Transcript

Aaron Nemoyten (00:09)
Good morning, I’m Aaron Nemoyten and this is Make Games Drink Coffee, a podcast featuring conversations with game developers about their jobs, their hobbies, and whatever they’re passionate about. Except for today. Today I am doing something a little bit different. It is Thanksgiving weekend And due to various scheduling issues,

I just did not have a guest interview ready for this episode. So instead, I decided that I would sort of wing it on my own and respond to an email that I got from a random person who contacted me because I worked on the Madagascar game,

which came out in 2005. The story behind this is that when I was 19 years old, I happened to see an ad, I think on Craigslist, for a junior cinematics designer at Toys for Bob and…

At that point, my experience was that I had learned how to make websites using HTML back in like 1996 when HTML was all there was and there was no CSS and there was no JavaScript. And I had taken some filmmaking classes at Marin Community College. And that was it. I was actually planning on transferring to SF State, San Francisco State, to go to their film production program. But I…

did have a gap in my schedule where I could go and work for Toys for Bob. And it ended up working perfectly because what they would do at the time, was to bring people on on a six month contract as sort of a probationary period. And then if they liked you, they would just hire you full time. And if they didn’t, they would just not renew the contract. While I was there, almost everybody who got brought on on the same day as me, all on six month contracts,

got rehired full time and some of them ended up working there for a really long time after that, which is really cool. But I had always planned to transfer to a four year college after that. And so basically what ended up happening was that my six months ended the Friday before the Monday I was going to start at SF State. So my last week, I was commuting from my dorm that I had just moved into in San Francisco back to

Marin County, ⁓ Novato, to go work at Toys for Bob. Now working at Toys for Bob at 19 was an incredible experience and I honestly probably did not appreciate how great that place was until after I’d worked in the industry again for another decade and kind of looked back and realized that Toys for Bob was calm, it was well organized, they knew how to get good projects that would pay them to do what they did best.

there were a lot of people there that had been working there for a long time. And I’m pretty sure that Toys for Bob’s retention rate was way above industry were people that were at Toys for Bob when I was there in 2005 that had been there a few years that only just stopped working there in the last five to 10 years. So there are people that were there for like 10, 15, 20 years. It’s amazing. Anyway,

Toys for Bob had extra significance to me because the founders of Toys for Bob had made Star Control 2 back in 1992, which is kind of one of the best PC games ever. It looks janky by today’s standards, but it is an epic action RPG set in space where

You have all these different game modes that include exploring a solar system, landing on planets and collecting resources, having conversations with all kinds of different alien species, and a battle mode that’s like a top-down 2D thing that has all these different alien ships with their different strengths and weaknesses, completely different weapon loadouts, different strategies, and it’s just super fun. ⁓ It’s got a really big sort of epic story that…

probably inspired Mass Effect and other games. It’s really cool.

Anyway, the co-founders of Toys for Bob, Paul Richie and Fred Ford, were basically at it together from the 80s all the way until I think last year when Paul finally went his own way so he could move to the UK to be with his grandkids, which is pretty cool.

anyway, so I was working on the Madagascar game as a junior cut scene designer and

I’m pretty sure this was the first time there was a dedicated person at Toys for Bob doing cutscenes and the cutscenes were all done with just pure scripting like the same programming language and toolkit which Fred Ford had developed that they called TFB script that they used to make gameplay. I was also using to make cutscenes and this is both a good thing and a bad thing. First of all, it was a pretty fully featured tool set. So

When I learned how to use it to make cutscenes, also learned how to use it to make gameplay, and I made a little mini game that ended up in the full game. But that also meant that it wasn’t ideal for cutscenes, and there were a lot of weird things that I had to do to accommodate.

that groundwork laid, I should say that I wrote a whole postmortem about my work on Madagascar on my website and I uploaded a reel of cutscenes that I worked on to YouTube. So every once in a while I get people contacting me and asking me questions about it. So

here’s an excerpt from this email that I got and I want to address these questions. so Shannon says, wanted to ask a few things if that’s all right with you. Just to have it be specific, what was the production like from the idea of the scene to the final product shown for the ending cut scene of the New York street chase level, as well as the starting cinematic for the save the lemurs level? Okay, hold on. These are two different things that are very different points in the game. I have pulled up.

the end of the New York Street Chase level, and I’m just gonna play it. I know this may not translate well to podcast form, but what you should know is in the game, there’s Marty the Zebra, Alex the Lion, Melman the Giraffe, and Gloria the Hippo. Marty the Zebra has escaped from the zoo because he wants to find a way to make it to, quote, the wild.

