#campo santo
Piazza dei Miracoli
Baptistery, Cathedral, Campanile (leaning tower), and Campo Santo
Pisa, Italy
Dark Field Monotype
22 x 30 [Full Bleed]
2019
~Age
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SAN FRANCISCO–LOS ANGELES–LONDON–SOMEWHERE IN NORTHERN ENGLAND—The twelve of us at Campo Santo have agreed to join Valve, where we will maintain our jobs as video game developers and continue production on our current project, In the Valley of Gods.
If you’re the type of person who gives two flips about this news, we can elaborate a little bit on this big decision. First, we really like making video games. Furthermore, and perhaps more accurately, we really like making and producing entertainment. From the day-to-day production of our last game, Firewatch, to the way we run the company, make merchandise, meet players at expos and shows, send out a quarterly literary journal, throw open-to-the-public game demos in the middle of an artificial forest—all of it is geared towards surprising, delighting, and entertaining the customers who have shared in our success.
In Valve we found a group of folks who, to their core, feel the same way about the work that they do (this, you may be surprised to learn, doesn’t happen every day). In us, they found a group with unique experience and valuable, diverse perspectives. It quickly became an obvious match.
Second, while visiting IGN’s headquarters in early 2015 to talk about Firewatch, we came across an undelivered 2011 Game of the Year Award for Portal 2. It happened to be engraved on an unopened bottle of champagne. Never ones to pass up free alcohol, we stole it and drank it to celebrate the launch of Firewatch a year later. So in some sense, this is a return home for us. Well, for that bottle of champagne.
Third, and last, we had a series of long conversations with the people at Valve and everyone shared the satisfaction we take in working with people whose talents dwarf our own to make things we never thought possible. Both sides spoke about our values and how, when you get right down to it, we, as human beings, are hard-limited by the time we have left when it comes to making the things we care about and believe in. They asked us if we’d all be interested in coming up to Bellevue and doing that there and we said yes.
Yes, we’re still making In the Valley of Gods (as a Valve game!); yes, we’ll still support Firewatch; and yes, we’ll still produce The Quarterly Review and our regular blog content. Thanks so much for your interest in our games and we’ll see you in Washington. Cheers.
—Campo Santo
Each shot of the In the Valley of Godstrailer went through a number of iterations before ending up in the final cut. The idea of this opening shot—a cramped silent film frame blooming open into a wide, dramatic desert vista—was established pretty early on in our development of the trailer. It sets the tone, it hints at the scale of our story, and it gives us a target for how we want our sweeping outdoor spaces to feel in the final game.
I started with a series of quick studies from Lawrence of Arabia to get myself in the right mindset. If anyone knows how to make a lot of sand look exceedingly dramatic, it’s cinematographer Freddie Young:
The vista for this shot draws inspiration from the wide, terraced hills above Luxor, to lead naturally into the temple facade in the next shot being nestled in the recessed limestone cliffs.
We vacillated between modeling out this vista in 3D, vs. a 2D matte painting, but in the end it made the most sense to paint it as a matte painting that we could have far more control over, and redirect Jane’s efforts to more pressing environments in the trailer. Jane modeled and lit a rough layout based on my early concepts, and from there I just painted the dang thing until it was done.
Everything behind the foreground sand-dunes is hand-painted, with additional heat shimmer and sand FX to break up the shot courtesy of Matt Wilde.
From top to bottom: Rough Storyboards, Color/Composition Studies, Final Concept, Final Shot, Lawrence of Arabia Studies, Final Shot In Motion
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Hi! I’m Matt Wilde, an old man from the North of England who has worked in visual effects, lighting, and rendering for games since the last century. Most recently, I worked on Variable State’s Virginia. Previously I was responsible for blood, magic, and urine in games as diverse as The Lord of The Rings Aragorn’s Quest(magic/blood),The House of the Dead: Overkill (blood/urine), and Dancing with the Stars: The Official Game (all of the above). Now I’m contributing VFX and rendering to In the Valley of Gods at Campo Santo.
Putting together our announcement trailer provided plenty of challenges, but one thing I spent a fair chunk of time on didn’t actually make the final cut: a scene where Zora and Rashida wade through an ancient flooded passageway.
The starting point was this thumbnail sketch from art director Claire Hummel:
To bring the scene to life, we’d need nice-looking water, which wouldn’t be convincing if it didn’t react to the motion of the characters and surrounding geometry. A game that does this well is Resident Evil 7(especially if you’re a fan of floating corpses, like I am).
