Guild Chat - Episode 30

The following is an unofficial, player-written transcript of the episode. The accuracy of this transcription has not been verified by ArenaNet.
The 30th episode of Guild Chat aired on February 5, 2016.
"Host Rubi Bayer is joined by developer guests Brian Walter and Ben Phongluangtham for this episode of Guild Chat. This week’s episode will give you a closer look at some of the wild and weird creatures in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns™."
Transcription[edit]

Below is the raw unformatted transcript from Youtube.
[Music]
happy friday everybody and welcome back
to guild chat i'm your host ruby if
you're here for the first time welcome
uh we're gonna be talking about creature
design in heart of thorns today
i have a quick update for you though
we've been talking about scribing costs
the past couple of episodes of guild
chat
and just in case you missed it there's
an update in the guild wars 2 discussion
forum
on our official forums uh that goes into
some specifics about recipes and costs
of
items so if you are interested in what
we're up to with scribing costs and
adjusting those go check that out
um that's our update on that for this
week but
now we have two of our guys from the
creature team
um i'm going to let you guys introduce
yourselves and then we'll get into what
you've been doing and how you're doing
it
all right i'm ben pong tom i'm a game
designer on the creature team
and i'm brian walter and i'm an animator
on the creature team
yeah thank you for coming back brian
yeah welcome for the first time
um why don't we go ahead and just talk
about
how how you even get started because to
me
before i really got to talking to you
guys and learning more about this it was
just
yeah you can make a thing and put it in
the game this isn't that hard
but it turns out there's a lot more
going on
one of the things that we talked about
that i found especially interesting was
how you use existing rigging to save
some time in creating something
and so we don't just create an asset
from the ground up and throw it away and
be completely inefficient about it so do
you guys want to talk about
how you've used existing riggings in
heart of thorns first
uh yeah sure so for people who don't
know
a rig is kind of the digital um
it's the digital puppet we use to
animate the
character um we have a picture here that
shows off on the loved quaggan
so you can see the little lines
throughout the character those are his
joints
those are the bones that drive the
character and then all the
little lines on the outside those are
the controls i grab to move him around
and make him do cool poses and stuff
okay so
the lines that are extending out from
his body are where you can actually
control him and make him do
yeah so i'll grab those rotate them move
them around to kind of get the pose
that we want for the animation
all right so what do we do what do we do
with him so
like you're saying we do share since
building rigs
it takes a lot of time and a lot of
effort
and we do a ton of animations on a rig
it would
be a waste to then not repurpose that on
other creatures later on
so i put together this little video
which will show off the way we use the
quaggan rig
okay here's your quaggan down here
oh so the bristleback was actually based
off
using the quaggan rig and so for a while
in development bristlebacks were
actually running around doing
little quaggan animations before we
updated the animation
all right how weird did that look i was
pretty funny yeah oh man i forgot about
that you mentioned that the other day
and then i forgot now i kind of want to
see that so
yeah let's talk later if you have some
of those lying around all right so
that's where you can take those like
those purple lines we were talking about
that's where you can take those and
start adjusting and make them
not just pointy quaggins yeah so
basically
the bristleback is an example of one
that we use the quegan as a baseline but
then
to make the creature have its own unique
personality and stand out
we went over because he's a larger
creature and wouldn't
really work with the same animations we
had to do a whole new animation set for
him
and if you notice on that picture we had
all those extra spines that were added
so yeah we added on to the rig
um to make it the character we needed so
having that building block is actually
really important
as far as saving time it seems like if
you had to build every single thing from
scratch
we'd have a lot fewer creatures yeah all
right
so we kind of took the quaggan rig turn
him into a bristleback
and can we take a look at the other one
yeah so i have another example
oh here's that image i should have
clicked too earlier but didn't
all right so okay so
we had the bog scale and he's
his rig is shared with the vampire beast
and heart of thorns
nice so you just like took off his tails
yeah so there's there's a lot of
creatures who may have tails
and then versions of the rigs won't have
the tails
but that's an example where the creature
used a majority of the animation set
of the bog scale oh yeah okay you get a
variety of
looking creatures but also you still
have a full library of animations he can
use and it still works
nice and then the only animations we
need to do are the skills that ben will
come up with yeah
all right so if we look at that if we
look at the
vampire if we look at the vampire beast
versus the
bug scale his rigging has
it's not just like purple lines there's
a lot more going on there so
what are those because i'm assuming it's
not just for pretty oh
yeah those different colored lines in
there work
so he's got um those joints control them
but based on the rigging he has
there's like different ik chains and
stuff that
um basically just change the colors of
the joints so you know what
the controls are okay so i already made
you do this yesterday but i want to hear
you need to take us through what ik is
the other one ak
fk fk ik and fk so in animation 3d
