The Inspirations Of Oceanhorn 2: Knights Of The Lost Realm - Part 1

The best thing about being a small team of developers is that we get to come to work and exchange opinions on what games we played lately, what retro titles our colleagues should check out, and what we could learn from the design of this or that game.

By popular demand, we decided to go over some of the games we think had some influence on our work for the Oceanhorn series, and in particular on its newest chapter, Knights of the Lost Realm.

   

Our first guest is Miko, Cornfox & Bros Game Artist. "I work very closely with Heikki (Cornfox's Creative Director) to create the visual style of the game. I focus mostly on environment art, but have worked on other things as well," says Miko, "We're trying to capture the feel of the original Oceanhorn, but the transition to the new Unreal Engine physic-based rendering opened up new possibilities for the series."  

Knights of the Lost Realm sports a world inspired by quite many late-90s RPG games: in contrast to what came before, often set in a medieval world of knights and castles, here we have both technology and industrial elements seamlessly integrated into a "classic" RPG setting. Breath of Fire 3, Grandia and Alundra (all from 1997) are good examples of this style, where coal, electricity, and gritty backdrops are mixed with classic RPG stuff.

"The world of Oceanhorn 2 is not completely industrialized, and in most areas it doesn't go as far as many of the environments do in FFVII, for example." continues Miko, "We are big fans of this classic though, and one can most likely see the influence Midgar had had on Arcadia's capital, the White City. Like Midgar, it has a circular design and you can see gigantic pipes rising over the walls of the city, but unlike Midgar it's not a dystopia. The White City is a beautiful and bright place, where the sun is always shining. In a way, we try to bring the scale of things to a level similar to what you see in FFVII: even if we use a different aesthetic approach, you feel like you could easily just walk on the pipes."

The more advanced technology in Oceanhorn 2 quite often have rounder and smoother shapes, much like some of the vehicles found in Akira Toriyama's work. The Yellow Bird, Trin's airship, is the perfect example of this rounder design. The most advanced Arcadian tech takes this up a notch, featuring an even sleeker and aggressive design, inspired by modern sports cars or jet planes.

"And then we have the Living Fortresses," says Miko, "compared to the original Oceanhorn, we had a bit more technical freedom with the art, so we tried to make them look even more sophisticated and dynamic. If the Living Fortress in the first title was our version of the Metal Gear Rex, the Living Fortresses in Oceanhorn 2 are an evolution on that, Cornfox's Metal Gear Rays."

If you want to know more about the games and styles that inspired us during the development of Knights of the Lost Realm, stay tuned for Part 2!

Tech Book Face Off: Game Engine Black Book [Wolfenstein 3D Vs. Doom]

After all of the heavier reading I've been doing lately—machine learning, CUDA programming, fundamental Lisp programming, etc.—I wanted to kick back and read something a bit more relaxing and entertaining. Luckily, at just the right time a friend lent me a couple of books that promised to fit the bill perfectly: the Game Engine Black Books for Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, both by Fabien Sanglard. I grew up with these games, with them being my first and second PC FPS games. I played countless hours of these and other id Software games and other games that used id Software engines like Rise of the Triad, Heretic, and Hexen. I couldn't wait to dig into these books and see what was underneath the games that pleasantly wasted away the night hours of my youth.

VS.

Software to code Doom almost entirely in C, freeing the developers to think at a higher level and implement more features more rapidly.

Chapter 3 is entirely new because id Software used an entirely different development environment for Doom. Instead of developing everything on unstable DOS PCs, they took the chance on using expensive NeXT workstations. Even a fairly basic NeXTstation cost $4,995 in 1991, and a NeXTcube ran $12,395! It turned out to be worth it, though, because these workstations were rock-solid and allowed John Carmack and the other developers to make incredible progress instead of constantly fighting with crashing machines and a poor development environment. This chapter did a great job going through the architecture and benefits of the NeXT systems, and how id Software used them to full effect.

The next chapter was about the team and tools, like chapter 3 in the Wolfenstein 3D book. Things had changed dramatically, with the team moving to Dallas, TX and growing to fourteen people by the end of development. The tools were evolving, too, with some of the character sprites and animation done using stop motion capture, and the map editor (DoomED) taking on new features to support the multitude of new capabilities in the game engine. Walls in the game no longer needed to be orthogonal, although they still had to be vertical for rendering to be fast enough. Floors and ceilings could change height to create steps, platforms, and other environmental features. Various kinds of traps and ambushes were also possible now. It's quite amazing how many features were added to idTech 1 when compared to the Wolf3D engine. These new features, especially the non-orthogonal walls and varying heights, required a more efficient data structure for the maps, and the BSP (Binary Space Partitioning) node tree was commandeered for the job

Nearly half of the book is taken up by chapter 5 on the idTech 1 game engine. This chapter is just a monster of awesome information about the engine. It goes through every detail from the game tic design and use of fixed-point arithmetic to sound propagation and enemy AI. The section on the 3D renderer was especially interesting and detailed. There are great explanations on how the environment was drawn with its additional complexity, texture mapping with perspective correction, sprite clipping and animation, and diminished lighting to give the game its intense horror movie feel. This renderer section in particular was so interesting that it made me want to go implement a bunch of the algorithms myself just to be able to recreate them and see them in action. It looks like it would be immensely satisfying.

The last chapter described in fairly good detail how a number of ports of Doom were done on other game consoles. The console ports included the Atari Jaguar, Sega 32X, Super Nintendo, Sony PlayStation, 3DO, and Sega Saturn, and both the system architectures and Doom engine implementations are described. I was in high school during this era of the great console wars, although I never played Doom on any of them, just the excellent experience of the PC. I had forgotten how different these console architectures were, and some of the design decisions that went into those systems were truly remarkable...and strange. The sections on the Super Nintendo and PlayStation ports were my favorites. The Super Nintendo would have never been able to run Doom on its own, but with the extra power of the SuperFX chip that was used in Star Fox and a few other games, it was able to pull it off reasonably well. The PlayStation port was the most faithful of the ports, and even added some cool new features like colored ambient lighting. Of all of these systems, the PlayStation was exceptionally powerful for making great games. Even though other systems might have looked more powerful on paper, they all had disadvantages and unfortunate design decisions that handicapped them while the PlayStation was so easy to develop for that its potential could consistently be achieved in practice.

I enjoyed this book as much, if not more than the Wolf3D Black Book. From the beautiful full-color pictures to the detailed explanations of technical feature implementations to the well-chosen code listings sprinkled throughout the book, this was an incredibly fun guided tour of a legendary game engine. I devoured this book, and through it all, I wanted to do two things: go back and play through Doom again and re-implement some of those rendering algorithms for myself. I can't think of higher praise for a book, so if you've ever played Doom and want to know how it works, you need to go treat yourself to this book and the Wolfenstein 3D Black Book, too.