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Pissing on demons is a good way to get fangs when you either don't know, don't have, or screw up the floral finisher. It's also a good idea to get fangs early cause of the items that is obtained through trading, the Golden Lucky Cat, draws valuables to you which is a godsend in battle. There are other good things you can get through trading but that's the one you should focus on early. Tyty posted:I really could've sworn bloom worked on imps. Sorry about that. I'll try to keep my mouth shut about game mechanic stuff I remember in the future since I really don't know a ton about the game. I've played this game multiple times and even have the physical guide for it on my bookself. I only looked up floral finishers cause the guide surprisingly didn't have them.
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Feb 15, 2017 09:10
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OH MY GOD why is this game so GOOD? I'm falling in love with it all over again.
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Feb 15, 2017 10:25
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nweismuller posted:I am surprised you did not point out that the dojo master's head literally rotates 180 degrees while he's instructing you. The eyebrows and moustache are the same thing. I find it incredibly amusing. Henshin a go-go, baby!
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Feb 15, 2017 10:49
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This episode lacks promised quirky title. Bad poorlywrittennovel, no jelly donut for you.
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Feb 15, 2017 13:50
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Mr. Vile posted:Henshin a go-go, baby! I wanted to point it out in the video, but wasn't 100% sure, but I think Onigiri-san is straight up doing the Viewtiful Joe pose.
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Feb 15, 2017 16:32
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poorlywrittennovel posted:I wanted to point it out in the video, but wasn't 100% sure, but I think Onigiri-san is straight up doing the Viewtiful Joe pose. Yes he is. This game is packed full of of Viewtiful Joe references. The Midnight Wonderboy firework is another one, referencing Alastor's nickname of Midnight Thunderboy in the same game. Also, Master Onigiri is a double edged pun in that it can be read as either "rice ball" (o-nigiri) or "demon slash" (oni-giri)
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Feb 15, 2017 17:08
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Mr. Vile posted:Also, Master Onigiri is a double edged pun in that it can be read as either "rice ball" (o-nigiri) or "demon slash" (oni-giri) I'm sad I didn't get that one.
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Feb 15, 2017 20:02
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Anaxite posted:I'm sad I didn't get that one. Same. Also I realized why I thought Bakugami had a double meaning. Turns out I was thinking of Baku, dream eating spirits from folklore. They have nothing to do with explosions, or pigs, but are sometimes depicted as tapirs.
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Feb 15, 2017 20:38
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Mr. Vile posted:Also, Master Onigiri is a double edged pun in that it can be read as either "rice ball" (o-nigiri) or "demon slash" (oni-giri) Riceball being the kindly old man head. Demon Slash the angry eyebrow man.
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Feb 16, 2017 00:21
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Miz Kriss posted:Part of me was wanting to do a write up of the animals of the zodiac that inspired the 13 brush gods, but that was done in another Okami LP and I feel like that would be copying. Uh, if you're referring to my LP, then I don't care at all. Knock yourself out. Pretty sure I just stole my info from Wikipedia anyway. If you mean a different LP, then it's already been done in at least one other LP so what's one more?
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Feb 16, 2017 21:37
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Silver Falcon posted:Uh, if you're referring to my LP, then I don't care at all. Knock yourself out. Pretty sure I just stole my info from Wikipedia anyway. If you mean a different LP, then it's already been done in at least one other LP so what's one more? I think it was yours actually. It's been a few years. I'll do a write up of the story behind the Chinese zodiac and the brush gods we've met so far tomorrow.
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Feb 17, 2017 06:08
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 And that's the end of session 2. Next time we'll get to the first proper dungeon. Anaxite posted:Thankfully we've seen a lot of stuff by now, so my notes for episode 6 are shorter. poorlywrittennovel fucked around with this message at 03:02 on May 11, 2017 |
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Feb 17, 2017 23:18
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Wow. Fae did not just poo poo on pomeranians, right? I must have misunderstood something.
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Feb 17, 2017 23:43
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I too prefer the prayer beads. Long range multi hit attacks are great for combo, damage avoidance, and just style in my opinion.
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Feb 18, 2017 00:10
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cant cook creole bream posted:Wow. Fae did not just poo poo on pomeranians, right? I must have misunderstood something.  Benny is disappointed.
