Archive notice: This article was originally published on October 12, 2009. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Autodesk has announced that Montreal-based game developer Artificial Mind & Movement (A2M) used a variety of Autodesk solutions to support the creation of its new game “WET”. Autodesk Maya and Autodesk MotionBuilder 3D animation software were used to create the game’s characters and levels. Autodesk Kynapse middleware was used to implement artificial intelligence as the basis for the game’s non-playable characters.
Rubi, the protagonist of the third-person shooter, is a hard-nosed problem solver trying to find out who betrayed her and why. She is able to fight her enemies with a unique mixture of shooting, acrobatics and sword fighting. The dual-targeting system allows players to control one of Rubi’s weapons while the other aims automatically.
Combining photorealistic 3D elements with stylised graphic-novel-style visuals, the game’s gritty atmosphere can be compared to films such as “Kill Bill”, “Desperado” and “Sin City”. At key moments, Rubi enters “Rage Mode”, offering players a completely different experience. Rubi becomes faster and stronger, and the game’s visuals transform into a minimalist colour palette from which enemies stand out in high contrast.
Autodesk Kynapse Helps A2M Focus on Creativity and Gameplay
Using Autodesk Kynapse enabled A2M to focus its development efforts on creative design and high-quality gameplay interactions instead of dealing with time-consuming processes such as pathfinding and spatial awareness.
“Our main philosophy regarding development tools has always been: if it is good and available at a reasonable price – why reinvent the wheel? That is why we decided to use Kynapse as the AI engine for ‘WET’. In the game, the player faces a large number of enemies. We needed a pathfinding and spatial-awareness system to control the decision-making for these characters in a coherent way,” explained Martin Walker, CTO of A2M. “Kynapse has a fantastic hide-and-shoot algorithm that we used to hide and distribute enemies naturally throughout the environments.”
Optimising a Game Pipeline with Autodesk Maya and Autodesk MotionBuilder
Maintaining a stable and consistent pipeline from one title to the next is of central importance to A2M. With 500 employees and a dozen projects per year, standardising on turnkey tools such as Maya is indispensable. MotionBuilder was also used extensively by the A2M team to help optimise motion-capture sequences. “MotionBuilder was used extensively to clean up motion-capture data,” said Walker. “When recording motion-capture sequences, we were also not yet entirely sure which enemy would use which movement patterns. With MotionBuilder, we were able to apply motion data to different characters even when the skeletal data did not necessarily match perfectly. This saved us an enormous amount of time and provided room for experimentation.”
“WET” is A2M’s first game title approved for ages 17 and over (rating M). “Titles such as ‘WET’ are now almost interactive films, and the quality of the content is more important than ever before. So if we can optimise our pipelines to enable a greater number of iterations more quickly, we stay one step ahead of the competition. Tools such as Autodesk Maya, MotionBuilder and Kynapse help us achieve that advantage,” Walker continued.
“WET” was released by Bethesda Softworks on September 15, 2009. The game was written by Duppy Demetrius, and actress Eliza Dushku (“Dollhouse” and “Buffy – Im Bann der Dämonen) lends her voice to Rubi Malone, the game’s protagonist.