The House of Tesla News

Hi there!

After some devlogs by my lovely colleagues, it’s time for another delve into the development process with the design department.
If you’ve been paying attention you went from early puzzle prototypes, different concepts, and then tying it all up into a single style or vision with completion of the 3d assets. If we were just making a 3d environment without any interactivity that would be it. However, games are all about interactivity.

You need different controllers, levers, and ways to interact with the puzzles and they all need to be able to react to the player’s input and affect the environment in a believable way. And that's when programming, as a vital part of any gaming project, comes into play. But how do they know what each interaction should be like? They need a baseline. Something that will show them what, how, and when should be happening (without a designer standing behind their backs, nagging). That finally brings me to today’s theme: animatics✨🦄✨!



What is an animatic? In general, animatic is a series of images or short videos that are made to convey planned features, or a feeling a piece of audiovisual art should portray. In our case, it is a bit more specific. Our animatics use prototypes of 3d assets and animations of any active objects and aim to show the full workings of any one puzzle and scene.



Finished animatics help designers to finally see what their ideas look like after all the iterations and changes, tweak the workings and mechanisms of the puzzles (this of course requires cooperation with the 3d artist who made the prototypes in the first place), and convey their ideas about interactions and causalities in the game world to the coders who then use the animatic as a baseline of how should things behave.



You can picture our animatic as a playthrough video made before the game is finished. It focuses on all things the player can interact with and follows his every step through the chapter, every stage, every zoom, every puzzle as well as any extra interactions that are not necessary for the completion of the game.



Making animatics often requires cooperation across all of our departments and helps us iron out a lot of potential issues. To show you a small glimpse of what our animatics look like (and maybe to get a chuckle out of you), Lucka, one of our designers and the specialist on animatics for The House of Tesla created this gif for you.



And that's my cue until next month when we will talk about Gamescom, our preparations for an event like this, and what goes into making a playable demo.

Viktor
Lead Designer of The House of Tesla
Blue Brain Games

Hello everyone!

It's Honza again, the art director for The House of Tesla. Last time we took a peek at how we go about creating the general visual direction of our game. As promised, today we are going to delve a bit deeper into the making of the actual assets the player interacts with in the game.

Each model we see in the game is unique and requires its own specific approach. Sometimes the process of creating it is a journey of discovery in itself, a little puzzle our artists have to solve to deliver a model that's functional, pleasing to look at, and also works within the technical limitations of our engine. Because of that, there's no general recipe to follow, which is also part of the fun for us: discovering new ways to deal with various challenges along the way. With that in mind, let's walk through each of the steps we take to come up with a model for one particular puzzle.

We start with a simple prototype, which serves as a guide for its location in the game, size, proportions, and functionality. Once we are sure all the necessary parts are blocked out and working, we can move on to modeling.



In the case of this particular puzzle, a moving statue, we start by sculpting a high-resolution model. At this stage, we don't yet have to worry about all the technical aspects that will come into play later. The artist mainly focuses on the aesthetic aspects, the anatomy, and the moving joints connecting the limbs.



Once we're done with the detailed model, it's time to convert it into a lower-resolution version that has a smaller density of polygons, the squares that make up the wire-frame shell of the statue. Sometimes this can be quite a time-consuming process, as we re-draw the new cage of the mesh over the original hi-res sculpt, ensuring all the main shapes are still there.



When the whole statue has been re-made into this lower-resolution version, we start preparing it for the texturing process. In the end, all the colors applied to the model are just flat images, so to apply them, we first have to "unwrap" the 3D mesh. Think of it as taking the wrapper off of a chocolate bunny and then flattening it out on a table.



After this, we can bring the unwrapped low-resolution model into our texturing software and put it through a process called "baking." Unlike baking a chocolate bunny, this results in all of the details of our high-resolution sculpt being transferred onto the low-resolution model through the magic of a "normal map," a texturing color channel that, when applied to the low-density model, creates the illusion of detail.



Then it's off to painting the actual colors and materials on the model. Every material has its color, roughness, and metallic values, which determine how it's going to look in our game engine. In this case, we're going for an overall metallic look, with some dirt and oxidation painted into the cavities to give it a more interesting look when reflecting light.



Then just repeat this process for all the parts of the model, import it into our game engine, throw some lights at it, and voila! A waving statue. Our part of the puzzle is now solved, and we can't wait for the players to figure out how it works!

Honza
Art Director
Blue Brain Games

Hello everyone,

I am Sari, the lead concept artist for The House of Tesla. Just like my colleagues before me, I am here to unveil a bit behind the magic that is creating the visuals for our game.
As was mentioned in the previous dev log, the era of Nikola Tesla is rich in visual inspiration. While The House of Da Vinci had good old, stylish Renaissance coat, with Tesla we can build on that, add new, cool materials and processes of the industrial architecture, then work with the huge leaps in science fields and finally sprinkle it all with the glamour of branching decorative art styles... and electricity!



