French school in video game development: Another World

French artistic aesthetics have always been slightly different from the aesthetics of English-speaking countries. When creating their paintings, films and even furniture, the French often abandoned the boring literalism, so characteristic of English-speaking art, in favor of something more refined. The impression became more important than the objective reality. French copyright cinema will not be completely unusual for the English eyes, as it would be with a Bollywood or Egyptian film. However, the effects created by him are much more confusing: it seems that something recognizable and predictable lies on the surface, but suddenly a sudden turn occurs. In particular, the film may show a discouragingly small interest in the logic of the plot - the basis of cinema in English culture. For such directors as, for example, Francois Truffaut, the plot is much less interesting than the emotional impact of the film as a whole.

No matter how rude these stereotypes are, but when the French discovered computer games, they remained true to themselves. For a long time, the “French game” for an English-speaking person was synonymous with “strange”, eccentric, and it was difficult to understand whose fault it was - the game or the player. Vintage French games were not always the most polished or balanced in terms of design, but today they are famous for their willingness to use the palette of feelings, much richer than the primitive “fear-rage”, “laughter-sadness”. This is especially true for the game Eric Shayi Another World .

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France left its own mark in the early years of the digital revolution. Most of the French got their first glimpse of the digital future not through a home computer, but with the help of Minitel, a remarkable online service — a network of “stupid” terminals operated by the French postal and telephone service. Millions of people have installed free terminals in their homes, making Minitel the most widely used online service in the 1980s world, overshadowing even the similarity of CompuServe in the United States. Meanwhile, the French, who wanted to use all the features of a full-featured computer, avoided the popular Sinclair Spectrum and Commodore 64 in other parts of Europe in favor of less common cars like the Amstrad CPC and Oric-1 . Apple, almost unknown almost anywhere in Europe, also justified its first bridgehead in France thanks to the efforts of tough and very Gallic general manager Jean-Louis Gasset, who later played a crucial role in increasing the popularity of Macintosh in the United States.

In the second half of the 1980s, the French choice of "iron" slowly began to lean toward the preferences of the rest of Europe. The most popular gaming computers in the rest of Europe, the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST gaming computers have received some recognition in France. By 1992, there were already 250,000 "Amig" in the houses of the French. This number can not be compared with 2.5 million of these computers in Britain and Germany, but it turned out to be more than enough to keep the small Amiga game development community active for several years. “Our games did not have a terrific English-language gameplay,” recalls French game designer Philip Ulrich. "But their aesthetics were better, which led to the emergence of the term" French school ", which then began to be used by musicians such as Daft Punk and Air."

Many owners of the Amiga and ST met with an unforgettable French look at the game back in 1988. This year Captain Blood appeared, in which the player became a clone doomed to death if he couldn’t stretch his life forces from five other clones scattered across the galaxy - an existential search for identity replaced the subject of conquering galaxies of most science fiction games. If in itself this does not seem to be quite strange, then I would say that the gameplay basically consisted in communicating with aliens in a strange hieroglyphic language invented by game developers.

This method of avoiding in-game text, chosen either as a practical way to simplify localization, or simply because of the ambivalent attitude of the French to translations from their native language, became the hallmark of the games that followed this project, along with the desire to study topics that no one else touched. The French did not so much abandon traditional themes and genres of video games, as they filtered them through their own perception. Often this led to a rethinking of American culture, often discouraging and at the same time entertaining manner. The game North & South , for example, turned the Civil War, the greatest tragedy in American history, into a mad satirical farce. For any American child who grew up on a diet of exclusivity and sacred patriotism, this was an extremely strange thing.

The author of Another World , perhaps the best example of the “French school” in games, was, like all of us, a product of its environment. Erica Shayi turned ten years old the year of the release of Star Wars , which became the symbol of the emergence of inter-ethnic culture of blockbusters, and he, like the other little boys around the world, could not resist the charms of the film. But he watched this very American film through the lens of French perception. He liked the rhythm and appearance of the picture - the way the camera flies over the endless horizons of peaceful space to the battle scene at the beginning of the film; the reference to the “Triumph of the Will” at the medal presentation ceremony at the end is much more than the plot. In his most famous game, a rather non-American pursuit of aesthetics priority is manifested, experimenting with the style of American science fiction pop culture with a distinct French aftertaste.

But first there were other games. A few years after Star Wars, Eric discovered computers and fell in love with them. “During the school holidays, I almost did not see the sunlight,” he says. "Programming quickly became an obsession, I spent about seventeen hours a day in front of a computer screen." The nascent French video game industry was fairly self-contained, but precisely because of this it was more accessible to young people than the industry in other countries. Soon, the games of Shayi (from platform games to text adventure games) began to be published in France on a strange set of popular 8-bit platforms. His trump card for the developer was the second talent that set it apart from the rest of amateur coders: he was also a terrific artist, both in working with pixels and with more traditional materials. Although none of his hastily made 8-bit games became a big hit, his industry connections attracted the attention of the new Delphine Software company in 1988.

