularly bad idea.
01:05It's the worst idea you can have.
01:08Actually, he didn't have a choice,
01:11but I think he warmed up to the idea pretty quick.
01:15And the definite answer to that is no.
01:18So we had basically no pre-production whatsoever for the new deponia game.
01:24This was a tough situation since the whole project map is not like you'd usually do it
01:31or should do it like you learn it in project management 101.
01:38That also had a bright side because we started producing assets very early.
01:47With Deponia Doomsday, for example, we got sketches from Poki
01:51with pretty clear-cut ideas what would be in the screens,
01:54since he knows what happens, who acts, and what puzzles have to be solved.
01:58So he's got… he knows what elements are needed,
02:01and based on that we make our own sketches accordingly.
02:06Usually we have to apply some changes to the screens
02:09when gameplay-related things don't work.
02:14That's why there are sometimes slight deviations.
02:17Otherwise, we stay pretty close to the Poki scribbles.
02:20Yeah, that's really… Poki knows pretty well how he wants things done.
02:25Yeah, that's almost correct.
02:28Poki frantically tried to find a way to credibly continue this whole finished trilogy clutter.
02:36It's just totally finished.
02:39Everything that had to be told has been told.
02:43There was nothing left.
02:45You know how it is when things seem impossible.
02:48there is a certain attraction, a certain excitement to it.
02:53And somehow, in the middle of the night,
02:55I had a rough idea how I could make a fourth Deponia part.
02:59I had to giggle.
03:00And usually, when I start giggling, there's probably no turning back.
03:05And that set the foundation for Deponia 4.
03:10Deponia Doomsday.
03:29There was relatively little time for Poki to come up with a story that made sense to him.
03:39The oldest trick in the book.
03:42I always wondered, which book?
03:45There has to be a book somewhere, where all the tricks are written down.
03:49And the oldest trick of all is, of course, when you don't continue a story, you pull a Deus Ex
03:55time travel.
03:58Yeah, anyway, nonetheless, I really, really, really enjoy these kinds of stories.
04:04And especially in Rufus's case, it's pretty forgiving, since you can stretch the laws of logic here and there.
04:12But I'm very, very happy that when you play the game a few times, you'll notice how very thoroughly everything's
04:19thought through.
04:21Both of us spent the first phase together at my place.
04:24So we'd have some semblance of peace and quiet.
04:29And then we started plastering the walls with timelines.
04:33Since they're all recurring, diverging, or intertwine at some point, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
04:39This became an incredibly confusing mess real quickly.
04:44A mess which spread across the whole wall.
04:47It stayed there for months, by the way.
04:51It looked a bit like the room of a mentally very ill person, but it only looked like it.
04:59It's, it's far from any, yeah, where were we?
05:06Yeah, it became quite a lot bigger than we planned, than we anticipated.
05:14That's one of the qualities Poki sometimes shows, this kind of mild overreaching.
05:22It's the fine line between genius and madness, you could say.
05:27And then we were in a situation where we'd have a much bigger project than we planned, and we just
05:35had to deal with that.
05:37But, fuck it. We'll just do it.
05:41Well, actually, this project was not only story-wise, but also in terms of time management, impossible right from the
05:49beginning.
05:50Just like I love it.
05:52Strictly speaking, this wasn't doable.
05:56We always had quite a narrow timeframe for production when it came to Deponia titles.
06:03We started Chaos on Deponia in February 2012, and released it in September 2012.
06:11For Goodbye Deponia, the third part, we had one year of production, pretty close to what we had this time.
06:18And Goodbye Deponia was about this big, while Deponia Doomsday upped that and got more like this.
06:26As a consequence, we actually had to start production when we were basically still in the concept phase.
06:36The hugest Deponia ever, dude!
06:55The style is very consistent. That's worth mentioning.
06:58The style of the first parts was heavily influenced by one background artist.
07:02That was Michael Benrad, and it's our job to basically mimic this style.
07:07It's, of course, difficult to gauge what exactly Poki had in mind when it comes to backgrounds that haven't been
07:14there before.
07:15Since Deponia Doomsday features a lot of new locations which haven't been in the other installments.
07:20Like deserts and snowy landscapes, for example.
07:25That leaves a lot of leeway for your own creativity and for some ideas you might have and want to
07:30sprinkle in there.
07:31There was this tree in the time bubble, completely made from scrap, something that has never been in the game
07:37before.
07:38It looks like it's about one kilometer high, and that's something new as well.
07:43The time bubble is a particularly unique place, as Deponia usually has really down-to-earth locations.
07:49And this is a little... almost otherworldly.
07:54And originally, we had something completely different in mind.
07:57Originally, the paths were made of piano keys, and the buildings were just floating around.
08:02The background was supposed to be littered with fractals, like, you know?
08:06But I'm very happy with how it turned out.
08:09All in all, with Poki's ideas, it's a bit more down-to-earth and not as far out there.
08:14I think Deponia is something particularly appealing, because there are actually no standard situations.
08:22I mean, the music can change completely from one screen to the next.
08:28It's sometimes a different genre, or a completely different instrumentation, or a different mood.
08:34We don't really have fixed conventions we have to cater to.
08:38We can throw around references, we can basically do what we want.
08:42That's a huge playground for a composer.
08:45Apart from that, we also get to use instruments that you just don't have in a standard orchestra.
08:50That's important, too, to play with elements like that.
08:53Like, in the time travel song, for instance, we have a theramine as an essential part of the song,
08:59which is a reference to the Doctor Who theme.
09:02And we have those horns in the beginning.
09:04Okay, that's a classic concert instrument, but also a reference to Back to the Future.
09:11Another goal of mine for Deponia 3 was that we, no matter which theme, always had to keep the Rufus
09:17theme in there.
