This new cycle scheme allows the plabt (the connoisseur name of the AE dev team) to build bigger, stronger features between 2 major releases, while also staying up-to-date with fancy stuff for the .5 one.

CS5 was a major step forward mainly thanks to the 64bit jump. Sadly, while being huge and important, this “feature” was almost overseen because it needed a 64b OS, which was not a standard by that time, and because users didn’t know how to really take advantage of it. Worst, it broke all your 3rd party plugin.

After Effects CS6 also have a major new “invisible” feature that might not be as sexy as 3D shiny stuff, but that will make you work faster and wish to never come back to an older version: the Global Performance Cache.

Global Performance Cache

Behind this unsexy name is hidden the biggest overhaul in the recent AE history: the caching system. To put it simple: it rocks. Why ? Because now, the cached frames are persistant, even between sessions. Just imagine, it’s the end of the day, you ram preview your heavy comp, and then close AE. The next morning, you boot-up your computer, launch AE, and BOOM: AE loads all your previously cached frames and your RAM preview is still here, ready to play.

Better: You do a ram preview of your comp, then tweak some settings and redo a ram preview. You don’t like the settings so you undo and go back to the previous ones. You know what: your former ram preview is reloaded, no need to recalculate them.

Even better: Your precomps can be cached in the background while you work, and modifying layers on top of them won’t need a rerender of their content. Plus, if your using the same precomps in different projects, once cached, the frames will be available for all of them !

Even even better: If you have visually identical frames repeted in your project (like in loops for exemple), once AE cached one, it will fill all the others.

This is the most time saving, workflow enhancing feature you’ve seen in AE since… since a very long time. It will litterally kill your coffee breaks. It’s a first step toward real time in AE. Now testing and tweaking settings in AE have never been so rewarding.

The other (fancy) new features

On top of this brilliant caching, AE CS6 has a lot of new features as well:

A 3D Camera Tracker: based on the same technology as the WarpStabilizer introduced in CS5.5, AE now have a 3D camera tracker built-in, and the best thing about it: it doesn’t suck.

Variable Mask Feathering. Yes, after so long you lost faith in seeing it coming to your favorite compositing app, but they did it, for real.

Rolling Shutter Repair: Like the 3D Camera Tracker, this effect is built on the same tech as the WarpStabilizer introduced in CS5.5. Fast and Efficient.

Ray traced Texts and Shapes. Yes, 3D is coming in After Effects. No, you won’t be able to import meshes or objects from 3D software (not even from Photoshop). But even if it’s limited to Texts and Shape layers, the raytracing engine, optimized for GPU, is very powerfull and is a solid starting point for more to come (at least I hope more will come). And even if it sounds limited, it comes with another new nifty feature: you can now convert Illustrator layers into shape layers… Oh yes, repeaters, animators, etc etc… You’re gonna love it. The ray tracing engine also allows you to have environment map layers, and to bend/distort our usual 3D layers.

More effects in 16bit and 32bit, including the Cycore effects.

Dropped in CS6

Sadly, not all the features of CS5.5 made the cut, so before jumping into the CS6 bandwagon, let’s have a minute of silence for the beloved one we lost:

Pixel Bender support, so all your Pb effects are gone.
Photoshop 3D support
Photoshop Video layers
FreeForm

As you may be aware, After Effects CS5.5 included a very convenient automated stereoscopic rig to help us work smoothly with stereoscopic projects.

I thouroughly tested this new rig while writing my book about Stereo in AE (sorry guys, once again it’s in french) , combined with a revamped 3D Glasses effect to see how cool and hip it was. The journey was a lot of fun, as it’s quite simple to use this rig for most of my stereo needs. But when came the time for me to export my 2 views separately, I was stuck.

The 3D glasses effects allows you to display your stereo comp in stretched Side-by-Side, Up-Down, and a large amount of Anaglyph modes. This is sufficent for uploading projects on youtube, but for Post Production work in big facilities, it’s not sufficent. We have to export the full picture for both eyes.

That can be done quite easily by going into the original comp where the rig created both cameras for you, but, there is one case where this workaround falls apart: it’s when you use one of these 2 3D glasses parameters: converge and vertical align. If both are at different than 0, you can’t just render the left and right preview camera.

After a few hours of unsuccessfully workarounding inside AE, googling and surfing, I eventually contacted the AE Team. Amir Stone, the engineer behind the stereoscopic workflow inside AE replyed me with this very usefull workaround.

This is the direct quote of his mail:

Ok here is a wonky workaround. Its unintuitive, but it should do the trick.
Create a black solid.
Set the 3D glasses to difference mode.
Set the right view to the black solid (leave the left view) and render out the comp to get the left eye.
Set the left view to the black solid (leave the right view) and render out the comp to get right eye.

It’s not as unintuitive as it sounds and pretty straight forward. I’m confident that the effect will be updated in future versions, but that’s my wild guess.

I hope that it will help all my fellow Stereoscopic workers in AE.

But, this special something that is getting me angry is how lame all the french clichés are in there. Seriously. It’s always a huge pain in my quality time whenever one of these movies features scenes set in France or Paris. Not that I don’t like being made fun of, no. What really driving me crazy is that these clichés are outdated to say the least. When you know that I can’t stand being one version behind on any software I use, you see how I feel in front of these clichés.

Maybe you can’t really notice it, because, you are probably not french. So, in order to help you fix this Hollywood, here is for free how to upgrade and update your french clichés for the next 20 years. Don’t thank me for making you save hundreds of thousands in dollars worth of consulting, it’s my pleasure (well if you insist, there is still this little thing I’d love to own to start taking pictures again. You can help me with that right here).

Spoiler alert

Incomming content full of clichés and stéréotypes. Be warned.

The Mime

Ok. I know you are using them as color charts for your camera calibration, but you know it’s old when we put these clichés in our own movies. On top of that you know that we can’t stand being made fun of, or that we can’t make fun of us. So if Les Nuls managed to do that in their movie La Cité de la Peur in 1997, you can’t say it’s not old. Sure, but what to update it with ? Well, you have different choices, depending on your scene.

