By Jane Jensen

Welcome to 2010! The year of Gray Matter’s release? Could it be? You ain’t whistling Dixie. And speaking of whistling Dixie… but I’ll get to that in a moment. First, a status update.

The last part of 2009 was a busy time on the project. In September I flew to London for a 7 day Gray Matter voice-over recording session. It was uber thrilling to be back in the studio once again for a big adventure game recording. Our Sam, Phillipa Alexander, was, well, Sam-ish in real life and David, played by Steven Pacey, was appropriately intimidating. In fact, all the actors were world-class, as was our director, Lorelei King. To take a cue from Candide, we really did get “the best of all possible voices”. More on that in another blog entry.

In October we had a pre-beta test with a dozen or so adventure game players. It was a nail-biting experience to watch the forum as real users played the game for the first time. We got their raves – and rants. We still have a lot to do, but the underlying story/game is worthy to be the GK successor, it appears. Good thing as it’s rather late to change that now!

Now on to the subject of my post. I’m kind of excited to write about this…

Those of you familiar with the Gabriel Knight games may recall that my husband, Robert Holmes, wrote the music for that game series. We haven’t had an opportunity to collaborate together since then, but fortunately we were able to get him involved in Gray Matter.

He wrote a few pieces for the game, big sweeping game themes, and was probably a little annoyed with me when I listened politely and said “Yeah…. That’s nice…. But…. I prefer THAT.” ‘THAT’ is music from a band called The Scarlet Furies. Our house has been immersed in it for the past year – no surprise given that Robert formed the band and plays guitar for it and the lead singer is my step-daughter, Raleigh.

I couldn’t get the music, with its southern gothic longing, out of my head. Several of the songs personified Sam for me. Wouldn’t it be cool to have indie band music in the game? To make a long story short, we worked out the details and we will be using some Scarlet Furies songs. Yay!

The entire soundtrack for the game was put together by a terrific sound studio called Periscope, from Hamburg. They used some of the Scarlet Furies tunes, with and without vocals, and a few additional pieces written by Robert. These formed the basis for the game’s main themes, then Periscope filled out the soundtrack with their own excellent work.

I’m attaching a free mp3 download from The Scarlet Furies. This song, Safe In Arms, will be in the game. You can check out more tunes at the band’s website or Facebook page.

The Scarlet Furies:

www.scarletfuries.com

Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#/pages/The-Scarlet-Furies/121218125931?ref=ts

Happy listening!

Jane

Hi, it’s Dinga Bakaba again. Continuing on our tour at Wizarbox with the development team, I will now take you guys to the detailed actual process of making the scenes and the characters of the game. The bread and butter, for sure, but not always a piece of cake.

1) The Characters

The characters populate the game world. They can also be the player’s ego through the experience. Moreover, they are often the game’s identity, that’s why so many games are named after their protagonist (Gabriel Knight anyone?).

Jane has already told you about how much care you have to put as a writer to make the characters unique and loveable, especially in a story driven game. So a lot of care is put into giving those characters an appealing look and body.

The first step would be the technical character designs. In order to do that, we need to brainstorm a bit about how Jane created the character’s personality and how we can materialize a precise trait of character, etc. We were going to make a character model for Sam from the concept arts we presented you in the past. We now will show you how we develop Sam’s character design a little further by fine tuning characterization on her appearance so that it matches her edgy personality. While tweaking many things from a technical perspective, our main goal is to bring the visualization of the characters as close as possible to Jane’s imagination.

To that effect, a new design was made as well as a few expression drawings to get a better view on her character. Then, for the 3D modeling, the concept alone can’t suffice, so we accompanied it with a model sheet, as well as a very rough Z-brush model to serve as a basis for modeling.

And then, a few days later, voilà, the skilled artists made us a nice brand new model so that Samantha can have her new body. Hopefully, the body transfer is not (much) painful for our gifted street magician.

2) The Backgrounds

Ah, these things are a bit trickier. For an adventure game, they have a pretty heavy responsibility as they have several roles:

1)    They are pure gameplay elements for lots of puzzles
2)    They are the vector by which we navigate the game world
3)    They shape our vision of the game’s universe
4)    They are a reward for completing puzzles

I have already told you about the high level art direction on my last blog. Concretely, what we usually do, is a little meeting with the artists where I, as the inhouse game designer, basically inform them about what’s going on in the scene, what the main gameplay elements are, what story scenes take place in here, what’s the mood, is there an actual location and, if it’s the case will we make changes on that location and why, etc. We discuss, they give suggestions, on the fly drawings etc.

The next step is the rough sketch. When the artists are finished, we can discuss and sometimes makes adjustments etc., and when I’m cool with it gameplay wise, I submit it to Jane. She is behind all important decisions and gives us her views at many stages in the process.

