Dante's Inferno

E3 2009 Video Interview with Executive Producer Jonathan Knight

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

We shot this video interview at the end of the final day of E3 last week inside our private demo room, empty for the first time since the show opened.

We had a great week and enjoyed sharing the game with everyone who stood in line, posed with our Dante statue and came to our demo room. Take a look and get Executive Producer Jonathan Knight's perspective on the show, as well as his thoughts on what we showed at E3 and what we will be showing here in the coming months!

If you'd like to see more from Dante's Inferno at E3 2009 check out previews in Ars Technica, GameSpot and some coverage of the hubub outside the South Hall at UGO.

Thanks to everyone who made it out to the show, visited the site and stayed in touch on Twitter.

Welcome to Greed!

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMT

The Dante's Inferno Booth from GenCon and PAX 2009.

Yesterday marked the beginning of the month of Greed, the fourth month of nine months of Hell leading to the game’s launch on February 9, 2010. Not only are we debuting a brand new Circle of Hell, but we are also revealing new details about Dante’s Inferno, sharing the game with press and players at a number of international game expos, providing a ton of brand new video and interactive content and much more.

With the unveiling of Greed, we have re-skinned the site, featuring the Hoarder-Waster, a unique enemy in Dante’s Inferno that manifests the sins of greed in a pair of sinners sewn together, one forever spending money, the other hoarding it. You can download a desktop wallpaper of this foe in our Downloads section under the Community tab.

We have also added the Circle of Greed to our Explore Hell feature. This allows you to explore the circle of Greed as envisioned in Dante’s Inferno, encounter the Wheel of Fortune and other denizens and landmarks of Greed through the eyes of the damned who reside there.

Also, with the release of Greed comes a new developer diary, focusing on the character of Dante and his struggle to atone for his own sins. Dante’s way of expressing his penance is a brutal thread that ties Dante’s own struggle for redemption in to the overarching themes of his journey through Hell. Watch the developer diary to get a glimpse inside the tortured soul of Dante.

A temptation from the circle of Greed, are you a Hoarder or a Waster?

We’ve also announced that renowned composer Garry Schyman, who won many prestigious awards most recently for his work on BioShock, is composing the dramatic score for Dante’s Inferno. Schyman said of the experience “Literally being asked to score hell was fantastic especially once I saw the surrealistically frightening world that Visceral Games had developed. I thought long and hard about every piece of music I wrote to create something new, surprising and fitting. It has turned out to be one of the most creative experiences in my career.” You can download a free sample track from the game’s score here.

In the past two months, Dante’s Inferno has finally made its way into the hands of the players, first at San Diego Comic Con and then at Games Com in Cologne, Germany and most recently PAX in Seattle. Sharing the game with the public has been a wonderful experience and the excitement of the fans who stopped by to play the game only to come back for more later in the day is part of what drives us.

Lastly, the Dante’s Inferno team has reached out to the gaming press with a temptation connected to this month’s Circle. How each editor chooses to respond to this temptation will determine the consequences of their sin. See how this unfolds throughout the month on sites like Kotaku and Joystiq.

Designing the Holy Cross in Dante's Inferno

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Dante wields two main weapons against the enemies of the Inferno. One of them, a magical cross imbued with divine powers, is given as a parting gift from Beatrice before he descends into the Inferno. For all intents and purposes, the cross is Dante’s secondary weapon -- but, the cross serves a very different purpose than the Scythe does during combat. The cross offers a completely unique experience for players who decide to favor the cross over the scythe when upgrading throughout the game.

Our three major goals for designing Dante’s Cross:

1. The first and most important thing is that the Cross needs to add to the moment to moment game play of Dante’s Inferno. This means we cannot have the Cross bound by some type of energy or mana.
2. The Cross also has to be accessible. Early prototypes of the control scheme for the Cross had it triggered via holding down the left shoulder button or R2 before pressing any of the four face button. However we found that scheme of multiple button presses, shift keys, etc. to be far too cumbersome.
3. Lastly, the Cross needs to be Dante’s ranged weapon and serve a completely different function than the Scythe. The Scythe is already a great catch-all tool for anything Dante needs to do close range, so we needed something that controls an entirely different spatial area.