If you’re in a suburban train (like the one I’m actually in typing this text), or in a subway, you can use the french hobo playing music clichés. He will usually be in his 50′s, play classical music with an accordion. If you don’t want music, you have two more choices: The french hobo asking for money to help him stay clean and have a warm meal (in that case, he enters the train car, do a little speech about himself and then will come collect the money), or if you want something less intrusive, you have the eastern european hobo just putting a piece of paper written in Comic Sans Ms, saying that he has several kids, asking for a euro or two and that may god be with you.

If you’re in a restaurant, it’s easy: An eastern european hobo trying to sell you cheap (and cheap) roses at your table.

If you’re in a street, you can easily add an estern european hobo with her drugged kid in her arm asking you for money. But if your character is a tourist in France, you have the still eastern european young girl asking for directions but asking for money as soon as you’re hooked. Or you have the older eastern europen hobo woman faking that she has just found a golden rig in front of you and will ask you if you want to share the prize with her.

If you’re in a car, make it stop at a traffic light. There you’ll have some eastern european guy trying to wash your windshield.

Yes I know, that’s an awful lot of estern european hobo for your typical french looking scene, but it looks like we’ve outsourced our poverty to them (joking here).

The infamous car: La 2cv

It’s also time for you to update your car clichés. We’ve moved into the 21st century for Zack Snyder’s sake. But fear not, because french car company Renault made a car for that. The Twingo. The hugliest modern car, just before the Kangoo, also designed and built by Renault. With both car, you’ll have a unique french setup. These cars are affordable and the Twingo is such a huge success that it’s even impossible to not see one when walking in the streets. With it, you’ll keep your désuet french look.

La baguette

Yeah, seriously, what’s with us having a baguette under our arm all the time. Sure we love it, we eat it, but we’re not holding it like that. We are not that cool ! Nowadays, in Paris at least, we are doing what americans are doing best: holding cups of Starbucks while walking hooked on our smartphones. But if that doesnt look french enough, we are also holding (especialy women) bags full of bio-green-healthy food. With big green logos on it, to show everybody how healthy we eat, even if we are ridiculously fat. No forget that, we can’t be fat, we’re french. Besides, Bio is the only way to go.

Le beret

Ok, I admit, this is kinda cool on Jean-Claude Van Damme’s head in Street Fighter the movie. No we don’t wear beret hats anymore, unless we are a greedy bastardly-rich parisian fashionista. If this guy is your french character, you can forget what I’ve just said, and give him a full collection of exensive Haute Couture berets.

Café waiters

Ha, the good old garçon de café cliché. We’d love to have kept them, but sadly, café nowadays are not as classy as what they used to be. Forget the back & white tux with a knot or a tie. Unless if you’re in a very hype restaurant, all you’ll get is a dull guy wearing the latest cheap jean and tshirt he just have seen in a shity MTV music video… Ho sorry, I’ve just been told that it’s actually an outdated cliché to say that MTV broadcast music videos. My bad ! So all you’ll get is a dull underpaid guy wearing the latest Jersey Shore fashion Line. That or a green Starbucks uniform.

French Kissing on a bench in a park with a bird

In Paris, we have a shity weather, so no ones actually have enough time to date on a bench. Then, said benches are full of bird crap. And what I call bird to be nice is actually a flying rat called Feral Pigeon. They are Paris first (of seven) plague. Stay more than 5 minutes on a bench, and you’ll sure get some creamy white stains falling from the sky on your overly made-up hair. So please, keep this cliché for a Bob & Peter Farelly movie. In a romantic comedy, just let them make out in the subway.

Traffic free streets in Paris

Ok, this one is just pissing us so much that you can actually continue to use it. No matter the time or the day, you’ll never find any street in Paris without it’s very own traffic jam. So if your plan was to shoot Fast & Furious Next in Paris, just forget about it.

Last but not least

Just so you know, we have iPhones, Androids and any modern electronic device. We just pay them twice the price compared to our american friends. So please, don’t make us use old non smartphone Nokia looks-a-like, or old fashionned CRT TVs. We would take this as a “Thank You for overpaying stuff designed in California but still made in China for cheap”.

Post Scriptum

Not directly related to the subject, but still close. If you have any french speaking character in your movies, please, give me call or drop me an email so I can write you grammatically correct sentances. I’m watching movies / tv shows / any content in original version, and hearing someone speaking your language like a 3 years old is just making my ears bleed. If indie movies can get it right, I’m sure you big guns can get it right too ? Same goes for video games BTW.

I had the honor to spend time and host the conference of Mr. Suzuki-san. As most of the media coverage will be in French, please let me sum the main tibits of the conference for you:

Hang-On

Yu Suzuki wanted to make an off-road racing game, but for commercial purposes, it was decided later on that it will become an on-road game. They choosed bikes because Mr. Suzuki was used to riding bikes.

Outrun

This game started the legend that Mr. Suzuki is a huge Ferrari fan. That is true, but he pointed out that he loves all cars.

To him, Outrun is not a racing game, but a cruising game. He designed it to make us feel the pleasure of driving a powerfull car with one hand, alongside a pretty girl. That’s why the game is not made of tracks like every other game, and that’s also why you could choose the music on the radio. The ultimate cruising experience. That’s also where the path grid came from. To be able to cruise in different places, like in real life.

Virtua Racing

As Mr. Suzuki was used to driving games, that’s the genre they chose to create their first true 3D arcade game. But he wanted to explore 3D characters and so he made the pit worker animations a test. The test being conclusive, he turned the pit worker experiment into a fighting game…

Virtua Fighter

Mr. Suzuki whent to learn martial arts in China and stopped when reaching Shaolin. He still knows the moves but he is not powerfull.

Shenmue

No news on the Shenmue 3 front. As always, he wants to make it, but it’s just a matter of opportunity.

When asked about Shenmue 1&2 being re-released digitaly on XboxLive, he made an embarrassed smile and asked the audience if it answered the question. Cheers and applause follwed.

About the meaning of the Shenmue word, it means “group of pink flowers on this tree”, and evoques the group of people around this tree. As for why it was used as the title of the game, he replied “You’ll have to play the rest of the story to know”. Laugh and cheers from the audience.

