Postmortem: SANITARIUM

By Chris Pasetto
Gamasutra
December 4, 1998
Vol. 2: Issue 47

Originally
Published in Game Developer Magazine, November 1998.

Postmortem: SANITARIUM

Introduction- The Designers' Tale The Artists' Tale The Programmers' Tale The Sweet The Sour

For all the designers' concentration on SANITARIUM's story, many of the game elements were conceived in artistic terms. We knew that the visual atmosphere of the game would be extremely important to the game play. The art conveyed the emotions that the player would feel, as well as the player character's state of mind. Because it's all about emotions and states of mind, SANITARIUM is a very art-intensive game. Thus, early in the process, the design team spent a lot of time determining the correct look for each part of the game.

One of the first things that we did was to gather reference material. We went on field trips to cemeteries, took pictures of St. Vincent's Cathedral, and raided local libraries. Eric Rice even captured a picture of a haunted gravestone on one of our cemetery photo shoots.

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Back in the office, the heavy-duty work was getting underway. From concept sketches to full 3D models to touched-up game art, we strove to maintain that disturbing, realistic visual style as much as possible.

One of the first hurdles was an accurate isometric camera view. Finding a way to render six by four screen widths of landscape from twenty-four viewpoints and seam the shots together without any perspective warping was daunting. Tracy Smith worked out the bugs on this one. The final solution was to pull the cameras back to what would be the equivalent of viewing a city block with the Hubble telescope.

The biggest bottleneck that occurred during SANITARIUM's development came during the post-production of the art. We call the post-production department "5D," not because they exist on some H.P. Lovecraft penta-dimensional plane, but because they work on a combination of 3D and 2D art. Once materials such as screens, characters, and animations poured smoothly out of 3D like good scotch, they had to go through the 5D twelve-step program before they would be ready for programming.

For the game art, Jason Johnson coordinated DreamForge's art staff as they used 3D Studio MAX to make the designers' vision a reality. The artists retouched the 3D background in Photoshop, then generated a temporary palette. Still barriers were clipped in true color, then squeezed into the temporary palette; coordinates were determined. 3D animations underwent alterations, retouches, and special effects as necessary. The artists then composited the animations into the retouched background. A final palette was generated and applied to all artwork for any given level. It was tough to create a palette that could support the massive environments and all the NPCs. The enormous number of colors used in the game was a nightmare for our post-production team. Using DeBabelizer Pro, these guys had to reduce entire levels of true-color renders to less than 230 colors. At that point, the original artists would walk over and ask, "Hey, what did you do to my level?" or management would say, "Is it gonna look like that when it's done?"

The steps continued. Still barriers in the temporary palette were reformatted into the new palette. Animations were then clipped and coordinates determined. Free-walking NPCs were retouched and clipped. Cursors, icons, and inventory were retouched and clipped. The player characters were put into a 24-color palette, retouched, and clipped. This was mind-numbing work at times. Even as brains turned to protein-rich pudding and limbs lost all feeling, the game art was taking shape.

All of this took anywhere from 50 to 350 man-hours per level. It was a demanding set of tasks requiring not only technical skill but the experience of having worked on games before and knowing how to deliver game art to a programming team in a perfectly usable form. Problems arose mainly due to inexperience.

The final look and quality of the levels and animations in SANITARIUM is a testament to some very determined artists who stayed late, worked weekends, and apologized when they were too sick to crawl to their desks.