Chapter 353: Motion capture studio
There were so many flaws in this story that Chen Mo didn’t even know where to start. In any case, Chen Mo had already guessed the nature of the story halfway through and came to this conclusion.
According to the usual summary, the routine of this horror game was similar to that of domestic horror movies. It could be summarized in one sentence: “Mental patients have a wide range of thoughts, while mentally-disabled children have more joy.”
Chen Mo couldn’t help but feel disappointed. How could a horror game of this level bring joy to the players? How could he let the players ‘spirits be baptized?
For players who didn’t like horror games, they wouldn’t play this game at all. But for players who liked horror games,”deserted house shock” was simply a test of their intelligence.
It was time to let the horror game players experience what a real horror game was like!
……
Chen Mo already had some experience with VR games. According to the usual process, he would make the PC version first, then improve the quality and resources of the game before porting it to VR.
However, making a horror game like outlast and a building game like Minecraft would require completely different resources. Chen Mo was now facing two serious problems.
One was to ensure the physical and mental health of the players through the game settings, so that they would not be scared to death in the game.
The second was how to better express the expressions and actions of the characters in the game, making the game more realistic.
…
Outlast’s immersion in the original game was so good that many players didn’t dare to play it on the PC side. They often screamed in fear and had to rest for a long time after each level. If it was transplanted to the VR platform, the sense of immersion would only be multiplied. While the players would feel more excited, it would also make them more afraid.
If safety measures weren’t taken, the players might get sick from fear even if they weren’t sick.
Fortunately, some horror games abroad already had corresponding settings, such as real-time monitoring of the player’s vital signs and health through VR gaming pods, and automatically disconnecting when the fear level exceeded a certain value. Or, at the beginning, the players could only use the refreshing experience, and after clearing the game once, they could unlock the fully immersive experience and higher difficulty, and so on.
There wasn’t too much technical difficulty in setting up these things, just that the settings were a little more c.u.mbersome.
Chen Mo was already quite good at facial expressions and actions, after all, he had eaten so many action skill books. Normal actions, such as climbing, jumping, and attacking, could all be made into very realistic effects.
However, it was difficult to make a character’s expression perfect by hand. Even if he could, it would be a waste of effort, because the character’s expression, mouth shape, and words had to match perfectly when they spoke. It was too inefficient to make all the expressions by hand, and Chen Mo would die of exhaustion.
If it was a lazier domestic game company, they wouldn’t bother with the facial expressions and mouth shapes of the characters at all. They would only do a common “speaking” action.
However, in VR games, the character’s expression and mouth shape had to be done, otherwise, it would feel particularly fake when observed up close.
Generally, when major manufacturers produced first-person masterpieces, they would generally choose motion capture. This was also the most common method used by European and American manufacturers in Chen Mo’s previous life to produce Triple-A games.
The so-called motion capture was to invite live actors to perform the words and actions of the characters in the drama. Tracking devices would be set up on the key parts of these actors ‘bodies and faces, which would record their movements very accurately and transform them into motion data for the character model in the game.
This kind of technology first appeared in movies, like Avatar, Pirates of the Caribbean, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and so on in Chen Mo’s previous life. It was quickly applied to the gaming industry.
In the parallel world, this technology had also begun to be widely used in the gaming industry. Currently, some of the big Chinese manufacturers, such as Emperor dynasty entertainment and ZEN Entertainment, had already set up their own motion capture Studios.
Chen Mo was also planning on setting up his own motion capture studio, since outlast wouldn’t be the only game he’d use motion capture technology in. He’d be making more first person games with different themes in the future, and there were many uses for this studio.
Besides, there was another benefit to making outlast: it didn’t require many actors.
Because this was a horror game, in addition to the patients with tumors on their faces, there were also fully armed soldiers. They basically didn’t show their faces, didn’t speak, and had no expressions. They just screamed and rushed toward the male protagonist in a very strange posture.
The only ones with expressions were the priest, Scissorhands, and other individual characters. These people’s facial expressions were very ferocious. For actors, they didn’t need to perform so perfectly. Anyway, they just had to show how scary it was. If they really couldn’t do it, they could still adjust the actions later, so it wouldn’t affect the quality of the game.
If Chen Mo really wanted to make a game like GTA 5, he would be exhausted just by looking for actors.
Chen Mo briefly told Zhou Hanyu about the motion capture studio and asked him to do some research. He also asked him to meet up with Guo Feng from dazzling Aurora to see if there were any reliable foreign actors that could be recommended.
In fact, there was a group of foreign actors in the country. It would take some effort to find them, but they could still be found.
It was mainly because there were some domestic companies that occasionally made games with foreign themes. These actors had a certain demand in the domestic market and their schedules were quite full. They made quite a lot of money by doing guest roles for movies and TV series, dubbing for the overseas versions of domestic games, and so on.
Fortunately, there weren’t many dubbing parts of outlast. One to two foreign male actors who were fluent in English were enough to handle the role. Of course, some special voices also needed post-editing.
……
A motion capture studio required quite a lot of s.p.a.ce, but it didn’t need to be in the same location as the experience store, so Chen Mo rented an extra floor in the office building where dazzling Aurora Studio was located to be used as a motion capture studio. It would make it more convenient for him to create cinematics.
Zhou Hanyu posted some more recruitment notices online and recruited a few people with relevant work experience. The studio was considered to be initially established.
The price of a complete set of motion capture equipment was quite high, around ten million, including a complete system and a professional motion capture camera. Chen Mo bought it without thinking, since he would have to buy it sooner or later.
After all of this was arranged, it was about time to announce the next game to the project team.