Developer Q&A - 04/23/2020

TOPIC: Art/Sound

Q: Something with GL Rey's face looks off, why is it so hard to capture female faces?

• A: CG_RagingSpaniard - This is a good chance to talk about process and to clear up a few misconceptions. Lets get into it
  
  Female faces are challenging with low poly budgets. Even though we increased our poly count by double, our direct competitors literally use 3x the amount of polys our new models do. Your follow up would be "then why dont you do the same” and that comes down to a decision we made a long time ago to make sure that Galaxy of Heroes would be playable on a very wide variety of devices. The more we push into higher poly count, the more we exclude some Star Wars fans. It’s a delicate balance and we err towards letting more players play.
  
  To give you a concrete SWGoH example, the WIP model for GL Rey that was shared in our State of the Galaxy reports is the exact same model and texture that was used in game, and the exact same model that was used in our promotional videos. I read a lot of comments along the lines of "why did they change the mode;" or "why didnt they use the one from the youtube video". We did - we had to lower the texture resolution in-game and we don't get the benefits of the fancy lighting and shaders you have at your disposal when making a promotional video, but it’s the same asset throughout, even for her unit icon. Same thing with the Cara Dune model used for promo materials this week. Same model and texture, but the texture is uncompressed and there's fancy shaders and lighting we can't replicate in-game.
  
  Conventionally attractive female faces are hard to caricaturize, it's a typical challenge any artist faces. Daisy Ridley is a very beautiful woman and she comes with a very precise set of challenges when it comes to bring her into our art style because depending on the angle her face shape changes a fair amount, meaning that if you model her to look just like the reference from the front, her 3/4 view may look like a different person altogether, same with the profile view and so on. More unique looking faces like Adam Driver's or Oscar Isaac's are much easier to capture likeness wise because they are much easier to stylize and remain in-character, but it's not even a male to female comparison, Mark Hammill and Harrison Ford look like different people every time I see a photo of them, yet they remain recognizable - it’s a difficult challenge. To lead into the next question, Gina Carano, who is also a very beautiful woman, has particular facial traits that make it much easier to slightly exaggerate her features to make her more recognizable.
  

Q: Why does Cara Dune look so much better Galactic Legends Rey?

• A: CG_RagingSpaniard - I really like how both of them turned out but I agree that Cara Dune is among the best in the game. I can go into a bit more depth, however.
  
  Back in ... around October/November is when we started considering higher polygonal meshes for our big releases and Rey was the character we chose as the prototype for that change. We knew that our previous lower poly models were preventing us from reaching a certain level of quality, 3/4 views were very affected by the fact that we didnt have eye sockets or mouths modeled, making those textures look warped at those angles, the lower the number of polygons you use in a face the worse the lighting will make that face look, etc. Anyways, our character artist was very excited about the possibility of taking the next step in fidelity and Rey was the first character that came out of that new pipeline, next up was Finn, Poe, then Kylo. As with most artists, he has simply gotten better, faster and more confident with each subsequent character release, so with the Mandalorian characters you are just seeing our team grow in skill and execution as time goes on.
  
  The funny thing is, and we do take this as a compliment, are the comments I heard this week whether we hired a new artist or something. Nope, its the same guy we've used for the last 3+ years. Increasing the number of available polys is a better fit for his talents and we are also able to provide much better reference now. Both of these key aspects, along with a more concerted effort to raise the level of quality in our game along with getting more and more reps in are what amount for the increase in quality a lot of you have commented on this week.
  
  And Rey for us is more than just her model - she was a character that took a lot of effort from a lot of different departments. Her number of animations is incredibly high, about 3x more than any other character (same for Kylo), plus cinematic needs, making a separate version for the beginning of the event (with JTR's kit) and the duel does take more time to prep and make sure it's bug free. As a point of reference, anytime we make something new, like the duel, or setting up an environment to switch in real time to another environment, it adds a bunch of dev time because it introduces bugs and we have to make sure it works with our current codebase. The models and textures themselves, however, don't take all that much longer than they usually do. For this new batch, Cara was basically spot-on right away, however, with Greef he took us a few tries to get the character right because Carl Weathers has a very assymetrical face and it's very easy to just make him look like one of his previous characters instead of Greef Karga.
  

Q: The Jango Fett blaster sounds is one of the most iconic and satisfying audio clips in the game. What are some of the audio files you most enjoyed creating and what are some you look forward to in the future?

