00:21I'm Todd Pappy, Game Director at God of War Ascension.
00:24What you're about to see is I'm making a video
00:26that we've been shooting over about two plus years.
00:28It gives you a good idea of the inception of an idea
00:31all the way through to the final product.
00:33Keep in mind that this is a work in progress. Enjoy.
00:39You are on one of two teams fighting over the chance
00:43to slaughter this giant cyclops that we have nicknamed Megalops,
00:48a mega cyclops.
00:50And there's been some debate, it's Megalops, not Megaclops,
00:53because Megaclops sounds like a giant horsey.
00:56Megaclops is a terrible misnomer.
00:58I'm going to fight to the bitter end
01:00to change his name from Megaclops.
01:02It's been in gestation for quite a while
01:04because it's kind of the sum total of a lot of the stuff
01:07that we've been messing around with in the multiplayer mode
01:09really for the last, I don't know, what's near two years.
01:13We need a Titan in the multiplayer
01:15to capture the God of War essence
01:17and insert it into multiplayer.
01:19That's what we need.
01:20Some of the early sketches, this guy right here.
01:22This one is a more upright, barrel-chested,
01:25more intelligent cyclops.
01:26With gigantic characters, it's always a good idea
01:28to find some way to suggest scale.
01:31His necklace is made out of human skulls.
01:34We moved on to the next step.
01:36I didn't really think about it, but he looks like a rock star
01:38up on the stage, like going,
01:40and that's all Todd could see after I designed it.
01:43So I was like, ah, s***.
01:46So very close to that is this.
01:48One of the biggest challenges in designing cyclops
01:51is to keep them from feeling cartoony.
01:54Seeing the white of the eye
01:55is what gives it that cartoony quality.
01:57I don't know why that is.
01:59So this is kind of like a dog eye.
02:01So it gives him more of an animalistic evil quality, I hope.
02:04But also I wanted to draw your attention
02:06to something that stuck through even from the beginning.
02:08The necklace made of human skulls,
02:10but this time it literally is a manclis
02:12because I added human bodies.
02:14I wanted to give the players every hint possible
02:16that this thing is horrible.
02:17I'm really proud that we got that on the design.
02:22Megaclops is actually Polyphemus.
02:25He appears in the Odyssey
02:26where Odysseus goes into the cave
02:28and they have to stab him in the eye.
02:30And that's how he's been incorporated into the multiplayer.
02:33This is the biggest character I've worked on.
02:36By far.
02:36Here's the full body of him.
02:39His lower half was not going to be incorporated.
02:41We didn't even build this
02:43because we were told that there was going to be a dust storm down there.
02:46And this is just kind of how things change around here.
02:47So now I had to go back and block in the legs.
02:50We're getting in and sculpting every dot and every pore
02:53because you get so close.
02:55His head and his shoulders and arms are at 11 million polys.
02:58We've had to sculpt each individual wrinkle
03:01and everything that happens on the hands.
03:03When I do start to color him,
03:06we can create masks from all of the depth
03:09and then I can paint on top of that.
03:11The reds really pop
03:12and then we can get some yellows on the surface of the skin
03:14just make it feel a little more real.
03:16Oh, the annoying part was sculpting his decap.
03:19What we do for the decap is we have two meshes.
03:22So we have his original mesh
03:24which doesn't have any of these wounds on it.
03:27When they cut him, we'll swap that out.
03:29Once we swap that out,
03:31they'll cut down his face
03:32and there'll be like a light explosion.
03:34And when that explodes, it'll swap to this.
03:36What we wanted to do
03:37was have that cut go over the edge
03:40so it looked more natural.
03:41So that's kind of what this is visually representing.
03:44And then once the explosion happens,
03:46his mouth pretty much split open.
03:48His bottom jaw will get cut in half.
03:50So we have these little bone bits
03:52that are sticking out,
03:53little organs and muscle tissue and fat.
03:56It's really hard to do
03:57because you have all the ups and downs with the teeth
03:59and all that's connected
04:00and this huge pain
04:02took way longer than I thought it would.
04:16First, I was designing a lot of architectures
04:19and once Todd and Chris liked the architecture,
04:21then I had to kind of put it into a 3D geometry
04:25which was given to me from a level designer.
04:28That was kind of hard
04:29because everything was made out of a geometry.
04:32It was literally just all cubes
04:34and most architectures are not cubes
04:36but I had to come up with a solution to look great.
04:39So what you see on the left of my screen
04:42are the high vision of sketches.
04:45Kind of quick, kind of color comp.
04:47And once they saw this,
04:49they kind of like feel the ideas.
04:51This was sent to the level designers
04:53and this is what I got back.
04:56Everything was just two cubes
04:58and everything was just all same size.
05:00I began to put some of the textures
05:03and some of the assets
05:04and just kind of try to come up
05:06with the interesting areas possible
05:08for the final I kind of took easy design
05:11and try to put them into the scenery.
05:14And then I did broke off some of the pieces in here
05:17just to make it a little bit more interesting,
05:20adding some rounder kind of columns
05:22and this was pretty much the final.
05:25A lot of people when they play a God of War game,
05:28it feels like refined design
05:31and Greek and classical
05:33but there's always this edge
05:34that's a little bit fantastic.
05:36Not fantasy, but it's special and grand.
05:40We were always kind of talking like,
05:42what is this place?
05:43It's just this weird little town in the desert.
05:45And so we were kind of talking like,
05:46okay, maybe the gods or whoever
05:48just chained Polyphemus here.
05:49So they added in chain towers
05:52with some stands on there
05:53so they could watch this sort of battle happen.
05:55Maybe we could have some chimneys
05:57with smoke coming out of them
05:58and some decayed bridges
06:00and some of the buildings
06:01are sort of falling apart
06:02from previous battles
06:04that have happened there.
06:05We have these rotundas,
06:08sort of gondola tops on top
06:10that he can smash.
06:11It was definitely really fun to work on.
06:15You have everything feeling kind of brown.
06:17The brown rock, you've got sand,
06:18which is brownish.
06:19You've got wood, ropes.
06:21It's hard to see where can you jump as a player
06:24and we really want to highlight
06:26some of those edges
06:26so a few strips of color,
06:28almost like paint
06:29to help guide the player.
06:30It's kind of a gamey thing,
06:31but in the end,
06:33if it's going to make the game play better,
06:34it's worth sacrificing
06:35some of the believability of the world.
06:38We're doing things now
06:39that we just take for granted
06:40that we couldn't have done
06:41on God of War 3.
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