Even though our goals were clearly outlined from the get go, it actually took quite a while to get the Cross to where we are now. We’ve gone through numerous revisions functionally and aesthetically to finally get to a place where we’re happy with it.

One of the first design elements we nailed down was that we didn’t want the player to be able to strafe targets while using the Cross. Strafing while firing at enemies may work fine in other action games, but it didn’t feel right for Dante’s Inferno. Part of the feel of the original poem is that Dante is in constant motion, descending downwards through hell and never backtracking. We wanted to keep that feel in combat as well so we decided that each Cross attack would function like a melee attack and push Dante forward. This not only keeps combat feeling more aggressive at all times, but adds an inherent risk versus reward scenario as Dante may be able to start at a great distance from his enemies, but each attack increases the risk of danger.

Another element that took forever to get right with the Cross was targeting. We didn’t want to introduce the notion of a targeting system or a “lock-on” system but obviously we want players to be able to choose what they aim at. Our solution takes several things into account. For starters, the Cross actually blasts in an incredibly wide arc rather than just a single projectile – it’s basically a spread shot. Also, each Cross projectile can actually “pierce” through enemies, which means whenever it hits an opponent it doesn’t stop moving – it damages them and then phases directly through them to hit anyone else it comes into contact with. Finally, we’ve implemented a pretty refined soft lock system that aims the projectile at what we believe is the player’s “intentional” target.

Oddly enough, the most difficult thing to develop for the Cross was the look of the actual projectile it fires. The first prototype started out with Dante literally shooting a big white cross. At the time it was just a test, but people seemed to generally like the look of it. From there, we made a first pass at our “Cross Bullet.” But for whatever reason, things just didn’t click. The treatment wasn’t working and so it was scrapped before we took it very far.

Our next attempt was to move to a less literal object and go with something more akin to a blasts of energy. This iteration even made it into our E3 demo and was taken to a relatively high level of completion.

Something still wasn’t right however. Along with the aesthetic not feeling perfect yet, the functionality of shooting spheres out just wasn’t working. Players would constantly miss their target, shooting too far to the left or right, but never on target. Not only did the object itself have to change, but the overall shape as well.

Coming full circle, we finally decided to head back to a treatment of “Cross Bullets,” except this time we invested a bit more into a stylized interpretation of the Cross effects by adding frost-like trails and whispy elements lingering off the cross itself. The biggest hurdle at this point was now frame rate. The effects need to be impressive, but not at the cost of 60 FPS. Luckily, our stellar VFX artist Sandy Lin and the graphics engineering team were up to the challenge.

Getting the Cross to where it is today took, literally, months of iteration time from almost every department. The effects had to be optimized constantly, and the damage and spacing of the cross shots were tweaked after almost every playtest.

But, the end result is something that both the team, and playtesters have found to be incredibly satisfying and fun to use. Here’s hoping everyone else feels the same on February 9th!

This post was also featured as a guest blog on Destructoid.

Launch Day Live Chat!

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

To help celebrate the release of Dante's Inferno, join the Dante's dev team and other fans like you for a CoverItLive chat event on launch day, this Tuesday, February 9th. Fans can chat live with the Dante's production team from 2-5pm PST!

The event schedule is as follows:

2-2:45 = Vince Napoli, Combat Designer
2:45-3:30 = Zach Mumbach, Assistant Producer
3:30-4:15 = Jonathan Knight, EP
4:15-5 = Justin Lambros, Producer

Ash Huang on the Art of Limbo

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT

"Abandon all hope, ye who enter here"

These are the words in the poem that are inscribed over the threshold that takes Dante and Virgil on their epic journey into Hell. Likewise for the development team of Inferno, it also represented our first level during pre-production and the first stop of what would become an incredible journey of creativity for the art team.