So why did Mr. Suzuki went from Arcade games to RPG ? Sega was looking for a killer app for it’s Dreamcast, and it had to be an adventure game or an RPG. As no one at Sega wanted to do it, he took the challenge and created the story that would become Shenmue.

About the Saturn version, it was only a prototype to test gameplay features, like walking and talking to people, questing, and global balance between all this. Only one village and some caves where made before jumping onto the Dreamcast version.

Psi-Phi

He would love to create an iPad or a Kinect version of it. Yu Suzuki loves Kinect and smartphones.

Yu Suzuki future projects

He loves social networking games, that why he made Shenmue City. With the success of smartphones and tablet, it now easier to reach broader audience. Shenmue City coming in Europe or US is now a possibility. He wants to make it, it’s just a matter of opportunity.

We were teased a new fighting games with animals and monsters. Nothing real was shown, only fun pictures of animal fighting he found on the internet, saying that even if it looked like a joke, it still gives hint to what to expect in his next game.

Last but not least

His favorite game amongst the ones he made is Shenmue.

When asked about his favorite game not made by him, he said that he was playing a lot of simple family games with his wife and daughter. He mentioned Animal Crossing as the game he really liked.

When asked if he had been contacted by Nintendo, he replied (with a smile) that he had already worked for them.

After playing some billiard with him, I can assure you one thing: Yu Suzuki is a semi-god at it. He could definitively develop a pro simulation game…

In a week, I’ll have the honor to host the Yu Suzuki’s life achievements conference at the Toulouse Game Show expo, in Toulouse France.

I’m readying-up my host docs, and I would like to take a chance at asking you what you’d like me to ask him, besides Shenmue 3 of course.

I can’t, and won’t, promess that I’ll be able to ask him more than what I prepared, but I’ve still some room left on some slides so let’s fill them with the best we can !

You can contact me through my remarkably on purpose contact page, or directly via Twitter.

Captain Obvious

Let’s not be mistaken, companies are here to make money, and profits. We, as consumers, are here to buy their products. But, if the company wants to keep us captive to stick with their products, they need to create a strong relationship with their users, aka us. This mecanic is so simple that I’m even ashamed to re-explain it here. Apple, weither you like it or not, is the perfect exemple of this.

With social networks, like Facebook or Twitter, it has become really easy for a company to make their customers feel at home. Twitter is even more powerfull as you deal directly one-on-one with people from the company. I had very good user experience on Twitter with several big companies like Microsoft or Adobe.

Your scam is in another Castle

Of course, there are several levels of screwiness: some are just annoying, like the unskippable copyright warnings and ads before you can get to the menu of you newly acquired BluRay Disk, some are just blatant stupid, like the Netflix Summer Fiasco ™ (Stu Maschwitz wrote an excellent article about that) and some are just nasty rip-offs.

Blindness in the rough

As anybody, I know I can’t trust companies eye wide shut. There are very few of them that have my trust, either because I truely enjoy their products, or their human contact, or both. Apple is not one of them.

This very short list just became shorter. They have lost my trust, and for one of them (Canal+, french TV network ala HBO) it’s definitive. For the other, Epic Games, it will be very hard for them to win me back, but not impossible. First, let’s talk about facts.

Fandom of the Opera

Epic is a big game and middleware developer. It is known for the unbelievably powerfull Unreal Engine. Amongts hard core gamers it is also known for big game franchises such as Unreal Tournament and Gears of War.

They have a very good reputation thanks to a dedicated love for their community. Giving them tools to mod, adding content and tweaking their games, listening and most of all, being human and humble. I started coding because of them, creating an autorun UI for the CD where I put all the Unreal Tournament add-ons I downloaded, to share and install them easily at friends houses. I was around 15.

Epic just have shipped Gears of War 3, the last part of the Marcus Fenix story arc. The game, as most Epic games, was critically acclaimed, and truth is, it’s a very good game. From A to Z. Better than the 2 first opus.

Do Love Cash

But I began being suspicious as soon as I started playing. When customizing my multiplayer character, I noticed some dollar signs on gun skins. I mean, you had to pay to unlock content on the disk.

Wait what ?!

I paid 70€ for the game (collector edition), and I have to give even more money to unlock part of the game that is already on the disk ? WTF Epic seriously ? Ok, let’s calm down, and have a look at the price before ranting.

3€… For a single gun skin… That hurts !

You’ll need to buy the 45€ pack to unlock all the skins… you already bought by buying the game. Remember, they are already on the game disk. Worse, the game menu is filled with this locked content notified by a blinking $ sign ! Even crappy iPhone apps don’t do that: a menu filled with $ signs everywere.

I could understand this if the game was free-to-play, or sold at a discount price, but with a full 60€ / 70€ retail price, it’s just a big rip-off. They should have put the skins for sale on the market place a leave the menu alone.

Anyway, selling content that is already on disk is just fucking lame. Putting it right in front of our face it one stop lamer.

Achievement Unlocked

Now that you have spent 115€ (I haven’t) to buy the game and unlock it’s content, you’ll be glad to know that Epic joined the bandwagon of “Season Pass” download.

For a discounted price, you preorder a predefined number of DLC. The Gears of War 3 “Season Pass” is sold for 30€, and will give you access to the first 4 DLC they’ll release, granting you a neat 33% discount compared to the full DLC prices if bought standalones.

Of course the “Season Pass” was on sold the day of release. I won’t complain but releasing this 30€ add-on preorder on day of release is like asking your customers 30€ more when they just spent 70€. Give us some room to breath ! Wait a week or two ! Let us discover the game before asking you to give you more. We will want more, for sure, because the game is brilliant. But we won’t want more on day of release.

So, soon after (maybe a week) the first batch of DLC content was announced: 3 new maps, new skins and new options for the Horde Mode. Street price is 10€, free if you bought the “Season Pass”.

Still trusting Epic, despite the cheap move of custom skins, I bought the “Season Pass” and on November 1, I downloaded the DLC. 1,42mb of download later, I understand that these 10€ (and thus 1/4 of my “Season Pass” was to unlock even more content from the Game Disk. What the hell is going wrong with you guys ? How could you stand on such a cheap and rip-off move like that ? What is our trustworthy Cliff Bleszinsky saying about this ?