• A: CG_AU-D10 - The audio team utilizes the Star Wars sound library as much as possible. However, when it comes to the Force there's not a lot of audio for it in the movies. That's when we get to make a lot of sound from scratch. Malak is absolutely one of my favorites. I got to dive into some deep tones and had a lot of fun with it. I also enjoyed putting together the Raddus and setting up the audio states for that. When you use the Raddus' Holdo Maneuver, I made an audio state to duck out all audio and music to emulate the silence that the movie has. It came together nicely and I was ecstatic to bring that to our game.
  

Q: There is a small audio track when you unlock and promote specific characters and it's different for most characters. I like them and ramp up the volume when promoting a character. How much consideration during the development goes into choosing this track? Are there plans to update the tracks for some characters that got none or some generic track? Also would it be possible to allow a way to listen to it again after promoting the character to 7*?

• A: CG_AU-D10 - Mid last-year the audio team did a huge update to our unlock stingers. Everyone now has their own stinger rather than generic. Some still have generic ones that don't fall under anything like Light side, Dark side, Imperial, Rebel, First Order, Separatist, etc. And special main characters like Rey, Kylo, Han, Anakin, Ahsoka, etc. have their own unlock music stinger. However, if you've already unlocked those characters before I've updated them, there's currently nowhere else in the game their music pieces play. It is something the audio team is thinking about and we hope to find ways to play their unlock stingers elsewhere so you don't only get to hear that music once
  

Q: Do you guys use sound clips from the movies for some of the characters defeat sounds (such as Vader’s Nooooo) or do you have to recreate them yourselves?

• A: CG_AU-D10 - We created Vader's "No!" by recording a voice actor and then processed it to sound like Vader. We do use voices like Chewbacca, some of the Ewoks, and the Jawas from the movies. The other special case is that we were able to use Anthony Daniel's voice from Battlefront for our C3PO.
  

Q: @CG_AU-D10 How do you design sound effects? Does it frustrate you that most players have the sound turned off?

• A: CG_AU-D10 - That's a big question that I can answer in many ways! The audio team utilizes the audio from the movies as well as make our own sound effects, especially for Force users where the movies don't have a lot a sound for the Force. That said, that doesn't mean we grab sounds from the movies and just plop them in. A lot of the recordings are from the 70s and 80s, so we try to process them to be more clean and vibrant. When it comes to designing a sound around a character we have to think what that character represents. So, when I designed Malak, he is an evil dude who sucks the life out of people. In general, lower tones represent evil, and since he uses the force to drain the lifeforce of Jedi, I used breathy voices in my sound to represent that. As for the frustration part, a little, haha! But being a mobile user myself I understand. A lot of the time when I play a mobile game I'm not in an area where I'd want my sound on to disturb others, unless I had headphones. It makes me appreciate it more when I see comments on the work the audio team does. Let's me know at least someone out there gets to hear our work. :)
  

Q: What does Darth Nihilus say in the game? I can't unhear "hand over the flash drive" LOL

• A: CG_AU-D10 - Haha! I mean, he really does want that flash drive back. He's actually reciting the Sith code, then we reversed it, and then added some effects to make it sound mysterious and eerie.
  

Q: What is your favorite sound in the game?

• A: CG_AU-D10 - Mine personally is the very first sounds I made for the game, which would be Mother Talzin's abilities. It was a milestone for me to to create and implement those and to say that I was officially a part of the SWGoH universe.
  
• A: CG_Miller - I am really a fan of Nute Gunray's laugh when he extorts someone. Captures that character perfectly.
  
• A: CG_SBCrumb - Grevious' laugh is also very good
  
• A: CG_Coffee - I've changed my answer 10 times since reading this but I'll probably settle on Jango's blasters.
  
• A: CG_RagingSpaniard - I made the Chewbacca cinematic (yes, I know, it was long, my bad) and seeing audio being placed on it for the first time I was floored because all of a sudden it really hit me that I was truly making something that was part of the Star Wars universe. More recently I really enjoyed the audio done for the Holdo Maneuver, that was rad."
  

Q: Can we expect more characters to get animations in their inventory page; at the very least, the ones in journey guide that don’t have one yet?

• A: CG_RagingSpaniard - Absolutely, we recently worked on one idle animation for Jedi Training Rey, so that should be in soon ... and Padme is next. We try to fit these in as we can, the hope is that every Journey Guide character will get one this year. However, I do like the reddit threads when they get stealth added and people find it as a surprise so for the rest you'll have to wait and see ;)
  

Q: When you design character animations, do you take into account that many players will only ever see them at 4x speed?