From a visual standpoint, we always knew that while we could deliver on the fire and brimstone aspects of Hell, we also wanted to make sure we spent some time thinking about how we could offer new interpretations on old notions of Hell. In the early days, we had a pretty small team working on ideation on Limbo...and for that matter the game. Bringing on numerous visions during concept exploration, we decided why not contact Wayne Barlowe as he had done a fair amount of thinking on the topic of Hell. For those of you who might not know him, Wayne's an amazing concept artist whose body of work has spanned film, books, television, and videogames. He's done concept work for the Hellboy and Blade franchises, and his published work ‘Barlowe's Inferno' is an incredibly crazy cool book of paintings based on a journey through Hell....he was a natural choice and we were pretty stoked when he agreed to come onboard the project. In any case, one of our first reinterpretations was the design of Charon, the old boatman responsible for ferrying the Shades (aka the Damned) across the River Acheron. Typically, he's illustrated as a single old man in a small boat with a single oar. Given that we wanted a more epic sensibility, we worked with Wayne to re-interpret him into actually being the boat and one of a significantly larger scale - think cruise ship size. We ask a lot of ‘what if' questions during concept ideation and oftentimes it leads in pretty cool directions.

From an environment standpoint, we knew that we had to make sure that the player was aware that they weren't in Kansas in anymore. We wanted to imbue a sense of awe, mystery, and horror all at once upon arrival. It's important to note that Limbo isn't quite Hell proper yet...it's really the front door- the Ellis Island of Hell- where the Shades come to be processed and ferried to Minos who is the judge of the Damned. It is his responsibility to sentence and ultimately define where in Hell each of the Shades is sent to spend all of eternity. As we make our way through the first half of the level, we are surrounded by screaming Shades dropping from the sky, waterfalls of bodies, and huddled masses making their way to Charon. By the time we cross the mysterious River of Acheron and come to the shores of Limbo proper, we are greeted with a set of buildings that are suspended- fixed not to the firmament of the earth but held in balance...suspended much like the theme of the level. For the art team, it's important that visually we're amplifying the gameplay and the pacing that the story is developing so we wanted to make sure that the environment began to pick up the tempo as we moved towards the final encounter with Minos. We couldn't miss an opportunity to stage a battle with the Unbaptized babies during this part of the story and the audio on these guys is downright creepy (pay attention to the architectural columns in the Hall of the Unbaptized babies as well). For Minos' court, we wanted a sense of macabre theatricality...it is afterall, a spectacle of sorts where Minos holds court sentencing the Shades and spiking them on a wheel that defines what circle they will be cast to. For the architecture we rolled together stadium and theater design into an imposing architecture designed to frame and elevate Minos. While the battle itself is epic, Limbo really only scratches the surface of the surreal horror that the player will encounter in subsequent circles of Hell. In some ways, it is one of the more ‘tame' levels...afterall, it is only the doorstep into what will be a much darker journey of descent...we hope you'll enjoy the ride!

Gates of Hell Demo Coming this December

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

TO DOWNLOAD ON XBOX LIVE™ MARKETPLACE:

Simply click this link and add the demo to your download queue!

TO DOWNLOAD ON PLAYSTATION®NETWORK:

1. Boot up your PlayStation®3 console:

2. Scroll to the PlayStation® Network icon on the XMB™ and select PlayStation® Store.

3. From here you can access the demo through the New Releases section-- Just look for the Dante's Inferno logo.

4. Click on the Dante's Inferno demo icon and select the orange Download button.

AVAILABLE ON XBOX LIVE™ MARKETPLACE DECEMBER 24, 2009

Coming this December, the ‘Gates of Hell’ demo includes the entire opening level and gives gamers a taste of Visceral Games’ blockbuster adaptation of Dante Alighieri’s epic poem, The Divine Comedy.

The ‘Gates of Hell’ demo will introduce players to the game’s hero, epic story and intense action gameplay, tracing Dante’s battles from the surface all the way to the Gates of Hell. Players will experience fast-paced hack-n-slash combat as they fend off waves of enemies before taking on the ultimate battle against Death. After defeating this boss, Dante will be armed with Death’s scythe, a powerful holy cross, and will be ready to tear open the Gates of Hell. The demo also features two stunning cinematic movies made by Blur, the award-winning visual effects, animation and design studio.

“Our main goal from the start of this project has been to create a journey that will make gamers truly feel like they are going through hell,” said executive producer Jonathan Knight. “The demo will give everyone some insight into how we are treating the story and a taste of the gameplay. And with nine more circles of hell to explore once the game comes out in February, we are literally just scratching the surface.”

EA’s Dante’s Inferno is an epic descent through Dante Alighieri’s nine circles of hell – limbo, lust, gluttony, greed, anger, heresy, violence, fraud and treachery. At a blazing-fast 60 frames per second, each circle features unique environments, all new creatures, terrifying demons, story elements and are scored distinctly to set a tone that fits each circle of sinners.

