Blog 7 And 8 - Freestyle Blog

Concept Art And The Making Of Mirrors Edge

Research and Images reference: http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3170015

Mirrors Edge is a first person action adventure game developed by DICE and published by EA, for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 systems. You play as the main female character, Faith, and she is a messenger in a world where communications are heavily monitored by the Government. To evade the Government Surveillance, Faith uses her free-running skills to leap across buildings, shimmy across walls, hang from pipes etc and get away from the corrupt Government.

The initial concept of Mirrors Edge started as early as 2006, where ideas were just in the pencil and paper stage. Because the game is first person, the developers had to figure out the perception of the environment from this view, because it is going to be different from, say, if the game was in third person. The early prototyping for the game was in the Battlefield 2 games engine, because they wanted to see what the game was like within an urban environment, and they wanted to test out the first person view.



They found out that the controls with first person weren't good enough, and that there were issues such as it not being smooth enough; being too irritating and not giving the user enough control over the main character, which is what is needed, especially in this game. So they added their own mechanics and objects such as zip lines, grappling hooks, hang bars, ladders etc so the environment was more challenging to get around. As the concept was being developed, the company decided that because of the games nature and environment, vehicles wouldn't really work in it. The movement needed to be quick and the addition of vehicles would have slowed the gameplay down a lot. The inclusion of weapons was also changed during the development. At first they were to be heavily used in the game, now you can go through the whole game without picking up a weapon.

The main character also changed a lot during production. She first started out as a multiplayer character, but the developers like this character so much they scrapped every other idea they had and built the game around her. In a different version of the game, the main character was a male, but this version of the game is so different from the final version you wouldn't recognise it as a Mirrors Edge concept anymore. To make sure the game was as realistic as possible, they had to look at different ways of capturing the parkour elements of the game, because of the first person perspective. They couldn't use the regular motion capture that is used in third person games. So they had to study lots of first person videos and try and get a feel of what its actually like. They thought that it felt jerky and floaty, so they had to design a highly advanced physics program to capture this feel. This made the movements and animations that they thought had been completed be redesigned to fit in with the rest of the game. They had to be hand-drawn, edited into Maya and then hand-animated so that they looked right, and not like an FMV.

People had to be convinced the game could actually be made, before they started to make it. They thought the idea was too difficult and that it would be easier to make it in third person. So DICE had to show them the concept demo and the design process to prove that it could be done.

The physics also had to be designed so it would be realistic. They wanted the main character to not appear as a superhuman, but actually quite normal. So she can only jump, run, vault and slide a bit higher, further and faster than a normal person, and she can't do all the parkour maneuvers with a rocket launcher or a shotgun in her hands, for example. They didn't put explosive weaponry in the game because they thought it wouldn't feel right. Running around rooftops with a rocket launcher in your hand was not the vision they had in mind.

The main character was based on Jason Bourne, from the Bourne Conspiracy films and games. He doesn't take weapons and he isn't superhuman, so they wanted to portray something like this with Faith.

The Floating Camera really helped them to include everything that they possibly could in the experience. For example they played other FPS games and felt that it didn't feel as real as it could have done. So they spent a long time refining the body parts and the movements to get them just right. When designing the game, the developers felt it was important to bring fresh perspective into the office to make sure they wouldn't get stuck on a part for too long. If the new person had an alternative idea, it could be the correct way around the problem at hand.