Absolutely. The card design team gets a lot of love (and scorn here) but we all the amazing art, visual effects, voicework, and sound effects is what keeps me hooked.
And BTW, thank you for whoever did the "Deck Destroying" animation from Rin/Azari, I owe you a coke for making it suitably legendary.
<3
I will happily accept this coke as long as I get to buy you one too.
Man I love voice actors and I wish I could watch more of behind the scenes voice acting! So many cards, so many characters and voices it's amazing to see the faces behind these characters.
More of that pretty please!
So during our milestone review, Dave Kosak was kind enough to share some of the odd and ends of the VO sessions. Fungalmancer Flurgl’s voice actor is just two or three solid minutes of horrible burping and vomiting noises, which he concludes with a Cleveland Brown-esque “And that’s how I get the ladies.”
Dave couldn’t find a spot to stash it in the Dungeons, but we also apparently have a VO recording of a tiny Kobold reciting the ‘Tears in the Rain’ monolgue. Y’know, just in case.
Also ping to /u/PowerForward since you mentioned wanting more stories about voice actors.:)
What's the software they show to design animations?
Unity engine. It’s free to download and our FX system has very little customization compared to what the base engine comes with, so you can pretty much just hop in and go ham if you want to try it out!:)
The effects on [[Healing Rain]] and [[Crushing Walls]] are dope AF. I love the work they put in!
=D Thank you! Really glad you dig ‘em, those were some of my favorites this set!
Those were also some of my favorite tickets I’ve ever gotten from Design - normally the request is dometjing really loose like “legendary CIP” or “icy version of arcane boosh.” These two were, respectively, “volcano but with love and healing and rainbows” and “crushing walls crush minions ded.”
I mean, how can anyone resist a mandate like that?:3
Thank you for all the hard work you and your team put into the effects, the anesthetic experience is beyond compare and even seeing an animation like Ysera dreaming or a Jade Shuriken hissing through the air for the 1000th time players never tire of it.
It also makes the game feel very intuitive: you almost don't need card text for cards like Gang Up, Mukla's Champion, Echo of Medivh or Archbishop Benedictus, you can easily infer from the effects what they do.
Can you tell us a favourite effect of yours?
Oh, wow, thank you! That is really the best compliment anyone can give me, I try to make the FX a very intuitive part of the gameplay (exactly as you say, so that people don’t have to constantly read the cards to understand what’s happened), so I’m really delighted that you feel like they’re doing their job!:D
Choosing favorite FX is hard.:P From prior sets, I think Elise the Trailblaze, Wickerflame Burnbristle, and the various Karazhan portals are probably my favorites, and Deathwing’s update was loads of fun. From this set, I think Togwaggle’s Battlecry is my absolute favorite, although Crushing Walls, Dragon’s Fury and the entire Rin/Azeri series also give him a run for my love.
Crushing Walls has a silly dumb story to go with it though. St about 1:25 in the video, there’s a hot mess of a flowchart on my screen - this is the script for the visuals specifically, no gameplay stuff. And I was SUPER proud of this hot mess, because this script doesn’t actually have a real way to tell how many minions are on the board, and I had five different animations I wanted to play based on the number of minions and whether they were on the left or right end. So I did this whole ridiculous thing where I got all the potential X-coordinates of the minions, found the ranges of that only occurred with certain numbers of minions of the board (if X was between 68 and 75, it meant there was only one minion on the board, etc.), compared that range to the X-coordinate that the spell was playing at, and used that to branch the script to play the correct animation. And I, pleased as fuckin’ punch with myself, was telling my favorite engineer about this in the hallway one day after filming, and he sort of paused, gave me this awkward smile, and said “You know we could have made you a new script action to check how many minions were on the board, right? It would have been like, an hour, tops, I wouldn’t have minded.”
I really wish the film crew had captured that, because it about as quintessentially game-dev-in-a-nutshell a kinda moment as they come.:P
Out of curiosity, is it absolutely required to know Playmaker to work on Hearthstone, or is good ol' C# enough ?
I mean, knowing C# means that you should be at ease with Playmaker anyway but who knows
C# is awesome (I’m also biased, I love C#), and is what our gameplay engineers typically use. We only use PlayMaker for art stuff (although a lot of the engineers know it well enough to debug things), but as far as I know just about everyone here learned PlayMaker on the job.
So for engineering, C# is expected and PlayMaker would just be a neat bonus. For art, making pretty things is expected and PlayMaker would be a really nice bonus. Either way we’re happy to teach you PM.:)
I would apply as a game designer tho, but I guess it's pretty much the same.