Gamers will get to go to hell in North America beginning February 9, 2010 and in Europe on February 12, 2010 for the PlayStation®3 computer entertainment system, the Xbox 360® video game and entertainment system, and the PlayStation® Portable (PSP®). The Gates of Hell demo will be available on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles.

A Message From Executive Producer, Jonathan Knight

Fri, 29 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Hello Everyone!

Thanks for visiting dantesinferno.com. We hope you’ll continue to do so as the site develops. We plan to add lots of updates and new information about the project as the team moves through production. Our goal is to share with you our passion for both the video game, and also for the great work of literature on which it is based.

The big idea behind the project was essentially to adapt part one of The Divine Comedy (commonly known as “Dante’s Inferno”) for a big, over-the-top, action adventure video game. The themes of death, sin, eternal damnation, and the medieval vision of Hell and its punishments made for extremely compelling game material. The location was perfect. And the core narrative of the poem—a guy pursuing his true love through the kingdoms of the afterlife—had all the makings of an epic story.

Written in the early 1300’s by the Florentine poet/politician Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy is widely considered to be one of the most influential works of western literature. In Dante’s masterpiece, we find three major innovations. First, he writes in the common language of the Italian people, as opposed to Latin, making his work accessible to the public at large. Second, he casts himself as the central character in the poem, mixing fiction and biography in a completely unique way (the character of Beatrice is based upon Beatrice Portinari, Dante’s real-life unrequited love). Third, and most importantly, he synthesizes medieval folklore, contemporary Florentine politics, Catholic dogma, biblical references, and ancient mythologies into one powerful unified vision that becomes the definitive world view of the afterlife.

It is basically impossible to overstate the influence of The Divine Comedy on western culture. He literally maps hell, and gives us the concept of the nine circles of hell and the seven deadly sins of purgatory (neither of which are found in the bible). Throughout the centuries, some of the world’s greatest artists, composers, authors and filmmakers have treated and adapted the “Inferno” to their medium of choice. (For example, the great sculptor Rodin spent years studying the poem while creating the “Gates of Hell,” and his great statue known as “The Thinker” is actually a depiction of Dante contemplating hell.) For our project, we wanted to continue humbly in that tradition, and give the poem an outlet in today’s most exciting entertainment medium: video games.

We’ve approached the adaptation seriously, particularly the setting and characters, which are described by Dante in incredible, imaginative detail. We’ve taken some liberties with the story, to create a narrative that has enough drama, conflict, and fighting to make for an exciting action game. It’s obviously not the same as curling up with the original 14,000 lines of Italian poetry, but we expect it to be a fun way to experience the fundamentals of the poem that we think Dante himself would have appreciated :)

As we move forward, we hope you’ll be compelled to learn more about both the game and the original poem itself.

Best Regards,

Jonathan Knight
Executive Producer & Creative Director
Dante’s Inferno

The Sights and Sounds of the Inferno

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Join us Wednesday, December 16th at 4pm EST (1pm PST) for a live web stream with Art Director Ash Huang and Audio Director Paul Gorman. We're calling this one “The Sights and Sounds of the Inferno," because topics of discussion will include the inspiration and process in visually designing each circle of Hell, the role of audio as a storytelling device and a game mechanic, and the scoring and voice acting in Dante’s Inferno.

Get your art & audio-related questions in ahead of time by sending a tweet to @danteteam on twitter, or posting a comment on our facebook wall at facebook.com/dantesinferno, and we'll do our best to get them answered live.

Wes Culver talks about Developing for the PSP

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Interested in finding out what it's like to develop on the PSP and console simultaneously? We sat down with Wes Culver, Associate Producer on Dante's Inferno for the PSP, and dug deep to find out what this unique experience is like. Take a look at the below Q and A session we had with him, and be sure to let us know if you have any additional questions here on this site, on the Facebook, or even our Twitter channel.

Q : We've often seen games for the PSP come out after the console release, and as a different version of the game. What are you guys going for with this particular release?

