Bradford Animation Festival (BAF) 2010 Review
As I’d never been to any kind of animation or game festival, I didn’t know what to expect. The first show that was on was the company Splash Damage with their upcoming game ‘Brink’. It seems the gameplay is focused on multiplayer third-person shooting based on two rebel factions, in a dystopian future scenario. The team mostly showed us their design work, which consisted of some 3-D models but mostly concept art. That was the kind of role I would want in the game design industry, as that kind of game art is my favourite (as I am particularly fond of Japanese concept artists Yoshitaka Amano and Tetsuya Nomura).
The most useful fact I gleaned from Splash Damage was that they explained when they were designing the characters and locales in the game (especially as it was futuristic), it was more important to work visually rather than scientifically. An example was that they designed a futuristic building that would never be physically possible to build, but it worked visually and had believability in basic physical properties (like the fact that it was free-standing, attached to the ground and had windows, etc). They also said a general knowledge of all things is useful when designing as it can be integrated into your designs. One thing of note is that all the characters are male, as females were regrettably cut from the final product (because of storage difficulties) despite being designed.
The next show was Charles Cecil (the creator of the Broken Sword series, one of my favourite games) talking about his involvement in the new Doctor Who Game on the BBC website. After viewing the trailer, it came across to me as more of an interactive episode than a game. One thing that Charles Cecil mentioned was that his Broken Sword game was remade for iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch as there seems to be a large audience for touchscreen games.
There was then a presentation on indie games, which are games produced by independent creators. I’d never heard the term before, but I knew of the genre. Despite the high-profile specifications of modern console games, there is still a huge market for indie games which are usually lesser in graphical capability but better in terms of pick-up-and-play value. This led into a talk of mods (modifications), which are also popular today. To me though, modifications seemed to be geared more towards programmers and coders.
The next presentation was for a Flash-movie based game called The Curfew by a company called LittleLoud. However, in my opinion the ‘game’ was more of an interactive episode than the previous Doctor Who one (as that one at least had direct character control, a stealth element and adventure-style gameplay). This one was basically a film, which paused occasionally so that the viewer could choose from a multi-choice branching feature to change the story. This seemed to be the only gameplay feature, but even the story-branching feature is usually implemented more subtly in most video games (such as Silent Hill: Shattered Memories by Climax Studios, which potentially has very drastic story changes depending simply on things the player looks at or places the player goes to first).
The last presentation was the company Ninja Theory with their game ‘Enslaved’ which concerned a character called Monkey. The gameplay is an adventure game with a hack n slash element, with the main character travelling with a female companion. The focus was on the cinematic nature of the game’s cutscenes. Another feature discussed was the way in which the main character carries his female companion as they had rendered several poses, some of which looked impractical (as the character couldn’t move in the same way and was hindered by his carrying of her) or inappropriate (as one looked a bit too sexual). Obviously, it helps to be sensitive and aware about these issues when designing concepts in video games.
