By: Mark Wilson

"We went to E3 with our most neutral environment, which was only meant to be neutral. We didn't have our lighting working right...the characters blended into the background, so we quickly learned our lesson on that and everything we've done is about making the characters come forward. " -Evan Hirsch, Art Director, FASA Studios

When I visited FASA a few months ago for an early look at Shadowrun, I talked for a long time to Art Director Evan Hirsch about E3—and more specifically the royal spanking that the game's graphics design had received at the event. He was clearly humbled by the situation—not just the negative response from fans—but from his own peers in the business.

At the time, Hirsch was retooling characters while testers played a game full of trolls running around in red and blue footie pajamas. Given my long infatuation with footie pajamas, I just had to see how this story turned out. So I set a date to talk more around the game's release. Hirsch and I, along with FASA Studio Head Mitch Gitelman, talked for nearly 45 minutes as I baked in a hot car under Texas sun (a necessity for a quiet interview on the road). Still, I enjoyed the conversation and Hirsch's blunt explanation of Shadowrun's art design.

In other words, yes, this article is long as hell. Yes, Hirsch said a lot of interesting stuff. Yes, there are lots of pretty pictures for those too lazy to read.

Characters In Differing Environments: Making them Shootable

"Our characters are effectively a studied signal to noise...The problem is, the more realistic you make [them], if you go with, say, Gears of War, the signal to noise is really hard. That works in a Gears space but it doesn't work in a wicked-fast, twitchy space," Hirsch explained. "We didn't want to make them cartoony, because we know how people thought about that... For me it was about finding that balance point - how do you make it very different and very visible?"

Easy: Profiles, Color Pallet and Lighting (I may have been given the answers.)

Racial profiling may be frowned upon in real life, but it's essential in Shadowrun. Knowing a troll from a dwarf is relatively simple to design, but what about knowing an RNA (corporate) troll from a Lineage (native) troll—just from their profiles? A solution was found through symmetry. The RNA is symmetrical, from the characters to their monolithic environments. Meanwhile, the Lineage assets are equally asymmetrical, breaking the corporate mold, so to speak.

Color Pallets are organized in a similar fashion, with cold tones (blues) denoting RNA and warm tones (reds) denoting Lineage.

"Why'd we go with blue [for RNA]? If we went with green then it's the military in the Tom Clancy games...Why don't we go with brown? Then it's Smokey and the Bandit and the forest service," Hirsch said. "But we had to explore all this, because we wanted them to look like mercenaries. Blue is really the only color that made them look like mercenaries without being the army."

Using lighting, Hirsch and his team solidified the color palletes of both the characters and the maps. Since these environments (in essence) match either red or blue color palletes, lighting clarifies any potential blending issues that may crop, and allow fine tweaking on the "moving target" factor. Note: I just made that term up and have no clue why I put it in quotes.

Ultimately, these decisions combine to a relatively unconscious gaming experience in which a player simply feels like their character does or does not belong on a certain map or alongside a certain team, adding a sense of story and identity to a game that technically has no story other than that in the manual.

Or as Gitelman put it, "whether or not anyone reads the story or not, they know that one's there."

Creating Drama on a Budget

"The biggest challenge of Shadowrun for me - as an art director - was I had 16 characters on screen that could, at any given time, each spawn three characters. Each one of our characters is carrying roughly 65 bones," said Hirsch. "That means I've got 3,072 collision detection calculations potentially in every frame...And I've got 30 bullets a second per character."

So disagreements can become petty slap fights easily.

"John (lead designer) and I had many screaming matches over whether or not I could have weeds in hallways," said Hirsch. "Because if I draw weeds, is that gonna cost him bullets and frames? Everything on that screen costs you something."

Hirsch also gave me the example of rails on stairways. He needed them to invoke a sense of speed, but those working on gameplay could use those resources for any number of other things. In very few cases designers had to compromise hugely to squeeze them in: like by omitting collision detection.

Another price of the online game environment was that the entire map had to be loaded into the 512MB of RAM at all times, since buffering simply isn't an option when you can teleport indoors to outdoors or up 5 stories of a building in a manner of seconds.

To make the game work, Hirsch had to "rob" the RNA level's development time to give the team a longer window to make the complex Lineage and slum levels possible. And by choosing International Style Architecture for the RNA, the art team was able to create a look that wouldn't require painstaking technical compromises at every turn.

"They're a simple form, but they actually, to your eye, don't look like simple extrusions like they normally would in a hallway shooter because these buildings have been around for hundreds of years, you understand that style of architecture...We just add texture and color and lighting to mess with your eye, but that was it."

And Hirsch is right: the ultra-sterile RNA maps are simple without making you feel cheated. The non-RNA levels, as we talked about before, fall back on the property of asymmetry to create identity and tension.

"One of the big goals for me and John was that in the slums maps, you always feel like you're being closed in on, you always feel like you're in a Alfred Hitchcock film."

"All the angles are odd angles, nothing is perfectly linear, everything is off. All The buildings if you look up are coming in over your head more than they're going away. And we do all that on purpose to make you feel more anxious and uncomfortable," Hirsch said. "In the corporate spaces they're much more ordered, and actually you have a different problem that in some cases they're so symmetrical that you get lost."

So What's Missing?
Every developer has things they wanted in a game but just couldn't make happen. Here are Evan Hirsch's top three:

More Effects/Shaders
"The look we came up for the magic like teleport, smoke and resurrect, all had this wonderful unique look. What I wish I could have done more was getting more of a tech look to work on the tech effects... we hired in a new guy who comes from the film industry and wrote his own shaders, and it wasn't until the last month of the project that he figured out how to work it within our engine. The shaders he wrote for something like the minion are just stunning. The minion's hot shit... I really wish we had gotten our head around it much earlier."

Female Elves
"The biggest compromise was the female elves. We had a whole set of female elves that we just loved, but...we agreed that to bring females in we'd need to have them move differently, and we just didn't have the time to get that done. We had the models built and the skeleton built and we just couldn't get it in on our date."

Various 3D Atmospherics
"The last one is, and this was a conscious decision, we had to cut a lot of the real 3D atmospherics that we had in. If you see in the intro video there's a waterfall. That waterfall was actually in the game. It was the waterfall or the minions - guess who won."

Too bad...that waterfall was "hot shit".

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