Delphine Software was as stereotypical as a French development studio, as you can imagine. It became an offshoot of the studio Delphine Records, the cash cow of which was the insanely popular pianist Richard Clayderman (sales of his records by 2006 reached 150 million copies). The owner of Delphine Records Paul De Sevenil himself was a composer and musician. An artist by nature, he gave his new game studio almost absolute freedom in creating any games. Their Paris offices resembled a hippie recording studio; Shayi recalls "the red carpet at the entrance, golden discs everywhere and many eccentric works in the spirit of modern art."


Future wars

Delphine hired him more because of his artistic, rather than programming skills, to illustrate the adventure point-and-click adventure with the grand name Les Voyageurs du Temps: La Menace (“The Time Travelers: The Threat”), which was later released in English under more energetic named Future Wars . The authors were inspired by the Sierra graphic adventures of that time, but nevertheless the game remained completely French: absolutely beautiful on the outside (the illustrations of Chailly were very appetizing), but with problems in the gameplay — a strange interface, an even stranger plot, and the strangest puzzles. Therefore, today it is perceived as a template for the next decade of French adventure games from companies such as Coktel Vision, as well as Delphine itself.

But from the point of view of the Shayi, it was important that, after graduation in mid-1989, the game became a hit throughout Europe entirely due to his amazing illustrator work. He finally managed to make a breakthrough. But everyone who expected him to use this success in the usual way — the continuation of Delphine’s stable career as an illustrator — did not understand the temperament of this artist. He decided that he wanted to create a completely large, ambitious game on his own - a statement by a real artist. “I felt that I could convey something very personal, and in order to show my vision to the others, I had to develop the game myself.” Like Marcel Proust, locked up in his famous Parisian apartment, frantically working on the novel “In Search of Lost Time” , Chailly spent the next two years in the basement of his parents' house, working sixteen, seventeen, eighteen hours a day on Another World . He began with only two unchanging ideas: the creation of a “cinematic” sci-fi game based on polygonal graphics.

Authors like my articles are terribly often scattered with terms such as “polygonal graphics,” but their meaning is not always obvious to the modern reader. Let's start by asking the question: what was the difference between the schedule proposed by Shayi and what he did before.

Images created by Shayi for Future Wars were what are often called “pixel graphics.” To create them, the artist launches a graphics program, for example, Amiga Deluxe Paint, a favorite of users, and manipulates screen pixels to create a background scene. Animation is performed using sprites: additional smaller images superimposed on the background scene. On many computers of the 1980s, including the Amiga, with which Shayi worked, for the sake of efficiency, work with sprites was supported by hardware. On other computers, such as the IBM PC and Atari ST, they had to be drawn in a less efficient software way. Anyway, the basic concept remained the same.

On the other hand, an artist working with polygonal graphics does not directly manipulate screen pixels. Instead, he sets his "pictures" mathematically. It builds scenes from geometric polygons with three or more sides, defined as three or more connected points, or sets of X, Y, and Z coordinates of an abstract space. During the execution of the program, the computer renders all the data into an image on the monitor screen, tying them to physical pixels from the point of view of the “camera” fixed at a certain point in space and looking in a certain direction. If you give such a system a lot of polygons for rendering, then it can create scenes of tremendous complexity.

But it still seems to be some workaround way, is not it? You may ask - why would someone use polygonal graphics, and not just draw scenes in a regular graphics program? In fact, the potential benefit is huge. Polygonal graphics is a much more flexible and dynamic form of computer graphics. In the case of a pixel background, we have to stick to the perspective and distance chosen by the artist, and the polygonal scene can be viewed at any possible angle, telling the computer where the “camera” is in space. In other words, a polygonal scene looks more like a virtual space than a familiar illustration - a space through which you can move , and which, thanks to changing only a few numbers, can move around you . In addition, it has an additional advantage - since such graphics are defined as a set of reference points of polygons, it does not need to explicitly indicate the color of each individual pixel, which means that it takes up less disk space.

Having dealt with all this, you can ask the opposite question: why aren't polygonal graphics used by everyone ? .. In fact, polygonal graphics have been used in computer in one form or another since the 1960s, and the industry was hardly known in the 1980s. Most often it was used in transport simulators like Flight Simulator subLOGIC, which required constant change of the world view. Elite , better known in Europe, one of the most serious games of the decade, also painted its aggressive space battles using polygons.