animation there's fk
and ik and so an ik
is like on a foot control where you want
the foot
planted and you move the character
around and keep the foot
planted in place and so that's an
inverse kinematic
okay and then uh fk forward kinematics
is just like
an arm where you move the lower part and
everything just follows in the parent
down the chain so all right so changing
the color just helps you identify
what you're looking at yeah i think my
just uh
automatically does it so yeah you can
tell if something's
running on it or not there's a lot going
on with movement
in there yeah all right neat so that's
kind of where we start from you've got
the building blocks
and once you've figured out all right
what rig do we want to use do we do we
have an existing rig do we need to build
a new one
then what's the process i mean how does
this evolve from concept
into game so kind of once we get um
once we've decided on the armies we want
like usually that starts with a big
meeting of
you know everybody getting together
deciding what armies we want
deciding what they want to do once we
choose some monsters and decide which
rigs will fit them best we go into uh
prototyping um but before that we
usually get some pictures from
concept art so this is yeah this is an
example of the axe commander
this is one of the earlier concepts and
you'll notice they put a lot of material
treatment on there will they'll get real
world examples of what they kind of
expect the skin to look like
and that's just for the benefit of the
modelers of when they're putting in the
details they can kind of see
and then you can see here's a later one
once it's been refined a lot
uh once a lot of feedback has been given
then we kind of refine the
the concept again and this is the the
final concept
so once the concept is finalized they
usually will get sent off to
a modeler and they will model the
monster based on this
sometimes it'll change a little bit but
this one got pretty close
so this is again this is the x commander
and we got both an armored version and
an unarmored version of him
i love that you can see the real world
examples
and i think i'm cheating a little bit
because i read the notes on you know
well here's some bark and that's that's
where that should go and here's
here's like the material for his torso
but you can see how that translated into
game and you can see the different
pieces and the different parts and how
they all fit onto the creature
so once uh yeah we get actually
kind of during this modeling phase we'll
usually get what we call blue model
which is a an untextured version that
just has the basic
shape assigned to a skeleton and
everything so i can start prototyping
skills
a lot of times the skills we prototype
i'll work closely with brian to actually
get
or another animator to get the
animations we need we'll go back and
forth quite a bit
on okay we want him to have a heavy
swing you know what are the timings on
that swing how much warning should the
players get before he does that
that kind of thing and then
an example of some early animations for
this guy
here's a with an actual green model this
time instead of a blue model but
yeah that walk actually i don't think
ended up making it into the
thing i think we were trying out some
different postures
but eventually it just didn't work out
with
how he would need to blend into other
animations
so here's my question looking at this
animation
you were talking about like if he has a
heavy swing and how he moves and meshing
all of that stuff together
because right here it almost looks like
he's just swinging something that weighs
six ounces
how do you how do you give weight to how
do you give weight to these things and
the movements
um well a lot of it comes down to
timing so if you want to really sell
weight
then you gotta like kind of add in a
bunch of anticipation get
ready for the swing and then you
do this strong hitting my dodge key
really hard yeah yeah
so i mean that's also a cool thing to
help designers
because you know they can come up with a
skill idea
that's like okay we want him to show
it's this powerful attack
and we want to show the powerful attack
and we need that time also
all right that makes sense and trying to
build this thing and mesh what it looks
like
what he does how he moves and what his
skills are is it's way more than just
you guys
yeah i mean once the skills in place
along with working with the animators we
have
a group of effects artists that will
make effects to try to reinforce the
skills we do
um you know sometimes we'll want the
monster to glow as he's charging up to
give the player a chance
you know more indication that they need
to move and
there's pretty much just a lot of back
and forth the whole time a lot of
iteration
um usually you know for the axe
commander i think i probably did like
eight skills or something at one point
for them but they only ended up with a
hand you know we don't use all those
skills because too many skills ends up
being you can't
can't figure out what the monster is
going to do yeah um and sometimes they
just they're
i won't ever get to a skill if we have
too many skills on their list
um and then just goes through once we
get them all put together it goes to
play testing
we play test it with you know a small
group of people
just on the team and you know we'll get
feedback from colin and our team leads
and all that kind of thing and our
other other designers it kind of goes
through probably
i i won't even guess the number of
iteration phases because it just goes
back
and forth with increasing groups of or
increasing larger groups of people until
we get it to where we feel like it's a
solid design oh wow and that
it sounds quick on here but over the
time it's probably several months
before a monster goes from you know
concept to completion and then even
after that we'll be tweaking it
even you know before launch based off of
player feedback
you know once something goes to the
alpha play tests and the beta play tests