which is a place he thinks he’ll be happier because he’s bored at the zoo. In the level, you play as the three other characters chasing after him, and the level ends when everybody converges at the same place at Grand Central Station. So I’m gonna play that here and let you know that there’s police surrounding them as they’re trying to figure out what’s going on. At the very end, they all get shot with tranquilizer darts and fall over and it fades out.

it’s so fun looking back at this and remembering working on it. One of the things that’s interesting about this is that was storyboarded by one of the animators on the game. when I first started, they weren’t sure if they needed to kind of have the animators direct the cutscenes and just let me implement. So…

they would give me storyboards and the script and I would have temporary VO and I would basically have to implement it as they had written it and storyboarded it. And so this one actually has a bunch of shots that were kind of a pain and this was one of the early ones to implement if I remember correctly.

to sort of start from the beginning, in terms of how this was built, ⁓ TFB script as a toolkit set up for things like enemy AI. So that means it’s based on behavior. So it’s a block of code that’s gonna run in its entirety every frame.

and it’s doing its checks, like is there something near? Am I walking towards a waypoint? And all of those things have a condition associated with them. So am I near this character if I am switched to a different behavior? Am I at my waypoint if I am switched to a different waypoint so I can like walk in a circle or patrol or go back and forth or whatever? Am I turning towards something if I’m turned at it?

then do the next behavior that I would do now that I’m facing it. So it’s all set up to be like, here’s what I’m currently doing, continue to do that until a condition is reached, at which point I will do a different thing. So in the context of a cut scene, almost every shot is a different behavior. And not only that, but sometimes I would have a behavior to set up the beginning of a shot.

and then a behavior of while the shot is going. And sometimes it is even a behavior per line of dialogue. And I think most of them are probably that, but most of the lines of dialogue also get their own shots. So whatever. But the reason that I had to set it up like this for even to set up a scene, you know, the beginning of the behavior is its own thing. And then we switched to a behavior for dialogue is because characters needed to hit their

marks, and in this respect this is really like directing a stage play or directing a movie because the way it’s set up is there is a move to command and the move to command is like move this character to this location until they get within X units meters feet I don’t remember what it was I’ll say feet from here on out

playing the following animation. And then when they reach that distance, we can hit a flag and say, okay, we’re there, and or we can switch to another behavior. And so the levels are actually littered with cut scene waypoints. They are invisible objects that exist in the world, but that you can’t see, but they are solely for the purpose of characters in cut scenes to walk to them.

and then stop and do something else. Probably say a line, turn to another character, play an animation, et cetera. Another thing worth noting is that we also have switching cameras. ⁓ so in a behavior, we might say, switch to this camera, and then all these characters are moving towards their waypoints. And then it’s basically set up so that ⁓ once all the characters are at their waypoints,

we can start the next line. This also means, by the way, that there are special versions of each character just for cutscenes littered all over these levels. And in fact, there is one version of each character at least per cutscene in the level. So that means each level has at least two, three, four, maybe five versions of every main character and other characters that are going to be in cutscenes.

so generally a shot will play out like this. We switch to the camera that we want to use, and there are cameras everywhere that are each set up to, you know, be for different shots. We switch to the camera,

take control of every character that needs to be doing something and we tell them what to do and we pay attention to every condition that needs to be met in order to move to the next shot. The one thing I haven’t mentioned yet is dialogue. So this is the other thing that’s gonna happen is that we will pay attention to how far through a line of dialogue we are and once we get to a certain point, we can go to the next behavior which has maybe a different camera angle, ⁓ maybe a different

know, set of character movements, et cetera, et cetera. And essentially, my job for six months was to do nothing but lay a bunch of marks, pick a camera angle, write a bunch of code that says, character moves here, this character moves here, this character moves here, play this animation, play this animation, turn to here, look at this character, because we could have head tracking of like, you know, pay attention to this thing, ⁓ and then play this audio from this character.

And that’s it. Every cutscene was just that.

So you string a bunch of sequences of that together and you get an entire cut scene.

one of the last things I wanna mention before we move on is that one of the most important things to me about making these cut scenes work is that Madagascar is comedy and comedy is timing. And so I learned really quickly that if I just waited for the audio to be done for each line before moving to the next one, it completely ruined the pace. It was lame, it was boring.

None of the jokes worked. So I had to kind of arbitrarily pick different thresholds so that the characters would seem to sort of jump on each other with their and often doing that meant that it didn’t even seem like they were jumping on each other. It just seemed like normal conversation.

