CD Projekt Red

These days I've watched some pretty interesting talks about CD Projekt Red, the guys that released The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

The first talk was hold by 2 developers from CD Projekt Red, an environment artist named Kacper and a concept artist named Marta. They started explaining the teamwork involved in creating The Witcher 3 Blood and Wine which is an expansion for the game. Marta begins to talk about the relationship between the concept art and environment art, and they discuss the iterations, draw backs and analysis of references they’ve gone through to finish multiple scenes in the game world.

They talk about the design process of the architecture and the link between the concepts and the art done by the teams. The task was very difficult especially keeping the relation between the book and the game and also making the player feel that the world has problems that needed to be solved. The benefits of working in a team is that the quality increases and also the inspiration you get by going out of the comfort zone helps you push further your ideas.

At the end there was a Q&A session where the team replied to the public regarding different subjects and topics. Producers and leads are always helping and keeping things on track minimizing wasted time.

Because things were getting pretty exciting, I watched a second talk from the CD Projekt Red studio because I wanted to know more about their way of thinking and managing different aspects of the game development. The name of the producer is Stan and he talks about the structure, and what it is involved in making art for the Witcher 3 and expansion packs along with it. He started with presenting the pipeline and how the assets priority is assigned based on how many departments will need to have a pass on it.

Optimization is an important aspect which takes place right at the end of the production and Stan is talking about what it takes to bring as much detail as possible in the characters and also keep the balance between details and frame rate by doing LODs (level of details) , shader LODs and so on.

He also talks about the importance of the little details and how that is dropping the quality of the game if not given enough attention, for example clipping. Different solution that might come across can vary from changing the angle of camera shots to trying to hide it with custom animations on every scene and some other ways, but in the end ask for help from coders.

When making repeatable or mass assets try and limit the amount of details like hair, cloth sim and movable parts as it might not be seen by the player and won't be noticed. Try to use simple elements like colors and patterns.

Human equipment was another interesting topic because they wanted the armour on the main character to be up-gradable and the player to be able to not only change between different types but to build upon the previous one. Also the armour needed to look good from behind as well. Sometimes it didn’t fit with the game so Stan talks about using a proxy high poly mesh to see the silhouette and make changes early on the production rather than wasting time.

The dismemberment was another aspect and the approach was consisting in preparing the types of bodies for all the types of characters in the game and then cover all of them in blood.

The presentation ended with a usual Q&A session.

References

DevGAMM Conference, 2015. Youtube. [Online]
Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzvkB3w1qXQ
[Accessed 16 January 2017].

Dragons, D., 2016. Youtube. [Online]
Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J20Zd96i6oM
[Accessed 16 January 2017].