However, the truth is that the polygonal graphics along with the advantages have significant drawbacks, which were intensified due to the weak hardware of that era. Rendering scenes from polygons was a mathematically expensive operation compared to sprite graphics, which heavily loaded 8-bit or even 16-bit CPUs (for example, the Motorola 68000 Amiga computer). For this reason, early versions of Flight Simulator and Elite , as well as many other polygonal games, rendered their worlds in wireframe graphics; computers simply lacked the “horsepower” for drawing solid surfaces with a high frame rate.

There were other drawbacks. The individual polygons from which the scenes were formed were flat surfaces; in mathematics there is no concept of smooth curvature, which could become their basis. ¹ But our real world, of course, consists almost entirely of curves. To compensate for this discrepancy, you can use many small polygons that are connected so closely to each other that their flat surfaces look like curves to the eye. But such an increase in the number of polygons increased the rendering load on the already heavily loaded CPUs of that time, and this load quickly became irrational. At that time, in practice, polygonal graphics had a clearly broken, unnatural appearance, and the sense of artificiality was only intensified due to the monochrome fill with which they were drawn. ²


These illustrations show how to make an object rounded, making it from a sufficient number of flat polygons. The problem is that every additional polygon that needs to be rendered, even more loaded the processor.

For all these reasons, polygonal graphics were mainly used in first-person games, such as the aforementioned transport simulators and some British action adventure games , that is, where its use was unavoidable. But Shayi went against the trends and applied it in his own game in the perspective of a third person. The unique capabilities and limitations of polygonal graphics have left a mark on Another World to the same extent as on the personality of its creator, giving the levels of the game a mysterious broken uncertainty inherent in dreams. This effect was further enhanced by the fact that Chailly used a muted, almost pastel palette of only 16 colors and the expressive minimalist soundtrack of Jean-Francois Freta - the only part of the game that was not created by Chailly himself. Although the player is constantly threatened with death and he will surely die again and again in the process of finding ways to complete the game, it all works more on the level of impressions than reality.

According to some theories of visual art, the border between copying reality and conveying impressions of reality separates the artisan from the artist. While other games sought more and more realism in the transmission of cruelty, Another World went a completely different way, creating an effect that is difficult to express in words - a quality that in itself is a sign of Art. Shayi himself tells:

“Polygonal techniques are great for animation, but you have to pay for this with a lack of details. Since I could not create a lot of details, I decided to work with the player’s imagination, transferring the contents with hints, not detailed descriptions. Therefore, for example, the beast from the first scene is so impressive, although it is just a big black figure. Another World’s visual style actually borrowed the style of black-and-white comic books, in which form and volume are conveyed only by hints. When creating Another World, I learned a lot about hints. I understood that the player’s imagination is the medium. ”

To create his own suggestive, rather than realistic graphics, Shayi first spent a lot of time developing tools, starting with an editor written in a variety of BASIC. The data displayed by the editor for the sake of speed was rendered in a game in assembly language, and their logic was completely controlled by its own scripting language developed by Shayi. This approach turned out to be a real find when it came time to port the game to other platforms; for porting, it was enough just to recreate the engine on a new platform, teaching it to interpret the original data of the Shayi polygonal graphics and scripts. That is, besides the game, Another World was actually a new cross-platform engine, although it was used only for one project.

Part of the graphics was based on the real world, it was captured using the well-known animation technique called “rotoscoping”: frame-by-frame outlines of moving real people or objects to create the basis for their animated counterparts. Regular readers of this blog may recall that Jordan Mekner used the same technology as early as 1983 to create his cinematic game about Karateka karate. However, differences in the approaches of the two young developers say a lot about the development of technology between 1983 and 1989.

Mekner filmed his shots on a real film, and then used the mechanical Moviola editing device (the standard cinema tool that has been used for decades) to separate and print every third frame of shooting. He then transferred these prints to the Apple II using one of the first drawing tablets called the VersaWriter .

The computer Amiga Shayi allowed to use a different approach. It was developed in the period of short-term triumph of games on laser discs in arcade machines . They often used the overlay of interactive computer graphics on static video read from the laser disc itself. Wanting to give their new computer the ability to play such games at home with the help of an additional laser disc player, the Amiga designers built in the graphics chips of the machine a way to overlay pictures on another video; One color of the screen palette could be set to transparent, allowing the video layer to “shine through” the image. - , , , Amiga , , - . , « » Amiga, .

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: Principles of Three-Dimension Animation: Modeling, Rendering, and Animating with 3D Computer Graphics ; Computer Gaming World , 1992 ; Game Developer , 2011 ; Questbusters , / 1992 ; The One , 1991 1992 ; Zero , 1991 ; Retro Gamer , 24 158; Amiga Format , 1992 ; , 20th Anniversary edition Another World ; , From Bedrooms to Billions: The Amiga Years ; - Game Developers Conference 2011 ; “How 'French Touch' Gave Early Videogames Art, Brains” Wired ; “The Eccentricities of Eric Chahi” Eurogamer . YouTube World of Longplays .

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