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Feb 18, 2017 00:51
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I believe that Ammy is supposed to be a grey wolf which is still appropriate for the Dog of the Chinese Zodiac as the domestic dog is actually one of the thirty-seven subspecies of the grey wolf with their binomial name being Canis lupus familiaris (Canis lupus being the binomial name of the grey wolf itself). Japan actually has two subspecies of grey wolf that are sadly both extinct: the Japanese or Honshū wolf (Canis lupus hodophilax) and the Hokkaido or Ezo wolf (Canis lupus hattai) and it's possible that Ammy is specifically the former do to her size compared to other dogs in the game.
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Feb 18, 2017 01:04
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Yeah, Ammy is huge. She's also got slightly rounded ears and a stick-straight tail (despite the twist in her fur, it hangs straight), which are hallmarks of an actual wolf, not a dog.
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Feb 18, 2017 02:32
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Faerie come on!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31PhPvUPtEU
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Feb 18, 2017 02:36
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poorlywrittennovel posted:
Thankfully we've seen a lot of stuff by now, so my notes for episode 6 are shorter. New god names:
26:33 - The Japanese name for Waka is shown as Ushiwaka (ウシワカ).
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Feb 18, 2017 03:31
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I don't know why, but that Konohana Shuffle bit was hell for me. I had to try it so many times and kept failing. Just doing all those circles in what at the time felt like such a short time was super difficult. The only part I didn't like with Wii controls from what I've played of the game. As for the new weapon, I loved it! I remember as soon as I tried it out for the first time I thought to myself that it'd be rad if we had a Wii Castlevania with similar controls for the whip.
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Feb 18, 2017 06:53
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I remember reading about it a few years ago, but Waka was definitely using English in the Japanese version. Also I'll be That Person and say I actually like Waka. He's got some sick fight music, a doofy hat, and a flute that's also a lightsaber? As for weapons, I think I used Rosaries for cheaping out on certain fights, but stuck to the Reflector mostly (there are specific reasons but I'll wait until the LP brings it up)
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Feb 18, 2017 07:27
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YggiDee posted:He's got some sick fight music, a doofy hat, and a flute that's also a lightsaber? Well, a prop lightsaber. You'll notice that he drew a real sword for the fight.
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Feb 18, 2017 08:01
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Is this the origin of Bayonetta's Pillow Talk?
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Feb 18, 2017 08:17
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I love this game to death, I'm glad to see it being LP'd. I'm also quite jealous of the HD version, I just have it on Wii. You've mentioned feeding all the animals; do you know one is permanently missable? There's also an enemy type and a stray bead that are missable, if those are things you care about. Unless they've changed that for the re-release. Do you want a notice when any of these come up? Rosaries are fantastic, especially at building godhood, but when I last replayed the game, I made a point to git gud at the third type, which has easily become my favorite. They're tied for best secondary attack, too. The Lone Badger posted:Well, a prop lightsaber. You'll notice that he drew a real sword for the fight. He drew a normal sword to flourish in the cutscene, but used the lightsaber in the fight. His normal sword was visibly sheathed, and it's the one he uses for his ranged attack.
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Feb 18, 2017 19:09
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The Konohana Shuffle is pretty badass, but I also like the other dance that Mr. Orange does if you talk to him before blooming all the trees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsR9WMiGiD0 As for the rosaries, they're great for building godhood quickly, but they don't stun enemies as much, so I usually go with another weapon type that you get later.
