2017 TGDF Notes: Creating 3D Japanese Animation Quality in a Small Indie Studio

Speaker | Route 59 Games | Kevin Chen

Kevin Chen founded Route 59 Games in 2015 to create narrative games that combine games, visual novels, and Japanese animation. Route 59’s debut game, Necrobarista, uses a 3D visual novel style and takes place in a supernatural cafe where the dead can spend one final night with the living.

─ Excerpted from TGDF official

These are personal notes and may not fully represent the original speaker’s intent.

Other articles in this series

• 2017 TGDF Notes: Creating 3D Japanese Animation Quality in a Small Indie Studio
• 2017 TGDF Notes: Game AI and Level Difficulty
• 2017 TGDF Notes: Finding a Path in a Crowded Market
• 2017 TGDF Notes: Making the Future Present Through Rez Infinite
• 2017 TGDF Notes: Lanota Development Experience
• 2017 TGDF Notes: Postmortem on What Went Right and Wrong
• 2017 TGDF Notes: The Art Direction of Detention
• 2017 TGDF Notes: Visual Design Notes from Qubot
• 2017 TGDF Notes: Survival Rules for Game Software Engineers

Game case: Necrobarista

Quick testing with editing tools

Basic visual elements: shapes

Basic visual elements: shadows

Manually controlling normals creates more precise shadows and allows separate treatment for backgrounds and characters.

Reference: Guilty Gear Xrd’s Art Style: The X Factor Between 2D and 3D

Character and background contrast:

Basic visual elements: lines

Lines can be treated as shadows.

Basic visual elements: perspective (2D ↔ 3D)

• Humans are bad at rendering perspective accurately.
• Machines are good at rendering perspective accurately.
• Humans are good at recognizing faces.

Humans can still recognize faces even when perspective is distorted.

Basic visual elements: Gestalt

References

• [Translation] The secret of “real-time 3D graphics of pure cartoon animation” realized in “Experimental Game Graphics” “GUILTY GEAR Xrd -SIGN-” by Zenji Nishikawa, Part 1 (1)
• [Translation] The secret of “real-time 3D graphics of pure cartoon animation” realized in “Experimental Game Graphics” “GUILTY GEAR Xrd -SIGN-” by Zenji Nishikawa, Part 1 (2)
• [Translation] The secret of “real-time 3D graphics of pure cartoon animation” realized in “Experimental Game Graphics” “GUILTY GEAR Xrd -SIGN-” by Zenji Nishikawa, Part 2

Attribution

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