all of that just putting it through all
of those iterations and
through spaces um we talked about i mean
you know we're looking at the axe
commander and we talked a little bit
about the mordrem maggot was one that
we pulled from an existing rig and is a
good example of this iteration
yeah um grosses me out but you know so
the mordrem maggot
uh was based off of the grub rig we just
wanted some kind of mordrem worm
um i actually have this set to oh yeah
half speed right now
this is an amazing testing lobby
yeah we do stuff in kind of an empty
area so we could just focus on the
monsters in a lot of cases
so one of the cool things that brian and
i wanted to do with the mordrem maggot
was we decided
you know his standard skills he was not
wasn't meant to be a super hard monster
or anything he's kind of a baseline
monster
but we wanted to have him a little
unique thing so we gave him
the ability to split himself when he
dies
this is not my favorite feature you guys
yes and that actually just kind of came
off of
you know okay what do what do worms kind
of do well one of the things i don't
i'm not sure how scientific it is but we
always heard you know worms if you cut
them in half they still you know they
become two worms so
you know if we're gonna go down the
science road i call down fire from this
guy
in the game so you know so one of the
interesting things about this guy is
that
we started off using the model as the
missile so what's happening is
when he dies he actually spits two
missiles off of him
and when they land they spawn a smaller
version
and we just used his model uh as the
missile as a
instead of getting an effects and then
brian just did some special animations
for him yeah so i had to do a couple
unique animations one of him
rolled up in a ball spinning and that
would be the missile animation
and then there was a second animation of
when he hits the ground to have him like
pop out and be ready to attack you
so even just that tiny little split
second thing
you're still having to think all right
how does this move what does it do and
why is it doing that
yeah and how can we get it to work how
can we communicate through all the
pieces of animation
yeah we didn't want to make it look like
it just appears out of nowhere when it
lands so you know we get effects that
kind of cover up the spawn
uh to some degree and we try to get the
unlurk what we call the unlurk
animations to match
the the animation of when it hits the
ground
just to make it look somewhat smooth
yeah kill some more of them yeah
kill some more of them please so unlurk
is is that when they're spawning
yeah unlike is one it's not a not every
monster has an alert though
uh monsters going forward as a matter of
polish we kind of want them
to all have on lurks from now on
basically just makes them so they don't
fade in
they get the traditional mmo fake the
monster fades in when it spawns we would
rather have them like
come out of the ground or you know fly
in from the sky
that type of thing it just it adds a
little a level of
polish that it does yeah um as a player
it's something that i've noticed where
something's crawling out of the ground
and it gives you that moment of oh no or
oh yeah xp
yeah okay how many times does he split i
forget the only thing yeah what is
like a hydra or like they they'll split
once into smaller ones and these guys
will split
and then the last smaller guys oh my
gosh stop it
they just die and yeah the one thing we
had to do is
i think the first time i put them in i
forgot to make the smaller ones
uh not worth so much xp i think there
was some
actually this and one of the other
bosses i did that spawn monsters like
people were
were actually purposely not killing them
the boss so they can get infinite funds
so we usually oh my gosh when additional
ones spawn we try to
we try to make them worth a little bit
less yeah
the other example we wanted to show i
love these little guys
this is mainly an example of iteration
we had so the mushroom bombers
the early phase the mushroom bombers
they actually just
spawned like their thing is they spawn
small spoilings that run at the player
and explode
[Laughter]
so the early version it just spawned the
guy in place and he'd run
um but the feedback we had during play
testing some internal play testing was
that
the people at ranged had no felt no
danger
yeah he's just like plinking away at it
from far away so yeah so
uh to combat that i decided to make them
actually throw a few of their mushrooms
at the player
and then they would spawn one there
they'd throw one at range
i love them so much their little feet
and then yeah
my little uh that's the maggot again
oops
let me spawn another mushroom bomber
okay so my little secret is that
i use the same trick i had before yeah
they're finding each other
we actually use the model as a missile
shrunk down
and it's kind of hard to see in these
cases but
let me change let me spawn another one
and lower the uh i think we need to do a
show where we just pit monsters against
each other and say
stop fighting you guys we're trying to
look at you so
all right yeah i set the time in half
you'll actually see
the uh all right the spoiling do
a little uh cannonball sometimes like
he'll tuck his feet in at the end before
he hits the ground
what and that was just you'll never see
that
it's probably too difficult to ever see
in game but i know it's there so it
makes me happy
can you go in first person view so we
can see it better oh and please tell me
you're like
first person view key uh go into your
options
yeah i never go i never play first
person uh options up top
oh options uh no you had it yeah okay
i always go into dev menu now see where
it says first person camera
there's an actual camera blocking my
view so i can't see where it is but
first person field of view all right now
this is hard
oh enable first person camera right
there above restore defaults
to above restore default oh there he is
thank you and then i think you just zoom
