The battle sequences have a cinematic style. The game’s heroes move at full speed while their opponents are slowed to 5% speed to give the visuals a unique style.

MAS: What specific techniques are used in character rigging and in-game character design?

C: All our characters are drawn up in the concept stage — this is where the ideas are thrown about. Once we have a design that both looks good and fits the style of the character it is then modeled in Maya using the concept artwork as reference. The next stage after the modeling is the rigging. A skeleton will be made specifically for the character that enables us to animate anything from a giant four-legged robot down to a tiny Venom Gnat. Each character will have its own rig with different features that enable the animators to bring them to life. We have had a lot of freedom in the way we rig the characters. The characters were rigged using IK and FK (different joint set-ups) and contain roughly 90-100 bones or more in each skeleton — in a standard game you’d have only around 20 [bones] per skeleton. This gave the animators a lot of control in the movement of the characters. We used smoothed weighting on all the character meshes — giving us better deformation over the characters. Using this type of weighting allowed us to quickly make edits to the mesh by saving the weight maps to file and re-applying the weights once the edits were done with little or no tweaking of the weights afterwards. Blendshapes and Morph targets were created for speech and emotions. The PCs have up to 15 shapes and NPCs have eight shapes. With this many shapes we were able to create all the major phonemes needed for lip-synching.

MAS: The game is advertised as having cinematic style. What elements of the game are cinematic and how are they achieved? Are the same vfx-generating techniques used in films used in the game?

C: The realtime aspect of the combat and the cinematic cameras used in casting spells give the game a movie-like flavor, as does our One-Time feature. During skills attacks and spells our characters move at full speed while their enemies are slowed to 5% speed, creating a unique visual feel for the game’s many fight sequences.

MAS: How is lighting used?

C: The lighting system in Sudeki is exceptionally advanced. All the entities use self-shadowing and a mixture of direct sunlight and spotlights is used lavishly throughout the game. In some areas of the game you can see your character casting separate shadows for the sunlight and four other light sources such as torches. Artistically, the lighting is used to create the mood and feel of each game level. The Illumina Castle basks in light and bright colors, while the forbidding Aklorian Stronghold is very dark, only lit by lightning and an occasional flickering torch.