To this end, graphics programmer Pete Demoreuille (who apparently does exist even though he doesn’t have a Twitter profile) created a GPU-based simulation using a “shallow-water” approximation. It’s a little more accurate than traditional video game techniques, as it accounts for the water’s depth and computes its horizontal velocity along with height. For collision with the characters and the world, a “signed distance field” can be precomputed for the static environment, and characters are added in per-frame by attaching primitives (capsules, in this case) to bones in their rigs. Got it?
The end result is a number of dynamic textures which are fed into the shader for the water surface’s height, normal, velocity, and distance from a blocking object. Timo Kellomäki’s work on water simulation in games is a great reference.
With these at my disposal, I set about making an actual shader, starting with a simple flow mapping texture—the flowing determined by the simulation. The output is brightened depending on factors like surface normal and velocity. The below was captured right out of the Unity editor and was immediately fun to play with. Imagine the capsule is a rubber duck, like I did. For about a week.
I gradually built this into a more watery-looking shader with the addition of normal mapping, depth-based transparency, caustic lighting effects, and probably some other things.
By this time the passage scene contained some first pass environment modelling and character animation, so I could try the shader out in situ. But first, Claire produced this handy style guide broken down into layers.
Isolating each element of the material was really useful in getting the final combined effect to work as we hoped it would. This is how it looked with the breakdown recreated in the shader:
If you’ve worked with Unity shaders, you may appreciate that getting shadows to project onto a translucent surface is quite challenging. But I think it was worth the effort to enable the subtly visible geometry under the surface, fogged and blurred by depth.
With the characters and colliders added, the scene was as complete as it was ever going to get. The environment, character models and animation would all be updated in time, and I had plans to add particle splashes, water dripping from the ceiling, and a way to allow the characters to appear to get dynamically wet. But then, the devastating news.
The shot had been cut from the trailer.
Not one to take this kind of thing badly, I quickly brushed it off and it was really no more than a few months and a Balinese yoga retreat later and I was eagerly anticipating my next challenge. Dust motes? Oh no that’s great. Bring it on. I lovedust.
Zora is one of the two main characters in our second game, In the Valley of Gods. Quite a few people remarked on Zora’s character design, in particular her hair, when they saw our announcement trailer. Indeed, creating Zora’s hair is a challenging problem for intertwined technical and cultural reasons. I would like to talk about our explorations and aspirations so far, and why it’s important to us we get it right by the time we ship.
In 2015, Evan Narcisse wrote an important essay on natural hair and blackness in video games. You should read it. It was the first time I’ve really thought critically about hair and representation in video games, and the yearning in the piece struck me.
Hair is very personal. As an immigrant woman of Chinese descent with atypically frizzy wavy hair, my hair is, to an extent, an outward expression of my struggle with who I am and where I belong (or don’t). I want to love my hair the way it naturally is, but it’s never quite simple as that.
So when I first saw the character design for Zora, I had an understanding of what task lays before us as a team. None of us has Type 4 hair, characterized by tight coils and common among black women. In fact, none of us have even made video game hair before, but we are committed to giving Zora the hair she loves, the way she chooses to wear it, with all the care and effort we can.
Building Zora’s hair will be a continual effort that lasts the whole project. Our first milestone for the hair was getting it in shape for our announcement trailer, when Zora was first introduced to the public.
As a small team without a dedicated character modeler, we hired a couple of specialists to do Zora’s character sculpt. Their task included sculpting a static version of her asymmetric bob so we could evaluate the scale and silhouette of her whole body. We knew the static sculpt would serve only as a placeholder and reference while we figured out a longer term hair solution.
Hair is a complicated combination of geometry, shader work, and texturing, and it requires a very tight and frequent iteration loop to get right. It made sense for us to do it in house even if we haven’t created hair before. The task of modeling “good enough, first pass” real-time hair for the trailer fell to me; the shading and rendering work to our graphics programmer Pete; and the copious texture and oversight work to our art director Claire. We started by investigating what other developers have done.
Real-time hair geometry, as far as I can tell, falls into two broad categories: “hair helmets” and “hair cards.” A hair helmet is what I call completely opaque geometry, as one would see on a plastic action figure or Lego figurine—think Princess Zelda’s hair inThe Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Hair cards, on the other hand, use many sheets of hair strands to portray more free-flowing hair —think many charactersinUncharted 4. That approach is well suited to hair types that can be abstracted into sheets, which works well for any length of straight hair. There are also hybrid approaches, such as this wonderful tutorial of a game-ready afro by Baj Singh.