in
now just get rid of that and zoom in
yeah there we go all right now we can
see better i forgot to ask you about
that earlier and then i was like oh i
can't remember where it is
let's see if we can see him shooting the
guy out
he's funny there he tucks in i don't
think we could have planned that anyway
yeah
oh but yeah something so he does a
little cannonball with his knees tipped
up and that's kind of
an example of the iteration we usually
try to do based off of feedback
i don't know people are asking the
important questions
mushroom butts who did that that was a
an artist uh
gym who's actually like i don't know why
you chose to give them butts
yeah i think i mean it's funny i think
yeah i mean it's their anatomy they got
two legs
yeah you got you got a butt i mean what
do you yeah what do you call emotion i
mean there's no mushrooms and two legs
to
with two legs to kind of so i think
that's the
that's the end of the sentence there's
no mushrooms with two legs in the room
they don't have a butt yeah i can't
prove it yeah the other weird thing like
people
i don't know if they know that the
mushrooms are based on the skirt rig you
know what i talked about yeah
we mentioned that so yeah one example of
how we try to stretch those rigs as far
as we can go
yeah okay like you guys heard what
marcus said
really you guys really
mark's in my ear going to players want
to see the mushroom butts
let's see if i can respawn him again we
need another mushroom i have the
i have the things the commands if you
need it no megan yeah what was the
number for the mushroom
don't have them memorized there
[Laughter]
fungus butts yeah all right so there's
this i wanted to see another little
candle
okay they're fighting with the mortar
maggot again yeah that's hilarious that
they
went in there and started yeah we
actually try to set up um
family like we call them families but
each family of monster will have
an affinity set that says really who
they can attack and who they can and who
they're aggro against
and the mushrooms in the mordrem don't
like don't necessarily always get along
so we made them fight yeah we do that
for
a lot of the monsters will have the same
ones um but a lot of them well all of
them
um but we yeah we try to do a unique one
for every family of monsters
so when i'm running through hard thorns
and there's like a raptor fighting a
random warthog
yeah their families don't get along it's
like the hatfield's mccoy's here but i
appreciate it because then i can get to
where i'm going if i don't feel like
stopping and
fighting that raptor i'm like thanks
just leave me out of it i'm just going
over here
there's an air ship cargo and i need it
wow
okay so they all have things that
they'll fight and things that they'll
just bypass pieces yeah sometimes they
won't care or sometimes they're allies
you know that type of thing wow all
right that wasn't in the script but i'm
so glad you said it
awesome happy accident nope i'll take it
i like it
um let's see what else do we have we've
got the mushroom bombers
um we were talking about the vampire
beast i was like i know there was
another thing the vampire beast and the
bat
mother were just good examples of how
many teams are involved in
yeah together the bat mother was kind of
a thing so we
that was like a special boss request
that we got from the content team
saying we need a boss in this area it's
in a cave
i'm like what can we do that we haven't
done a lot of in hot and
yeah i know bats are fairly common in
other parts of the game but we haven't
used a lot of it in hot so we decided to
make a bat boss that was another one
brian and i worked on
quite a bit together yeah um getting the
animations for it because it spawns a
little bat lanes we were like
well first of all we're like what what
should a bat boss do and
i'm like brian what would it look like
if a boss had a sonic attack and what
was your response
it was like i was like you mean like a
zubat yeah
zubat from pokemon i'm like exactly
that's what i want
and it turns out we can't just take that
thing whole wholesale and stick it in
our game
so we made the other thing that content
wanted the boss to do was to take
advantage of some mushrooms that were in
the area
some of the mastery mushrooms so the
masteries in the area
i think were the the poison clearing uh
mastery
where you can use like the this thing to
clear off that effect so
one of the head hacks that the bat
mother ends up doing spits these poison
pools all over the place that just
put a whole bunch of bad things bad
conditions on you so if you have the
mastery the mushrooms are nearby to
clear those off
but you have a little tougher time if
you don't have the mastery
and then the funnest i think attack we
did for him at least for us to make was
the one for
or actually i should say for her
actually it was to spawn the uh
her bat links um do you have the number
for her uh yeah here
it's like all the way down below the
questions i'm sorry that's okay i have
to scroll way down
that mother it's bat mother that's
literally the the command
is bad mother let me kind of scale back
to one
actually what's the there's a command
for her skill too
uh where'd it go yeah and this was one
screw up the other way a little bit this
way yeah
oh batman there we go oh okay
and this was one that was kind of a
challenge for animation how to
how do we make how do we make a bat
spawn
other bats yeah and so i kind of had the
idea
like a vampire maybe she like puts her
wings up
and like like fantastic motions
you should see him at his desk sometimes
i love that hey
well as an animator you have to like
feel what it feels like
yeah get it on the creature all right so
can we do her can we see her summon one
more time
yeah or will we just wind up with like a
million battlings and everything's
terrible
we could have we can have a few bat
links
nice the other uh interesting thing we
did about that was their unlurk
animation
yeah we utilized that unlurk thing again
with the
