Blue Sky Thinking

Saying you're going to provide everyone with everything they're going to need to make a game is a big, bold statement. I don't think we were ready to be that bold... The character animation problem touches a lot of things: there's a lot of content creation on the tools side, there's a lot of run-time authoring, and then there's run-time; it kind of touched all of the pieces so it was a complex process. It wasn't an easy problem.

It was also a problem that our customers identified as difficult for them from a workflow perspective. So that's why we decided to take a vertical slice.

Skyline is a platform for us to take this model to whatever, whether it's lighting, layout and design of levels. We took character animation as a vertical slice, so we could go from beginning to end and at least validate that what we're thinking about in terms of solving this problem makes sense, and it's actually going to help the customers. Once we do that, we can then apply this approach to other areas of game design.

The economics of making games has changed over the last ten years. When you're trying to make a big success, it used to be that you didn't worry about cost; you were just trying to make the best possible game, whatever the cost, and you'd make money in the end. That's just not the case anymore. Game makers have to become smarter and more efficient.

When I started at EA, things were almost always as I'm about to describe them. There was a pipeline where you start in a tool like 3DS Max or Maya – typically an Autodesk product – and you author your source assets there. Then you'd export those assets out to somewhere you assemble them to gameplay.

Only the studios with more resources are able to do this, and they do it because they have no choice

Eric Plante, Autodesk

First off, there are a lot of issues with that step. If you were going to design something from the ground up, you'd never design it that way. That would be one and the same. Once you've crossed over there's no going back. You can't make changes in the gameplay editor to your source assets.

And then you build those assets together and build the data for the run-time. And in addition to the same objection that this step also should not exist, it's extraordinarily slow. If you're unlucky, you're an artist, and your change depends on a programmers change... You look at the result of your work only once you've gone through all of this, and then it's never perfect the first time. You go through it again, and it's still not right - a bit better, but... So you go through that cycle many times and you lose a lot of time. It can be hours or days or weeks depending, for every one of those iterations. This is how we were developing games on my projects, and it's just terrible.

The more technologically minded studios implemented something like this at least for the bigger pain points in their productions – maybe not across the board, but where they suffered most they invested in developing [solutions].

What we've learned from working with creative people – in the film industry, too – things get better with iteration. You don't get anyone going, "Right, that's it. This is what I want. I'm done." So when you look at that process the more iteration you can do the better your end product is going to be.

Yeah. Absolutely.

Skyline has an asset database that allows you to, when you see something on the run-time, it allows you to make the link back to the source asset... Normally, the authoring tool is outside of that live loop, so you're able to change how the assets are assembled together but you can't change the assets themselves, but when you think of it, that's the part that would benefit the most from being in that loop.

So that's one issue. The other issue Marc has touched on already: people are developing this on their own and it's very expensive to do. Only the more technologically minded studios and the studios with more resources are able to do this, and they do it because they have no choice, but really it doesn't add value to the game... That's what Skyline is about. We didn't invent this, but we're trying to standardise it, and more importantly, we also put the authoring into it.

Not from a commercial point-of-view. Game companies had built up a lot of internal knowledge over 20 years, where they've made some things that look like this, maybe tied to a specific game, but also where the authoring tools aren't really well integrated into the process. So from the level editor out to the game, that part of the loop is probably a lot better, but including all the way back to the 3DS Max or Maya [asset], you don't really see that, even internally.

We've done this for one vertical in particular: character animation. That's for a few reasons: one, it's for one of our core competencies; two, animation is an area that really benefits tremendously from this. Animators are trained to replicate and stylise the natural motions of the human body, but we ask them to author tiny clips of a walk cycle that's looping, of one jump, but it's hard to author those in the context of the whole motion of the character.

If they were able to author these animations in the context of the all the animations that already exist, it's a huge gain for them, and a completely different way of working. So we do this to allow animations to be authored, assembled together, and viewed all at once, live, as the game is running.