Absolutly all the content of this 10€ DLC is on disk. It was just locked away for no reason except money.

The BluRay Analogy

It’s as cool as if you had to buy the right to watch the bonus content of your heavily priced BluRay Disk. Now that BR Players are connected to the internet, they just have to add paypal on the firmware and here will we be. That would have no sens and get a big backlash. And that’s exactly what Epic is doing, execpt that it’s not a BluRay but a game. Market is smaller, so backlash is smaller too.

The same Epic that was so attached to it’s community, without prior warning backstabbed us. How such a turnaround could come so fast ? And why ?

And when you thought it couldn’t get any worse

The day the DLC was released, Epic had a small conference announcing the next waves of content coming for Gears. And guess what, the only valuable thing in the DLC, the maps, are going to be available for free later this month.

Wait What Again ?

Giving stuff for free is nice and kind, but not announcing that this free stuff is what you had your fanbase buy few hours before, just after they discovered that it’s content was already on the disk, making them realise that they paid for something they already paid for.

It’s like a double hit combo. You buy something you already bought, and then you get the news that you’ll get most of it for free three weeks later…

Sure the “free” version will be limited to versus online mode (if you are not host), whereas the “paid twice” versions are available for all game modes. But let’s be honest, most of us bought the pack for the maps, and mostly to play in versus. I was already disappointed with the lack of content for a 10€ DLC pack, but now, it’s not disappointement anymore, it’s just sadness and anger.

Last but not least, the DLC was already on disk, but not in an unfinished beta form. Proof is that if I create a game with a DLC map, anyone having the game without the DLC can join, without downloading anything, nor patch. Nice touch !

Maybe you’re one dev guy from Epic reading this, and feeling downed by such criticizm on some marketing bullshit you are not involved with. I feel your pain. The game is really great. But let’s face it, you’ll need to make a big move to get back on your pedestal.

Right now you’re like this fancy girlfriend we just dumped because she cheated on us. It may have been a one night cheat stand, and we may want you back, but you’ll have to be excused. And that won’t be easy.

If you want to talk about it, my Gamertag is on top of this page, and you’ll find my email here.

Broadband not only allowed mass sharing of video content, it also helped mass learning in video content. Sharing knowledge, and getting skills have never been so easy.

But before giving us the privilege of watching your new piece of art, please, follow these few advices.

Videocopilot

In the mograph community, we all know videocopilot.net and all the main tutorial websites. So before posting you new cool video, asking us to share/like/comment, make sure it’s not a lame barely touched tutorial project file. You have no idea the backlash you’re gonna have.

Copy, Steal, Paste

The other bad idea is to re-create a very look-a-like effect (not to say a rip-off) of something you just saw online that is trendy. Remember thoses tasty Apple iPod ads ? Well it got old before everybody riped-it off.

If you are inspired by something you just saw, it’s cool, stay inspired and take the idea, bake it with your own sauce, and push it to the next level.

Motion to the Music

Rythm is the key in music. You’ll probably put a music on your soon to be masterpiece. Ok, then don’t forget to keep the animation to the beat. If you’re not easy with that, buy some plugs like SoundKeys for After Effects.

Default Particles

We all love particles, so cool when you make 3D camera moves. All this sudden depth, these gorgeous animations… We basically eat particles for breakfast. So be imaginative and don’t stop working after clic this preset button. Presets are good as a starting point, but are bad for anything else. And just changing the particle color doesn’t count. Be creative, and don’t overuse particles. If you don’t need them, don’t use them.

Comic Sans Ms

Well, if you’re gonna put some texts, animated or not, be sure not to use the dreaded Comic Sans Ms. Just sayin’…

Lense Flare

Lense flare are a real plague nowadays. Thanks to the nifty and affordable plugs like Optical Flare. But don’t be J.J. Abrams. Don’t put lense flares everywhere, we are all fed up with that. And go beyond the presets please.

Presets

Already told this twice in this article, but we are never too carefull. Presets are only starting points, not end of the line. Pros don’t stop on presets, so you shouldn’t.

Bokeh

Bokeh is that lovely shape defining your cute looking depth of field. Since DOF made a great comeback thanks to DSLRs, don’t forget that all shots don’t need nor have it. If you put that everywhere, even on wide lense shots, it won’t meaning anything anymore (except that you blured your backgrounds just to hide low quality stuff)

Make it look easy to do

The more easy to do it looks, the more impressive it gets. I can’t tell you why, I have no idea.

Finish it

Last but not least, don’t release a Work in Progress version prior to your final version. We don’t care how you did it until it becomes the new trending topic on twitter. Don’t build hype on nothing. Do your video, finish it, publish it and promote it.

Then you’ll have plenty of time to show us how you did that incredible scene.

If you follow these simple guidelines, all you’ll need to have is a brilliant idea, and time to make it happen.

For a long time, stories in videogames were told like in movies. You had an opening sequence, then you would follow a predetermined path called level, beat a boss, got a new story sequence which lead you to another level, and so on until you reach the end. Even RPGs somehow worked like that.

But, as interactive entertainement evolved, a new breed of game came to life. With it, the promess to break the linear storytelling rules. That was the birth of Sandboxed games.

In the sandbox, no one hear you scream

Sure GTA III is not the first sandbox game at all (not only by the fact that it was already the 3rd entry in the licence), but the first to be so critically acclaimed on top of being a sale success. GTA III’s path was followed by a lot of copycats, as open world was the new mandatory bulletpoint on your Powerpoint pitch to a publisher.

But what is a sandbox game ?

It’s a game with an open world you can roam freely, with no “right” way to play. The freedom allows the player to break the linearity of the story. That was what was promised on the cover of these games. As we’ll see, even though a lot of progress has been done, we are far from this so called freedom.

When GTA III was released in 2001, it was competing with another great sandboxed game, Shenmue 2. They both had extremely positive reviews, but Shenmue and Shenmue 2 failed in stores.

