Author: Trafficblast

The beta for Marvel’s Avengers didn’t particularly blow me away, but I did enjoy the snippet of story I got to see. Specifically, I love Kamala Khan, who’s the focal point for the campaign. Not only does she have my favorite combat mechanics, but she injects both a wonderful playfulness and human element into the story.

Kamala is a nerdy teenager who likes to tell cheesy jokes, but she’s also struggling to come to terms with being labeled as a freak for having the superpower to enlarge and stretch her body (which she calls embiggening). Marvel’s Avengers is about Earth’s Mightiest Heroes learning to become a team again, but the beta also showcases that it’s just as much the origin story for an ordinary girl who becomes the second Ms. Marvel–a symbol of inspiration for Inhumans and teenage superheroes. This is the aspect of Marvel’s Avengers that I’m most intrigued to see unfold, and that largely comes from actor Sandra Saad’s performance as Kamala.

Saad does a wonderful job bringing the young hero to life and, after playing through the Marvel’s Avengers beta, I got to sit down and talk with her about her performance, how she prepared for the role, and what someone like Kamala means to both her and the wider superhero fan community. I was immediately surprised by how much Saad already is so much like Kamala–I can see why she was cast. “That’s what I’ve been told,” she said, laughing. “That I’m pretty similar to her character DNA already, so I didn’t have to go very far in my study.”

She continued: “Forming the character from my own personal experience was really nice because my personal experience is a lot like Kamala’s. I was a lot like her at 16. I had a lot of the same struggles as a first-generation American girl. I’m just as awkward and quirky, apparently.”

Seeing a superhero story about a group as notable as the Avengers through someone like Kamala is incredibly important, says Saad. Too often, people of color are relegated to background roles in superhero narratives where they can run the risk of being portrayed with negative stereotypes. And that can be harmful to the emotional and mental development for kids of color and how they perceive themselves. “When you grow up, you see your people being put up in the media in a certain way,” Saad said. “And at some point you get old enough to understand it for what it is. But when you’re a kid growing up with that, it’s disheartening and you’re like, ‘Wait, but is that really what my people are like? Is that real?’ And it’s confusing.”

She continued: “I can’t tell you how many auditions I’ve been on for stuff like ‘woman whose husband gets blown up in front of her.’ It was super sad at first. And then I was just like, I don’t want to do this anymore. I would rather not be successful then do this to my people because I know that’s not what we’re like, and that’s not all we are. When you have a character like Kamala Khan, a person who looks like Kamala Khan can look up to her, can see people like them being reflected in a better light. And there’s just something about that that empowers a young person.”

To that end, Saad wanted to ensure that Kamala was done her due justice. “I think I took on that heavy responsibility [of becoming Ms. Marvel] really quickly,” Saad said. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to play an Avenger. What do I do? Okay, I’m going to read the comics.’ And I delved into that. Nice and slowly actually, because there’s only so many of them–there isn’t 50 years of history behind her yet. That was really nice. And then having my time with the script and with the director was also really helpful. [Creative director/writer] Shaun Escayg is really great about spending his time with the actors and talking through the characters with each one of them. And then in that way we can kind of create our own Crystal Dynamics version of the character and not just the ones that you’re used to.”

Amusingly enough, Saad has been able to draw inspiration from being cast as Kamala in order to inform her performance for what it would feel like for Kamala to meet the Avengers and take on new challenges. Coming from a background in comedy and television and movies, Saad is a relatively new voice in the video game industry in comparison to fellow Avengers actors Jeff Schine (Steve Rogers/Captain America), Travis Willingham (Thor), Nolan North (Tony Stark/Iron Man), Laura Bailey (Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow), and Troy Baker (Bruce Banner), all of whom have been a part of numerous video games and many of whom have worked together on past projects. Meanwhile, though Saad has voiced characters in a few notable video games (Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Rage 2, and Fallout 76) she doesn’t have the same amount of experience doing the other things that go into creating a character, like motion capture.

“They’re mega mo-cap superheroes already,” Saad said. “This is my first mo-cap game. I’ve done other games. I auditioned for film and TV, and I came up in comedy. That’s where I come from. But you step onto this mo-cap stage where everyone’s already a superhero on that stage. And I’m like, ‘What’s a mo-cap? Explain this to me.’ And everyone’s super cool and super inviting and super giving with their knowledge. It fit like a glove.”

