Being that the team behind The Vanishing of Ethan Carter were the founders of People Can Fly, the studio known for titles like Bulletstorm and Painkiller, it might seem strange that their new project deviates so far from the high-intensity FPS action that their former home was known for. Last week, Artistry in Games caught up with the Astronauts’ Art Lead Andrew Poznanski for a little more insight into the ‘weird fiction’ of their upcoming first release.
“The game is, indeed, nothing like Bulletstorm or Painkiller,” Andrew told me when I asked about the seemingly dramatic departure from the sort of titles that People Can Fly, the studio that he, Adrian Chmielarz and Michal Kosieradzki left in 2012 to found the Astronauts. “For one, there’s no combat—no one is trying to kill you. Our game is deeply focused on exploration and discovery, it’s a supernatural tale in which you play a detective trying to figure out what happened to a missing boy, Ethan Carter.” As you might well imagine, the more thoughtful pace of this detective story compared to the demon and alien splattering mechanics of their prior output has changed the very way that the game has come together—both in terms of gameplay mechanics and the way that the world has been built.
“In Bulletstorm we were blazing through environments often at break neck speed so in order for something to stand out visually, you’d almost have to put a huge glowing, flashing neon sign above it, otherwise players would have missed it,” Andrew said when discussing the approach to exploration in The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. “Another huge difference is that in Bulletstorm, just like in most modern games, world wasn’t really a world – it was low covers, tall covers, spawnpoints, waypoints and checkpoints, all dressed up in pretty graphics that attempted to resemble actual world.”
The Astronauts aren’t simply looking to design an environment that looks appealing, they’re out to create a world that feels real enough to draw the player into the narrative, something that Andrew feels that the standard working relationship between level designers and artists can often interfere with. “That’s how most modern games are being built–level designers start with this synthetic checkerboard full of blocks, with perfect height, width and distances between them, and only then, artists get their hands on this level shell and are supposed to make it look like a real world. Sometimes results are pretty good, but often players feel the environment is artificial, it exists only as a dress up for this virtual playing field. While designing The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, we wanted to get away from all that, as far as possible. We designed a world that is real, organic and makes deep sense.”
One of the techniques that the Astronauts are employing to give The Vanishing of Ethan Carter this sense of place is photogrammetry, a tool used in sports games to capture the likeness of real-world athletes. However, the Astronauts are using the technique in a less conventional way, using the same methods to capture the very scenery that will fill the game world. “We are always on the lookout for new tools, new techniques, new approach to building games. Many studios stick to their guns and are almost slaves to their tools and workflows. We find this approach limiting and, well, boring,” Andrew said of the Astronauts’ discovery of photogrammetry. “We played around with it a bit, but tools were crude, documentation and know-how was pretty much non-existent and most of all, the hardware was nowhere near ready for the amount of data that photogrammetry delivers.” A blog post on the Astronauts’ development blog shows just how complex the process of digitizing a person, an object or even an environment via photogrammetry really is. “The learning curve was long and steep: lots of things you are used to as a traditional photographer, are exactly the things you need to avoid when scanning. Capturing environments for games seemed like a downright crazy idea at the time, but we love pushing boundaries and don’t give up easily.”
However, this usage of photogrammetry isn’t just for the sake of using an interesting technique. In fact, in a great post on the Astronauts development blog, Andrew has stated that a ‘weird fiction’ game like The Vanishing of Ethan Carter needs something ‘beyond photorealism’ to be effective. “The learning curve was long and steep: lots of things you are used to as a traditional photographer, are exactly the things you need to avoid when scanning,” Andrew said when I asked him how the technique would play into the tone of the game. “Players get much more distracted by lost nuances in photorealistic graphics than by art that is obviously far from looking like a photo. Developers need to be smart about how they use photogrammetry.” The Vanishing of Ethan Carter won’t be completely photorealistic, nor does it intend to—but the world itself looks set to be a very realistic environment in terms of the logic of the landscape. Well-worn tropes of level design like linear paths that shepherd the player into the next set-piece are what the Astronauts are hoping to avoid, and photogrammetry is more of an effort to achieve this than to make something with ‘good graphics’. The visuals of the game are for practical purposes; to create a compelling game world and to execute on the concept of ‘weird fiction’ that has been bandied around in much of the early discussion of the project.
“Ethan is not a particular scary horror game. We call it weird fiction horror to emphasize the fact that it’s more about the dark thoughts of the mind rather than the terror of the flesh,” said Andrew on the subject of the approach to horror in the game. “As our writer calls it, the game is about ‘clumsy unease’, about the atmosphere. We want players to feel like they are actually there, in the valley, wandering through this vast and calm environment. We want their minds to drift away as they roam through meadows and forests, hypnotized by the shimmering tree leaves and rhythmic sway of grass. And only then we want them to stumble upon a leg-less corpse with it’s skull smashed in.”