After being approved by Jane, a 3D rough is done. It helps to straighten some perspectives, and to serve as a basis for the final 3D background in terms of proportions and all. It is way more useful than that actually, because it’s the actual geometry the characters will walk on, even if you can’t see it.

The artist then finishes the concept art, and after validation, the background is then ready to go to the 3D artists.

Once the skilled 3D artists start working on the modeling, we evaluate progressive Work in Progress versions on which we give detailed feedback all together.

And finally, the nice and shiny 3D model is ready.

A little touch of post process and the final voilà.

3) Game Design

The game design is obviously much less visual so I will keep it short here. Though the main design document (game bible) has been written by Jane long ago, there are still everyday design decisions to be taken to actually integrate the scenes into the actual gameplay. We have to make all the further, more detailed documents so that each member of the team has everything he or she needs to do his work.

A good example and one of the main tasks would obviously be doing the documents for the scripting team. They are the courageous folk who integrate the graphic assets into the game engine, they also make the choreography for the scenes, they make the objects and characters interactive etc. In order to do that, we have to provide them with a walkthrough of the scene first, which would be the step by step critical path. But more importantly we have to provide them with a detailed version of the game bible that is reformatted to show all the logical actions possible in the scene. They then translate that into the scripting language and after a bit of debugging, the scene is done.

There is a lot more stuff involved of course, but to be lengthy entails to be boring, so I will stop here. I hope this little tour in the studio was a pleasure for you guys, you are always welcome. And to show you that we are pleased to be your hosts, here is a bunch of work in progress pictures. Enjoy…

By Jane Jensen

People often want to know where I get my ideas.  Why I have chosen, at different times, to write about King Ludwig of Bavaria, the Torah code, the apocalypse and Rennes-le-Chateau.  I don’t know where my fascination in ‘weird stuff’ comes from, or why certain subjects hook me.  Perhaps a neurologist could pinpoint an overgrown ‘lurid’ receptor on an MRI of my brain.  But for whatever reason, I find myself piqued by the strange and the gothic.  And if I’m piqued, the subject runs the risk of ending up in a story or two.  Here are some of the things that inspired Gray Matter:

“The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat” by Oliver Sacks, MD
This is a collection of clinical tales, accounts of patients who have developed strange beliefs or perceptions due to tumors, strokes, injuries or imbalances of the brain.  One patient thinks he is tilted like the Tower of Pisa, an 89-year-old woman becomes a giggling flirt, a man sees rivers and parasols in a photo of the desert, a pair of mentally disabled twins can calculate the day of the week for any named date, a woman who has had a stroke cannot see – or even ‘hear someone reference’ – anything that appears to her left.
What these stories have in common is the absolutely conviction each patient has in his or her version of reality.  And who are we to say they aren’t the ones who have it right?

“Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind” by V.S. Ramachandran, MD
Dr Ramachandran, professor and director of The Center for Brain and Cognition at UC San Diego, recounts his own cases with neurology patients.  Like Sacks’s book, this book is full of mental anomalies that make you go ‘hmmm’.  There’s a fascinating discussion of the phenomenon of phantom limbs – people who have lost limbs being troubled by itching or pain in the non-existent body part.  Dr. Ramachandran develops an interesting technique to allow these patients to ‘touch’ the phantom limb and get relief.
Like Dr. Sacks, Dr Ramachandran works with patients whose brain has gone awry and, in the process, has discovered clues about how the mind works and how and why we perceive as we do.  Both of these books, and their authors, were inspiration for Dr. David Styles and his work with in neurology (that is, well, before the accident).

“The Conscious Universe:  The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena” by Dean Radin, PHD
This book is one of the most comprehensive, and most rational, discussions of psychic research I’ve seen.  It covers a gamut of tests run over the years such as trying to guess the image on the face of a card or trying to force a number on a random number generator.  The positive results of most of these tests fall within a scientific margin of error.  But by looking at the results as a whole, a much stronger case is made that something beyond chance is going on.  There’s a section on field consciousness which shows what happens to a random number generator when millions of minds are simultaneously focused at once on the same thing — the Oscars or Super Bowl.  Now that is bizarre!

In addition to the books in my library, there are experiences of my own that have also offered breadcrumbs along the trail to Gray Matter.  As a child I once had a very strong fever.   I rose from the couch where I was lying sick, went upstairs in my sister’s house, and tore up the pillows and bedding on her bed in a rage at feeling so terrible.  I returned downstairs and apologized tearfully to my sister, fearing punishment.  She followed me upstairs so that I could show I could show her what I had done, and to my astonishment the bedding, and pillows, had not been touched.  I had hallucinated the act, but it had been as real as anything I’ve ever done.

