In the Valley of Gods

por Campo Santo

The studio

Choosing their own adventure

It’s not surprising that storytelling sits at the core of Campo Santo. The team, which includes alums from Telltale, Irrational, Double Fine, and Lionhead (among others), lives at the crossroads where place, people, and stories meet. “One of the things that drives us is our fascination with how transportive games can be,” says Campo Santo co-founder Jake Rodkin. “It’s not just about telling a story, it’s about making the person playing it feel a real connection to the character and story being told.”

Indeed, one of Campo Santo’s main design philosophies is making sure players comfortably settle into the skin of the main character. Ideas like body awareness and intricate animations for hands help make that connection between player and game, allowing them to get lost and adopt the character’s perspective as their own.

The self-described “scrappy” Campo Santo team in San Francisco

Campo Santo learned a lot developing their first title – the award-winning narrative adventure Firewatch – making them confident embarking on the even more ambitious In the Valley of Gods, where they’re introducing an AI-controlled actor who has many adventures. And while their focus is currently on how the story unfolds, Campo Santo is taking steps to ensure it’s truly compelling with plenty of meaningful character interactions.

The project

Out of the trees and into the desert

In the Valley of Gods tells the story about the challenges of friendship, placing players in the boots of Rashida, a documentary filmmaker in the 1920s who is trying to get her career out of a slump. Though her boots are covered in Egyptian sand rather than the dirt of Firewatch’s mountainous Wyoming forests, the character still brings all of the rich and complicated history and baggage you’d expect to find in a real person’s life story.

As with Firewatch, character development is central to In the Valley of Gods

With this, their sophomore effort, Campo Santo is hoping to refine and improve the techniques developed in Firewatch to connect players directly to Rashida, while introducing even more complexity via Rashida’s companion character Zora, a former friend whom Rashida had vowed never to work with again.

The revived relationship progresses as players interact with Zora, who responds based on player choices. “In Firewatch, Henry’s relationship with Delilah was really great and fun, but having a disembodied voice along with you for yet another story could wear thin. There are probably only so many times you can get away with that,” remarks Rodkin. “We knew the next big step was introducing a fully animated, emoting NPC that reacts to player actions. Zora isn’t just there to staunch the feeling of loneliness, but to offer a more impactful way to express the story and the characters’ relationship.”

Mira el tráiler de Valley of Gods

The reveal

The luxury of planning

With In the Valley of Gods, Campo Santo has spent the majority of the game’s early development in preproduction: Fleshing out the story and characters, building out visual style, and developing the unique tools they need to deliver on their aspirations, which you can see in the trailer released during the 2017 Game Awards.

This is different than the approach they took on Firewatch, where all phases of development happened more or less at the same time. Once production got underway, most of the gameplay and level design was built side by side with story and dialogue. “Though that was partly just a necessity. A big reason we developed Firewatch that way was because the simpler design of that game allowed us to.” For In the Valley of Gods, the team has aimed its sights at achieving lofty goals, which tend to require meticulous planning.

“The development of the scenes for the trailer was a way for the people working on art, tech, and rendering to figure out how to take the concept paintings and make them a reality in-engine, and they really ‘knocked it out of the park.’ Now we’re busy taking all of those learnings and improving on everything even more. We’re working with Unity fairly closely on much of this, with the hope that what we’re doing will make its way back into the community, and hopefully Unity itself – if not our literal code then at least our discoveries.”

Research leading to better options

Most of what we’re looking at in the trailer, while already running in real-time in Unity at a high frame rate, is merely a first pass that allowed the team to work on the look of the game and explore new technologies and shaders.

The companion character Zora was particularly eye-catching. Not only for her smooth animation and memorable silhouette, but also for facial animation and her dramatic hair, which looked as though it had real volume thanks to some custom shaders and interesting baking techniques to get the rim light to look exactly right (you can read about it here).

Una prueba de retroiluminación del cabello de Zora

And while the hair was hand-animated for the trailer, if you look closely, you can also see a preview of the simple physics spring system in Zora’s earrings, which will eventually provide a more realistic and dynamic bounce to those beautiful locks.

Even sequences eventually cut from the final trailer were beneficial to levels planned for the final game, including one that had the two characters wading through waist-high, fully simulated water in a flooded underground tomb. “It was one of the most technical pieces of the trailer but it didn’t really fit with the story we wanted to tell at the time so it was cut,” says Rodkin. “It’s something we’re very excited to evolve as we go farther down the development road.”

A veces son las cosas sencillas

Los ambiciosos elementos visuales de última generación no caen mal: lugares hermosos, personas llenas de detalles, luces y sombras tan realistas que hacen que el jugador se quiera mezclar con el entorno... Pero gran parte de las veces, el éxito yace en pequeñas características técnicas menos llamativas. Como es el caso de la hermosa animación de personaje de Campo Santo. Pasaron de la gigante máquina de estado de animación que usaron para Henry en Firewatch a máquinas de estado localizadas, animaciones y timelines únicas basadas en las API reproducibles que se presentaron lentamente en el 2017.

"Con Henry en Firewatch, nuestro animador quería una experiencia de cuerpo completo en todo momento, lo que significaba que, si mirabas hacia abajo en primera persona, verías a una persona caminando, subiendo por una cuerda, recogiendo objetos, etc. —explica Rodkin—. Firewatch era un enorme espacio continuo. No hay pantallas de carga ni oportunidades de descargar partes del juego solo porque caminaste por el mundo. En ese momento, esto significaba una enorme máquina de estado Mecanim para cada interacción que podía ocurrir en cualquier punto del juego, lo que era muy difícil de leer y de manipular”.

Like Zora, the team has its eyes on the horizon

Los API reproducibles, para los nuevos, proporcionan una forma de organizar y compartir fuentes de datos a través de varias funciones. Los scripts de juego, animación y sonido pueden verse a través de una gráfica para mantener todo organizado entre funciones.

"La forma en que funciona todo ahora permite que los personajes lleven muchos menos datos. Esto significa que la organización del mundo es más sencilla y que los objetos pueden compartir datos de manera rápida y eficiente. Las animaciones aún se pueden combinar, pero ahora esos datos pueden enlazarse a objetos específicos".

"Por ejemplo, si te quieres sentar en una silla, la mezcla de la animación de la silla se puede compartir, ya que el personaje interactúa con el objeto en sí. Afortunadamente, esto se traduce en máquinas de estados de animación más pequeñas en vez de una red gigante en donde cada hilo es difícil de seguir. Seguimos trabajando en la organización de los detalles de nuestra estructura de producción, pero las primeras exploraciones son muy prometedoras", concluye Rodkin.

It’s a long road

The development journey of In the Valley of Gods has only just begun. Keep your eyes on this page for details as the game progresses, and we’ll also share how Campo Santo is using Unity’s new features to make this already stunningly beautiful adventure come to life in 2019.

Campo Santo utiliza una amplia gama de características de Unity para dar vida a los personajes de Rashida y Zora.

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