And we sure do draw (pun very much intended) from this vast pool of visual inspiration. It is proving to be quite helpful any time our game designers come to us with their ideas neatly written down... or with some charming scribbles of a complex puzzle or mysterious device.



Our task is then both simple and difficult. Make it pretty, believable, and functional.
Sometimes we are given strict instructions about the looks or function. That means it is time for thorough research and inspiration hunting! It can range from photos and drawings of contemporary buildings, interiors, furniture, fashion, and decorative items which may lead us to obscure places of abandoned factories, heavy machinery, pictures of first cabling, and light switches and make us wonder how people even survived the first experiments with electricity.



There are other times when no one is really sure what is an item, room, or whole scene supposed to look like. Then... we vibe. Did you find an interesting photo of some old machinery? Use the lovely color scheme of rusty metals. A dramatic environmental shot? The lighting is neat. Wouldn't it look nice if applied to this room?



As you can see, our creative job can take us on many different and unexpected adventures.
And now, since words are not my first weapon of choice and I've already used too many of them... let me part with you by offering you a picture of Nikola Tesla in his natural environment.

Sarianne
Lead Concept Artist
Blue Brain Games

Good morning people!

The most perceptive of you might have noticed that yesterday day was the day when we should have had another devlog. Sadly, sometimes things don’t go as we want them to for all the wrong reasons and devlog will be available at the end of the month (you can look forward to our concept art leader showing you another part of the game dev process through her eyes).
Luckily, sometimes things do not go as planned for all the right reasons and this is exactly the case because today we have another announcement to make! While part of our team works hard to bring you The House of Tesla, the rest went to a secret underground bunker to work secretly on an amazing new project (ok, ok, you got me. It’s not so secret anymore and not really underground, it’s just our offices).
Without further ado let me introduce you to:



Yes, we are making a virtual reality game. Yes, it’s gonna be amazing. Yes, all the puzzles and environments were completely redone to use the potential of VR. Yes, you can Wishlist it right now and play it in several months!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2948310

Hello everyone!
My name is Honza, and I work as the art director for our game. In this brief write-up, I'd like to offer you a glimpse into our process of creating the visuals for The House of Tesla.

Among our initial and most important tasks was crafting a cohesive, unified vision for how our world is going to look. Coming from The House of Da Vinci, we knew we wanted to create an environment just as rich and compelling as the one presented in our previous projects. Luckily, our colleagues from the story department provided us with the perfect backdrop for a visually engaging experience: a narrative that takes place in a time of great technological, industrial, and societal change. These grand shifts also prompted the rise of unique artistic movements, be it in fine arts, architecture, or fashion, so there was no shortage of places for us to look for inspiration.



For our team of artists, the journey begins with a script and an overview of all the puzzles, mysterious places, and strange devices the player is going to encounter. Sometimes, we feel like the players themselves, scrambling our minds while trying to understand the wicked inventions our coworkers came up with. Because we are always striving for an authentic period look, we start by researching the actual places our characters inhabited, the technology they used (or invented), as well as looking at works by great artists of the era; in our case, for example, Alphonse Mucha, Louis Majorelle, or the brilliant architect Daniel Burnham. From then on, our amazing concept artists work closely with the gameplay department to flesh out the first rough sketches, ensuring that every creative decision we make supports the experience they designed.



When we are happy with those, we can move on to adding more details, while aiming to keep the look of everything consistent throughout the whole experience. We're also always focusing on visual storytelling and finding interesting ways to help make the player feel like they’re visiting a rich, lived-in world. I can’t tell you how many times I came to the story folks with a request like 'We have a stack of books in a dimly lit corner, do you have any pointers as to what person X might have been reading?' only to come back with book recommendations that would fill a library even Mark Twain would not be ashamed of. Once we're satisfied with the overall look, layout, and mood, we move into 3D prototyping.



After translating the ideas of our concept artists into three dimensions, we can begin to determine the final composition of scenes, the player's movement, and the finer technical details of how Tesla's wondrous machines operate. This is where our talented 3D modelers join in on the fun, informing us that this moving thing actually can’t be where it is because it obstructs another moving thing, thereby preventing the third moving thing from moving at all. Fortunately, they almost certainly devise a solution even before presenting us with the problem. However, all of this is just the beginning of our work; the next step is to create the final assets with which the player will interact in the game. Perhaps we can delve deeper into those at another time.

Thank you for reading our little article. I hope it provided at least a small window into the initial stages of our process. Because we're still more comfortable with creating pictures than writing words, as a token of gratitude, here’s a little sneak peek of one of the other characters players will encounter in our game. Can you guess who it will be?

Honza
Art Director
Blue Brain Games