What is a scenario?
One of the new features of the 3.0 beta is the “scenario”.
It simply is a tell taled through characters frozen in time. They thus become part of the setting as well as obstacles.
What is our process ?
At the beginning, there is a scenery without any character. For now we are using those already set up by the Synty studio team.
Slight changes are brought, mainly fixing objetcs, buildings and terrain small errors, accentued by the small size of SRX’s vehicles.
In the future, we will use these assets to create brand new environments and tell new stories.
Once the global parts of the environment are here, it is time to imagine all the characters, their actions and possible objects and equipment for those actions.
We then place everything in the corresponding locations to evaluate the spacing of the area.
After placing characters in what we call the “T-Pose”, the default position for most of the biped characters with arms spread out, we can manipulate their skeleton to set them up.
This process generally includes several runs to properly adjust characters to the environment and multiple objects that surround them.
The different scenario elements are finally gathered into groups to facilitate activation or deactivation of the whole area. In the above scene, we could for instance remove both the workers, their shovels and the solider in one click.
The purpose is to potentially tell different stories inside the same environment, include variations, make the story slightly different from one track to another or the follow-up of the a previous scenario.
The future of the scenarios
At this time, only one scenario is set up per environment and therefore by episode.
The final objective is to get close to one scenario per track or at least a scenario shared by a few tracks inside an episode.
It would mean a lot of time spent but would offer the possibility to tell more complete stories along with truly unique tracks and exploration scenes.
We are constently working on tools allowing us to set up environments and tracks better and faster in order to provide new content more often.
The long-term goal is to share those tools to players so they can create their own environments and scenarios.