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Feb 19, 2017 03:29
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Do you like art? I like art! Strap in, because I think it's time to look at Disclaimer: I'm not a professional game designer. These are my observations based on past modding, knowledge of various technology, and a whole lot of guessing. ---- First, let's think back to 2005-2006. About five years after the release of the PS2, the PS3 and Okami are both unveiled at E3 2005. By now, PS2 development has matured enough for games to show much improved visual fidelity, but also to really hit hardware limits. The PS2 has a particular kind of processor architecture which made development a bit harder in some circumstances. Also, even if you could harness the advantages of this architecture, it didn't change that you always have memory or CPU limitations... and the PS2 is still a ~300 MHz machine with 32 MB of system memory, and 4 MB of video memory. The PS2 also doesn't support nifty features we now take for granted like normal maps or pixel shaders, which let you do things like add relief effect to textures, or modify the visual output on a per-pixel basis, respectively. It's not that those features couldn't be implemented on the PS2 (or on a SNES if you really want), but there was no hardware dedicated to speeding up those effects. If you wanted to have those kinds of features, you needed to create the effect in your graphics engine yourself, run it on a CPU not optimized for the task, and hope you don't need more memory to hold it. In short, you could have a bag of tricks for your PS2, but it was your job to make them, and hope they work. The PS3 could do better effects, being a full generation ahead and having a better GPU, but Okami wasn't made for it. Clover Studios was pretty clever, though. I think they had a good grasp of what makes painting or drawing styles iconic, and found five significant ways (as I see them) to implement relatively simple effects that worked with their vision. In no particular order, those are:
 Black bordering is probably the most prominent effect of the game, and has been staring at us since the beginning. Just look at this screenshot:  Almost every object in that image has a black border of some kind, like someone drew outlines with a brush. Not all bordering is created equal, though. In this section, I specifically mean black borders around 3D objects. Remember this sequence from Episode 6? Having gained the power to make water lilies, Amaterasu runs around a big tree on an island. The tree has a big black border. As we run around it, though, this border has some weird visual artifacting where its bottom seems to shrink and disappear.  You see that? That looks like a disappearing polygon, which tells us it's just another 3d object around the tree! When we see the black, we're actually seeing the inside of the 3d model. The see-through effect is due to how polygon visibility works. Polygons in 3d models have two sides. When you create a 3d model, and texture its surface, you can set which, or both, of the sides are textured; if you only do one, the other side becomes transparent. A lot of modeling software defaults to texturing the outside of 3d models, meaning that if the viewport camera somehow got inside or near the object, you'd suddenly be able to see through it. That's how you get moments like these:  (courtesy Unity forums)What Okami devs did with the tree relies on this texturing behavior. They made an exterior model with its inside polygons colored a flat black, and left the outside surface uncolored. When we're viewing the tree head-on, we're mostly viewing the outside of the border model, so it's invisible and doesn't obscure the tree. At the edges of the tree, though, we see through to the interior polygons of the rear half of the border model, so the tree gets a black outline... except towards the bottom, where the limitations of 3d models come into play. That's where we see individual polygon edges as the visible sides turn away from the camera. All black borders around 3d objects seem to be done the same way. A 3d model is cloned. The clone is enlarged, but remains linked to the original for position and animations. The clone's color is set to flat black, and the polygons have their texture face reversed. If you look closely at characters' and other 3d objects' outlines, you'll see similar visual artifacts as with the tree. Advantages:
The disadvantages are sufficiently minor to make any trade-offs worth it. Good shading effects can really tax a computer.  Sprites are two-dimensional bitmaps that are composited on a larger scene. We see the term used heavily when talking about 2d games, as foreground objects in those games are all sprites, animated or not. They're used in 3d games as well, but when they are, they have a unique property that they always look like they're facing the player -- 2d animations aside. Remember DOOM, Duke Nukem, or Wolfenstein 3D? Back then, we didn't have good 3d. In those games, almost everything which is not terrain is a sprite. These always face the camera no matter where they are, and the only calculations done are positioning, sizing, and obscuring things behind them. Look at the barrel:  Computers have done image compositing for a long time; it's not especially hard to do. Compare that to 3d models where on every frame, you need to also figure out what polygons are visible to the player, what textures and texture effects they use, how the lighting is done, how the polygons deform, etc... it gets complicated real fast. Since a sprite is a 2d image, it also doesn't use much more memory than a texture, rather than also needing the memory of a complex 3d model. Unfortunately, if you get too close to a sprite in a 3d game, it can look like poo poo.  Okami uses sprites heavily. Those black trees you make bloom are sprites. The grass is made of sprites. The plants that trail behind your movement are sprites. All the cherry blossoms are made of sprites.     I believe sprites work in this game's favor for a few reasons. First, the sprites aren't too complex detail-wise, and smooth resizing is available. Second, the sprites are displayed alongside other 3d objects, somewhat hiding their 2d characteristics. Third, viewing flat images fits the aesthetic -- you always look at a painting head-on, and this game kind of pretends it's a painting. Finally, sprites are fairly light on the CPU, so a PS2 would chug along just fine. In order to save on image storage, many sprites are just copies of each-other. There's enough visual variety elsewhere to afford re-use, and the lesser resolution of the PS2 may have helped hide this copying. Still, the game looks great on the PS3 too! Advantages:
