Hexahedron Intro Cinematic

Hexahedron is a Dark Souls-inspired game developed by students at the Academy of Art as part of the Studio class. It follows a geometric theme with its creatures and enemies due to a lack of animation students. I was responsible for the narrative elements found in this story, including the above cinematic.

Writing

When I first joined the Hexahedron team, which had already been working hard for three semesters, the only narrative that existed was a blurb written by one of the designers as a guide for the team.

Long ago, two factions known as the Shapewrights and the Abstrakt were fighting against each other for territory. With the Shapewrights losing the war yet refusing to surrender, they turned to the Polymancers to open the rift to the Stygian Polychasm. They knew that opening the rift would lead to unknown yet devastating consequences, but it was the only method of winning the war. Performed at the undercroft of Fort Hexahedron, the Polymancers opened the rift.

However, Stygian Cubes, among other monsters, began to ravage everyone in sight. Dozens of cubes sprinted through the portal, and the traps weren't enough to fend off the assault. One of the Polymancers successfully performed a reverse ritual, sealing the rift and transporting all the Stygians to the Polychasm, but all the Shapewrights in Hexahedron, the most important base of the faction, were already killed off.

Six hundred years after the invasion, the base has now transformed into the peaceful town of Multifaceton, with the abandoned tomb and sewer blocked off from the residents. However, the seal couldn't last forever, and the Stygians mastered the human technology they had seen during their initial invasion. They killed all the residents and took control of Multifaceton. The two remaining survivors were prisoners Face von Shapeless and Maximilian. With Maximilian killed by a Stygian Cube, it was up to Face von Shapeless to find the source of the portal and seal it once and for all.

I broke it down into the following three plotlines:

* The far past - 500 years ago, there was a war between two factions where the losing side summoned geometric monsters who turned on everyone and went on a rampage. Mages then sealed them back in the dimension they came from.
* The past - 5 hours ago, the geometric monsters broke the seal on the portal and killed everyone in the fort.
* The present - Face von Shapeless, the player character, breaks out of prison and must now go on a quest to destroy the rift and lock away the monsters once and for all.

I’ve decided to focus on the first plotline because it gave the player the most context for his action. If the player understands it, he will know who he is fighting and why he should care. I thought the second plotline could be easily told through codex entries a different student could write after I graduate. The third plotline was the lowest priority because the player could make up the reason why their character ended up in prison and choose to follow the quest, or, like the second plotline, it could be added later.

After talking with the team, we decided the best way to tackle the first plotline was through both cinematics and codex entries. Cinematics will give the player only the most basic information, and the codex will provide further reading for those interested.

Script

We really wanted to give the game an epic ambiance and make the player feel the importance of the quest. We thought that this juxtaposed with the ridiculous appearance, would make our game original. This meant that through these cinematics, I had to answer many questions in a serious voice.

* What is my goal?
* Why is it important?
* What are the consequences of failing?
* Who am I?
* Why do the enemies look funny?
* Why do they want to kill me?

The only question I didn’t answer was “who am I?”. It was because, as I wrote above, it is something the players might be content with imagining for themselves. I chose to push things further with:

* Who is the narrator?
* Why do they care?

This allowed me to ground the story in a character the player could become attached to and gave me a clear point of view from which to write. The reveal at the end lets the player know that the narrator who has been helping them is directly responsible for their troubles, rewards them for their efforts, and gives the narrator a character arc.

Voice Over

During the first semester of my work on this project, I was also taking a voice acting class tied to our school's acting department. With the studio teacher's permission, I talked to the acting teacher and requested that everyone in the class audition for the narrator role. She thought it was a great idea. I presented Hex in class and described what we were looking for using the Cate Blanchett (Galadriel) narration in the Lord of the Rings prologue. I gave each student comments on how to get closer to the character we needed and brought the audition recordings to the studio class.

We voted on our top three performers. The idea was to have backups if some actors disappeared. I sent our final selection and the final script to perform, and they sent me back their recordings. It was really important for me that we get them back before everyone started their winter break because I knew it was going to take a while to get things back up and running once the spring semester started, so I had the recordings in Perforce before the semester was over.

Cinematic

Proposal

At the beginning of the semester, there was no time to focus on narrative as everyone was busy preparing a build for GDC, but once that was over, we began working on the intro cinematic. We started by brainstorming ideas about what could be done with the time and resources we had. We preferred doing something with a smaller scope but a higher polish. Originally we were supposed to start working on one video, but we had a couple of good ideas, and there was one I really believed in. Thus we created prototypes and brought them to class for a vote. There were three options we thought of, the scrolling text, the traveling image, and the in-game rotation. I worked on the scrolling text and the traveling image.