What is interesting about these 2 franchises, is how they built their open world games. They both took some interesting but yet different design choices. Since GTA III is going into the hands of iNewcomers soon, and with GTA V having it’s first trailer to be released in the next few days, I’ll use Grand Theft Auto IV as my source material. With Shenmue 3 on hold until SEGA makes Bazillion Dollars, and no re-release of Shenmue 1 & 2 on XBLA / iOS / PSN announced, I’ll use both games as source too.

Basics of storytelling

No matter the media for which you write your story, you’ll always have one goal: have the audience embrace your vision, while making them feel that it’s theirs. This is important in the movie industry, more important in books because you get to build you own world out of the words, and more important even in video games because you get to live the experience with a controller in your hands. Needless to say that if your audience doesn’t bond with your main character, you’ll loose them. It’s called empathy: You understand the way the character feels and behave. That’s the first point.

Now that your audience is connected with your character(s), you need to connect them with his world. This can be easy if the character lives in a facsimile of our world. If not, you have to explain clearly what can be and what can’t be done. It can get really tricky if your character lives in our world but with just some slight modification. A great exemple is Spider Man. Peter Parker lives in our world, but we accept the fact that he can be bitten by a spider and then develop super powers. But we won’t accept that a normal human being survive a fall from a 10 floor balcony in that same world. Making an audience believe in your world is not as easy as it sounds, and it can get extremely complexe in video games (more on this later).

Finaly, once your audience is hooked on your setup, you need to provide them with a good story. To build a good story, you have to make your main character behave exactly how he is supposed to, and make sure that the situations he gets involved in stays inside the limits of your world. Then it’s a question of building narrative arcs, tension, suspens, and give your audience what they came for: Emotions.

Spoiler Alert

If you have not played / completed GTA IV or Shenmue 1 & 2, beware of spoilers.

The Setup: The characters

In linear games, such as Gears of War, Alan Wake, Super Mario, and so on, the setup is the same as in a movie. You have a nice intro sequence, telling you who you are, where you are, and what you have to do. Then, you won’t have to think about your character emotional arc as it will be driven by the cut-scenes spread along your path. Sometimes you will have to make an A/B choice, to follow one of the predetermined path (A bit like in Outrun). That was nicely done in Bioshock when you had the choice of harvesting or not the Little Sisters after defeating a Big Daddy.

In games like Shenmue, and GTA IV (to a greater extent), the setup will define what the player will expect. That’s the most important part, because a wrong setup will create frustration. As you are not supposed to follow a predetermined path, you will have to create your own “version” of the story, and you will have an important role to play in your character emotional arc.

Let’s start with Shenmue. The game begins with a cut-scene of Ryo’s dad being killed by a vilain called Lan-Di. You know he is after some Mirrors. Lan-Di escapes, and you will get your revenge for your father’s death. Very early in the game, as a player, you’ll discover that you’ll have to resolve the case before the spring (before the cherry trees blossom). You’ll also have to sleep at night, and get back home before midnight. Ryo knows how to fight, but you know he won’t use it unless to defend himself.

In GTA IV you start with the arrival by boat of Nico Bellic into the land of opportunities, aka USA. While talking to some friends on the boat, you know that he has done a lot of bad things (killed peoples) and that he want to change his life, thanks to his cousin who succeeded in Liberty City. At the end of the intro sequence, you know that your cousin lied, and that life is going to be a bit more complicated.

In both games, main characters are correctly introduced. You know who they are, what they have done or will do, and you can immediately create a bond with them. One seeks revange, another seeks redemption. Both intro cutscenes are really well directed, and perfectly sets the mood of the game. With that in mind we can start to draw our expectations for their journey through the game. I’m Ryo Hazuki, as much as I’m Nico Bellic.

The Setup: The world

In GTA IV, your playground is a smaller but yet huge parody of New York City: Liberty City. It’s based on the real world, so no super powers or mystical stuff. You know from the start that you’ll be able to walk, drive cars, kill people, etc etc…

In Shenmue, your playground is much smaller than in GTA, but it’s also based on real location. To be more precise, you don’t have the irony of the parody, it’s as close as the technology could afford for the recreation of a small japanese village/district. You know you’ll be able to walk around, talk to people, etc etc…

Once again, we have a clear glimpse of what we’ll be able to do in both universe pretty soon in the game. This is on this first impression that the player (we) will build it’s (our) expectations for the degree of “freeness” the game will have to offer. And this is one of the first pitfall the sandboxed games falls into, usually promising far much more than what they can deliver. Let’s see how, Shenmue and GTA IV failed/succeeded on their setups.

Free, like a river

Both games sells freedom, but yet doesn’t offer the same freedom.

Shenmue provides a more intimist version of open world, where the actual world is not so open or vast, but filled with lots of details. For instance, you can talk to everybody. As you’re living in the village, everybody knows you and/or your father. Not everybody will tell you interesting stuff, but everybody will answer your call. You are also free to knock on every door you can reach. Sometimes people will open their door, sometimes not. If you had access to the Internet with your Dreamcast, you could even read a bio for every character you have talked to. Also, the weather played an important role, but not in the gameplay itself. It just reminded you of time flying by, and thus, the end of the game getting closer (You had snow around christmas). Because right from the start you know that if you take to much time to solve the case, you’ll eventually fail. This was emphased by the time and date displayed on every loading screen. Plus, you had to go to bed at midnight. This contributed to give a real sense of time, and you were somehow forced into a “real” like life. This setup is more story driven than gameplay driven.

All of this is not in GTA IV.

In GTA, you have the freedom to cruise on a huge open world. And by open, it means you can still get to the locked islands directly from the start, by driving on the subway rails or finding secret passages. In Shenmue you cannot leave a place before you are far enough in the story. In GTA you can’t talk to the pedestrians on the street, or so few. You cannot knock on every door either. Weather plays a role too, but only gameplay wise. It lifts up the difficulty by reducing the visibility and soaking the roads. Same for the day and night. It doesn’t play a big part on the story, and the difference between night and day life (apart from a graphical point of view) is not that big. You can go to bed whenever you want, it will only refill your life and save the game. Much like the weather, it’s more gameplay driven that story driven. Unlike Shenmue, you can’t fail in the end. You don’t have a giant timer telling you how close to the big game over you are.

