Black&White 2: Developer Diary #2: The Creature ...

It’s time once again for Black & White Studios to embark on the fabulous journey through the development diaries so that you’ll be able to keep abreast of all the goings on in the world of Black & White 2. I’ll be your guide through the entire development process of the game and, lucky you, you get to experience it all from my rather distinct perspective.

John McLean-Foreman

On a typical workday I give very little thought to how the other 50 or so people working in Black & White studios spend their time. I’m usually far too lost within the minds of my story characters to give anyone else’s job more than the most fleeting of thoughts. It therefore came as a bit of a surprise to me to discover just how many people are involved in the development of the Creature.

There’s Neil the Creature AI programmer, Stephen who works on the physics engine, the legion of animators, Mark the art lead, the concept artists, Sebastian who designs the Creature in 3D (bone structure and so forth), Per who creates the multitude of skins that surround the bone structure, Anton who develops the 3D rendering systems that enable the artists’ work to be transferred into a playable version of the Black and White program, Craig who does all the sound effects, and finally the testers that make certain everything is working perfectly. All in all, that’s more than a dozen people who are directly involved in crafting this part of the game.

From my personal perspective (and when am I not writing from my personal perspective?), the Creature was my favourite part of Black and White. In the original game, I fiddled around with my Tiger far more than anything else. The main problem with him though was that I couldn’t ever just leave him to his own devices. If I did, he’d wander off to the middle of nowhere, eat far too much, throw villagers around for no apparent reason, and basically do all the things that I didn’t want him to be doing. What a little punk. Grumble… grumble…

A frozen Lion anyone?

Although I loved my old Tiger to bits, thankfully there are some pretty spectacular changes in the newest incarnation of the Creature. First of all, he is no longer an enormous infant that requires constant Mummy-management, but is instead the player’s greatest asset. With the new AI, the Creature can control armies and employ dynamic military strategies at the appropriate times. Further, how you train the Creature is much less of a black box. By that I mean that when you train the Creature to do something now, you actually see directly into his brain, so you know exactly what it is that you’re training him to do. Gone are the days when you would slap the hell out of your Creature for eating a villager, but because he’d moved on to another action the game would say: “Your Creature has learned not to bring wood to the storage pit.”

Another fantastic change has to do with the physics engine. Stephen had to explain it to me several times before I understood him properly, but I got it in the end. In Black and White, the Creature wasn’t actually affected by any external forces. Everything that the Creature did, or was touched by, was simply animation that gave the Creature the illusion of being a part of the world. For example, if he tore a tree out of the ground and threw it, the game would run an animation while the Creature held the tree, and the tree would only become a physical object again when the Creature let it go. The game physics would then apply to the tree, the tree would fall, bounce, and so on, in as realistic a fashion as possible. In Black & White 2, all the animations are actually done within the physics engine so that if some outside force (ex: a ballista bolt tears into the Creature’s flesh and causes him to stagger painfully) were to interfere with an animation (the Creature charging the enemy), the result would be a combination of the two – a sort of stagger filled attempt to rush forward. The end result is that there will be endless combinations of unpredictable animations depending on whatever is happening to the Creature at the time.

One afternoon, I strolled over to the other side of the office and had a little chat with Sebastian. The part that I always get confused about in regards to 3D graphics terminology is the way in which artists like Seb use the terms ‘skeleton’ and ‘bone’. If I were to look at my own hand, a bone would be something that resides under the flesh and muscle and so on. For a 3D artist, a bone is an entire section of a 3D character’s body that is separated by a joint. So, if for example a finger only had one joint, then that would be considered two bones. The Creature in Black & White 2 has upwards of 70 bones, 20 of which are in the face. Placing nearly a third of all the bones in the face does sound like a lot, however it allows the animators to create a nearly limitless number of facial expressions.

When editors go wrong...

As I was admiring all the individual muscles of an incredibly detailed Lion on Seb’s monitor, he explained to me how he first creates a feature film quality image with thousands upon thousands of polygons, adds lighting so that all the muscles and so forth stand out very clearly, then takes that lit image and applies it to the game model of the same Creature. The end result is that the game model, by using the same lighting detail as the high polygon model, then looks the same as the high poly model except for the fact that it has a slightly jagged outline.

Once Seb has finished his work, the Creature is ready to be passed on to the animation team, who then imbue each different Creature with its own personality. The Lion, for example, is quite aloof and catlike (big surprise there), while the Ape is a bit cheeky and foolish, and more human in nature. Kelly, one of the animators, demonstrated to me how these two Creatures approached the same task: knocking a human soldier off a city wall. The Ape’s approach was to send the human screaming towards his demise with a flick of a finger, while the Lion’s method was to pounce, and swat the soldier half a kilometre through the air. Both were equally effective, but very indicative of vastly different personalities, just as every animation is required to be.

What further separates one creature from another is the myriad of ways in which the Creature alters its form to suit each player’s actions. Based on those actions, the Creature will appear good or evil, young or old, strong or weak, fat or thin, and every combination in-between. The Creature may grow long hair, which can get wet, or matted, or burned off by fire. The more a Creature fights the more likely he is to become badly scarred. The outcome is that every player has a Creature unique to their own gaming style.

Having discovered exactly what it takes to make the Creature, I have become quite excited about how it’s all coming together. Even though I can see everything that is happening and changing on a daily basis, and that ultimately there won’t be any big surprises for me, I still can’t wait for the moment when I can mould my Creature in my own likeness and unleash him upon the unsuspecting world of Black & White 2. In fact I’m off to see who’s up for a game.