Okay, so that’s all of the basics. Now the next thing I want to address is that in this scene in particular, if you’re listening to this on podcast, which you probably are, you heard a lot of tires screeching. And that’s because one of the things that was storyboarded for this cut scene was that a bunch of cop cars would skid into place sideways. And I don’t know that anyone knew how I was supposed to do that when we started.

but I kind of just had to figure it out. So I had these shots where I would take control of all these cop cars and basically have them move and turn at the same time and just do it all really quickly. And so really all you’re seeing is that something’s moving and turning at the same time and we’re playing this sound and it gives the illusion that it is skidding into place in a kind of physics, physicsy type of way. There are no physics happening here. It’s just me doing this manually and basically

opening up the code, fiddling with the numbers, hitting play in the cut scene, watching the cop cars skid into place, and then going, ⁓ maybe a little faster turn, a little slower move, a little faster move, a little faster turn, whatever, and just doing that over and over and over again. The other thing is that the skids are staggered along with the camera panning from left to right. So again, like, it’s all timing, it’s all when do I skip to the next thing? And it’s all in code. It’s all about…

What percentage of the sound is done? What percentage of the camera move is done? How many seconds have gone by from this to that? So in modern cut scene design, you tend to have timelines. You have a timeline view, like you’re actually editing a thing and you can scrub back and forth and characters, you you can see them move back and forward as you scrub back and forward and you go, Ooh, at exactly this point, I want this to happen. they hit their mark here. Great. It’s gonna, this is gonna happen like this.

I got none of that, no timeline whatsoever. Everything is code. So I had to be very patient. I had to do a lot of iteration. I had to wait for the build a lot because sometimes I had to test this stuff on the PS2 instead of simulating on the computer. And sometimes the build time would take so long that I would have an actual game in my development PS2 and I could play it for like five minutes while I waited for the build on my computer. And then when the computer build was ready, I would like,

save my game and then restart the PS2 and then restart it in dev mode and load the game into it from the computer and then play it and then go back to iterating and then do the whole thing again, play a game for five minutes while the computer is busy. In this way, I beat three Ratchet and Clank games

and really cool underappreciated game called Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy. Check it out, it is an action puzzle platformer, very clever, very cool.

Okay, I’m going to move on to the next part of the question, which was about the save the lemurs level. So let’s find that cut scene in this playthrough. And by the way, I found this playthrough online. It is from at wishing Tika W I S H I N G T I K A. That is a YouTube channel that is nothing but long plays and ⁓ mostly of older games. So I really appreciate it. You know, check it out if you want to see any obscure old like PS2 games. ⁓

run through.

the characters run in while the lemurs are partying and the lemurs run away and hide.

Okay, wait, I wanna pause it there. So I wrote this scene. And one of the things I wanna mention here is that ⁓ we had a really weird timeline in relation to the movie script. So when the Madagascar game started production, the movie script was not done, but everyone at the game studio, and this was before I was there, got to read a version of the script. So they put together a plan for the game that was based on a version of the script that they read when they started.

and then the script continued to change as they worked on the game.

So months later, We got another chance to look at the script and it was the final script, I think, if I remember And DreamWorks was very protective of this. They gave us one script, it was watermarked, it was like, do not copy

we had to sign up to read it half an hour at a time and we would basically take it to our desk, speed through it as fast as possible, handwrite notes or whatever we were doing, and then give it to the next person. And one of the things that became apparent to me very quickly as the only person full-time dedicated to cutscenes is that we did not have enough cutscenes because we weren’t really getting through the story of the movie in a way that made any sense. And…

To go on top of that, the game obviously had more stuff happening than the movie because we needed to pad it out with levels. So between extra levels with stuff happening that never happens in the movie and us completely missing stuff from the movie, there was a lot missing from the cutscenes. Now, the script was a collaboration between basically anyone in the studio who wanted to work on it.

And so at some point I was like, hey, we need a scene for this, we need a scene for that, we need to cover these holes that we’re leaving because we’re not covering what’s in the movie. And the answer I got back was basically, go for it. So I wrote this whole scene introducing the lemurs because we did not have a scene where the lemurs get introduced and where the main characters meet them. Now what you just heard was a weird line read.

And this is one of those things where like, look, I didn’t get to be involved in any of the direction of the VO. And for the most part, the voice actors who were all impersonating celebrities who did the movie voices, they did a pretty good job.

of interpreting the lines that we had in the script and doing it while impersonating the other actors, right? It’s ⁓ Chris Rock, Ben Stiller, Jada Pinkett Smith, and David Schwimmer as the main characters. And obviously…

they’re not going to do the voices for this game, So some professional voice actors did those jobs instead. They did a really good job. But occasionally the line readings don’t quite match the context. And this is an area where every actor had a different interpretation of the line we know and…

It would have been great if they all had the same interpretation because that’s kind of how the joke is supposed to read. And this is one of the few jokes that kind of got ruined by that. But I’m going to rewind and play it again, right?