And yet, both setups works, even if you can already taste the limitations.

In Shenmue, you might be able to talk to everybody, but you can’t buy flowers from your friend Nozomi, nor everything you want from the market. You can’t ride a bicycle too (unlike in the beta). You can’t even go to a further place until you have solved enough of the story plot. You walk down the road and Ryo will refuse to go further. Even if Ryo’s character is calm, this is not an excuse for not allowing him to fight anybody in the street. I’m Ryo, and if I decide that at that particular moment this particular character needs to be beaten down, I should get the opportunity. My dad was murdered in front of me, I can have a nervous breakdown ! Why should we wait until we are on a “designated” fight zone with “designated” bad guys ?

You don’t have these feelings at first in GTA. The world is so huge, and you have so much to discover that not being able to enter a shop or doing this or that is not a big deal… yet ! You can almost do anything/everything right from the start. And even if at first is seams you can’t leave the first island, at least they put some effort (Police cars & trucks on the road) to disguise this design choice.

The way you interact with the world and it inhabitants is an important part of the storytelling too: it sets the scale of the story.

GTA IV world is huge, you’re a stranger in a big city. You can’t really talk to the people (but you can beat them up) because the story is not about them, you don’t know them. They are just here to populate the street life. Your story is in another castle. In fact, you don’t even know what your story will be like, because you’ve come to change your life, to throw away what you were and what you’ve done to start from scratch.

Shenmue world is small, we deal with intimacy. You lived there for a long time, your family is well known. You know your neighbours, you can even follow them in the street, you’ll share a part of their life. They all have their schedule, a name, a bio. They don’t randomly spawn to fill the void. The story and the mood is a completly different tone. In Shenmue you already experienced some limitations, but you don’t really care, because the odds that you want to fight a grandpa in the street for fun are ridiculously small.

Your freedom ends where my plot begins

So until the main story starts to unfold, we are indeed in control of our character’s life and behavior, and up until here, we can call that a free world, despite the obvious technical, design and gameplay limitations.

It’s really when the game asks you to come back and follow the main events that all the openess falls and goes back to a traditional linear storytelling.

Shenmue does a better job at softening the fallback because it was less open and more intimate by design. Theses choices, frustrating at first from a gameplay point of view (can’t do much than walking, talking and collecting capsules) forces your mind to fit in their predetermined train of thoughts, narrowing down the odds of you doing something the “wrong” way, while still giving you the opportunity to get a game over.

GTA IV on the otherhand have taken the bet to give you almost all the freedom it technically can offer right from the start. And then, tries to force you into following their path.

Nico Bellic comes in this land of opportunity to take a new life, far from killing or dealing with illegal stuff. As soon as the main missions start, you are asked to go against his new ideal. You are asked to kill and deal with bad stuff. Sure, without a conflict, you don’t tell a story, and forcing you to go against your character ideas is a good way to start. But what if you refuse to do so ?

Let say, I don’t want to help my cousin. I could spend years stuck on the first island doing nothing. Here, GTA fails to give me the choice between going the way they want, and going the way I want. I would have felt more free if instead I had a chance to ignore his request and that after a small amount of time, something bad happened to him, giving me a natural reaction of “I need to help him now”. By allowing me to do that you actualy give me the feeling that I’m in control, while still forcing me to follow your main plot.

In a case like this, I would have known that these guys weren’t joking, and would have felt bad about this, and more importantly, I would have to deal with the responsability of my behavior. Next time I would directly help him instead of sticking with my idea.

In a linear game, not giving freedom of choice is ok by design. In an open world, you can’t give almost all freedom between two main missions, and then force back the player into your story without alternatives. And this is because during that time, we started to build our character emotional arc. What if I failed a side mission and I’m totally pissed-off. When I get to the next main mission, my character will be pissed-off. But as you have no idea what happened between the end of the last main mission and the begining of this one, you have to give me choice. Or at least the illusion of choice.

In my above exemple, not helping my cousin because my character doesn’t want to fight, will trigger a stronger event that will make him change his mind. With this, I’m under the impression that I was free to make my choice, but in the end, the triggered event will naturaly drive me back into the intended main story events. Experiencing this is rewarding for the player. And even if I wanted to help my cousin, maybe spending too much time wandering around will trigger this event too. Much like the deadline you have in Shenmue.

It’s important to keep the player in danger. For him to experience freedom, you have to have him make choices. May he learn it the hard way. If the time spent between missions is just some “free time” to get some achievements, to fill some side quests to make money, or just to wonder around, then you fail to keep the player involved into the story. Sure he can take a break from time to time, but these inbetween mission time must be a full part of your storytelling. The player must ask himself, do he have time to do this side quest or not, if I do this, then I won’t be able to do that. The player shall not be able to complete everything in one run, because it would mean that he had no choices to make at all. Some opportunities must be A/B chosen or available only a certain amount of time.

Both Shenmue and GTA IV fails at this. How many time I lost track of were I was in the main story in GTA because I was completing to much side missions ? How much time I lost in Pachinko games or at the Arcade just for the fun of playing good old games in Shenmue ? Even if in Shenmue you had a deadline, it was far enough to give you too much time to waste. They both kept very linear main stories, cutted them into small bits, filling the in between mission freedom with lot of non related content and mini games.

That special someone

There’s another important part of your character you won’t have much freedom about too: his relationships. Both Shenmue and GTA failed at it.

From the start of the game, until the bike ride scene on a jpop-rock cheesy music, you wanna date Nozomi. You feel that special bond between Ryo and her. You can even phone her from home. But the game won’t ever give you the option to. Not even a goodbye kiss when she leaves the city. Wouldn’t this climactic scene be more climactic if we had at least the opportunity to try to date her ? And I mean try to date, not date. If the game doesn’t want you to be with her, make her say no, in an emotional way instead of not giving us any way to try. I’ll ask Yu Suzuki why did he did that when I have the chance to meet him next month.

GTA is even worse than that. During the game, the main story tries to hook you up with two ladies. The first, an annoying undercover cop you don’t wanna date (but you can share an hot coffee with her), and the second a cool irish girl, sister of a business “partner” the game wants you to love but won’t let you date. Two frustrations for the price of one !