um the maggot where i created two
special unlurks so they would swoop in
counter circles and have a little bit
more dynamic
entrance and not just pink here's one
yeah
oh wow all right so that was our bat
mother what was the other one
uh vampire beast yeah we can talk about
the vampire beast a little bit
because otherwise we're going to talk
about the bat guano hero point and
we're going to have some arguments do
you have the number for that one too
there's too many bat vampire beast mods
vampire beast crawler there we go
i like when they're things that make
sense and not just random numbers
because you all confuse me when it's
like here's seven numbers to
memorize and some of the thing so yeah
uh when coming up with these vampire
beasts we kind of wanted to do something
a little bit
different with them and so i actually we
created a new
condition that unfortunately can't be
cleared we called vampire vampiric
infection which is
this is the thing that gave people a lot
of trouble because it actually heals the
boss for
the damage it does to you um and it puts
it out
in a cone sometimes so there's a if
you're all in there
it can get a lot of healing at once and
i i did right after launch i got into a
group that did
the one at the mastery point so when he
scrolls up to legendary or
champion he gets a lot harder and we had
a
probably group of four or five people
that did it we were
able to maintain damage the whole time
but we couldn't get them down until you
know people figured out to get their
pets out of the area
and you know watch out for the attack
and it was pretty rewarding experience
watching people
struggle and not they were able to beat
it but you know as a designer
you're kind of both you kind of want
your monster to kill somebody every once
in a while
but as a player you know you obviously
you want to win so it was yeah it was a
rewarding experience watching us beat
the
you know the the challenge but it wasn't
a pushover yeah the fact that it was a
challenge
yeah so i found that out the hard way i
was running around with a minion master
that that didn't end well and then
people yelled at me and it was not it
was not cool
uh your one hp is like really hanging in
there yeah i made it up no death
yeah it does it always is really
gratifying when i do that on a dev
client
like just go ahead keep hitting me but
that what that last hp
is not going away i don't you didn't
work on the animations for him
no i didn't that was uh
that was mayhew yeah oh thank you scott
i like it
all right so do you guys feel like
taking some questions or do you want to
go through anything else
let's tackle some questions i have
questions for you right
all right and all right so the guys told
me i have to be the one to figure out
how to pronounce these names
so i would like to thank rf darko for
submitting a question let me start with
something easy yeah
um what if any other games did you look
to when designing the new jungle enemies
either in terms of combat mechanics or
art design we already know pokemon
yeah that was one i mean for me there's
not like i can't
it's hard to point at a specific one
because you know i've been gaming for
35 plus years at this point and now it's
that level of they're stuffing your yeah
it's in your head
and sometimes you pull stuff out they
i'm sure it's been used somewhere but
it's just stuff that was in your head
from playing a game when you're a kid or
playing a recent game i've been thinking
about skills for stuff from
like triforce heroes now because we've
been playing that a lot and um so every
once in a while think of i wonder if i
could turn that into a skill in our game
so these things kind of just come up
that way i don't know what brian
yeah i have a different answer for me
when we were making hot i was playing a
lot of monster hunter 4
and that game has super awesome
animations for their
creatures that you're fighting and
something that i
borrowed is they do a lot of like during
the fight and the struggle when the
monsters get stunned you really
feel the sense of struggle in the
monster yeah
so for the chalk gerund when i
when the break bar happens i have his
stun where he's like clawing and trying
to climb out of the hole that you
knocked him down into and that was kind
of
inspired by that game so you can have
there are like single games where a
particular element made an impression on
you
but it's a lot of that just growing up
as a gamer
and having a fee having a feel for
things yeah i mean that's a
the way it comes down to a lot of it
most of the skills
like for the monsters are usually um i i
look at the monster model like what do i
think this guy could do
sometimes i've even googled like real
life equivalents of monsters and said
you know
what do i think this monster might do if
it was or this animal would do if it was
a monster
type thing yeah that's valid yeah so
there's the inspiration comes from
pretty much
all different sources yeah and you know
taking taking from real life
i remember a story i heard ages ago from
one of our artists and i can't remember
who it was
it was at the old office um before we
moved out here and they were talking
about how there was like a dead crow in
the parking lot and
they were out there drawing the feathers
to pull inspiration i remember from the
first guild wars where there was like
they were like the crow wings
and they were kind of a little bit
broken and battered that's
if i remember correctly that's where the
inspiration for that came from so taking
it from real life is
happens a lot yeah is something that has
a huge history
oh yeah because i mean with art we're
making
imaginative stuff but you won't believe
it unless there is that element of
realism
in there so that kind of goes back for
me to
the work you're doing on the and lurks
where they're actually coming out of
coming out of the ground or swooping in
from the sky yeah it's the same thing
all right um how about the swede
well thank you guys for having easy
