Hiring: Level Designer Wanted

Frictional Games, the creators of Amnesia and Penumbra series, seeks a Level Designer for a new game project. Taking what we learned from our previous games we aim to take horror and interactive story-telling to the next level. We are looking for a talented individual to help us design and implement this vision.

Main Responsibilities:

• To take creative decisions on how puzzles, events, layout are to be designed.
• Through scripting implement gameplay in a level.
• To place sounds, tweak lighting and similar things to create atmosphere.
• Communicate with writers and artists on how to achieve the goals of a level.
• Provide feedback on design suggestions and implemented gameplay.

Work conditions:

The job will be carried out on a distance so you need to be able to work from home. This means you must have a fast internet connection, strong work moral and live in a timezone near the Swedish one (which is GMT+1). If you are not living in Sweden, you must also be able to invoice (or at least be willing to set this up). The work environment at Frictional Games is quite open and you need to be able to schedule your own time and take initiative when required.

Required qualifications:

• Having designed and implement gameplay for a commercial game or a released mod/indie project.
• Progressive view on video games and a will to evolve the medium.
• Excellent understanding of game design for adventure games and immersive simulations.
• Good enough coding skills to implement your ideas.
• Experience in working with 3D level editing software.
• Good understanding of lighting and architecture in 3D scenes.
• In-depth knowledge on how to create an interactive narrative.
• Not be shy of learning new things and work in areas out of your comfort zone.

Further Qualifications:

• Experience in writing fiction.
• Skills in 3D modeling.
• Experience in the horror-genre.
• Interest in science and science-fiction.
• Experience with Fmod and/or sound-editing.

Send your application to jobs@frictionalgames.com. Attach your CV to the mail, but provide links for other files or images.

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Amnesia - Two Years Later

Introduction
It has now passed a little more than two years since we launched Amnesia and one year since the last report, so time for another! One would think that there is perhaps not much to be said this long after release, especially for a single player game with no built-in social features. But the fact is that Amnesia is still going very strong and 2012 will probably be the best financial year here at Frictional Games, which we would never had expected two years ago.

Sales
As always, let's start with the sales and some numbers. The first thing will be to figure out how many units we have sold in total, which is actually really hard to pin down. The biggest reasons for the uncertainty is that Amnesia was part of the Humble Indie Bundle (HIB) earlier this year and Potato Bundle last year. Both of these account for quite a lot of sales. Without counting the units bought there our total lands at 710 000 units. Adding all HIB and Potato Sack sales gets us to 1 360 000 units in total, which can be called the optimistic figure. This means that, optimistically speaking, Amnesia has sold almost 1.4 million units! This reasoning is not strictly speaking invalid, but I think that one should not really count anyone that bought the bundle and already owned Amnesia as a proper unit. A slightly pessimistic guess (not far from reality I think) is that 2/3 of every bundle and pack buyer already owned Amnesia. This gives us about 920 000 units in total, pessimistically speaking. So saying that we have sold a million units seems fair. Wait... a million units! Oh shit!!

Despite that huge number of sales, what I think is more interesting is how good the monthly sales still are. Not counting any discounts, the monthly full price sales lie at over 10 000 units. This means that less then every 5th minute someone in the world is buying a copy of Amnesia. This is totally insane to me. The figures themselves are far beyond any guesses we would have made two years ago. It is also insane, because this number is actually higher than it was around three months after initial launch. That a game can still be going this good two years after is truly remarkable.  This success is due to many factors, some of which are the uniqueness of the game (horror games without combat do not really exist on PC), the large modding community (more on this later) and the steady flood of YouTube clips (which is in turn is fueled by the modding community output).

Also worth noting that our Penumbra games are still going on at the same rate that they always have. They are still selling about the same numbers (a little more actually) as they did three years ago. This totals to about 900 units per month. Taking all sales together is more than enough to support the company, financing A Machine For Pigs (more on that later) and having some left over. This means that we are in a very good position and aim to use it to take more risk and try out new things (more on this later).

I think we have never disclosed how much we Amnesia cost to make, so might as well do that here. The (exactly) three years of development cost a total of 360 000 US Dollars. It has since earned more than ten times that. Take that investors we talked to in 2009!

Piracy
It has been over a year since we even thought about piracy. With sales as good as above we cannot really see this as an issue worth more than two lines in this post, so screw it.