These two girls are thought to be important in the main plot. You’ll meet again the undercover cop later on in the game, where you are supposed to feel betrayed by her. You’ll discover that the police was building a file against you. Honestly may you have been spied by her or not it doesn’t change anything. You have been killing so much people at this moment of the game that it is completly logical that the police have a file on you. I tried to kill her after yet another annoying date. I shot her right in the face. She answered me: “that’s rude !”. In my head I was thinking: “yeah it is, but you should be dead”. And she should have been. Why can I shoot anybody on the street and not her ? She is annoying me, she is spying on me, I wanna get rid of her. Her come back later on is useless and could be replaced by any police officer character. Killing her should have given me a slight variation in my interaction with Malorie (she would call me to know if I had news of her recently, sounding worried). Not killing her gives me her comeback later on. You could even imagine that the negociation gets harder if I kill her because the new cop character hadn’t be getting hot coffee with me.

And now, what about the irish girl Kate ? Well, depending on a choice you make in one of the final missions, either her or your cousin will die. But how can I feel sorry for her as I wasn’t able to date her while the game tried to force me to fall in love with her ? Sure, her brother warns you that you shouldn’t date her, but you should be free to follow or not his advice. And if the scriptwriter doesn’t want you to date her, well give us the opportunity to try and have her kindly or violently reject us (or at least his brother spying on the scene and jumping to punch you right on time).

What’s most saddening is that Rockstar managed to get some of your love relationships right. In GTA IV you can connect to a date site and meet some women. You’ll be able to meet some of them. This is completly optional, and you’re free to date her or not. And what’s even more rewarding is that succeeding in dating her, and keeping in touch regularly will reward you with in game options (like reducing the number of stars during a police chase). This is exactly how the main plot relationships should have been dealt with !

Last but not least, while both game suggests you who you should like and love (but never gives you a rewarding experience about this), neither gives you the option to choose who ever you want to bond with. And why is the protagonist must fall in love with a person of the opposite sex ? Why not allow the player to choose if his character should be gay or not ? Sure some story will inherently void this assumption, but in GTA (or in Shenmue), nothing in your character background, religion or belief goes against this idea. Give us the option the try to date important NPC, this could lead to some fun things.

To sum-up, both games offer strictly linear relationships in their main story failing once again on bringing us something new.

Exemple: How could your choices should have changed GTA IV begining

I’d like to share an exemple of what could be considered sandboxed storytelling. Let’s get back on my GTA IV exemple.

In the first hours of gameplay, you arrive in LC, help your cousin, date an undercover cop, kills a big head and have your place burned. You have no other choice.

Now, let’s see what could have happened with true choice, while still getting the same result in the end.

First, I don’t want to help my cousin. He lied to me, and I don’t want to do dirty stuff again. After 2-3 days (ingame time), my cousin calls me something bad happened. Because I hadn’t helped him, the bad guys burned our appartment. So he goes on to live with Malorie, while on my side I have to find somewhere to sleep (and save). Now 2 options: maybe I want to date the cop to have access to her appartment, or maybe Rockstar placed hotels around the city where I can stay, but at a price. So maybe I could go on a date with the cop girl, kill her because she pisses me off, stole her money to be able to pay for the hotel. As I don’t want to steal money on a daily basis just to pay for that, and because my cousin is threatned again, I will eventually accept to help him. We’ll go kill the big head and move to the second island.

Whatever path I choose, I always end up in the same place, but the experience, and thus, the story, is different and better fits what I want to do with my character. I taste freedom, even if the scriptwriter will find ingenious ways to course correct my freedom and bring me back on the main storyline.

What designers and scriptwriters needs to understand, is that they don’t have to write 10 different main stories to cover every possible path, they just have to give us the choice to not do what we are asked to, and find a clever way to bring us back where we didn’t wanted to go in the first place.

The right order, freedom of choice

You might object that in GTA you are not forced to do the missions in an exact order, and that some missions gives you alternatives. Well that’s true, and it indeed gives the illusion of freedom and the illusion of choice.

Some missions, very few, offers you the opportunity to kill or spare the guy you were chasing. Your choice won’t have a huge impact. You’ll lock/unlock a special mission or a special feature. What would have been more rewarding would have to be able to fail some missions (the chases for exemple).

Right now, if you fail a mission you have to replay it until you succeed to go onward. This is mendatory for all missions. What if failing some missions didn’t make you restart it, but instead take you on a follow up mission to “fix” your failure. This would be much more interesting in a narrative / storytelling way. Maybe this failure will cost your character more than if you just had to restart it (for instance someone important could be killed) giving you more pressure to do your mission the “right” way. It’s always a game of facing the consequences of your choice, success or failures. Giving you the opportunity to fail, to pay for it / learn from it, builds a stronger impression of freedom, and a better experience in the end.

As for the order of the missions, it’s just a clever trick that works well. Every story, might it be a game (linear or sandboxed), a book or a movie is composed of a main plot, usually bonded with the main character arc, and some subplots. If well written, the subplots will enrich the main plot, and their events will cross and sometime even resolve in the same scene. GTA have built it’s story progression system, and thus, mission order, on this scheme. In fact, the mission order choice is not really an “order” it’s just the entry points to several subplots. You can choose to unfold completly a subplot, then another, and so on until you get back on the main one, or you can chose to play a little bit of each. When some plots crosses, you won’t be able to continue one or another until you have reach the crossing point for all of them.

This is just a way to cut in small pieces several part of a linear story and giving the choice on how to browse through them. In GTA IV’s case, this is really well done, with a good depth, giving in fact, a sensation of freedom. But no matter how much depth it has, it can’t compare with a true freedom of choice, even if this freedom is just a reroute to the same cue points of the main story.

Memoria

As the free play sessions between missions are not taken into account in the story, whatever you do there won’t have any impact on the game later on. As you are building your character’s arc during these gameplay sessions too, the game should remember what you do. Of course, I’m not talking of remembering what lamp you crushed with your car.