A: The main thing we're focused on is that you can get the full experience that you would on the Xbox 360 or the PS3, just ‘to go.' Sometimes, compromises are made for the PSP versions of console games for a variety of reasons. Our goal is to avoid compromises wherever possible. As an example, we're going to have the same number of levels and bosses as the console counterparts in Dante's Inferno for the PSP.
The PSP is a great portable gaming platform, and I think the reason why some games - first and third-person action games in particular - have been less exciting to play on the PSP is because it lacks right analog stick, which is usually reserved for camera control. I've played many games where I've found it was cumbersome to navigate the camera around during intense action sequences. To remedy this, we fixed the camera so the player won't have to deal with it. So all you have to worry about is running around, jumping and fighting. Additionally, we're aiming to spread out the checkpoints into kind of 25 minute experiences so you'll have the option to have short play sessions (if you're on a train or plane, as an example) or continue through for hours.

Q: What are some of the challenges of breaking down levels from the Xbox / PS3 to a PSP version?

A: Putting together the same level that's on the PS3 / 360 versions and making it feel the same is a challenge. We've been doing so many huge and exciting things on the console side that we are always concerned how it is going to translate onto a portable handheld. The PSP developer, A2M, takes each level and has their artists optimize and strategically get rid of polygons here and there so it can actually run on the PSP. After that's done, Engineering and Level Design take over to implement all the unique features to each circle of hell.
Scale is another difficult thing, because on the console you've got more pixels and HDTV's while Dante still needs to be viewable on the small PSP screen. I've seen some areas where Dante looks like a dot on the console versions and I (sarcastically) think to myself, 'well... this is going to be fun to bring to the PSP.' It's one of those things where we want to maintain the camera angles we have on the console, but we're going to have to adjust them so Dante doesn't get lost in the screen.
Controls are also an issue, as the PSP has less buttons than your standard 360 / PS3 controller. It doesn't have a right analog stick so we had to change around control schemes a bit. A good example is that a roll used to be on the right analog stick, but on the PSP because there is no right analogue stick we made it so you hold both the shoulder buttons and tap one way or the other and he'll roll. It's a familiar control scheme to other games as we didn't want to re-invent the wheel here.

Q: Do you work side by side with the rest of the team? I imagine that's a lot different than working on just one platform.

A: Yeah, it's much different than taking a finished game and porting it to the PSP. We're working on an unfinished product. It's not like we have the same artists working on both titles, so it's a lot of change. As we review and decide we're going to change a part of a level, we've then got to go back into the PSP version and make the same tweaks. There's always that challenge because the game's not done, so anything is subject to change.

Q: Do you get to take advantage of some of the things the Xbox / PS3 development team is learning as they build?

A: We've set up systems where, instead of having to manually remake assets from the console version and put them in the PSP version, a somewhat automated process helps translate assets down to the PSP version. There's no way we could get everything done if we didn't have that set up. As an example, there are so many different animations in that game that we'd have to have a monstrous team of people just to get animations done by hand.

Q: Are you guys using the same cut-scenes on the PSP that you are on the PS3 / 360?

A: Yes, both the full-motion videos and the in-game cut scenes will be the same as the console counterparts. The in-game cut scenes will be the same as the cut scenes on the Xbox 360 / PS3, because they're non-interactive and there's no reason to take away from the scene if it's already in there. Having the cinematics come over 100% in-tact from the console versions is very important, since the story is such an integral part of the game.

Q: Do you have any moments from your experiences in development that you can share with people?

A: I showed the PSP animated shade wall (Dante literally climbs on a wall composed of moving bodies) to the Art Director of the console version, who then grabbed the Technical Art Director. After checking it out, our TAD asked, ‘Can I have the assets that you guys used? We want to do something like that.' The PSP developer, A2M, was really pumped, seeing it's usually the PSP version borrowing ideas from the console side. It was nice for A2M to get that kind of recognition from our console art directors.

Q: If I were playing this game on an airplane next to somebody's grandmother, what's the worst image that could come onto the screen?

A: Probably be killing babies... or having naked Beatrice video playing. I don't worry about it too much, I've been on planes with movies and laptops with naked chicks and there's always that guy that goes out of his way to watch my screen.

Welcome to the Dante's Inferno Site!

Fri, 29 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Welcome to the official Dante’s Inferno site! There’s a lot to see and do here and our site will be evolving and growing over time. With that in mind, I wanted to take a second to share some of our future plans with you and point out some of the site’s features.

