Technical Peculiarities

80.lv: Could you discuss some of the technical side behind the project? What is 2D and what is 3D here? How are these two united to achieve the image you wanted?

Everything we do is made in our own engine, simply called Liquid Engine. On a side note, programmers are now working on a major upgrade to the new one, 2.0. Anyway, everything in This War of Mine is 3D. It just pretends it’s a 2D side-scrolling game as the experience works the best this way, but still it’s all 3D. Just the far background texture is flat. All the people, buildings, environment – it is all 3-dimensional but the camera is tight to this view and moves left / right and up / down with zooming in and out possible, but still, the camera is limited and moves parallel to the viewer. That gives you side-scroller perspective and a feel that is more like 2.5D. But like I mentioned before, this perspective when you see things from a side was the best choice for playing with a group of people, exploring buildings, streets and generally city architecture. It has this a bit sim-like feel, but that was our intention too, honestly speaking.

Character Production

80.lv: We’re really interested to hear about the way you worked with the characters. Could you tell us a bit about it: how do you create their look, movements, gameplay features? Would be awesome to look at how you handled it.

Let’s begin with how the characters’ physical look has been created. First of all, we scanned ourselves in 3D. That was a home-made improvised method of scanning, quite an interesting one: one guy had a wooden spinning platform and another person was standing on it in a T-pose. The first guy was spinning the platform to turn around the T-pose person a few times. Few cameras have been recording the spinning person from different angles and dedicated software (sorry, can’t remember the name of it) has been rendering the person into a 3D model. That was quite a messy model, badly textured and the mesh has had some flaws, so each such model would have to be fixed and cleared later by 3D artists.

Then the animator was using the models to make the characters walk, run, eat, sleep, fight and do hundreds of other activities. This way, we scanned ourselves and family members and we have become civilians in This War of Mine. I think I can say that somehow we have immortalized ourselves in digital experience. Anyway, there is a reason why we scanned ourselves. We didn’t want to have anonymous models or models that look like superhumans from Hollywood. Like I mentioned before, we wanted the game to stay as close to reality as possible and have models that resemble real people: skinny, chubby, tall, short etc.

The features of the civilians in the game resemble real people, too. So we’re not having soldiers in a war game, but civilians, regular people – some cook better, some can fight, some are defenseless, some are lawyers or teachers which seem to be useless skills during times of war. Some walk slowly because their age does not allow them to run fast anymore and so on.

Each civilian has some personality traits, talents and behavior patterns. Furthermore, their behavior in the game is determined by their physical and mental state. A person can be sick, wounded, hungry and you can make sure this person is healed, treated or fed. If you don’t, their mental state can go worse. Most importantly, they react to the deeds you make. They can go depressed if you do something evil unless they’re selfish or tough and don’t care. People who feel for others are sensitive and they can suffer a nervous breakdown if you decide as a player to do something against their moral spine. Behind these digital civilians, there is a quite complicated AI that tries to simulate different kinds of personalities and those personalities react in a different way to whatever is happening just because people are like that. Again, staying as close to reality as possible.