Claire designed Zora’s Type 4 coily hair to have a lot of texture and volume, but it also has a “big-chunky-tubes” structure allowing fluid “floppy” movement. Neither of the two previous approaches is ideal for Zora’s hair.
The closest in-game hair reference I found is Nadine RossfromUncharted 4, but on closer inspection Nadine has Type 3 hair with very defined curls, quite different from Zora’s tighter Type 4.
Sometimes the only way to solve a problem is… just by making something, even if it sucks in the beginning. So I started off with a variant of the hair cards approach by making “big tubes” of three cross-cards to follow the shape and flow of Zora’s hair helmet sculpted by Ted Lockwood. It was important to have some geometry that remotely resembles what we will ultimately create, to test the shader Pete has been writing.
I would work on the hair for a few days at a time whenever I wanted a break from creating the trailer’s environments. After two months of wrangling various placements of polygon tubes, flat cards, and cross-cards, as well as bending all their normals as if her hair were a shrub, we had the following result as of October 2017.
Part of the challenge of all this is that not only are we making Type 4 hair, we are making stylized Type 4 hair that evokes Claire’s distinct style. It became clear very early that the way Zora’s hair interacts with light would be a key part of the shader work.
I’m not able to go into the technical details of the shader in this post, but we ended up adding individual controls for each type of lighting we wanted the hair to respond to, based on Claire’s specific concept art: for instance, light striking from the back, from the side, ambiently, and so on. This got finicky, but taught us a lot and provided enough variation to create the trailer. It will take much more experimentation and iteration for the hair to behave according to the style guide under all necessary lighting conditions, but making the trailer gave us a lot of direction for our next steps.
Right now, we have an intensely stylized back-scatter effect in the hair when backlit, but we still lack the ability to do high-quality rim lighting without relying heavily on post-processing.
We are currently only using alpha-cutouts for the hair cards (alpha sorting is a whole different topic outside the scope of this post) and I’ve been advised by character artists that some number of alpha blend cards for flyaway hairs usually works well.
For the trailer, James rigged Zora’s hair and hand animated the movement, but we plan on applying physics simulation to the hair rig for the shipping game.
There is a long way to go before we’re truly happy with Zora’s hair, but this is a good first step. As the rest of the game’s visuals become more solidified, it will become more clear what we need to tackle next.
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ExperienceHenry’s lookout tower in VR thanks to Steam Destinations!
If you’ve got a Vive or Oculus Rift you might be familiar with Destinations, a great app that lets you visit all manner of real and imagined places. Today we’re releasing Henry’s lookout tower and you can walk around and poke your nose all over it in VR.
To get Firewatch stuff into Destinations we had to rebuild the scene in Source (Valve’s engine) and I think you’ll agree that Jane did a masterful job.
It’s really stunning to be in Henry’s personal space. In fact, while messing around in it the other day, I picked up and then dropped the twenty-sided-die in his desk drawer and it rolled underneath his chair. Then, because I was using the Vive, I had to get down on the actual floor and reach under there to get it. It was an interaction I could never have in non-VR and was pretty thrilling despite this Destination being a simple static scene.
Enjoy! And yes, we included the turtle.
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I’d like to talk a little bit more about that, what it means for a Firewatch movie, and why we’d do something like that, in general!
Almost a year ago we got an email from Akshay Mehta. He claimed that he worked for Good Universe, a company in LA run by two men, Joe Drake and Nathan Kahane, and that they had made successful movies. (Most recently, the horrifying Don’t Breathe, but Joe had run Lionsgate for years and brought you a few little movies based on The Hunger Games). His claims were validated by Google in addition to the fact that he repeatedly said “I’m legit, bubby!” like a real Hollywood deal-maker. (Akshay didn’t actually say this but I could tell he wanted to.)
Around this time, it was right after E3, we were getting a few emails about the future film rights to Firewatch and we kept putting them off. It felt silly to pursue a film deal for a game that wasn’t even out yet and probably could be a stinker. Nevertheless, I got to know Akshay and months later, about four days before Firewatch came out, I was in LA and stopped by to show them the game.
