Torment Torment: Tides of Numenera Pre-Release Thread [ALPHA RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Infinitron]

Torment dev Q&A threads:

https://forums.inxile-entertainment.com/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=9135

Hello to all the Torment fans around the world. My name is Jon Gwyn and I am one of the Environment artist for Torment Tides of Numenera at InXile! I thought this would be a good time to get the ball rolling on giving our faithful Numenera fans a little more of an inside look at what we're doing, and how we are going about creating this very cool world.

First a little background on myself. I am a 25 year game industry veteran and have worked on many titles. My main focus has been environment art for about the last 12 years or so on such titles as the Matrix games, Resistance 3, GTA 5, some mobile stuff ( Reign of Amira ) Wasteland 2 and now Tides of Numenera. Prior to that I was the main character artist on Sacrifice from Shiny entertainment and art lead on a few Might and Magic games. Lots of other projects are scattered in between the more high profile ones as well.

I was the first full time Environment artist on Torment and created the Bloom Scenes in the video. I'm still working on Bloom areas and they are creepy and gross as places tend to be when you are inside of a giant living evil beast.

I will be updating regularly and although I may not be able to get into too much detail about the game, I can chat about the work, methods and experiences of working on this title that we all are waiting for.

thanks
JonG

https://forums.inxile-entertainment.com/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=9879

Hi everyone,

My name is Josh Jertberg and you have once again given me the great opportunity to be your Animator for Torment. I have just wrapped up most of my work on WL2 so I am full steam ahead on Torment. I had a lot of fun talking to many of you during the development of WL2 and I hope we can do the same here. I value everyone's thoughts and opinions and am often inspired by them.

I am going to open this up by asking for everyone's trust and understanding. I am attempting a non traditional approach to Torments animation. Torment presents an opportunity I have been interested in as a game animator most of my career. That opportunity is root motion. What the heck is root motion? Root motion is a system that allows the animation to drive the characters movement thru the world giving it a life like quality that cant be achieved any other way.This is in contrast to a traditional system that has code move and rotate characters position usually in a very linear way with animation simply being played on top. Torment is an emotionally driven thought provoking game. My vision is to have the characters movement enhance this feeling.

Traditionally a RM system is used in conjunction with an analogue controller, the stick provides a natural curve to input. Devising a smart way to emulate this with a mouse click was the first challenge. Currently I am using distance of the click to drive some of the logic of movement. For example a short click will keep the character at a brisk walk, but a longer distance click will put them in a run right away. There is much more to it than this but it has a very organic feel to it. A big challenge is that its a mechanical system that is non deterministic yet we need you to hit your mark reliably. I am using Unitys built in RM system mecanim, it has its issues and is certainly not perfect but it gets the job done. Another traditional aspect of RM is the use of motion capture animation. It makes sense as all the real world translation is built right in to the animation. I am hand crafting the animations for Torment and its something that is not usually done with root motion but as an animator it excites the hell out of me. Using hand keyed animation also helps me push the bounds of reality a bit to get a balance between realism and responsiveness. Our recently released teaser has a taste of this ambitious animation system. I cant express how excited I am to be working on this and the vision of the animation is something that I am personally very passionate about. I have been fighting to make it viable in Torment and I hope all of you will appreciate the effort in the final product.

Please feel free to use this thread to ask any and all animation questions and I will do my best to answer as much as I can.

Thanks again to all of our backers

 

[tuluse]

That got me poking around the Torment forum, I don't know if this ksaun post was referenced. It's about dialog, UI, and voice acting.

https://forums.inxile-entertainment.com/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=8436#p118920

Roguey should appreciate this:

We plan to make the "help" text be togglable by the player (i.e., the yellow text reveal that Lore: Civilization was why you could see that first player response that's chosen). (We haven't implemented this option yet.)

 

[Abu Antar]

Same as Pillars of Eternity as far as I know.

 

[Chaotic_Heretic]

We plan to make the "help" text be togglable by the player (i.e., the yellow text reveal that Lore: Civilization was why you could see that first player response that's chosen). (We haven't implemented this option yet.)

Hope that is NOT Visible the retarded F3/NV syle.

 

[agentorange]

Yeah. Those 6 seconds it would take you to toggle it off would be a real deal breaker.

Hearing that the artist who did the character design work for Sacrifice is doing an environment is very reassuring. Now that I think about it, a lot of the stuff in that last trailer, especially the creatures, looked like it would be at home in Sacrifice.

 

[Chaotic_Heretic]

Those 6 seconds absolutely rape rest of the playthrough with spoilers.

 

[Abu Antar]

Those 6 seconds absolutely rape rest of the playthrough with spoilers.

You've been raping my brain with your dumbfuck posts in half the threads I read. Someone help me.

 

[Chaotic_Heretic]

 

[Rake]

I'm

Yes, we know. Use vaseline. It will help with the burn.

 

[Infinitron]

That got me poking around the Torment forum, I don't know if this ksaun post was referenced. It's about dialog, UI, and voice acting.

https://forums.inxile-entertainment.com/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=8436#p118920

Roguey should appreciate this:

We plan to make the "help" text be togglable by the player (i.e., the yellow text reveal that Lore: Civilization was why you could see that first player response that's chosen). (We haven't implemented this option yet.)