While the site will be updated regularly with new content, fresh blogs, video clips, images and more; we will be releasing a ton of new content on the 9th of each month, mark the date and remember to stop by. The “Explore Hell” section will be launching July 9th, it will allow you to explore a new, interactive circle of Hell each month. This is a great way to discover the world of Dante’s Inferno and meet both those who suffer and those who rule in Hell.

Also coming soon is a section called “The Poem,” which will provide you with information on Dante Alighieri, his famous work and the poetry, art and ideas that have established The Divine Comedy as a cornerstone of western culture.

In addition to these rich features, our site offers unlimited access to the latest videos, screenshots and art from Dante’s Inferno, as well as unrivaled behind the scenes access through our blog, Twitter feed and our monthly Newsletter. Below I’ve outlined some of the site’s feature so you know how to get the most out of every visit to the Dante’s Inferno site.

Our home page is an easy place to see what’s new at a glance. Our latest trailers are viewable in HD in the main window and you can easily comment, rate, embed or share them with friends on Facebook, Twitter and other top networks.

To the right of the media viewer is a carousel that will link you to our latest content and coverage here on the Dante’s Inferno site and elsewhere online.

Beneath the carousel is a window that displaying the latest tweets, blog postings and newsletter content. You can re-tweet, RSS our blog or sign up for the newsletter directly from this window as well.

Our Media page lets you view the latest videos, screenshots, concept art and more. Again you can rate, comment, share or download hi-res versions of everything. You can also easily filter media by a number of criteria in the window to the right of the viewer.

Under the Community tab of the main navigation you can access all of our development blog entries, visit our forums or download Wallpapers, Buddy Icons and soon, iPhone skins, Social Network Skins and Screensavers.

I hope you enjoy this and future visits to the Dante’s Inferno site, please feel free to leave a comment and let us know what you think!

Lead Designer Steve Desilets: Hell is a Real Place

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

One of the reasons why Dante’s epic poem was so important is that it satisfied a curiosity that tickles most folks imagination…’What does the afterlife look like?’
Dante literally was the Google Map of Hell for his time. He took people into the gritty nooks and crannies of the afterlife.

Likewise, it’s very important to the Dante’s Inferno team that we make Hell feel like a very real place, one that you literally walk, run, jump, slash, hack, decapitate across every single gorgeously disturbing square foot of Lucifer’s playpen for the wicked. The team is coming off of E3 with more tools, tricks, and cohesive vision than ever, and has been applying it across the 9 circles with feverish determination. I’m pretty amped about the progress, and can’t wait for everybody out there to catch a glimpse. I’m a cynical bastard, and even I have to admit, it’s pretty f-ing cool.

One aspect of creating hell that’s really important to me is that we make Hell feel like it’s teeming with life. No one wants to go to Hell only to see a couple of columns, a box or two, and 3 enemies every 30 meters. Games are really about delivering a fantasy, and if going to hell is the fantasy you’re portraying, you really want to see a MASS of humanity, hurled about, stuck in the walls, screaming in agony and pleading for you to help them as you walk by. See those hills? Aren’t they lovely? Oh wait, they’re…moving. Oh gross. It’s a pile of bodies, squirming like maggots. Oh the humanity. Hell ain’t pretty, but it’s gonna look GOOD, that’s for damn sure.

An important part about building a fantasy world is sustaining disbelief. Some of the best games I’ve worked on or played have one thing in common; you feel like the world was there despite you. It was running along just fine and then you just happened to come along. If you hadn’t, you believe that it would be business as usual. In action games, it’s a little harder to deliver this, since really, staging is pretty explicit when it comes to enemies, but the world as a whole will be operating in a very believable fashion otherwise, and I’m psyched about our progress thus far.

The real trick after you get the world looking alive is how to make the player feel like they’re interacting with it. That’s our challenge, and we’re working out some features that let you do just that, becoming an active participant in what happens to the poor suckers that found themselves in a very bad place.