Joe, Akshay and the rest of Good Universe work on Wilshire Blvd., about a block from an office where I used to make copies for a pair of producers in college, about fifty steps from Rodeo Dr. and a strong 7-iron from the agency WME. If you’ve ever watched an episode of Entourage,you have seen this stretch of street many times.
Sitting in Joe’s office, I started talking a little bit about what we wanted for Campo Santo as a company and quickly began to hate the sound of my own voice and transitioned into showing them the game. It was maybe 5pm so I figured I had 45 minutes before folks wanted to head home but we spent the next couple of hours combing over the prologue, Day 1 and Day 2 of Firewatch. It wasn’t the first time we’d talked to folks about the story or the game but it was the first time I’d played with anyone and had such a strong emotional reaction.
They understood what type of story we were trying to tell and were curious about the tools we employ to tell it. I’d never experienced anyone in that business have the sort of process curiosity they showed along with an easy-going demeanor that didn’t try to big-time the one guy in their office with an indie-game running on a giant laptop.
Conversations moved from Firewatch to the abstract ways Campo Santo and Good Universe could work together going forward. And in the end, we decided that, while developing a Firewatchmovie is exciting, and we are definitely in the early days of doing that, in Good Universe we had another company that shared our values and we could call upon with weird and exciting ideas (and that they could do the same). It’s not dissimilar to the wonderful partner we found in Panic Inc. when we set off on this scheme at the very beginning.
It felt ridiculous to notpursue a partnership with these folks. It’s rare that you find people who don’t just share your creative values but your business ones as well. Solid relationships are the only way anything in any creative business gets made.
So, when will Firewatch be in theaters? Who will play Henry’s hands? Who will do the voice of Turt? For those of you who understand what film development means you a) know I couldn’t say if I knew and b) know that getting a movie made is a tireless process that mixes luck, timing and sheer will together to create success. What I can tell you is this isn’t a situation where we sold someone the rights and they’re off to do whatever they want with with it – anything you see out of us will be the product of a partnership, brought to you by tireless people like Akshay and countless contributions by everyone here at Campo along the way.
Until next time. We’ve got convertibles to purchase and sunglasses to don. We’re in the pictures, bubby.
-Sean
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Firewatch is coming to Xbox One on September 21st!
You’ve been inquiring and those inquiries were not falling on deaf ears. We’re thrilled to finally be sharing Firewatch with our friends in the Xbox community.
Along with the main game, we’re also shipping the Firewatch Audio Tour (a free update for all customers!) which we’ll talk a little bit more about tomorrow. The short version: one part scavenger hunt, one part museum tour, one part game dev workshop, mixed with a dash of inside Campo Santo goofs. We think you will like it very much.
Furthermore, we’re going to be rolling out a free-roam mode to all customers, beginning with Xbox One (again, you asked!). In free roam, you’ll be able to live in the Shoshone with a full day/night cycle and explore with a few hidden secrets.
Thanks to everyone who’s made Firewatch such a success and we’re stoked to grow the Campo Santo family! We’ll see you on September 21st!
PAX West is this week and we’re excited to say we’re going to be there, with a full booth, new merchandise, an Official Fotodome Photo Booth and some never-before-seen Firewatch things to show.
Also, we’re partnering with our friends at Syber for our in-booth gaming PCs so you’ll be able to experience Firewatch on only the sickest of rigs. Thanks Syber!
WHERE: We’re on the six floor, booth 6808
WHEN: The whole show! Friday through Monday
WHO: Just about the whole Campo Santo crew!
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Firewatch is out now on GOG.com!
Since its debut, Firewatch has been the number one requested game on GOG.com and today, we’re thrilled to say those requests are answered.
Firewatch is available with GOG Achievements on Windows, Mac & Linux and retails for $19.99 but will be 10% in honor of of release week!
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Firewatch is out NOW on Steam and PlayStation 4! (The PS4 game is up on the PlayStation Americas store; we’re still waiting to hear back from PlayStation Europe/Australia.)
Furthermore, you can get the game bundled with its soundtrack on Steam or with a gorgeous Firewatch Dynamic Theme on PS4. (To find the bundle on PSN, search for Firewatch, FYI!)
The soundtrack is also available separately on our Bandcamp page. (It may come to other music stores later, but we don’t know our plans for that yet.)
Also, like this news isn’t enough, the game is 10% off at launch on Steam (until Friday, February 12th) and10% off for PS Plus members (until Tuesday, February 16). Get on it!
We can’t wait to hear about your adventure!