And once she got the hang of the mo-cap, Saad says that Crystal Dynamics afforded her a ton of creative freedom in defining Kamala’s idle animations, as well as how she stands, walks, runs, fights, and (most importantly) embiggens. “I think I just did whatever I wanted,” she said. “There was a lot of like, ‘Hey, what do you think it feels like to embiggen? Do that.’ And thankfully it worked out. Crystal Dynamics does a really good job of showing me the abilities and showing me the stuff that they’ve come up with. And that really helps inform what the movements are supposed to be. There’s only so much a human of my actual size can do, but I try.”

When you have a character like Kamala Khan, a person who looks like Kamala Khan can look up to her, can see people like them being reflected in a better light.

In order to avoid spoilers, I couldn’t get too much out of Saad about Kamala’s story and her arc as a hero in Marvel’s Avengers. But Saad did confirm that we can expect to see more scenes like the one in the beta between Kamala and Bruce, when Kamala momentarily breaks down as she deals with her situation as an Inhuman and Bruce comforts her–it’s a heartfelt moment for the two heroes who seemingly see themselves as having kindred experiences on account of their respective superpowers. “I’m not going to give anything away, but she does have special moments with everyone because it’s an Avengers story,” Saad said. “It’s not just the Hulk and Kamala story. She relates to all of them just from her own abilities. And just from knowing everyone’s abilities already, you can see how they all relate to her as her heroes. But the Hulk, as you know, he’s a monster who has this thing about him that he can’t really control and Kamala does, too. She has this new power and she’s like, ‘What do I do with it? Is this weird? How do I even use it? Do I use it for good? Is this a disease? What is it?’ And so in that way, you can see that they both have a lot of similarities.”

Saad also told me that she has had the chance to play the game and even after spending all her time shaping Kamala, she’s not sick of the teenage hero. Ms. Marvel is her go-to. “For me, there’s nothing like fwipping your limbs out from your body and swinging and stuff,” Saad said. “It’s so much fun.”

You can see and hear Sandra Saad’s performance as Kamala Khan in Marvel’s Avengers when it releases for Xbox One, PS4, PC, and Google Stadia on September 4. Next-gen versions for Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 will be available when both consoles come out later this year.

She Dreams Elsewhere is the retro-style RPG from solo developer Davionne Gooden, under the banner of Studio Zevere. It incorporates intricate turn-based combat in a surrealist world where the main character Thalia navigates a dream-like state alongside her friends, which comes with a lot of brutally honest dialogue that can be both fun and sobering.

In our exclusive gameplay video above, Thalia hits up a club for her friend Amia’s birthday, in what Gooden likens to a Persona-style social link scenario or Mass Effect loyalty mission. “With these connections, I wanted to explore mental health and these personal issues from a different perspective,” he explained. “Sometimes that relates to what Thalia’s going through, and other times it relates to how she views that person or their relationship.”

Gooden also assured that there’ll be many wild situations throughout She Dreams Elsewhere that explore these characters’ thoughts and feelings. In this particular moment, Amia and Thalia’s other friend Penelope are trying to have a good time in the club. The way things play out is quite reflective of what that experience is like–bugging the DJ to play a certain song, helping a friend out of an awkward interaction at the bar with a stranger, or having too good of a time shutting the club down. Towards the end of the video, you can also see the combat system in action and how the game casts a visually striking and stylish look.

We have more coverage of She Dreams Elsewhere in the works; look forward to an in-depth interview with Davionne Gooden that dives into the dynamics of being a solo developer, building an RPG that reflects his experiences and influences, and just staying afloat during tumultuous times in the world.

There’s no current release date for the game yet, but it’s set to hit Xbox One (also through Game Pass) and PC. You can try the game yourself with the She Dreams Elsewhere demo that’s available on Steam right now.

Often in a video game it can be the smallest of details that make the biggest impacts on the player experience. The way a gun feels satisfying to shoot thanks to small recoil animations or delicately balanced sound effects. The feeling of weight as a character moves due to precisely calculated animations reacting to your varied degrees of input. It’s not uncommon for Naughty Dog to be included in conversations about such elements, with the studio packing in extremely high levels of details into both their worlds and characters. But in The Last of Us Part II, one effect and its popularity with players took even the studio by surprise.

