THE PSVR IS AN OLD BIT OF KIT IN VR TERMS - HOW DID YOU GET AROUND ITS LIMITATIONS GIVEN FRACKED CROSS- GEN CAPABILITIES? We planned a multi-pronged approach up-front to mitigate performance, and to maximise explorable interior and exterior open worlds with enough dynamic content to bring it all to life. We knew PSVR was long in the tooth, but we were well versed in the rendering challenges and occlusion mitigations. We knew where to pick our battles, “focus and bang for buck” was the mantra. Form: A style that supports clarity of interaction and simple, legible shapes. This serves the mechanics of the game, the visual language to the player, with a healthy side effect of occlusion opportunities with conservative polys count meshes. A good scenario for 360 degrees of world rendering. Material complexity: By avoiding complex material passes and traditional clamping processes that you normally see from shader driven graphic styles, we leaned into hand illustrated textures and finishes with minimal post processing required. That gave us the flourishes and bespoke touches that are normally reserved for concept art or illustration. World layout: Portray an open world one view at a time. Artistic compositional skills combined with draw call and rendering aptitude leads to a well-managed rendering scene, one that maximises your budget. Level design and world layout rendering must go hand in hand if you want to deliver open worlds or mountain scale ski slopes on PSVR. There’s a whole bunch of more specific details of course, but the key take away is to consider your performance strategy up front and re- contextualise your initial weaknesses into your game’s unique strengths.
confidence that our creativity, collaboration, and mentoring has not only remained, but increased.
So, what was an “unexpected difficulty”
brought around some game changing silver linings.
HOW DIFFERENT DOES THE CURRENT GAME LOOK FROM HOW YOU ENVISIONED IT? Honestly, not too much different. We were in a beneficial position; we had a good
handle on the game and its core mechanics before art production really kicked in. We had a fully playable vertical slice demo in place before the full art team really ramped up. This enabled our artistic execution to be strategised and proven with some certainty and accuracy. The real challenge was how much of it could we make?
The art style was always intended to be bold and illustrative, so with a strong sense of composition and colour theory put into practice, we set out to faithfully translate
2D concept, grey box stylist paint over & visual target - VS - real-time implementation rendered in UE4.
64 | MCV/DEVELOP March 2022
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