names i love it uh will we see more
enemies with
more specified roles from here on out i
love the fact
that there are so many different kinds
in hot that focus on different things
like floppers menders healers punishers
and i hope you keep going down this
route
yeah i think that's something we
definitely want to try to do maybe not
for every single monster like some
monsters will have a wider variety of
roles but a lot of them especially when
they fit in with a larger army
we'll want them to have a you know a
specific role in their army so when we
group them together
you know they'll complement each other
to some degree yeah and i think it adds
a cool element of character
to giving them a specific class yeah to
kind of be
so it's it's a place you want to keep on
going yeah definitely
can we talk about the more dramanders
because oh my gosh you guys
none of us i don't think either worked
on the menders that was kevin
immediately absolve all responsibility
i did not do it all right i like it um
how about from orpheo oh hey will we see
more creatures from the first guild wars
maybe that will return to the world of
tyria
i can give a strong maybe thanks
we can't really talk too much about
future plans but we definitely look
uh whenever we're pulling new monsters
in that's something we know we have a
large backlog of
monsters in our you know ip that we can
pull from and we definitely use that for
inspiration
we might pull monsters and tweak them to
you know what would they look like in
our time frame but
yeah i wouldn't be surprised if we see
some more guild wars 1 monsters in the
future
awesome uh stand the wall
is it hard to design an npc to react
effectively in most situations
because with when you introduce the
human element you've got all these
players in there different things are
going to happen
yeah there's always a really difficult
line we have to walk between
what's fun and um you know what you'd
want you'd expect a monster to behave
intelligently like
making a monster that dives out of all
your aoes and tries to kaii the whole
time
might sound a lot more fun than in
theory than it actually is in practice
i think for standard mobs we're not
going to make them get
too horribly more intelligent we tried
to get them harder and hot and i think
we came to a pretty good level of
difficulty
though i think we can do better of
making some of the more unique monsters
like the
boss monsters and stuff maybe have a
little bit more intelligent ai
and we definitely have some new tools
that we might be using in the future for
that
nice sounds like a conversation we'd
want to bring an ai guy in foreign we're
out of chairs right now and we didn't
plan on that so
let's see ben k seriously you guys thank
you for having easy names
i love it if you're making a new pet
what do you have to keep in mind for
game play considerations and what do you
like to do to give it character
since we had some new pets in hot yeah a
lot of the
pets and hot were taken from just
creatures we had already done and spent
a lot of time on
it's kind of another one of those hey we
did all this animation work and
creature work on this guy hey maybe he's
cool enough yeah the
uh pit the class team several of the
pets were definitely just direct
monsters and then they would just modify
the skills to be appropriate for a
player class yeah we don't make those
specifically but they definitely
you reuse a lot of our work yeah we were
close
yeah we're close with that team they sit
right next to us so
yeah there's a good reason for that
evidently
cool um oh man okay might be
shoji might be show guy i don't know
it's g-e-i
but they want to know when an swings a
club at you oh i love this question
when an swings a club at you what is the
size and shape of the damage field hold
on because we're not done is it tight to
the club is it a tube around the club a
moving box or a cone in front of the
creature
that simply activates when the atom
swings the club through it how do clubs
work
there's actually not really a simple
answer to this well okay the complicated
answer is we can actually
do we have a lot of different options
for how we apply the the the damage
in most cases though it's just gonna be
a cone in front of the creature
um that we try to make match the
animation and the model
so we make sure the damage cone doesn't
go too far outside of where it's like
nine feet on either side
um yes i mean usually it's just a cone
but we we actually have a lot of
different options for how we wanted
to do the damage field okay we could do
in a circle around it we could do it in
a
you know a square rectangle in front of
it um
but we usually go the easiest route
depending on the the skill however makes
sense like
like a simple cone will you know will do
pretty well for a a
club swing yeah so
you don't have to worry about okay now
it needs to move with the club it's just
here's where he can go here
and they don't usually move well some of
their animations do but for a simple
swing they probably will stand in place
and swing so we don't have to worry too
much about the
damage area moving and it usually goes
so quickly like it's usually
less than a second you know at one point
of
when the damage occurs so if you're in
that spot when he swings you're pretty
much
gonna get hit you're pretty much
done okay oh gosh okay this question
came up so many times ultima stanza
i think i got this right we should do
like a betting pool on how many of these
i mess up now
because they're getting harder in
regards to creatures have you given any
thought on possibly creating an in-game
bestiary
yeah so many people ask this yeah i
really did like this question it was a
cool idea but unfortunately it's not
something that our team would actually
ever be assigned to make that's
uh it would be a new system if i was
assigned to it there's definitely a lot
of cool things i think we could do with
be shari
but that would usually be a completely
different team's function to do
that seems that feels like more than one