My brother is a PHD in Social Work and he did clinical work in the South for many years.  He has a plethora of stories from this time, but my favorite is that of a man whose ‘self’ had dislocated from his physical body.  He ‘saw’ with the eyes of his spiritual body, which had shifted out of his physical body and moved 6 inches to the left, as if his head were sitting on his shoulder.  When he went to pick something up, for example, or shake hands, he had to mentally correct for the difference in where he perceived his ‘hand’ to be and where his physical hand was actually located.  My brother believed that the man was filled with so much self-hatred that he couldn’t bear to be in his own body.  Through counseling, they slowly ‘coaxed’ his spiritual self back into alignment with his physical form.

What does a story like that tell us?  Do we have a ‘spiritual body’ or ‘energy body’ which is capable of detaching from our physical self?  And, if so, is this the true seat of our vision and not our eyes?  Or was the entire thing a delusion?  Did the man believe the delusion so strongly that he ‘translated’ where objects would be in space to fit his belief that he was shifted to the left?  Most psychiatrists would undoubtedly believe the later to be the case.  But I’m a fiction writer, and I can be allowed the indulgence of imagining the more interesting scenario.
And Dr David Styles… well David Styles is, himself, one of the walking wounded.  He is both doctor and patient.  And if his peers will not forgive him the indulgence of imagining the impossible, I will.  I hope you will, too.

By Jane Jensen

[Intro: Between Gabriel Knight #1 and #2, I wrote a short fictional piece for Sierra’s magazine called Pause that gave players an idea of what the characters were doing between the time frame of the two games. While thinking of a worthy December blog entry, the idea came to mind to write a short story about the characters but I dismissed it at first. Too much work, not enough time. But the idea wouldn’t go away. So here it is. This is the Christmas ‘before’ and Dread Hill House and David lie somewhere ahead in Sam’s future.]

The Spanish Steps, Rome, 2008

The dark‐haired girl with the pale face and black lipstick performed a graceful flourish of her hands. A spray of doves flew into the air. They beat their white wings above the Spanish Steps, somethings which had appeared from nothing and no place. There was a spattering of amazed applause from the few passers by who had caught the movement. But only a couple of coins clinked into the hat.

The crowds that clogged the Spanish Steps and streamed around the fashionable Spagna district in Rome had other things on their minds today. The elegantly‐dressed Italians outnumbered the tourists ten‐to‐one, a rare occurrence, and not a happy one for business. It was still a tradition in Rome for Christmas to come at, well, Christmas time. The city heaved and contracted in a frenzied glut of gift‐buying, bough‐choosing and the selection of delicacies for the Christmas table, as if it had only just dawned on people that tomorrow was December 25th. It was no wonder that people couldn’t spare a moment …

Download the whole story here

This month, Jane has decided to let me introduce you to Gray Matter from the developer’s point of view, so I’ll be your host. I’m Dinga Bakaba, game designer at Wizarbox, the studio responsible for the development, artistic direction, and game design on Gray Matter. As you know if you have been following the game’s history, we have only recently had the opportunity to work on the game.  We really loved what we have discovered, the characters, the story, the setting… And we were more than eager to do our best to improve on what has been done so far. I’ll try to give you guys a glimpse as to what our main philosophy is in developing Gray Matter.

At first, not everybody was aware of the scope of the game, and its other unique characteristics. As every other Jane Jensen game, Gray Matter is a very story and character driven adventure. The puzzles, while good, are not the main focus, they serve the story and are integrated to it, like “that’s exactly what I would do myself in that case” type of puzzles. This might seem obvious for the Gabriel Knights veterans, but the adventure scene have seen over the years many games with a heavy emphasis on puzzles over story.

With this in mind, we decided to go back to the story, and immerse ourselves in Jane’s universe and vision.  The first thing that occurred to us was that Jane was very precise in the kind of feeling and mood she wants: the game is, as she puts it: “Gothic Romantic”. To decode that, we first isolated the different themes in the story and worked on them separately, and then tried to blend it all together harmoniously.

The gothic architecture of the setting, the stage magic imagery, the paranormal/parascience world, the haunted manor, and some other strange and cool themes are explored in the story. And we felt that the existing visual design, while cool, lacked some soul and punch. So we added a dark and mysterious element in most of the backgrounds. We tried to make each and every single one intriguing, unique, beautiful, and worth exploring.

Then there were the characters. As you have read in the preceding word from Jane, she likes to put a lot of polish and care in crafting her characters. For the same reason, we decided to rework a bit of the character’s design to get more expressive, unique, and engaging characters. Take a look at the “before after” character design of Harvey’s (oops, I’m giving hints on last month’s guessing game).

From a game design perspective however, there was not very much to change. We are implementing the gameplay trying to stay very true to the author’s vision. The interface was completely redesigned though, to be consistent with the artistic direction. We see Gray Matter (and video games in general for that matter) as a complete package where all elements blend in to form a fully coherent experience, so we try not to neglect any aspect of the game.