Scrolling Text

We thought of creating a Star Wars scrolling text video and adding images to it on the side for more interest.

I generated images using Midjourny to create the prototype blow. The idea was to have a good image that communicated what we needed, and then replace it with original illustrations once we knew what we wanted.

Traveling Image

For this I wanted to move the camera around the image show a elements that match the words of the narrator, then zoom out and reveal a composition that includes all those elements. I got this idea from the first Witcher game, and it was my favorite because it was still dynamic but it only required 1 image to create.

I used the images created for the scrolling text and combined them into one composition using Photoshop. Again, the idea was to get a quick, good-looking result that communicated well and inspired the decision-makers. I thought that this was the best option, and my main goal was to convince the other members of the team that it was possible, that we could do it.

The response was beyond my wildest imagination. Everyone loved it, and our teachers even decided to expand upon it. Now, we were going to create six images instead of one and finish with a grand reveal in the end. As I had a little bit of experience with Premiere creating the prototypes, I volunteered to be the one to edit them.

Storyboard

Once we decided on the parameters, I was tasked with creating a storyboard for the artists to take inspiration from. While creating it, I used the intro of the Lord of the Rings as a reference amongst other similar intros from video games. The goal was to give the artists direction but also allow them the creative freedom to come up with their own ideas that fit what we needed.

After I finished my storyboard, I passed it on to Woon who was the artist responsible for the cinematic. She asked for clarification on a few points and returned with her own storyboard. After a bit of back and forth on next to which image should the dialogue appear, it was approved by the teachers and we were set to go. Woon got two more artists to help her create the images and logo for the cinematic while I started creating a draft for the video.

Animation

I animated the images as they were being made. Woon would send me an image, and I would add it to Premiere and begin to animate it, this allowed me to quickly ask for revision of assets and immediately see the result in the video. This was important because by that time, we only had roughly three weeks to make everything so I was always searching for what could be done in parallel while I was waiting on art.

I had to consider four things:

* How to separate the image into individual elements.
* The entrance of each component into the frame.
* The component’s movement once inside.
* The transition into the next image.

The movement inside the frame was what the player was going to notice the most, so I based all other decisions on what would look best there. Consider the following frame:

It was too tall to fit into one frame, as planned in the storyboard, which meant the camera needed to start at the bottom and move up. However, the center of the image was not that interesting, so I decided to slowly move up while on the bottom of the image and, at the appropriate time in the dialog, quickly move up to the top and hold there. Because of that, I needed to separate the foreground and background elements to create the illusion of depth when moving up. In this image, separating the layers required minimal effort; most of them were already separated this way from the beginning, but when it might have affected the art's quality, I requested assistance from Woon.

For many images, I could only give the impression of depth and movement, but when possible, I pushed it further. For example, it made sense to rotate the platform from side to side and play around with the ritual cube at the bottom part of the image. On the top, there wasn’t much room to play with depth, so I scaled the outlines of the eye and rotated the center circle to give the effect of a portal.

The transitions were another way to make each scene feel unique. The most common type was fade-in-out, but I made it more interesting by fading each element of the image at different times. I always tried to think about how I could blend the elements from both the current image and the next to create cool effects for the moment of transition. But my favorite part was going beyond that simple transition and looking for something unique to the image. In the image above, I made the portal circle expand across the entire screen, and once it swallowed, everything faded into the next image. It worked so well both because it was different than all other transitions and it matched the dialogue lines of an invasion from a different dimension.

Sound

The moment I knew what kind of images I had to work with, I started looking through the game files for appropriate sounds. It was important I use sounds from the game, especially the music, so I could better tie in the cinematic and make them both feel like part of the same experience. When I required sounds that did not exist in the game I went online to look for supplements. Overall I think I used about 90% of sounds from the internet.

Let's take this image again. The background music was from the game, but still, I was missing a lot of sounds. I knew it was a ritual and that the platforms were going to be moving, so I needed the creaking of chains and some chanting for the bottom part. For the top, I was dealing with a portal that was going to expand, so I looked for some continuous magic sound and a short magic burst. There is also some generic wind blowing throughout the entire video to make things a bit more unsettling.

Then came the positioning of the sounds and the volume control. For some sounds, like the burst of the portal, I had to control their placement very carefully. If the sound had started playing before the expansion, it would have immediately taken the viewer out of the video. With others, like the creaking chains, it was better not to pay too much attention to them, or they would have sounded too planned. As long as the chains were visible while they played, I was good to go. After placing the sounds in their appropriate place I had to adjust their volume so they would not overwhelm one another and the dialogue could be clearly heard.