But what if, the way you play gets taken into account ? What if I spend my time driving like nuts on the island, killing people and stealing cars. Wouldn’t the Police have some reinforcements to make sure they catch me next time ? The more damage I do in a place, the more Police vehicule cruises there ? Wouldn’t it be great if all this was monitored and influenced the main story ? And what if I kill somebody in the street, eye witnessed by people. Wouldn’t it be great that after several killing / stealling, they get a good idea of my head and asks for a reward if someone finds me ? People in the street could recognize me under specified circumstances (car crash, crazy driving, killing people, etc etc) and call the Police.

And if for some other reason I’m arrested by the Police, they would identify me and it would cost me more. That way, it would feel like the story is somehow adapting itself to the way my character behave (instead of trying to force my character to behave in a way to adapt it to the story).

In the end

It looks like I’m bashing GTA IV and Shenmue. Both games are some of the best open world games available, and are definitly in my favorite games of all time.

Shenmue was released when this type of game was young, GTA IV was released a few years ago and was considered being the most advanced game in the genre.

Yet, both of them shows the same weakness when it comes to storytelling. What they are doing is dividing the story by plots, and them cutting them down to allow us to feel free to complete them in whatever order we want. And between these cuts, they allow us to interact with the game environment, without any major impact on the story itself. It’s just as linear as linear games are (story wise). With less corridors.

On the storytelling point, a lot can be done to move forward to a real sandboxed storytelling. It’s not about technology anymore, actual consoles and PC hardware allows this, it’s just rethinking how we tell stories, and how we define it’s interaction with the player.

Please make the whole experience an integrated experience, not a disconnected sequence of free roaming intercut with missions to move the story forward. Make the free roaming part of the Story. Give us choices to make, reward us (in a good or bad way) for our choices. Use them to emotionnaly shake us so we stay in the path you want us to stay in. Give us ways to lose, the kind of loosing that needs us to start over the game because we went to far from what we were expected to do (but warn us before too, like Shenmue did).

Rockstar just announced GTA V, and I can’t wait to see how they will try to redefine the genre, and I hope that some of these ideas will be there. Your move Rockstar.

And to my beloved SEGA. Please, bring us Shenmue 3.

It was the most visited page of the site until yesturday, when it went offline to give room for the new blog. But that was just a temporary move, as I compiled a brand new 2011 list which will be outdated in less than 3 months from now. The beauty of the Internet even allows me to publish this new list on the old list url. Hooray for forward compatibility !

This list is based on my daily use of scripts, and in no way is a “best-of” list. A lot of very cool and huge scripts are not mentionned here simply because I don’t use them.

All of the scripts in the Top Ten are available on Lloyd Alvarez’s aescripts.com. It’s a great ressource for scripts (mine included). Other than having my scripts hosted there, and owing Lloyd a few beers for the help he provided me through all these years of scripting, I’m not involved in aescripts.com. That was for the mandatory disclaimer. Now, let’s have a deeper look at that list.

10 – 3D Extruder

3D Extruder is so convenient when you don’t have 3rd party plugs to create 3D / Extruded logos. It uses a well known hack workaround to give that fake look, but with it’s speed and ease of use, you finally get some extra time to fine tune your titles.

09 – Smart Baker

Sharing projects including Expressions can become really messy if you open After Effects in a different language than the one used to create them in the first place. To workaround this problem, AE have a neat option “Convert expressions to Keyframes”. Well this option is neat until you use it. It clutters your expressioned properties with keyframes on every frame, even if your expression is simple like “use value from this property”. That’s where Smart Baker comes handy. It will analyze your expressions and create the needed keyframes only.

08 – Stereo 3D Toolkit

Stereo 3D bubble may have burst because of greedy producers, you’ll probably have to work on Stereo projects for the years to come. AE isn’t really helping you that much, and finding the perfect workflow is kinda trial and errors. Stereo 3D toolkit helps easing the process. So sad it went out after I finished writing my book about Stereo in AE (Yes self promotion is lame, but as it’s written in french, the odds you’re gonna buy it are pretty low anyway. And I really wanted to include it, but it was really too late !).

07 – rd: Kinda Sorta

You know how it starts, you try to keep things clear in your comp, but as you go back and forth with your client, and this deadline way beyond your schedule, it gets so messy that you feel a bit lost. Well this happens to me sometimes, usualy on 3D comps with tons of layers. That’s where Kinda Sorta comes into play. It will sort for me all my layers (by z-pos, starting point, and so on…) and my comp will shine again.

06 – Comps from Spreadsheet

This script is so useful when it comes down to lowerthird and titles. Fill a spreadsheet, create a template project, open the script and watch the magic happens.

05 – Save Comp as Project

Ok, this is one I’ve developed, but still, one of the most usefull I’ve ever used. As the name implies, it saves the selected comps as new projects, and even reduce them on the fly.

04 – pt_ExpressEdit

I’m a big fan of Expressions, and even wrote a book about it. Paul’s scripts is a real time saver when dealing with large amounts of Expressions.

03 – Immigration

Working with file sequences is not handy in AE. Immigration turns it into the best experience you can expect. You can replace, reorder, browse faster than ever all your picture sequences and manage them like a breeze. Definitively a must have.

02 – Zorro: The layer Tagger

Zorro is such a smart idea that I wonder when the After Effects team will introduce it natively inside AE. Zorro uses the often left aside layer comments to fill them with tags you choose, and then allows you to easily hide / show / solo your layers based on their tags with a single mouse click.

01 – BG Renderer

Back in 2009, BG Renderer was on the top of this listt, and today it still shines as the most useful script in my workflow. Only now it’s bigger and better. While you can still easily render your comps in background as the name suggest, Lloyd added so much extra cool features that you’ll have to test it to believe it. You can have the script send you an iPhone notification, an SMS or a mail whenever the render completes. I told you you wouldn’t believe me.

Following the “less is more” paradigm, I’ve thrown away all the content you’ve been used to, but most of it was outdated anyway. You’ll now find here, on a randomly timed basis, my thoughts on the mograph, geeky, pop-culture, scriptwriting and movie industry. Sometimes short, sometimes long.

Anyway, welcome back, and stay tuned, more to come soon.