Adam Heine speaks:

We're still smoothing out that workflow as we go, but in a very general sense:
(1) The designer in charge of a specific Zone groups the Zone's conversations into logical groups.
(2) Those groups are divvied out to available writers, with Colin typically taking Main Story dialogues and the Zone Designer taking most Zone-critical dialogues.
(3) Then we start our ridiculous review and iteration process. The Zone Designer looks to see that the conversation suits their design. I look to see whether it follows our dialogue conventions. George and I both look to see where structure could be improved. And Colin makes sure the voice and writing style suit the game as a whole.

In theory, the review and iteration process will get less ridiculous as time goes on and our writers become accustomed to writing for Torment.

As for coordinating it with scripts and things, we've come at that from two different directions, and both seem to work okay.

DIRECTION ONE: Our esteemed and clever area designer Jesse Farrell will write a temp conversation as he's blocking out the level. This blockout conversation has all the scripts, variables, and structure that it needs to be functional (along with Jesse's Hilarious Temp Text™) but is very simplistic. Writers will later go over these and add actual game text along with extra player responses and structure to make it a full conversation.

DIRECTION TWO: Writers will write the dialogue first. Some of our writers add their own scripts. For the rest (or where we need scripts for things that don't exist yet), we add a note to the dialogue node with SCRIPT in big fat letters and what we need scripted. Designers like Jesse will later do a global search for those notes and add in scripts where they have been requested. (We also use that comment/search functionality to call out things like animations and sound effects that we might want to play during a conversation, since we have none of those yet).

So far both directions have worked pretty well.

Good questions!

Grouping conversations depends on design. Say there's a small village scene with two merchants arguing over something and a number of guards standing around in various places. Those would probably be three different groups, so that whoever wrote Arguing Merchant #1 would also write #2, and whoever wrote one of the guards would write the rest of them as well. This ensures consistency on a small scale (and is just plain easier, since most flags will be confined within the groups). But yeah, it's very ad hoc.

Object descriptions are a different thing. Some are planned in design, though many come out naturally after the environment art has been created. Most of them are cosmetic, yeah, but there are definitely some that can reveal things for you.

 

[80Maxwell08]

Well I actually did it. I actually paid $500 because I wanted a signed collector's edition. Really hoping it's going to be good. Also hoping my old CE is going to be worth something.

 

[hoverdog]

Well I actually did it. I actually paid $500 because I wanted a signed collector's edition. Really hoping it's going to be good. Also hoping my old CE is going to be worth something.

 

[Irenaeus]

 

[Drax]

I'm jealous.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Diablo169]

Sad to say I don't think they're going to raise the 70k they need :/

 

[Abu Antar]

Don't worry, the Codex will collectively contribute $50000. Everyone told me they would make it, but pessimist me thinks otherwise. (Last two day do usually see a big spike for KS projects but the question is how many people know about this stretch goal.)

 

[Ninjerk]

buy me one

 

[Irenaeus]

What stretch goal?

 

[Nihiliste]

Adam Heine speaks:

We're still smoothing out that workflow as we go, but in a very general sense:
(1) The designer in charge of a specific Zone groups the Zone's conversations into logical groups.
(2) Those groups are divvied out to available writers, with Colin typically taking Main Story dialogues and the Zone Designer taking most Zone-critical dialogues.
(3) Then we start our ridiculous review and iteration process. The Zone Designer looks to see that the conversation suits their design. I look to see whether it follows our dialogue conventions. George and I both look to see where structure could be improved. And Colin makes sure the voice and writing style suit the game as a whole.

In theory, the review and iteration process will get less ridiculous as time goes on and our writers become accustomed to writing for Torment.

As for coordinating it with scripts and things, we've come at that from two different directions, and both seem to work okay.

DIRECTION ONE: Our esteemed and clever area designer Jesse Farrell will write a temp conversation as he's blocking out the level. This blockout conversation has all the scripts, variables, and structure that it needs to be functional (along with Jesse's Hilarious Temp Text™) but is very simplistic. Writers will later go over these and add actual game text along with extra player responses and structure to make it a full conversation.

DIRECTION TWO: Writers will write the dialogue first. Some of our writers add their own scripts. For the rest (or where we need scripts for things that don't exist yet), we add a note to the dialogue node with SCRIPT in big fat letters and what we need scripted. Designers like Jesse will later do a global search for those notes and add in scripts where they have been requested. (We also use that comment/search functionality to call out things like animations and sound effects that we might want to play during a conversation, since we have none of those yet).

So far both directions have worked pretty well.

This seems like an immensely tedious process and demonstrates why we don't get more good storyfag games. Hopefully they find a better way to streamline their workflow so the game comes out before 2017.

 

[Jaesun]

What stretch goal?

All pledges are applied to improving Torment: Tides of Numenera, but with this Stretch Goal, one specific improvement we can commit to is restoring the Gullet to the Bloom, per George Ziets' original design. We had cut this area to control scope of the Bloom zone. Restoring it to the design would complete George's original vision for the Bloom and increase its scope by roughly 10%. More Info

 

[Irenaeus]

Maybe I can cought up $100... I already pledged $300

 

[Jasede]

They don't "need" 70K to do this. It's just money-baiting. (Which is fine, that's what you're supposed to do on KS.)

 

[Jaesun]

I am so fucking poor right now otherwise I would donate some more. This really really really needs to be in the game.

 

[Drax]

It's killing me, the stretch goal is GEORGE ZIETS STUFF, that HAS to happen...