There are so many little details to Naughty Dog’s sequel that bring the dreary world to life, but none stand out more prominently than its deeply satisfying glass-breaking mechanics. Whether you’re shattering the display window of a derelict bookstore or using your elbow to break through a weapon display case, there’s a tangible sense of joy that follows through with each action. It’s difficult to pin down one reason for it though. Perhaps it’s the dynamic nature of the cracking and the way pieces of glass remain reactive once they’re scattered on the floor. Maybe it’s the way it forces you to think about puzzles, giving you avenues to pursue solutions in ways that other games might restrict you. It could just be sensory, too, with the right amount of vibration accompanying the crunchy sound of the glass fracturing. Developers at Naughty Dog didn’t just focus on any one of these aspects, but instead sought to create a system unlike any they had played with before.

“I liked the glass breaking in the movie John Wick,” Jesse Garcia, a sound designer at Naughty Dog, explained. “You hear a nice explosive impact along with the glass layers. After that, a very nice, subtle glass debris rolls on the ground. This extra layer of detail gave not only the feeling of breaking glass but also the consequence that there is now glass all over the ground. This type of storytelling was exactly what we set out to achieve.”

Glass pieces do occupy a space around you once broken, rattling on the floor as you move by and cracking further under the pressure of a character’s foot. But it’s also the way the shards end up there that was important in the development process. “The main goal I remember was the player seeing a ‘unique’ glass shatter every time they break a window,” added Neilan Naicker, a dynamics and technical artist on the game. “However, because the glass doesn’t actually fracture in real time, we had to get creative.”

The fact that glass fractures in The Last of Us Part II aren’t dynamic might surprise you. In reality, simulating accurate breaks takes a lot of processing power on the part of the PlayStation 4, requiring computations to take into account the surface area you’re hitting, the force you’re applying, and the object applying the force. It’s not impossible, but it is impractical, especially when you’re working within the tight performance budgets that a game like this does. So instead, Naughty Dog’s designers did what lots of game designers do–they faked it.

All of the glass in The Last of Us Part II is, in fact, broken at all times, with some clever tricks used to hide the seams when it’s meant to look intact. Making sure this looks convincing from all angles was one challenge, but then determining which pieces remained interactive after impact, as well as how the transition from whole to shattered takes place based on the circumstances of the impact, were others entirely.

“The biggest piece of tech on my end was helping implement the system that pre-processes the glass, so that the broken edges only appear as the glass breaks,” Naicker said, detailing his involvement with the system. “Doing a melee move on the window applies a different force versus a more physics-based interaction, such as throwing a brick through said window. The windows are ultimately a physics-based setup and react accordingly to each method. We tested a bunch of different ways of breaking glass (throwables, bullets, melee, explosions) and tuned the response to make sure each felt satisfying.”

Tuning this wasn’t just to replicate the sensation as closely as possible, but also to give it a sense of “hyperreality” so often overlooked in games. There’s often a push to make things as realistic as possible, but Naicker believes that won’t always produce the best results. “I don’t think being perfectly realistic is always absolutely desirable–but you often need to get close before you can start ‘heightening’ the reality,” he said.

Knowing how glass would react to player interaction is something Naughty Dog settled on early, which is evident in how many times breaking it appears in puzzle solutions. Circumventing a locked door becomes a lot easier when you can just break the glass window next to it instead of hunting for a key–a nice touch that adds to the believability of the world you explore in the game. But giving that freedom to level designers presented another challenge to Naughty Dog’s programming team, who suddenly had to find a way to take this precisely processed system and apply it to any glass dimensions required.

The main goal I remember was the player seeing a ‘unique’ glass shatter every time they break a window. However, because the glass doesn’t actually fracture in real time, we had to get creative.

Neilan Naicker, LOU2 Dynamics and Technical Artist

Calculating how well you can fake glass breaking in just one scenario is tough enough, but The Last of Us Part II uses breaking glass in anything as small as a weapon display to something as large as the side of an office building. Scaling this system so that level designers had the freedom to use it in the ways they wanted was tough.

“As any game programmer can tell you, a scale is a feature that can wreak havoc into many parts of your engine,” Naughty Dog programmer Jaroslav Sinecky said. “If you want to support a non-uniform scale, things get much more complicated. If you want to non-uniformly scale breakable objects with collision, it can become a real headache.”