The Dante's Inferno Animated Epic

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Anger, Heresy, Violence, Fraud and Treachery! These are the 9 Circles of Hell made famous by Dante Alighieri in his famed masterpiece, Dante’s Inferno, his first story of The Divine Comedy. Dante’s Inferno: An Animated Epic will take you on a harrowing trip through Hell as Dante braves the forces of evil, slaying demons and monsters of extraordinary imagination, all to save his love Beatrice, from the clutches of Hell’s master - Lucifer. The companion piece to the hit Electronic Arts game, Dante’s Inferno: An Animated Epic, is inventively told through eyes of visionary animation directors from around the world, including Shuko Murase (Ergo Proxy) and Yasoumi Umetsu (Kite: Liberator) among others. 6 Directors, 6 terrifying visions of Hell, 1 heart-stopping epic adventure!

View the trailer here!

Buy it now at Amazon on DVD or Blu-Ray!

DANTE’S INFERNO (DVD)
Street Date:                       February 9, 2010
Order Date:                        January 6, 2010
Catalog #:                            P2491
UPC #:                                  0 1313 82491-8 0
Genre:                                  Horror
Format:                                1.78 Anamorphic Widescreen
Audio:                                   Dolby Digital 5.1
Rating:                                  Not Rated
Run Time:                            88 minutes
Retail Price:                        $26.97
Bonus Features:               EA Game Trailer, Animatics from the film

DANTE’S INFERNO (BLU-RAY™)
Street Date:                       February 9, 2010
Order Date:                        January 6, 2010
Catalog #:                            N3173
UPC #:                                  0 1313 83173-8 4
Genre:                                  Horror
Format:                                1.78 Anamorphic Widescreen
Audio:                                   Dolby Digital 5.1
Rating:                                  Not Rated
Run Time:                            88 minutes
Retail Price:                        $34.98
Bonus Features:               EA Game Trailer, Animatics from the film

The Divine Edition Announced!

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Visceral Games studio today announced Dante’s Inferno™ “Divine Edition” exclusive for the PlayStation®3 computer entertainment system. In addition to the game, all those who purchase Dante’s Inferno on the PlayStation 3 will receive this special edition which includes developer commentaries, a Wayne Barlowe digital art book, the soundtrack to the game and a digital version of the complete Longfellow translation of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno all for the standard retail price of $59.99. The studio also announced that a Dante’s Inferno™ downloadable demo for PlayStation® 3 is available for free on the PlayStation Network today. The demo allows fans to get a preview of Dante’s journey through hell. The demo will also be available on Xbox LIVE® on Thursday, December 24, 2009.

“We are thrilled to offer an exclusive game pack for PlayStation 3 gamers,” said Jonathan Knight, Executive Producer for Dante’s Inferno. “The PlayStation platform has a long history of delivering AAA action/adventure games. Adding Dante’s Inferno to that rich catalogue is very exciting for the team. And with the demo now available on the PlayStation Network, players can finally get a taste of what awaits them in the full game on Feb 9th.”

Designing Combat in Dante's Inferno

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

As lead combat designer on Dante’s Inferno, it’s my job to work with a bunch of other departments to try and craft the overall combat experience. This includes building out Dante’s attacks and abilities, while at the same time trying to craft fun and challenging enemies and bosses to take on throughout the Inferno. So I figured for a first blog post about combat, it would be good to explain (sort of) how that work gets done on a day to day basis.

Thanks to our team of awesome gameplay engineers, the combat designers and animators on Dante’s Inferno are able to create new attack moves pretty quickly from scratch. This means if someone has an idea for an attack that Dante should have, or we want to try out an idea we’re not sure of, it’s really quick and relatively cheap to experiment. This is amazingly helpful as it allows us to quickly weed out ideas that simply won’t work, without investing days or even weeks into something we’ll have to literally throw out later.

To get a sense of how that process works, here’s the rough process we might use for building a standard attack for Dante.

Creating a New Attack

We start by creating a “move” in a script file which is essentially just an animation for the character to play. The “move” itself might look something like this:

CreateMove( MoveName = Dante.LightAttack01, AnimationName = scythe_attack_animation_01
((
--stuff this move should do gets added here.
))

Next, we hook it up to a button by creating what we call a “Branch.” A branch is basically an event that responds to something the player does. or something happening in the game. In the example below, this “Branch” is selected when the player pushes the “X” button.