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You may already know that Firewatch is releasing for Windows, Mac, Linux, and PlayStation 4 on February 9, 2016—that’sone week from today!
What you may not know is everything else about the launch. Here we go…
- Firewatch is priced at US$19.99 on Steam and the PlayStation Store.
- On Steam, you can preorder the game now at a 10% discount—and it can be bought bundled with the original soundtrack, which is also 10% off!
- On PlayStation Network, you can buy the game on release day, and PlayStation Plus members will get 10% off! We’ve developed a super-snazzy PS4 theme, and that will be available separately or in a discounted bundle with the game.
If you want more details, we’ve alsorelaunched the official Firewatch site, which includes a lengthy FAQ as well as a page packed full of screenshots and trailers.
We’re really excited that Firewatch is finally approaching its release, and we can’t wait to hear what you all think. Thanks for being patient while we put all the finishing touches on this thing and got our launch plans worked out!
Firewatch is anticipated. These wonderful internet websites would go as far as to say it is “most anticipated of 2016!”
IGN:… the word refreshing keeps coming to mind…
Gamespot: “In a genre currently dominated by decision-driven narratives in the style of Telltale’s Walking Dead games, Firewatch actually manages to innovate.”
Entertainment Weekly: Firewatch is as visually striking as its unique premise.
The Guardian: …Expect plenty of creepy atmosphere.
Motherboard: …a mysterious and unique looking adventure…
Wired: All you really need to know about this first-person adventure game is that it’s written by Jake Rodkin and Sean Vanaman, who penned the moving story for Telltale Games’ breakout hit The Walking Dead. If you need to know more, it’s about a man alone in the forests of Wyoming with only a voice in a walkie-talkie as his companion. Oh, and the visual design is by Olly Moss. OK, now you should know why it’s on [our list].
The AV Club:… has the potential to deliver some real emotional heft…
PC World: Two things you need to know about Firewatch…It’s gorgeous… as far as indie games go, this one’s got an all-star crew…
PC Advisor: Firewatch is an upcoming first-person adventure game with a scary twist.
twinfinite: The combination of branching dialogue, well-acted characters, and intriguing story will make this game an immediate hit.
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We handed out these exclusive collector’s cards at Playstation Experience. We’ve got a few left and will think of a great way to give them away. (There were only 2000 “Bronze Trophy” cards and 200 Platinum!)
Playstation had us on their live-streaming stage at PSX. For some reason, I thought it’d be a good idea not to prep a play-through. Nevertheless, it turned out! Plus, it ends with a-never-before-seen surprise.
Campo Santo & Firewatch at the Playstation Experience 2015!
We spent an incredible weekend with thousands of Playstation fans here in San Francisco. Playstation Experience was our first time having a booth at a trade-show and all of you folks made it really special. As you can see from the photos, we were mobbed. There was even a line to play the game!
We got a lot of wonderful write-ups but we thought we’d just share one from GamesRadar about the tone of the game.
We had so much fun but when the doors closed on Sunday, it took about three minutes to go from what you see above to this.
If you met us at PSX, thanks so much for coming by. And if you’re now green with envy about how darn cool this event was, we’ll see you there next year!
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We’ll be at Sony’s Playstation Experience this weekend in San Francisco, December 5-6!
Play Firewatch, meet the team and maybe take home a shirt or a poster (or one of our new Firewatch totes!)
How:single and two-day tickets are still available
When: 10am-10pm on Saturday December, 5th and 10am-6pm on Sunday, December 6th
Where is Campo Santo: Booth 1134/1135 on the 1st Floor
Plus:New posters, special limited giveaways for PSX attendees, and Patrick Ewing hosting you at a demo station (Campo Santo programmer OR former NBA Big-Man? You’ll have to come see us to find out!)
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Cabel asked me if I had any Forrest Byrnes art lying around he could use for the Forrest 64 soundtrack art, and I said “yeah sure I do but WHAT IF INSTEAD-” and tried to channel my inner Yoichi Kotabe
anyway if you own Firewatch on Switch please enjoy this extremely dumb and good easter egg
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What’s So Great About That: Episode 27
First-Person Shooter: Mysterious Photography in Firewatch
We’re all good at finding evidence to justify our personal narratives, whether it’s believing we’re the centre of a conspiracy or using one minor mechanic to thematically explore and entire game. This essay looks at Campo Santo’s ‘Firewatch’ through the lens of its virtual camera.