Modding
I mentioned it a bit in last years summary, but feel it was not given enough focus. When we created the possibility of custom stories, it was something we thought of very late and I think Luis implemented it in less than a day. We put a few days on adding documentation our wiki as well, but all in all, it was a tiny effort compared to the rest of the game. Despite that, this aspect as been immensely important for the game and while it is hard to give any exact features in terms of sales, the influence on our community is easily seen. Before modding started, we had one or two daily post on our message boards. But as the modding community has grown, it is now up in over 40! (Remember this on the boards of a 2 year old a single player game.) There is even a long meme thread regarding the custom story community. What is interesting is that there are even internal expressions used, like "poofer", that we at Frictional did not know about and that was specific to Amnesia modding.

The output of modding community has been quite big as well. Amnesia is as of writing the 2nd most popular game at ModDB and sports 176 finished mods. Not only do this amount of user content lengthen the life of the game, it has also increased the amount of YouTube movies made with an Amnesia theme. There are lots of popular Let's Play channels that have devoted quite a bit of time with just playing various user-made custom stories. As mentioned earlier this have probably played a large role in keeping our monthly sales up.

It is quite clear that allowing users to create content is a feature worth putting time into. I also think that we managed to have a pretty good balance between having simple tools and still allowing a lot of possibilities. It is far from perfect though and for our new engine (which AMFP is not using) will have lots of improvements. It will still be possible to use the simple scripting as before, but now you can pretty much remake whatever you like and do not have to use a complicated total conversion to do so.

Future
The next big thing for us will be the release of Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs, which is a follow-up developed by thechineseroom and produced by us. This release will be very interesting in many ways. First of all it is a big experiment for us to do this sort of collaboration, so from the start we had no idea how it would turn out. Judging from the latest build we have nothing to worry about though, and so far it looks great. Another interesting aspect is how well it will sell compared to the initial Amnesia launch. Not only is the market a lot bigger now than two years ago, Amnesia is more known. The result will be very important to how we plan our future. Release for AMFP is expected early 2013.

At Frictional Games our main concern is our new super secret project. We do not want to say much about this project yet,but we can disclose that it will be horror and that it will be first person. One of the things I was most disappointed with in Amnesia was that it never really managed to deliver any deeper themes, but was more like a shallow fright-fest. For the new project we want to change that and really try and bring a certain theme to the front. Our hope is that this will create a very special experience, creating horror in a much more disturbing way. For the curious, some information on the path we are taking can be found in this paper. The game's current status is that we have pretty much all tech working, and have started to playtest the first parts. Still, a lot is up in the air and the current design is bound to change. While we do not want the project to go on forever, we want to use our good financial situation the best we can and make sure we do not just rush something out (which we did with Amnesia actually). Release will probably be some time in 2014.

Frictional Games have also grown over the last year and we now employ 11 people, which feels very close to the maximum. At least the way we run the company right now. We also do not want to lose the small underdog spirit that has fueled us in the past. When you have such financially different situation compared to when you started I think it is easy to get caught up in expansion, wild ideas and basically do not get much done. So, we do our best to keep our feet firmly on the ground, to be strict on deadlines and to always remember our humble pasts. At the same time we will not take any easy solutions and play it safe. After the successes we have had, I think it is our responsibility to use our money and independence the best way possible.

Tech Feature: HDR Lighting

Introduction

Hello my name is Peter and I’m the new graphics and engine programmer. New is not really the correct word since I have been working at Frictional for a year now. During this time I have updated the engine and added a lot of new graphic features. This will be the first of my blog posts descripting the changes that have been made.

HDR

One of the biggest changes to the the new engine is the introduction of HDR (High Dynamic Range) Lighting. This is a technique to increase the detail of the lighting system. The benefit of using HDR is that bright things can be really bright, dark things can be really dark, and details can be seen in both.

In nature there is no limit to how bright something can be. The difference between a 60 W light bulb and sunshine hitting the earth is around 10 000 luminance (cd/m^2). This means that we need a way to store high intensity values while keeping the quality and precision of the dark areas. Thankfully there already exists a method for storing such values - by using floating point numbers.

We use a 16-bit fp RGBA buffer to store our lighting. This gives us enough of a dynamic range without taking up too much memory.

Tone mapping

A normal computer monitor can display 8-bit colors between the value of [0..1]. Because of this the monitor can not display a 16-bit HDR image directly. To be displayed the image will have to be converted to 8-bit while keeping as much of the details as possible.

Tone mapping is the process of converting an image of dynamic range to one with a clamped range between [0..1].

The simplest method for doing this is to use the Reinhard tone mapping algorithm.

vec3 color = x / (x + 1.0)

No matter how high x gets the final value will always stay between [0..1]. The problem with Reinhard is that it desaturates your dark colors and removes contrast. In the brighter parts of the image Reinhard produces great result with its soft highlights.

