When you saw the trailer for our game "The Last Night" at E3,
it was probably the first time you ever heard of it.
In this video, you're going to learn how a small, unknown, indie studio like us,
ended up on stage at E3, and how we developed this unique visual style.
I'm Tim Soret, the creator of the game,
and let me bring you back to 2014,
when everything started for The Last Night.
3 years ago, we saw a gamejam with a cyberpunk theme.
And we thought it would be great to...
create a small tribute to cinematic platformers we grew up with,
games like Another World, Flashback or Abe's Oddysee.
Another great source of inspiration is... Hong Kong.
A city I went in 2012, working there as an art director & motion designer for Cartier.
Hong Kong is visually so
rich,
chaotic,
and overwhelming,
that it made me think of...
Blade Runner... another favorite of mine,
which established the cyberpunk genre in 1982,
with its gorgeous cinematography and art direction.
There is another masterpiece of cyberpunk,
inspired by Hong Kong too,
and that is Ghost in the Shell, directed by Mamoru Oshii,
with its long, immersive shots of the city.
So as you can see,
a lot of these inspirations were brewing in us for a long time.
With only 6 days ahead of us, we went for a very short experience,
made with spaghetti characters, very few scenes, and simplistic gameplay.
And after six days of work, we made it...
... hum barely in time...
A few weeks later,
we wake up, and we realise that The Last Night actually won the gamejam
out of 265 games.
Following the victory, we received a lot of media attention,
and this actually brought even more people to play the game,
and every time, the feedback we got was:
"I want more, I feel there is so much more to explore..."
So eventually, it became obvious that we needed
to make The Last Night a real game.
So we left everything behind to become real game developers, and we never looked back.
We thought...
if we could achieve that in 6 days, what can we do with more time?
In old fighting games like "Garou: Mark of the Wolves",
we had these absolutely gorgeous hand-drawn animated pixel art backgrounds.
What if instead of being eye-candy,
these backgrounds could be... at the core of the experience?
With this mindset, we developed
the first high-resolution screenshot of The Last Night.
Futuristic... yet, inviting...
Following this, it became obvious that our branding also needed some much needed upgrade.
To make this game, we needed a structure.
So we moved from Paris to London and created
Odd Tales, our own video game studio.
To achieve realistic lifelike animations, old games like Another World or Prince of Persia,
used a process called rotoscopy, using videos to guide the animation process.
And to honor the tradition, we decided to do the same in The Last Night.
After a year of preproduction,
we started to augment our pixel art with complex parallax & lighting,
but the traditional 2D approach became too limiting to achieve the visual depth we were after.
And that's when started to ignore traditional rules established by pixel art purists.
In The Last Night, our sprites are free from grids, tiles, color limitations,
and they receive lighting, shadows, physics and weather effects.
This move from a 2D parallaxing game to a full-fledged 3D game was liberating.
We knew we found a visual goldmine, and it had a profound effect on gameplay & level design.
That's when we decided to hide our progress, and continue working in the shadows.
We started to get notice and several partners came to help on The Last Night.
It started with ID@Xbox, the indie partnership program of Xbox,
then the British government helped us through UK game fund,
and finally we signed with the young publisher Raw Fury earlier this year.
It wasn't easy to keep our visual style for ourselves for so long,
but it paid off when it became a valuable asset for our partners,
who saw there an opportunity to create the surprise at E3,
if our small team could produce a trailer worthy enough.
Of course, you don't say "no" to such an opportunity.
First decision: in-game footage only.
Everything you saw is running in real-time on Unity, even the title screen.
We had to make the trailer at 4K 30 fps,
and it couldn't be longer than 75 seconds.
And we had a bit less than 2 months to make it happen.
At that time, we had a small team of 4 people working part-time to make the trailer.
It's not a launch trailer, it's a reveal trailer, so....
its goal was to introduce the public to a new IP first,
and then it was to reveal the new visual style,
and also tease the story & gameplay without revealing too much.
Ok so we know the specs, but it doesn't tell you how to design a trailer.
So, how did we do it?
Well, we spent a lot of time designing a storyboard, laying down 18 individual shots, one by one.
And knowing E3, we designed the trailer to let people wonder what this game was,
starting with this post-apocalyptic Paris, before evolving into the science-fiction of the game.
Every shot is handcrafted.
