I also wanted the game to look really beautiful (in the way that only programmer art can!), so I wasn’t opposed to putting effects into the game that perhaps don’t entirely make sense, but work from an atmospheric or visual stand point. But it’s all part of building the idea that something isn’t right within this cave. How did you come to that decision?Ĭhris Delay: From a purely technical standpoint it doesn’t really make sense that scan points on water dissolve away, or that water surfaces reflect the point clouds above them. Pip: The water works really nicely, slowly dissolving your scan points and leaving a reflection. It’s been a very unusual set of design constraints! It took us a while to discover what worked best, but generally speaking any feature that you want a player to notice has to be reasonably large, pushed forward from any walls (so it doesn’t just blend into them), and has to be a chunky enough shape that the player can tell what it is. For a while we were trying to add surface details to statues, and you just couldn’t see it at all. Pip: Do some environmental shapes work better than others? I imagine a corridor with no knobbly bits isn't as easy to "read" as one where the jagged bits offer colour contrasts and let you see depth better?Ĭhris Delay: Yes definitely, some types of geometry just don’t work at all when rendered as a point cloud. We also wanted the players to see specific things at specific times, and it can become quite difficult to get inside a player's head like that. In fact we’ve never done a first-person exploration-type game like this before, so we did quite a bit of playtesting to make sure our players knew where they were supposed to be going. Due to the total absence of light, we were never able to use the traditional trick of putting a brighter/more lit room at the end of a long section to draw the player forwards. Pip: What were the main challenges of designing a space where the player has to reveal their own path?Ĭhris Delay: We definitely had to lead the player quite strongly in some places. Sometimes you can see that by looking backward, but much of the time it’s obscured by the nearby geometry. Once you’ve been all around the world, there can be millions of points in your scan data, and it just looks incredible. But on top of that, I just love the look of it. You now have a map which you get given a little way into the game so can you tell me about the decision to add the map instead of relying on being able to look back?Ĭhris Delay: Partly we noticed during playtests that a lot of players just got completely lost! The map can help a great deal with that, because it helps the player to regain their orientation and figure out what direction they need to be heading in. Pip: The way the scanning works means you can look back and see the shapes of where you have been. It's how I imagine machines will see the world! For a long while now I've wanted to make a game that was visualised in that way just because of the atmosphere that I think it creates. It's incredibly inhuman and depersonalised, like all the warmth of the world has been removed, and replaced with this point cloud. I have always loved that look ever since I first saw it used in a Radiohead video. If you do a google image search for 'Lidar data', you'll find hundreds of examples of buildings, parks, rivers, bridges etc, all rendered in that recognisable style with strong rainbow colours usually representing elevation. I'm interested to know how much of the look of the game was curated/intentional and how much was a result of using that particular scanner mechanism?Ĭhris Delay: The look of the game was very much intentional, and it was intended to have the look of industrial LIDAR scans. Pip: I played the prototype version of the game you brought to Rezzed in 2016 and the unusual art style was attracting a lot of attention. You can enlarge any of the images by clicking on them! Chris Delay, one of the studio's directors, was on hand to talk more so we delved into particle systems, maps and the secret mouse button function: But the art style is the thing which drew me in and which continues to absolutely fascinate me.
#Scanner sombre mouse skin
That said, it managed to get under my skin to the point where I quit out forever about halfway through because I was TOO SCARED. It's an atmospheric game although it cleaves to a narrative I wasn't particularly interested in. Yellows and greens mark out the middle ground. In Scanner Sombre you use a scanning gun to reveal the world around you and to navigate its secrets.Ī spectrum of colour helps you parse the terrain with bluer areas being far away and reds indicating what's nearest. It caught my eye last year at Rezzed because it had such an unusual art style - the only thing close to it is A Light In Chorus and that does very different things with the specks of colour which make up its environments. Scanner Sombre is Introversion's curious LIDAR-inspired exploration game.
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