What you want to have is an algorithm that preserves the saturation of the color in the dark areas and that keeps as much of the contrast as possible.

I ended up choosing an algorithm created by John Hable for Uncharted 2.

vec3 Uncharted2Tonemap(vec3 x)
{
float A = 0.15;

float B = 0.50;

float C = 0.10;

float D = 0.20;

float E = 0.02;

float F = 0.30;

return ((x*(A*x+C*B)+D*E)/(x*(A*x+B)+D*F))-E/F;

}

Left: Long curve, Right: S-curve near dark values

This algorithm is based on a filmic tone mapping algorithm created by Kodak. It keeps the nice highlights from Reinhard while using a slightly S-shaped curve too keep the dark colors saturated.

Exposure

If you have been sitting in a dark room for some time and walk out into the sun, your eyes will not be ready for the bright light and you will have to squint. After a while your eyes will have adjusted to the light and it will not bother you anymore.

Exposure is a way to control the intensity of light that gets passed through the lens. In the eye this is controlled by the size of the pupil and in a camera it is done by selecting for how long the sensor should be active.

There are a few different ways to control exposure in a game. It can be controlled automatically by storing the average luminance over a few frames and calculating a exposure from that value.
We choose to go with a much simpler method that lets the artists control the exposure by dividing the level into areas that have different exposures. So in a dark area the exposure can be increased and in an outdoor area the exposure can be decreased.

vec3 color = Uncharted2Tonemap(scene_color * exposure)

White Point

A white point is used to increase the contrast of the image. This is the value that is selected to be the brightest any pixel can be. Pixels brighter than the white point will be clamped to 1.0.

vec3 color = Uncharted2Tonemap(scene_color * exposure) / Uncharted2Tonemap(white_point)

HDR Bloom

When a pixel is brighter than the white point it can be used to generate an additional post effect called HDR Bloom. Pixels that get too bright should start bleeding over to other nearby pixels, producing a halo around them. It is a subtle effect that adds realism to the image.

To solve this I use a few render passes. First a bright pass is applied to the image which removes all pixels that are below the white point and scales down all the pixels that are above it. The result is then blurred to create the halos. The blurred image is then added to the original image. The HDR Bloom effect must be performed before the tone mapping.

Final Thoughts

I would say that HDRL and filmic tone mapping is the most important part of any rendering pipeline. It greatly increases the quality of lighting and will make your game look much more realistic.

But HDR and tone mapping is all for nothing if your calculations are not done in linear color space. My next tech feature will focus on gamma correction and the linear color space.

References

http://filmicgames.com/archives/190

http://filmicgames.com/archives/183

http://filmicgames.com/archives/75

http://http.download.nvidia.com/developer/presentations/2004/6800_Leagues/6800_Leagues_HDR.pdf

The Self, Presence and Storytelling

At GDC last week I gave a talk called "The Self, Presence and StoryTelling". There will be a version of it up on the GDC Vault in 2 - 3 weeks I think and hopefully it will be free like last years' talk. Before that comes up I will put up a pdf version of the talk containing a bit more information (something I promised at the end of my talk). You can get hold of that here:

Download "The Self, Presence and Story-telling"

Get the mobi version here (thanks to Tomasz Rozanski for creating this).

The paper is basically a summary about a lot of the stuff that has been written on this blog. It is an attempt to define a new design approach that makes it easier to make games that can deal with a wider range of themes and let you play all the way through. I would be very interesting any feedback you got as I would like to keep the document updated and revised if there are any new insights or any info in it that is no longer true.

EDIT: Proof-read the paper a bit and made a little bit more readable.
EDIT2: Mobi version now available.

Horror Tip: Slender

Slender is a short horror game really similar to Hide. You walk (or run) around in a monotone environment looking for notes, while there is a scary monster hunting you. Like Hide it is interesting to see how a simple setup can create a really spooky experience. The graphics are nothing special, the music is simple moody droning and the sound effects are of no great quality. Still, taking all together and put in an interactive space, it gets a lot more immersion than what you would expect. I think this is a great testament to the power of interaction to create a strong sense of presence in way that is much harder to accomplish in any other media.

The game only lasts for few minutes, which is good because there is so little to do that any longer would most certainly break the spell. This makes me wonder what would have to be needed to make an experience like that last for one to two hours. Adding too much would likely decrease the sense of dread, so one would have to be careful in lengthening it. Hope someone attempts to do this.

Some other stuff worth noting:

- The game hides the mechanics that govern how the monster hunts you down and what makes you eventually get killed. I think this was a good move as you are free to make up for yourself what happened. (Bound to only work on the first play-through though, but that does not have to be a bad thing).