We compose a frame, we design elements, and we draw everything painstakingly
layer by layer, sprite by sprite, until we get the final result you can see on the screen now.
And, as you can guess, we have to do that for every single shot.
Each scene starts with a concept art, giving the team a target to achieve
in terms of mood, lighting, color & composition.
Because of the lack of detail in pixel art, it's up to our animators to carry the emotions
through body language.
Then we draw the environment in its final pixel art form, sprite by sprite, layer by layer.
Once we have all these nice ingredients, I can assemble the scene and express myself
through camera work and lighting.
Here you can see I use a Dolly zoom, a camera effect pioneered by Alfred Hitchcock
in his movie Vertigo to create a strong, unsettling effect.
When I'm satisfied with how a scene feel, I cook the final shot with our unique shaders,
compositing, and visual effects, and that's exactly what you're going to play in-game.
It was essential to design the trailer while keeping viewers' questions in mind like:
"When does it happen?"
- In a certain future where things have changed...
"Where?"
- In a brand new city far from Occident.
"Who?"
- This character there, awakening at 2AM.
"What happens?"
- Well, he's starting to have problems.
"How does he deal with it?"
- Hmm in a certain way, and you'll see. Etc etc...
We also start wide, showing the state of the world first,
and then we get closer and closer, first to the city, and then the characters,
then to his routine, his problems, and eventually even, his destiny.
If you look carefully, you'll also notice
the camera starts pretty tilted to show the state of the world,
before flattening to follow the boring routine of Charlie, our main character,
before tilting again more & more left or right as his life becomes less and less predictable.
If you ignore the details, and just focus on the colors, you will see that
the first half is rather static and muddy, while in the other half, we have bright flickers
and acid colors, as danger grows for Charlie.
Since our first prototype, internally we've been using
the dark, gritty music from the artist Lorn,
so you can imagine our pleasure when one day,
we receive a message from him, saying he would like to talk.
And since then, he joined The Last Night to help create immersive experience,
and he even let us use Acid Rain, one of his most iconic music, for the trailer.
We also have our own audio director, composer & sound designer, Joe Kataldo,
who's been part of the project since the beginning.
Joe is doing all these incredible sound designs you can enjoy in the trailer,
and he mixed everything in 5.1 to make sure that it sounds great on the big stage.
After 2 long and exhausting months, we delivered the final trailer,
and we were finally going to see, if The Last Night was going to connect with the public.
"This is the 2017 Xbox E3 briefing".
Being the kind of kid that bought video game magazines anxiously after E3 to learn everything,
I can't tell you how surreal it was to not only be there,
but to actually be there to reveal my own game.
I designed the trailer to create a strong reaction,
I delayed on purpose the first close-up shot, in Charlie's bedroom,
to build momentum before revealing that Yes, it is pixel art!
"I was wondering it's like is that pixelated?"
"And pixelated..."
"Oh yeah"
"Look at this"
"Huh.."
"WoOOow..."
"Yep"
Then we go from mundane scenes to extraordinary situations
until the climax at which point we let things cool down.
"And this is cool..."
"This is fuckin' gorgeous eh?"
"The art style alooone makes me so interested..."
"Yeah"
"I kind of like it"
"I like it a lot"
"Yeah" "Looks really nice"
"Oh yeah"
"Oh my god"
"This is my shit"
"This looks amazing"
"That's really cool"
"Ok"
"This actually looks really nice"
"This looks sooO sweeEEEEEET"
"Oh hell yeah"
"Ooowww"
"They got themselves a good one there"
"Wooo, oh oh... my god..."
"Wooooaaww..."
"That's it?"
"Nooo..."
We knew people would want to see more, so we put the taxi scene as a bonus shot.
"Very very short, but..."
"Yeeeees..."
"Yeees..."
"Yes"
"Yeeees... yes..."
Just after the trailer went live,
my phone just died under the thousands of notifications.
It was a huge success,
and it seems people connected with what we were trying to do.
They got it.
And after years of working in isolation, this was pure relief...
With millions of views, reactions, shares, and likes,
the trailer reception far exceeded everything we could have hoped for,
so thanks to all of you, for all the love you expressed for The Last Night <3
We can't wait to show you some proper gameplay next time,
and we think we'll surprise you again.
Follow us everywhere for more updates,
and thank you so much... for... enabling us.
See you next time...