09:18Basically, a small challenge I gave myself.
09:21And for Deponia 4, I didn't have this challenge.
09:24I didn't want to have such a dogmatic approach to it.
09:27But he is still our hero, and we see everything through his eyes.
09:31And accordingly, his theme is somehow omnipresent.
09:35I was mostly responsible for the Deponia cutscenes.
09:39First, I got Poki's storyboard, pretty little drawings.
09:43And those I translated into the proper Deponia style.
09:47Then I made all those sketches, which have been nicely rigged by Nick.
09:51And when that was set and done, I let Nick continue, so he could flesh out and animate everything.
10:00When we were through with that, I helped animating and did all kinds of odds and ends, applied fixes,
10:06and made sure that everything stylistically came together nicely.
10:11Well, back then I only did in-game animations, like hand-drawn with Photoshop.
10:16Since Deponia 3, I've been working on cutscenes, as I mentioned, still with After Effects.
10:22First, there are Poki's little scribbles, and based on those, Simona creates layouts of the characters.
10:28And one of our backgrounders draws backgrounds for the cutscenes.
10:32Everyone has a different approach with the backgrounds.
10:35Basically, everyone has their own technique, you can't generalize.
10:39But as a matter of fact, from Poki's layout to the line art, it's all quite similar,
10:43since, theoretically, you have to be able to animate with only the line art,
10:47if you have to animate any background or character animations happening there.
10:52In my case, as an intermediate step, I did a variant, complete in grayscale,
10:57where I just defined light and shadow, since I had to do a lot of night screens.
11:01There, you basically had one light source, which illuminated certain things,
11:06just so I knew beforehand, okay, there's a lighter area and there's a darker area,
11:10and then I just created a color mood, all fleshed out and with colors,
11:14very roughly slapped on in a style you think is nice.
11:22And if that got approved, you could start with proper coloring,
11:25and I think each of us has their own technique to achieve the fastest results,
11:29yet still creating a consistent style in the end.
11:34And then I get the backgrounds and layouts, and start drawing in the characters cleanly.
11:39And the, yeah, greatest novelty when it comes to that in Deponia Doomsday,
11:43is that we use Spine as our animation tool.
11:48First, you have to know how this all works, how things seem to move.
11:52And it works by drawing many, many pictures of one character, each slightly different,
11:56and thus your eye perceives the sequence as a moving picture.
12:00With Spine, animations work a little different.
12:03Eventually it comes down to drawing a character,
12:12cutting them to pieces,
12:19and use them kind of like, well, like a puppet.
12:23You have all the single limbs, and you can move them, and this is what makes the motion in the
12:28end.
12:29The special thing about Spine, however, is that you can not only move pieces, but also skew them,
12:35and this adds a nice three-dimensional touch.
12:41There's this nice wedding scene where Gol turns around, in her wedding dress,
12:46with a very generous neckline, and that's when Simone instructed me on how I could, using Spine,
12:52place just the right bone to make Gol's breast jiggle perfectly,
12:56when she turns around.
12:59After I worked on that scene for a while,
13:01Simone suddenly came running into the room, yelling,
13:04Show me the boobies!
13:05True story.
13:08Well, there really were situations when we thought,
13:11this will never work out.
13:13How can we possibly do this?
13:15Pokey, yeah, he's a megalomaniac.
13:17He made us suffer through mass scenes full of yellow critters.
13:23This was our battle of Helm's Deep.
13:25Those were mass scenes we never could have done without Spine as animation tool.
13:30They're called Few Locks now, for copyright reasons.
13:34We're one year too early, cause then the copyright on the name Moorlock will expire.
13:39Some of you might know them from H. D. Wells' The Time Machine, and then we could have used it.
13:44But they're the Few Locks.
13:47They're a few more locks.
13:53They're in a lot of scenes, and there's a lot going on.
13:56And the more characters you have on one screen, the more complicated things get.
14:00And I don't think we would have made it without the tool.
14:05And that was the question in the beginning.
14:07How often do those appear in the cutscenes?
14:09Like, if you go through all that effort and set the picture to the music,
14:13and then there's one more video and one after that and after that,
14:17keep in mind that you have to avoid monotony and make it cool every single time
14:22and remember that you can play around with it.
14:25I generated an instrument to create a Moorlock sound really fast.
14:30Starts right here.
14:33Here are some of the guys, just a few of them scattered.
14:37Has to sound a bit nasty.
14:40And when there's a lot of Moorlocks, I can just…
14:53And voila!
14:56My favorite cutscene is probably the one where Gohl pulls Rufus out of the grave,
15:02out of a grave.
15:03It sounds weird, and it probably is.
15:08But there were nice perspectives, nice setups.
15:11And in the end, Gohl pulls Rufus out of there and lands… splat!
15:16Kinda on top of her, and it looks a bit titillating, and I like that.
15:21It's generally really interesting to see how each chapter has its own color scheme.
15:26The chapter I was referring to is extremely purple.
15:29Then there's a blue chapter.
15:31We also have a chapter that's relatively green.
15:33And sometimes we had a wall full of background screens, like all printed out as photos,
15:39and you could see really nicely how everything has its very own color.
15:43What I noticed is that this Deponia has a lot of nature in it.
15:47That's something we didn't do until now.
15:49You know, we never had that many plants drawn in any Deponia.
15:53I enjoyed this episode.
15:54Thank you for the reason.
15:57Thank you so much for watching.
15:58In the next episode.
15:59In the next episode.
16:01We'll see you next time.
16:01Thanks for being here.
16:05I'll see you next time.
16:05Two of my new episodes.
16:08I'll see you next time.
16:08Grazie.
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