25-02-2016, 07:50 AM
Square Enix have begun releasing their staff blogs as promised last week and for their first feature, they've interviewed Final Fantasy XV Environment Artist, Hiromitsu Sasaki, to talk about their methods when creating the game's world.
Starting off, Taji, one of Square Enix Japan's community managers, explains that when it comes to environments, there are 3 sections; world, locations, and dungeons with different staff dedicated to each. Sasaki is a part of the staff that create the cave structures and dungeons in the game.
Sasaki explains that at the moment the team is currently working on improving the visual quality of the game by balancing lights and shadows along with fine tuning smaller bits of the environment. This means making sharp rocks actually look dangerous and adding slippery looking surfaces within the caves. The team's objective with the dungeon bits is to make it look dark and frightening as a real cave would be.
One of the big hurdles the team had to get over were the rules within the environment (i.e. agreeing on the height of the terrain you're allowed to walk on and the angles of slopes, etc). One of their hopes is to allow players to fight monsters on slopes and have them move seamlessly within the environment. Unfortunately this comes with a bit of a challenge as the team is trying not to sacrifice the look of the game for better gameplay and vice versa. There have apparently been many debates within the team over how to handle situations like this but ultimately, Sasaki said the team prioritize great gameplay over small graphical errors.
As seen in one of the old trailers for Final Fantasy XV, the environment team had the privilege of traveling to locations for references/resources. They had two types of trips throughout the development and they were "experience" vs. "collection". The experience is obviously when they went to locations to get the feel of the environment, but with collection, they actually collected real samples to use in the game. They are utilizing a new type of photo scanner which creates 3D models from photographs. It consumes 10x the amount of memory compared to when someone just designs it in game, however, it takes half the time. With this method they've been able to take 3 days worth of work and turn it into just a half day's worth.
Closing out, Sasaki stated that the team are in their final stages of development and hopes to further discuss the similarities the team have found between weight training and game creation (joking, honest), but unfortunately, Taji had to round out the interview.
The next interview should be out soon and it will be with another one of Final Fantasy XV's many designers. Stay tuned!
Starting off, Taji, one of Square Enix Japan's community managers, explains that when it comes to environments, there are 3 sections; world, locations, and dungeons with different staff dedicated to each. Sasaki is a part of the staff that create the cave structures and dungeons in the game.
Sasaki explains that at the moment the team is currently working on improving the visual quality of the game by balancing lights and shadows along with fine tuning smaller bits of the environment. This means making sharp rocks actually look dangerous and adding slippery looking surfaces within the caves. The team's objective with the dungeon bits is to make it look dark and frightening as a real cave would be.
One of the big hurdles the team had to get over were the rules within the environment (i.e. agreeing on the height of the terrain you're allowed to walk on and the angles of slopes, etc). One of their hopes is to allow players to fight monsters on slopes and have them move seamlessly within the environment. Unfortunately this comes with a bit of a challenge as the team is trying not to sacrifice the look of the game for better gameplay and vice versa. There have apparently been many debates within the team over how to handle situations like this but ultimately, Sasaki said the team prioritize great gameplay over small graphical errors.
As seen in one of the old trailers for Final Fantasy XV, the environment team had the privilege of traveling to locations for references/resources. They had two types of trips throughout the development and they were "experience" vs. "collection". The experience is obviously when they went to locations to get the feel of the environment, but with collection, they actually collected real samples to use in the game. They are utilizing a new type of photo scanner which creates 3D models from photographs. It consumes 10x the amount of memory compared to when someone just designs it in game, however, it takes half the time. With this method they've been able to take 3 days worth of work and turn it into just a half day's worth.
Closing out, Sasaki stated that the team are in their final stages of development and hopes to further discuss the similarities the team have found between weight training and game creation (joking, honest), but unfortunately, Taji had to round out the interview.
The next interview should be out soon and it will be with another one of Final Fantasy XV's many designers. Stay tuned!