Of course, it is not always “la vie en rose” on Gray Matter. We faced and are still facing a lot of challenges. It is not easy to take over such a high profile game. We are trying to both stay in continuity and to raise the quality of the experience you are about to take part in. Oh, and then there’s one challenge our team has to face, but I can’t talk to you about that just yet… A magician should never reveal his tricks, remember?

Also, the title on the game will say “Jane Jensen’s Gray Matter”. So if you are wondering, yes, it’s her game, it’s her baby, even if we (and other companies) are working on it. She follows the game’s development closely; she takes part in the decisions, and continually shares her creative vision.

I must say that I’m really eager to see how Gray Matter will be received by you: the gamers, both old time fans and newcomers. We have put our hearts in our part of the development, and are very pleased with the first feedback from the artworks. We are following closely your reactions on the forums and on this blog and we really want to deliver a game that you’ll love and remember.

While we’re waiting for the gods to drop upon us a cool playable demo, there’s not a lot to talk about except design. This month, I thought I’d share some new characters with you.  You already know Sam and David.  But are not the only pieces on the Gray Matter gameboard?  Hell no.  In fact, there’s a lively supporting cast.

Supporting characters can be a lot of fun to write.  For one thing, they can be more extreme since they’re applied in smaller doses.  Kind of like pepper in a stew.  They can be totally new, which becomes more relevant as a series progresses.  And they can be an excellent foil against which to test your main character and demonstrate what he or she is made of.

Mysteries often have great ensemble casts.  Think of Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None” and “Murder on the Orient Express”.  Or, you know, Love Boat.  I modeled my cast in “Gabriel Knight 3:  Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned” on this template.  You have an isolated location, a fixed group of diverse people, and a reason to suspect each one of them.  That’s inherently creepy.

Our “ensemb” in Gray Matter is called The Lamb’s Club.  It’s a group of Oxford students that Sam gathers up to take part in David’s experiments.  When one of the members gloomily dubs them “lambs to slaughter” the name sticks.  But naturally we won’t really slaughter them during the course of the game.  At least, not all of them.

They do, however, all fall under suspicion as Sam is investigating the happenings at Dread Hill House.  There’s gotta be an “inside man”, right?  But they can’t suspect that they’re suspected.  Got it?

The Members of The Lamb’s Club:
(Note:  For full effect, apply organ music stingers to the end of each bio. Thanks.)

Harvey – Harv’s a New Yorker whose father sent him to Harvard to study law, but who really wants to be the next Orson Welles.  He’s the class clown, but not stupid.  Sam can get very little by him.  Is that because he already knows what’s going to happen?

Helena – A European Princess from “some country you never heard of”, Helena is rich and pampered.  She cares about booze and boys, though not in that order.  How she ever got roped into something as pedestrian as this club is a puzzle.  Or did she get roped into it?

Charles – Charles looks like a statue of a Botticelli angel but doesn’t have the confidence to match.  In fact, this self-proclaimed momma’s boy from Manchester seems pathetically nervous around women.  No way, Jose.  Not with a bod like that.  It must be an act.

Angela – Bookish and quiet, Angela is the quintessential college type.  She even has the gentle Scottish brogue to match.  Such a waifish little thing.  Surely she’s harmless, even if she is a few pences shy of a pound when it comes to her interest in fate, angels and the paranormal.

Malik – This Indian neurobiology student seems both compelled and repulsed by the legendary Dr. Styles.  He invited himself to the experiments and is the first one to insist they continue.  Is he a neuro-science fan-boy or the younger gunslinger there to take David down?

The wunderbars artist at Wizarbox made this concept sketch of The Lamb’s Club.  It’s one of my favorite Gray matter concept sketches so far.  Can you tell which character is which?

Dear adventure game community,

I know there are a lot of questions out there about the Gray Matter project, so I wanted to give a status update. We changed developers last year and lost a good 9 months in the process. Yes, that sucks. However, the new dev team, Wizarbox, is a very tight, experienced team. They’re raising the quality bar on the project in a way that’s exciting for me personally. And the commitment to the project, and getting it to market, is absolute from dtp entertainment, the team and myself.

So the bad news is, the game has been delayed. The new team is still working (or reworking) all that infrastructure stuff that means you don’t see characters doing backflips on screen right now. Without something big and visible to show, we did not want to talk about Gray Matter at Leipzig again this year. But the good news is, it IS going to happen and happen well. As soon as we can show you a build, we will.

I totally get that this news is not going to be satisfactory. By now, you want the game IN your hand and that’s the end of it. There’ s nothing we can really do about that except keep working and hope that once we have a game, you’ll love it.

I’m looking into a way to put more regular updates out there myself so that it’s all not quite such a black hole. In the meantime, here’s some cool new concept art from Wizarbox that I hope you’ll like.

Jane Jensen