• A: CG_RagingSpaniard - Ugh, well, yeah, kind of. I am not going to go into detail, but the way our game handles speed settings has caused a few headaches for the art team. We do make sure animations don't look ridiculous in 4x, because I myself play at that speed, but they are all made to look their best at 1x. What I do with every new release is that when I want to see a characters animations for the first time I go down to 1x and, for The Mandalorian in particular, I make sure that sound is ON for his Disintegration ability because that makes me very happy inside.
  

Q: Within this COVID life, any chance you can share some of the background scenes that are used for battles? Because they would be excellent for Zoom backgrounds. =) And what are you all doing to personally avoid getting cabin fever?

• A: CG_RagingSpaniard - Oh I would love that, I think the backgrounds we made for the Galactic Legend events are some of our best yet, specifically that low angle on Kijimi. I think this is a cool idea and will bring it up with marketing because anything that isnt shared in-game is mostly out of my hands. For us personally, seeing people get creative with their Zoom backgrounds has been a treat, I've been partial to the Distracted Boyfriend meme as a background for a while now.
  

Q: Can you add grievous’s cape in game? It would be difficult to make it work with his attack animations but having it just in the character screen would be fantastic

• A: CG_RagingSpaniard - We considered it when we worked on his rework a while ago. He typically doesn't fight with his cape on so, as you say, it would be an addition for his out of combat screens. It would definitely be cool looking but it's really out of scope budget wise, especially considering it wouldn't even be used in battle. Making these characters as close to the fantasy as we can is a constant tug of war for us and we need to know when we need to compromise, adding a cape out of combat is a pretty good example of that.
  

Q: I have an artwork question. With the announcement of the Mandalorian coming to the game, would your art team consider having the character’s armor appear at unlock as he did in Ep. 1? Then as players achieve pre-determined gear levels, the character gains pieces of beskar armor with the full set achieved at gear 13? That could be a fun way to add some pride and accomplishment for players gearing him and be true to his journey in season 1

• A: CG_RagingSpaniard - We did consider it and it's a good idea. It's out of scope for what we have planned for him at this point though, so we focused on the cool stuff that he does in the show with his "starting" armor
  

Q: Which department is in charge of the game trailers like the Mandalorian trailer for SWGOH that launched today?

• A: CG_RagingSpaniard - We have an internal marketing team that handles all promotional materials of that kind. We typically collaborate pretty closely, thats why, for example, the promo videos for Darth Revan had some similar shots to our event cinematics since I made the storyboards early on and they got to reinterpret them in their own way. Our Mando content doesn't have any cinematics with it so they went ahead and had some fun, I think they came out really great and I'm always happy when we get to give them some feedback and ideas ahead of time.
  

Q: What is a typical workflow for the audio team?

• A: CG_AU-D10 - The audio team starts by looking at what is coming up for the next update. From there we discuss with the other teams what we want for those items. Then we'll reach out to Lucas if we need specific sounds. Then we continue to work with the environment, animation, and VFX team to see what they're doing. We'll get with tech artists to discuss any technical items we may need to implement our sound. Once environment, animation, and VFX are done, audio usually starts our work at this time. Audio in in the industry is usually one of the last steps in the pipeline so we can see the final product we're working with and make sure our audio matches with the visuals. We'll create our audio (usually 3 variations to not make it sound repetitive), make sure it is ready for mobile, put it in our audio engine, and finally into the game!
  

Q: What was the toughest challenge the team had with the audio?

• A: CG_AU-D10 - We originally were using a lot of the same sounds for lightsabers. We decided that we wanted to update them to all sound different. So we made a specific sound for Green, Blue, Red, Purple, and Yellow saber users. Characters who have special sabers that have unique sounds to them are Kylo, Traya, and Ezra. For the colors, we had to think what the saber color represented and made the sounds from there. For example, Blue represents justice so we made a higher and brighter hum for it. Another example is purple is a combo of blue and red saber tones so you get both the bright and gritty. It took a lot of thought and care to represent these colors and we hope it brings a bit of extra character to the sabers and their users!
  

Q: I like the audio for Grand Arena Championship league promotion / mod upgrades, are those original sounds? What other original sounds have you developed? Like the rancor sound or any blaster effects or anything were in-house? Who voiced Darth Nihlus?

• A: CG_AU-D10 - Thanks! Those are original! A lot of the force abilities are originals as well since there aren't a lot of sounds in the movies to represent them. Pretty much all of the UI buttons are originals as well. The song in the ship cantina is an original (you'll also see that the musicians are in time with the music!) The Rancor and blaster sounds are from the movies, but a lot of them are old recordings so we did spruce them up a little. Nihilus was one of us reading the Sith Code that we reversed and added a ton of effects to it to make it dark and mysterious.