Getting the glass to look great when smashed to bits and giving designers the freedom to use it wherever they want are just two pieces of the complex puzzle, neither of which would work at all if the player’s destructive actions weren’t rewarded with the ever so satisfying sound of the shatter. At a surface level, this might sound like the simplest part of the process–get some audio equipment setup and start grabbing as many samples as you can of real-life glass breaking. But like most things in game development, the reality is far more complex.

“When talking about the sound for glass, it is important to know there is not one glass break that is a single recording of ‘glass breaking’ from start to finish,” Garcia said. “The glass breaking is made up of many different layers with many variations. We essentially are making the building blocks for the sounds of breaking glass and arranging them in order to synthesize the sound and feeling of breaking glass.”

This process is broken up into three phases: Destruction, Physics, and Foley. Destruction itself is broken up even further into four sub-categories, all with distinct sound signatures inserted in split-second intervals during a single glass break. These layers, named Impact, Thump, Pane, and Debris, are where most of the audio engineering magic happens.

Impact is the initial sound you hear, as an object makes contact with glass for the first time. Here Garcia used glass breaking samples to find that ideal “cracking” sound to give weight to the force being exerted, but also leaned on electrical zaps to round out the effect. “Electricity can be used in all sorts of design. When used in the right way, it can be completely hidden to only give you one piece of an element you are looking for,” he said.

When talking about the sound for glass, it is important to know there is not one glass break that is a single recording of ‘glass breaking’ from start to finish. The glass breaking is made up of many different layers with many variations.

Jesse Garcia, LOU2 Sound Designer

The Pane layer was important for the scalability of the entire system, giving different sound to the different sizes of glass being destroyed to add the sense of size and weight to all other layers. This was then followed by the Thump layer, which Garcia said wasn’t created with samples of glass at all. “This is a processed low-frequency hit that gives your initial impact a nice shock to the body to help give the player a feeling of power and strength as they break the glass,” he explained.

The final layer, Debris, ties back into Garcia’s goal of recreating the sounds he heard in John Wick. Here, a mixture of short and long glass debris trails were used to give presence to the glass now scattered on the floor around you, which continues making noise as you interact with it further. “This helped get the realism to stick,” Garcia said. “I used this layer to sell the aspect of storytelling. When you hear the debris scatter along the ground, you know there is now a sea of glass laying on the ground around you.”

That glass influences gameplay too, especially in combat scenarios. If a grenade happens to shatter the windows of a handful of cars, that glass persists on the ground to offer enemies another way to detect your movements. Walking over the debris uses this layer to generate more noise for the AI to potentially pick up on, giving the system an additional element of consequence. To drive this effect home even further, senior sound designer Neil Uchitel modelled sounds for differently sized pieces of glass debris, giving the crunch you hear underneath your character’s boots an accurate reproduction.

The glass system in The Last of Us Part II is not the result of one person. It takes a village of people to get just one element in the game to work, from programming, animation, design, foreground, and audio.

Jesse Garcia, LOU2 Sound Designer

Features with this depth to their detail are products of multiple teams of people working in harmony together. It’s a testament to the thoughtfulness put in by each department involved, working together to not only challenge themselves but ensure it doesn’t come at the expense of the player experience. It’s not always a straight road to success. Garcia recalled an instance where issues arose when multiple instances of glass broke all at once, causing a variety of performance and effects issues. Scaling these hurdles requires tight teamwork, which Garcia praised during the development of the game.

“The glass system in The Last of Us Part II is not the result of one person,” Garcia said. “It takes a village of people to get just one element in the game to work, from programming, animation, design, foreground, and audio. One of the strengths we have at Naughty Dog is having these departments work so well and seamlessly together, in our systems and our studio as people.”

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Family Guy has broken almost every rule of network television, and has even been canceled twice. Despite all of that, the show is premiering its 19th season later this year. A fan-favorite character that has been key to the show’s success is Stewie, a one-year-old baby with a British accent and a high IQ. Let’s take a drive down memory lane and look at all of baby Stewie’s inventions throughout the years, from his mind control device to his gene-altering device and everything in between!