Ah, gotcha! In that case, solid game prototypes and lots of Hearthstone knowledge are the clutch parts. C# is really really useful because it means you can prototype your own mechanics (we’re always short implementer-designers). Designers don’t really interact with PlayMaker much at all though, so no need to worry about that bit.:)
Hadidjah
<3
I will happily accept this coke as long as I get to buy you one too.
Hadidjah
So during our milestone review, Dave Kosak was kind enough to share some of the odd and ends of the VO sessions. Fungalmancer Flurgl’s voice actor is just two or three solid minutes of horrible burping and vomiting noises, which he concludes with a Cleveland Brown-esque “And that’s how I get the ladies.”
Dave couldn’t find a spot to stash it in the Dungeons, but we also apparently have a VO recording of a tiny Kobold reciting the ‘Tears in the Rain’ monolgue. Y’know, just in case.
Also ping to /u/PowerForward since you mentioned wanting more stories about voice actors.:)
Hadidjah
Unity engine. It’s free to download and our FX system has very little customization compared to what the base engine comes with, so you can pretty much just hop in and go ham if you want to try it out!:)
Hadidjah
=D Thank you! Really glad you dig ‘em, those were some of my favorites this set!
Those were also some of my favorite tickets I’ve ever gotten from Design - normally the request is dometjing really loose like “legendary CIP” or “icy version of arcane boosh.” These two were, respectively, “volcano but with love and healing and rainbows” and “crushing walls crush minions ded.”
I mean, how can anyone resist a mandate like that?:3
Hadidjah
Oh, wow, thank you! That is really the best compliment anyone can give me, I try to make the FX a very intuitive part of the gameplay (exactly as you say, so that people don’t have to constantly read the cards to understand what’s happened), so I’m really delighted that you feel like they’re doing their job!:D
Choosing favorite FX is hard.:P From prior sets, I think Elise the Trailblaze, Wickerflame Burnbristle, and the various Karazhan portals are probably my favorites, and Deathwing’s update was loads of fun. From this set, I think Togwaggle’s Battlecry is my absolute favorite, although Crushing Walls, Dragon’s Fury and the entire Rin/Azeri series also give him a run for my love.
Crushing Walls has a silly dumb story to go with it though. St about 1:25 in the video, there’s a hot mess of a flowchart on my screen - this is the script for the visuals specifically, no gameplay stuff. And I was SUPER proud of this hot mess, because this script doesn’t actually have a real way to tell how many minions are on the board, and I had five different animations I wanted to play based on the number of minions and whether they were on the left or right end. So I did this whole ridiculous thing where I got all the potential X-coordinates of the minions, found the ranges of that only occurred with certain numbers of minions of the board (if X was between 68 and 75, it meant there was only one minion on the board, etc.), compared that range to the X-coordinate that the spell was playing at, and used that to branch the script to play the correct animation. And I, pleased as fuckin’ punch with myself, was telling my favorite engineer about this in the hallway one day after filming, and he sort of paused, gave me this awkward smile, and said “You know we could have made you a new script action to check how many minions were on the board, right? It would have been like, an hour, tops, I wouldn’t have minded.”
I really wish the film crew had captured that, because it about as quintessentially game-dev-in-a-nutshell a kinda moment as they come.:P
Hadidjah
I mean you were, as far as I could tell, everywhere in the whole convention center this BlizzCon.:P
Hadidjah
Oh definitely, I’m breaking out the champagne flutes for this. Only the finest for CasualAwful! (╭ರᴥ•́)
Hadidjah
I tried.
May your holidays be filled with real, eatable cheesecakes, friend.<3
Hadidjah
Oh!:B Cheesecake for all, then!
Hadidjah
Oh... oh... oh dear. It stands for Come-Into-Play, so... I guess they weren’t that far off the mark?:P
Hadidjah
C# is awesome (I’m also biased, I love C#), and is what our gameplay engineers typically use. We only use PlayMaker for art stuff (although a lot of the engineers know it well enough to debug things), but as far as I know just about everyone here learned PlayMaker on the job.
So for engineering, C# is expected and PlayMaker would just be a neat bonus. For art, making pretty things is expected and PlayMaker would be a really nice bonus. Either way we’re happy to teach you PM.:)
Hadidjah
Ah, gotcha! In that case, solid game prototypes and lots of Hearthstone knowledge are the clutch parts. C# is really really useful because it means you can prototype your own mechanics (we’re always short implementer-designers). Designers don’t really interact with PlayMaker much at all though, so no need to worry about that bit.:)