Just like building a car or a house (I assume…) it’s important to ensure there is a good foundation before starting production. Different industries use different names for this, but within games we call this Pre-Production.
An important component of a successful pre-production is to know to answer questions without finishing features. It’s not about having things perfect, instead about ensuring that we know roughly how long something will eventually take and what components we need to consider ahead of time.
For us, that was six weeks where we answered a lot of questions like:
Which enemies will we need, and how many?
What will the realities look like and how do we make them within our budget?
How versatile is One, can she deliver all the emotions of the storyline?
And the million dollar question (seriously, it’s been expensive) – how will we render One’s hair?
During pre-production, we focus on how the enemies will work more than how they would look. We start with core mechanics and ensure they are working and fun and only then can the concepts begin. Here is an example of the original pitch of the Ranged enemy. We discussed which attacks could be fun and how they could connect to elements.
Knowing that we wanted to have multiple realities meant we had to be very smart on how we built assets. We knew we couldn’t afford to make three completely unique realities without reusing content. We started with really simple tests like changing the colours of a rock to see if it could look different enough.
Not only was this an efficient way to create multiple items from one, it also helped us figure out how we would represent that the game has different realities, as opposed to alternative worlds.
In this image, you can see that a test of swapping out a few assets (highlighted in orange) and a different arrangement of coloured rocks look similar enough, but still with changes in the aesthetics and feeling of the space.
During this time we were working on figuring out our tone and how our characters would show emotions. We always loved the over-the-top reactions used in many anime and manga, so we tested how extreme One’s face could go without looking broken.
We wanted One to be able to be very serious and intense but also very silly and comical so we were very pleased with these results.
We knew water (and other elements) were crucial to our game, so we spent a lot of time doing Research and Development of various solutions to see what would make the most sense for us. Comprehensively going through different pre-made solutions as well as prototyping our own solutions.
Investigations included tools like FluidNinja Live and VFX, Niagara Fluids as well as in-house options like materials with ripples or baked mesh animations.
This was a really interesting and complex problem to solve, figuring out what the themes of the islands would be. We knew we wanted a semi-linear experience where the player could choose any direction and should have a unique feeling. We have to confirm things like:
Does each island make sense within the Bible/history of Fading Echo?
Could we explain their stories in narrative and environmentally storytelling, without being too complex?
Were they unique enough from each other but not so different we couldn’t re-use content between them?
There was A LOT of back and forth here and many loops of validation – and still quite a few changes since this document was made back in April 2024.
Taking the time to discuss the HOW, WHEN and arguably most importantly, the WHY, ensured we could start the Production phase of the game in the most efficient and exciting way… but more on that next week 😉.
The Emeteria Team
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