- A lot of the creepiness is induced through sensory deprivation. You mostly only see the same vague shapes over and over and it is not long until you start to imagine things.

- It is interesting how effective the tunnel vision created by the flashlight is. There is just something about having these large chunks of your vision pitch black that make you unnerved.

Recommend you all to give it a go!

Downloads:

Windows (alternative#1, alternative#2)

Mac  (alternative)
(there is no official website as far as I am aware)

Thoughts of The Walking Dead (ep1)

Introduction

I played through the first episode of The Walking Dead recently and few stuff popped up that I thought was worth discussing. For those of you who do not know what The Walking Dead is, it is a horror adventure game based upon a comic book (which is now also tv-series) featuring Heavy Rain inspired gameplay. It is developed by Tell Tale (makers of the Sam and Max reboot, etc) and is released on an episodic basis. I was unsure if Tell Tale could deliver a game with this kind of atmosphere, but having played I have to say that it is quite successful. The first episode is not a master piece by any means, but contain a few things worth bringing up.

Graphics

The comic-book inspired art direction combined with so-so animations does not look all that inviting and immersive. But when you play the game, it works very well and does the job. This even though the drama of the game is mostly about close-up dialog and relationships. I think this is a very important lesson about not having to have photo realistic graphics even though the game is meant to focus on human emotions. I have a hard time saying that Heavy Rain, which as a lot more gloss on its visual, managed to elicit any more emotions from me. However, watching trailers, Heavy Rain seems a lot better in this aspect and I thought Walking Dead looked downright horrible at times. But in-game it turned out not be really matter. This is also lesson in taking care of how you present the game in trailers and such, and make sure that the feelings you get from actually playing the game comes across.

Choices

Just like in Heavy Rain, a big feature is to make hard decisions throughout the game. You must choose who to save, whether to lie or not, etc. Most of these are made using timed dialog choices, where you only have a short time to decide what to do. On paper I think it sounds okay, but I just do not like how it feels when actually playing. There is just something that bothers me in knowing that all of these choices are prefabricated and that I the choice I did not make might have been better. And it does not really matter that the choices do not affect the game mechanically (eg like in Mass Effect where bad choice might mean less gain), there is just something holding me back from playing along with it.
I think a big problem is that it is way too obvious that you are actually making a choice. Supporting this hypothesis is that the game by default gives a pop-up hint of the consequences of a choice (eg that a character trust you less), and removing this makes it a lot better (but still not good enough). A few choices are made in a sort of "Virtua Cop"-like manner where you have to point a cross-hair over a target and then choose an action. It is not always clear that these are actual choices, in part because it is much more analog (not just choosing from a list of options) and partly because it is less clear that you can only can choose a ONE of the presented alternatives. These sequences did not bother me at all as much as the dialog options.

Pixel hunting

While the game does a lot to remove annoying adventure game features and make a smoother experience, it also falls back upon some annoying aspects of the genre. The most obvious is that of pixel hunting. There are only really two major adventure-game like puzzles in the game and both of these has the player searching for one or several objects, non-obviously located, in the environment. The worst of these is a remote control that is hidden in  drawer which is not accessible until you have done certain unrelated actions. This caused me to wander aimlessly in the scene for far too long.
I think it is really important to try and minimize this sort of things as it makes you go about exploring the scenes in a very unnatural way. Best is if the player can sort a puzzle out without having to search every nook and cranny for items.

Repetition

Once you get caught up wandering without any real goal, like I mentioned above, you start doing the same things over and over. This is when you start noticing the slim output of lines that characters have. When asked the same question, they just repeat the same line they gave before. This is especially jarring when it amounts to longer exchange between the protagonist and a supporting character. Repeating canned responses like this really breaks the sense of immersion for me. I just simply cannot role-play when I am subjected to this sort of repetition.
I think the game should have removed hot-spots, given leading answers from characters (especially the protagonist), etc. Anything to push me in the direction and to keep up the make-belief that it is real characters inhabiting the virtual world. Now they just come of as cardboard signs the moment you start wandering off the intended path.

End Notes

I'd say that The Walking Dead is worth playing and being just over 2 hours of gameplay in the first episode it just not that much wasted time in case you end up hating it. While the game did not blow me away, I was pleasantly surprised and am intrigued to see how the next episode will turn out.

If anyone else has played the game, I would love to hear your thoughts on the following.:

- What did you think of the graphics? Was the discrepancy between trailer and in-game also large?
- What did you like the choices? Did it feel like you could roleplay or was it hard to put as side that there was a better choice?
- How did you feel about the repeated lines? Not bothering at all, or a nail in eye each time they were encounter?