team they would take our monsters
i'm not even sure what team would do
that maybe the rewards team depending on
how
they wanted to do it like if there was
rewards for you know finding new
monsters
or unlocking different tracks for
killing you know
specific i mean there's so many things
you could do with that i guess it would
depend on what we decided the end design
would be
depending on what team would implement
it but it could definitely go a lot of
different ways
so in my head i mean when we went
through these questions i was thinking
oh these are good questions you know you
guys
you guys picked out the questions you
liked and oh i'm going to be interested
to see what they say and now i'm sitting
here going oh my gosh that's like
that's like the reward stream team and
that then there's a ui element yeah
and then there's lore team it would be a
lot of different teams combining to make
one thing i don't know which team would
own the final design
yeah yeah that got complicated super
fast but yes it is a cool idea
um and that's kind of all we have on
that particular question
i wish i wish we could say yes yeah i
wish it was that easy
if only okay um how about
mickey mickey mighty mike mike i mighty
could be when creating new monsters and
creatures that have some reference in
the first guild wars
how strict how strict do you stick to
how they looked
and how much freedom do you have to
update them
i think we do have a lot of freedom
i mean we have hundreds of years of
evolution here yeah i mean
a lot of it comes down to you want to
stay true to what it was
but that guild wars one was made
so long ago you got to update and you
just want to make it cooler
and look more modern day game
there's a common trope in game design
that whenever somebody else
takes the same they're gonna if you you
hand one monster off or one
design element off to a new designer
they're gonna want to put their own
stamp on it as much as possible
it's valid so a lot of times you know we
would take an existing monster but we
want to see
you know how can we ramp this up or you
know how can i put my own spin on this
yeah would not just take like the old
work was great i mean there was a reason
it's there and the reason why people
loved it but what how can we stay true
to the spirit of the monster and
you know make it fit in guild wars 2.
while at the same time making maybe make
something unique about it that didn't
have before yeah so
you're still staying true to it it's not
like okay these things had two legs now
they have six
right what would they look like in
modern day
in guild wars 2. and then you know our
our our spec
is higher than it was for guild wars 1
so we can do more you know than
they could back then in terms of you
know poly count and all that stuff
so that's gonna be so much fun
all right this might be my favorite
question oh yeah
pocket raptors let's talk about pocket
raptors where did the inspiration come
from
why do you hate us that last part might
be from me
and what are the statistics i'll answer
this one first because we went and found
the answer
what are the statistics of player deaths
to pocket raptors
pocket raptors have been responsible for
one million two hundred and eighty six
thousand eight hundred and seventeen
player deaths
probably more now because that question
answer came yesterday
uh i don't know if there was a specific
uh
inspiration for them but they did end up
being very close to
uh jurassic park the little dinos and
jurassic park
that swarm um i kind of liked the way
they we kind of knew that they were
going to turn out that way because then
they killed a lot of people internally
before we actually released the game but
we decided because it was something that
you can combat pretty as long as you see
them first then you
you take the initiative and don't try to
run through them you're generally fine
yeah once you learn how to fight them
yeah you can't do bad aoe is your friend
yeah very much so
yeah so trying to run through them is a
thing
all right i want to say that i had
learned the hard way except i still
haven't learned i'm still like
i'm a guardian it's fine you know save
yourselves
was it like super deliberate to make
sure we couldn't run through them or was
it just
a happy accident i think that was
somewhat happy accident because they're
so small they're hard to see
and the way the way the uh um the
content designers spawn them they spawn
them in a lot of shadowy places
just happen to be shadowy places so like
you'll i've i've
experienced the same thing you'll see
like oh there's little there's two
little guys right there that's no big
deal i'll just go
there and then you go there and oh my
god they're everywhere they're like 500
of them usually even if i see one i just
i play an elementalist as my primary
character and i i'll start dropping aoes
on them as soon as i see them because i
know there's more in there
whether i can see them or not i know
they're there flush them out with fire
pretty much
oh my gosh all right so here's one
from gamelteer probably right
currently i am doing a 3d arts and
animation school here in austria
my big goal is to suddenly work in a
major game studio and what are some good
hints you can give to a newbie character
creature artist
well go this one comes up a lot and
it's kind of a simple answer but it
really is the most
accurate just find that thing you want
to do if you want to be a character
creature artist
then just make characters and creatures
just go do it i mean
i didn't become an animator by not
animating
i spent all a lot of my free time
animating stuff i thought would be cool
and then going to school and learning
animation also
and it's the combination of having the
passion to
want to keep improving yourself and
working on it
and for some training that makes you i
feel like
a good artist animator whatever you want
to
become but doing it is actually
animating
is the thing not just okay i'm going to
wait until i'm perfect
