Yooooooo!
Sylvain and I (Adriaan) are SUPER proud to announce that this Thursday, June 15th, we will release the free Factory Update on Steam (and iOS) that adds the most complicated area to Hidden Folks we’ve ever made. The Factory has almost 30 targets, dozens of new interactions, hundreds of new sounds, and thousands of tiny stories.
In the three days leading up to the update, Sylvain and I have prepared three graphic-heavy posts, one per day, in which we show and talk about what makes us so excited for it. In today's post: Sylvain’s drawings and the hundreds of stories he puts together.
Like everything in Hidden Folks, the Factory started on paper. Sylvain uses a fineliner to draw every single element we’ll eventually want to place in the game. Sylvain and I brainstorm on the theme and possible sub-themes that could work well with interactions, after which Sylvain enters The Zone™ and just draws whatever comes to mind. After drawing a bunch of things, Sylvain scans them and (manually) places them in a sprite sheet.
Every theme in Hidden Folks has somewhere between 3 and 8 of these sprite sheets, and every area and every story you see is in the game is made up of the elements in those images.
Funny side-track: when Sylvain and I started working on Hidden Folks about three years ago, he decided to buy a somewhat medium-quality / cost-efficient scanner for the project. When that scanner broke down recently, he used a better scanner for a while only to discover that his digital drawings suddenly looked very different, and so we bought that same low-budget scanner just to make sure all Hidden Folks drawings look consistent.
Anyway - once we have those sprite sheets, we give everything a name, drag the elements into the area and sort them, one by one, so that they appear where you’d expect them to appear:
Oh my god I literally discovered today how awesome these putting-stuff-together GIFs are!! Here's two more for fun:
Drag stuff in the scene 19,475 times and you have the Factory:
(btw, this is not a joke: 19,475 is the actual amount of sprites in Factory!)
The image above might be a little unreadable, but we are getting ahead of ourselves here anyway. Because when we start working on a new area in the game, we first make an ‘interaction scene’ where Sylvain puts together all the interactions of a theme in one scene. One small section of this scene:
With this scene, I can start working on the technical side of the interactions while Sylvain can focus on putting together a rough layout with our ideas for sub-themes spread across the map. With a rough layout indicating how certain sub-themes make up sub-areas, Sylvain starts filling in the map, organically growing each sub-area bit by bit, while I add scripts to certain visuals to make them interactive - to give each sub-area not only a distinctive look, but also a distinctive feel.
As you can see in the GIF above, we revise the area quite a lot! Halfway through the process, we might decide to scrape half of the level as we did for the train yard in the Factory. During this process of filling up an area, Sylvain and I will continuously talk about the stuff we make and inspire each other for more elements and interactions. Even though it’s a lot of work, this is where all the fun and magic happens. Some of the things that happen in this phase:
- we try to make sure that the sub-areas are as distinct as possible so that when we add targets to them, the clues those targets get can point at those sub-areas as a way of indication an area as opposed to a single point or scenario.
- we try to spread the density of the interactions so that not everything happens only at specific parts of the map.
- together with sound designer Martin Kvale, we think about how the areas will sound and how that may influence the layout.
- we add and remove sub-areas based on their flow on the map or based on the interactions.
- we add characters and 'character randomizers', which decide the visuals and animations of the characters all around the scene.
- a thousand other things... ??
At this point in the process, most of the stuff we do really comes together visually. The following images are a couple of highlights of the stuff you will find in the new Factory area as a result of this step in the process:
Now that there is a whole map filled with stories and scenarios and cool looking places, I take over to put together the systems and interactions in scene that make it more lively. Think about cars, trains, conveyor belts, many small interactions, and sounds (although at this point Martin probably adds more sounds to objects than we do). This is what the next article is all about!