So it sounds like an exasperated we know, right? But it should have been like, we know. Anyway, I’m really pleased that I was able to write dialogue that was read by these professionals that made it into this game basically unchanged.

So anyway, I’m gonna continue with the rest of this scene and I can talk about a little bit more of it afterwards.

Okay, I’m gonna pause it here to note that the lemur models and the main character models have drastically different levels of fidelity. And the reason for that is pretty obvious when you think about it, animation data is very expensive. And the more bones you add to a character, so the more fidelity to their movement, the more the animation gets expensive. And we already had a pretty limited memory budget in this game. And…

I, as the cutscene person, had to be very judicious with adding extra animations to the cutscene versions of the characters because everything in the level had to be loaded at once, including all the animations that would be needed for all the characters. So anytime I was saying, I need this animation for this specific cutscene for this character, I was crowding something else out,

I’m gonna play the rest of this, ⁓ the rest of this cutscene and you’re gonna hear my favorite line that I wrote soon.

So the plan is that Mort is hiding in the bushes with the other lemurs

and he gets thrown out of the bushes and the main characters all run to him to try to figure out what’s going on.

Okay, one of the other questions in this email I got was, was there any resource that was given to you and the rest of the team from DreamWorks? If so, what were those resources? So I already talked about the script and the other one was a look book and, or like a look Bible. I don’t remember what they called it, but it was basically an enormous full color, almost coffee table sized book. There was all the guidelines about how everything in the Madagascar universe should look.

So they have all the main characters and sort of the turnarounds for them to different expressions. ⁓ But also the world, the concept art, the guidelines about how to use colors, stuff about the fonts. basically whenever a company is gonna do a huge IP push like this and they’re licensing it all over the place, they’re gonna do a movie, but they’re gonna do video games, but they’re gonna do a TV spinoff. They’re gonna do like lunch boxes, pajamas, underwear, like for kids, like all that stuff. ⁓

they put out these guides that unify the look of the IP across all of those different things.

Okay, so there’s nothing else specific in this email that ⁓ I could answer by like playing through the cutscenes here, but I do want to mention a few other interesting points. One of those is that I mentioned the limited animation budget, and this was also limited in terms of what our animators had time for, but what ended up happening is that the game was mostly done probably on schedule, and this is after I left.

with people a little bit and sort of heard what was going on. And what ended up happening was that they went back and they did another pass on some of the cut scenes they deemed as the most important that they wanted to redo with bespoke animations. So the first few cut scenes in the game, the really important stuff in terms of ⁓ introducing the characters.

that got redone with all these custom animations. So if you go watch a playthrough of the game, you’re going to see a lot more bespoke animations in the beginning of the game than anywhere else. And the other thing that happened is that the music got put in after I was done with everything else. So my contract is over, you I go back to school and then once everything was basically content complete in the game and they were just bug fixing, they sent it out to get music.

Another thing I wanna mention is that,

When I said earlier that I was given storyboards that didn’t last very long, because what happened was I started doing some of the cut scenes that were like just between things on my own and. The studio leadership noticed pretty quickly that I could kind of direct this stuff without without help. Like I could come up with interesting angles and. ⁓

and keep things moving and keep things interesting. And so there weren’t many storyboards given to me after the first like three or four. in my garage, I still have all of them because when I left, they let me keep my whole pile of notes, the pile of storyboards that had been given to me that were all hand drawn by one of the animators there. And I also have my stack of dev builds. So

Every single week, I believe it was like Friday morning or maybe it was every other week. They would ⁓ burn a bunch of copies of the game on DVD are that we could play on our PS 2s from start to finish because when we were playing by loading it like as part of the dev kit, we could only play one level at a time. So I have. Gosh, like 30 or 40 dev builds.

and they’ll only work on probably an emulator or a modded PS2 that’s like, I don’t know what the term is, like jailbroken or something. But at some point I’m gonna figure out who I can take these to and have them like save for posterity because it’s actually a really cool way to see how a game comes together. And you can see early versions of levels, you can see builds where the rendering was like in progress and broken and they were like rewriting stuff.

And so all the lighting is broken or the shadows are broken or the Z sorting is broken. You can hear all the temp VO, which is often hilarious. And you can see the stuff that changed over time.

Anyway, that’s my brain dump.

I hope you enjoyed this. think, you know, telling war stories like this, as they’re called, is a fun thing to do, and it’s also a good way to get people familiar with how games are made or have been to understand how far we’ve come, and just to get a slice of what it was like.