and i've learned all of these things and
then i will start animating oh yes
do the thing you're going to do some
things that you then just throw away
and then you're like all right well that
project is done it maybe didn't turn out
how i wanted
okay let's just do the next i've learned
my lesson i can approach it differently
this time
and you just keep getting better and
learning
ben uh well for the design side
it's kind of weird because i actually
have a business degree i didn't go to
school for game design
i didn't go to school for this either
but they didn't have like game design
schools didn't exist you know when i was
in college in the
90s so
i kind of got my experience with muds
starting out
like being a mud a wizard on a mud
programming there
and then just sticking with it uh i
started i started off in like cs
and then kind of went from there but in
terms of how to get into
the industry from the design side i
would just there's so many tools
available now that we didn't have back
in those days that
now if you want to make a game you can
make a game there's there's no shortage
of options out there
and so i would just like make mods um
you know
make your own skins for games make your
own just make your own games even if
it's just on pen and paper like
we all look at that kind of thing when
we're looking at new candidates like
you know what do they do what how did
like what are their design
ideas so like make your own dnd modules
just like if you want to design
the same thing design um and then
hopefully eventually you'll get
recognized for it and you'll get a shot
yeah and recognize maybe that you're not
going to be absolutely pro
right out of the gate like you have 20
years of experience
it's a learning process yeah and i think
the cool thing nowadays with the
internet
is there's so much community and sharing
that you can
do some work put it out there get
feedback from other people
and then improve yourself yeah just see
what people think
about them yeah so it sounds like
camel's off to a good start he's asking
the right questions
and he or she i actually don't know
asking the right questions
and going to school so start designing
make creatures design things
awesome all right we have one more
question that i deliberately saved for
last
and what is your favorite heart of
thorns enemy and what is your least
favorite to fight oh that's from safan
saffin saffin stefan
um well for me one of my favorite it's
like an event monster
is the gold guzzler just because i think
it's really fun to stand on top and just
throw those rocks on
you told me about that the other day and
i haven't gone to find it yet but it's
actually called the gold guzzler
yeah and it's it's an arrowhead it's a
champion arrowhead somewhere in the game
that i haven't come across yet
yeah but okay so what are you you're
just throwing rocks on its head you're
literally
i just like his name and he's just got a
fun little mechanic of throwing frogs on
him
i love it and if i'm not mistaken you
can do it from on high so he can't roll
over you
yeah that's amazing i gotta find you
have to show me where this is or i'll
just ask nelly she knew about it she
made it
um all right so what's your least
favorite uh
least favorite to fight i don't know
we can freeze it most infuriating if
that will help
i think yeah for me the mushrooms i
think
what is it because they swarm you too
much yeah there's too much swarming
i always get knocked down and just
killed play daredevil get that third
dodge bar it helps
makes a difference about you ben um
my favorite is mainly because i worked
on him so much as i really liked the axe
commander
he was just fun to create and fun to
make the animations for
and the fact that he's kind of a
prominent boss monster is kind of fun so
watching him march down the lanes in uh
dragon stand is really
really fun because he he stands out so
much he's also killed a lot of people
and that makes you i don't know the
exact number but he has killed a lot of
people yeah we should have got those
stats too yeah i should have
so that's like that's why you like him
that's one of the reasons i like have
you met peter freeze
uh i think so probably i do like the
kill players
that's part of my job description though
right yeah um
and my least favorite i probably get
annoyed by the chalk
because of all their missile shields and
missile reflects i've killed myself more
than i'd like to admit
because i'm not fast enough on hitting
the escape key from
[Music]
stop my auto attack stop hitting stop
hitting stop hitting yourself yeah
[Laughter]
can we get an anime can we get a skill
called that stop hitting yourself
the class team should do one like that
all right guys get on that yeah
awesome all right well i am giving a
totally opposite answer
the mushrooms are my favorite they crack
me up to watch they are so funny
and i can't believe neither of you said
that the smoke scale was your least
favorite
that might have i thought about that one
because getting him out of that smoke
screen is kind of a pain
oh my gosh i am like immediate as soon
as i see him start coming at me i'm mad
i mean like he's not even here yet and
i'm angry about this guy's pretty quick
if you can get him out of the smoke
screen
you know it's mostly just running and
screaming for me and trying to find a
cliff to jump off of so i can glide away
all right well that was our last
question thank you guys really for
coming and
showing us behind the curtain of
animation and showing us
the rigs for all of these things so now
you guys know bristleback
used to be a quaggan but he got
different anime that was my big takeaway
yeah yeah all right we will see you guys
next week i'm gonna let the two of you
get back to work
thank you guys don't forget to follow
our channel here on twitch so you don't
miss our future live streams
and we will see you next friday on guild
chat bye
[Music]
Guild Chat - Episode 30

Transcription[edit]

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