It’s hard to make a platformer stand out in 2020. Skully, a 3D platformer about a reanimated rolling skull imbued with magic clay that can create and control mud golems, can’t shake the baggage of its genre’s history. Though it has some distinctive details–like a surprisingly cute, bouncing skull-ball for a protagonist–Skully’s mild platforming, item collecting, and puzzle-solving often elicits the feeling that you’re just going through the motions. While it isn’t without charm or challenge, there isn’t enough of it to make a profound impression.

Skully the bouncing skull-ball is actually an elemental avatar created by the earth deity of an isolated island. In his natural form, Skully is a small, quick ball that can roll and hop across forest streams, wind-swept mountains, and lava-filled caves. There’s a satisfying kinetic feeling to rolling down a path and picking up speed, which makes gracefully jumping through platforming challenges feel good.

Skully isn’t always rolling, though. He also has the power to use pools of mud to create humanoid golems that trade speed for additional abilities. Each of the three golem forms has two skills, most of which are used in very specific ways to get past obstacles Skully can’t. For example, the big golem has a punch that can be used to break through walls and a steam attack that can temporarily dispel some enemies.

Though Skully is a puzzle-platformer, the two types of gameplay feel very separate. There are ball-form sequences that focus on tricky jumps that require finesse and/or forethought, and there are others that require you to use your golems’ abilities to uncover and arrange platforms so you can move forward. While the puzzles often involve jumping, but that isn’t what makes the puzzles interesting or difficult to solve.

Both types of sequences suffer as a result. Once you have a handle on how to jump precisely and keep Skully from rolling off of moving platforms, most technical platforming sequences feel more like exercises in mindfulness than technical skill. It’s always possible to make a mistake, but it rarely feels as if your precision and timing are truly tested.

It doesn’t help that most of the game’s tougher platforming challenges are entirely optional. Each level is stuffed with collectible leaves for Skully to grab. Like many of the later Mario games, the main path is relatively straightforward, but many sequences become longer and more challenging if you’re diligent about collecting every leaf.

For completionists, the act of gathering leaves is meant to be motivation unto itself, but it’s a hollow pursuit. They aren’t tied to the story in any way, nor do they give you health, unlock levels, or confer any other gameplay benefits. As your cumulative leaf total rises, you’ll unlock character art, but that’s it. I often tried to grab out-of-the-way leaves because I wanted a more challenging experience, but the extra effort wasn’t especially satisfying without any kind of meaningful reward. And Skully’s rolly movement, while novel, isn’t satisfying enough to be its own reward.

And Skully’s pleasant but monotonous-looking levels don’t compel you to find their hidden nooks and crannies. While there’s a decent variety in the types of areas you’ll find, many of the individual levels lack the level of visual detail to make a strong impression. You’ll see the same types of trees and rock formations used multiple times and across multiple levels in the same biome.

Likewise, as a puzzle game, Skully often fails to push you and your skills. The golem’s abilities are always used in very specific ways, so puzzle set-pieces simply come down to figuring out how to combine those skills and in what order. With such a limited set of abilities, rotating through the possibilities doesn’t take very long. By the end, the puzzles do gain a measure of complexity and begin to feel like genuine brain teasers, rather than themed obstacles, but only in the game’s final stretch.

Simple or complex, though, the process of working through and solving puzzles gets tedious quickly. To switch between golem shells, you must manually eject Skully and roll him to another body or clay pool to make a new one. The process makes completing puzzles take longer than it should, even after you’ve solved it, sucking the energy out that crucial “eureka” moment when you put all the pieces together.

But there are also times when Skully aspires to provide something more complex or even profound. Its story, a tale of feuding elemental god-siblings, conveys a heavy-handed but insightful allegory about the effects of grief on our closest relationships. Unfortunately, the power of the story is undercut by jarring storybook-style cutscenes, which pair conversations between characters–not narration–over static images of characters. The pace at which the pages turn changes, sometimes to sync up with cues in the dialogue, other times to create a light stop-motion effect. The changing pace was distracting; I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was technically off.

Across the board, Skully occasionally shows signs of strong, creative design, but often in isolated, incomplete forms. A cutscene’s well-written dialogue gets hamstrung by its animation. A strong platforming sequence feels hollow because its challenge offers little reward. A puzzle takes more time to complete than to solve. Even with those flaws, Skully isn’t altogether unpleasant. It lacks the depth and attention to detail to make the act of rolling, running and jumping an act of joy unto itself.