CreateBranch( BranchFrom = Dante.Idle, BranchTo = Dante.LightAttack01
((
Event=X_Button
))

So now in game, when I push the X button this is what I get:

Making the Attack Work

The next thing to do is make the move attack enemies, collide with breakables, etc. The way we handle that in Dante’s Inferno is to attach what we call “Shapes” to our weapons. It’s the combat designer’s job to turn them on and off depending on the speed of the move, specify how large they should be based on the weapon, etc. Once we create this shape and attach it to the move, we can visualize it in game to test it out:

Attack Presentation

Now that the move works, we need to add all of the stuff that will make it feel satisfying to use. We call it presentation, but these are really the key elements that will make combat fun or not. There are a ton of these elements, but the three I find most important are:

1)    Visual Effects

A good weapon trail will make the animation read better, demonstrates where your weapon is swinging from a functional standpoint, and all around just makes the attack “feel” more powerful.

Death’s Scythe

We choose the color scheme of black and gold for Death’s Scythe for a couple of reasons, but mainly because we felt black was the best representation of Death and gold matched the primary color of the weapon. Together they give the weapon a distinct look that both fits thematically and reads well visually in a large variety of environments.

2)    Hit Pause

This is a cool technique that has been around since the Street Fighter days, and is pretty common among 3rd person action games and 2d fighters. Basically, we freeze Dante and his victim for a near instant on the moment of collision in order to exaggerate the impact. It may sound subtle, but perhaps no feature adds to the general “feel” of combat like hit pause does.

3)    Enemy Reactions

Without strong enemy responses to Dante’s attacks, every attack would really start to feel the same. The animation team in Dante’s Inferno has gone to great lengths to provide dozens of unique enemy reactions based on Dante’s different attacks. And of course, last but not least, blood is always important. Don’t ever forget blood!

Here’s what the same attack looks like with all the bells and whistles added –

Lead Designer, Steve Desilets: Developing at 60 Frames Per Second

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:00:00 GMT

It started out with the statement, though a lot stronger than a statement, a full out declaration: “Our game will run at 60hz” (which translates into 60 frames per second). Great, now how do you achieve this?

It sounds a lot easier at first than it is. You can’t know how much of a PITA it can be to obey this self-imposed mandate. It costs time and patience for the team to achieve, but when all is said and done, it really does make the game and particularly combat feel GREAT.

The action games that our team loves have all hit 60fps, and really if you want the FLUID feel to combat that is important to the genre, it’s hard to argue that 30fps is going to help in giving it to you. 60 is the magic number. Lower frame rates make the character feel ‘heavy’, and overall less exciting I think. Good character design and animations can make up for this ‘drunken’ feel of 30fps, but I prefer the games that delivered on both counts. If your fiction is conducive to a slow, lumbering character however, then 30fps will be fine. This is the case for most shooters, for instance (although I think COD4 seems to argue successfully for 60 in that space as well).

I’ve often compared developing a 60hz game to walking over a minefield. You may be working, say, on a VFX that doesn’t seem too bad performance-wise by itself, but when added to a scene with 100 other VFX going off, the red X’s (our indication of the 60hz break) pop up and you realize you’ve just made the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Now, you could totally let these cases slide if you wanted to, but that’s a slippery slope back down to 30fps. Overall, our obsession with 60hz has produced a really responsible way to develop since there is 100% accountability for all check-ins. I think back now to every game I’ve worked on in the past at 30fps (but come on, most of those games actually spiked down to 16 – 20 fps a LOT), and we were all throwing assets into the game without a care in the world until the game would start chugging miserably, and the panic alarms would sound. Then the engineers would have to take time do to CSI work to dig through the check-in history to find where it all went horribly wrong. No, it’s best to measure the effect of every add as its being added, and be completely honest and aware of its effect on the game.

In the end, 60 frames per second does not a fun game make, but if the game is fun to play anyway, then 60 frames per second only makes it better.

Paul Gorman Discusses the Sound of Gluttony

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Recently we sat down with Dante's Inferno Audio Director, Paul Gorman in his office at Visceral Games. He gave us some insight into the thought that goes into designing the game's score, focusing on the unique sound design of the Circle of Gluttony. Take a look at the video above, hear what Paul has to say and get a glimpse behind the sound of Dante' Inferno.

Click here to download a song from the Dante's Inferno score!