If this weren't a game with a painterly aesthetic, sprites probably wouldn't work so well. But it is, so they do, to a point.  By "texture", I mean the colored texture of 3d objects. Like this:  Okami uses a variably painted style for textures, though I think this is the least effective style point of the game. You could change the textures to some other look, like cel shading, and the other major effects could still shrine through. If you removed the other effects, though, I think the painted texture look would stop being as interesting. The textures complement but don't stand as well on their own. Still... it's good that the textures are as they are, and Clover also put in a bunch of neat effects. Look at Amaterasu's body and weapon:  That pulsing is neat. I don't recall seeing it in many other places, or maybe it's just that Amaterasu is always in view and easier to notice. Clover may have done it by having an animated texture, though that would mean saving multiple textures as frames, thus using up more memory. They may also have done it by shifting the colors of textures in real-time, saving memory at the expense of using the CPU a bit more. If someone has other thoughts on how the effect is achieved, please let me know. I suspect we don't see many more complicated texture effects because they're not really necessary for the game's style, they would increase CPU usage, and implementing fancy shading effects for the PS2 means more development time. There are also two occasions I noticed textures used to great effect: gusts of wind, and Amaterasu's shadow. With wind, it looks like there are a bunch of simple 3d models in the sky. The telltale sign is that the wind is angular in places, suggesting 3d vertices. If that's the case, it uses a brushstroke texture which seems to animate by advancing along the model. Not having a sprite means a more dynamic view based on the camear, but still looking 2d and painted thanks to the simple brush texture:  And with Amaterasu's shadow, there's nothing more than a brushstroke, which is far simpler than real-time shadow calculation. Hooray for thematic appropriateness!  Advantages:
 This effect is easier to explain. Many 3d models and textures in the game can have, in whole or in part, exaggerated features. This is mostly visible on characters.     See? Susano has big arms and an unkempt, bushy beard. Kushi is svelte but has big flowing robes. Mushi has a big nose. Mr Orange has a big pendant, beard, and head. This is stuff done in cartoons and comics every day: emphasize the parts of the body which you want to draw attention to, and which reveal a character's personality. Disney had this idea a long time ago:  (Disney has more than just "cute" guidelines, if you go look for them) I'm not exploring animation as much, but you may be interested in how models deform. Squash and Stretch are important principles of animation, which we see to some extent in the game, such as when NPCs talk. If you want to know more, this video is pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYP7rJni1vc Okami also features exaggerated 3d models such as huge shrine gates, or white cords around objects. If we're embracing a painting style, then we can eschew realism here too! I think this can be used to draw the player's focus for gameplay reasons, but object dimensions are a part of style, and we also need to make sure there's enough space for brush strokes on textures. Advantages:
 The final effect I'm exploring is one I think only applies to characters. If you look at Amaterasu when she's standing still, you can see that both her main 3d model and its bordel model seem to warp and deform independently:  This effect is also applied to all other character models, and mimics hand-drawn 2d animation frames. You can imagine an artist sketching every frame of a character by hand, and none of their features turn out exactly the same. It's easy to find examples as video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYmxAfsvINA&t=10s or in video games (note the rough color look of the sprites): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aO6VFuUVrg&t=85s I think the effect is achieved by randomly moving all the vertices of character models and border models, on every frame in real-time, within certain bounds. It's also possible to use a pixel shader for something like this, but that would probably be more costly in terms of CPU and memory usage on the PS2. Model deformation may be one of the more costly effects already. Either way, it looks good, and thankfully it's not overused. Can you imagine everything on the screen deforming? That would just give us headaches. Thankfully Clover didn't apply the effect to everything so, like in 2d animation, we have a clear separation between "animated" and "background". Advantages:
--- To summarize
I'm aware there are a couple more visual effects, but they don't seem as important to the aesthetic of the game as these five, to me. Anaxite fucked around with this message at 00:34 on Feb 21, 2017 |
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Feb 20, 2017 20:03
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I have completed my analysis and determined that video games are fascinating. And this basically goes triple for games with distinctive art styles. This and Wind Waker are basically goldmines of interesting technical poo poo.
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Feb 20, 2017 23:57
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That's a nice catch, I just assumed it was done with shaders like similar effects in later games. I should have remembered the PS2 predated hardware shaders.
Sindai fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Feb 21, 2017 |
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Feb 21, 2017 00:03
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Anaxite posted:A real loving good post. Yo this is a really solid post on a lot of things I love about how this game achieves it's art style. I never even thought about how the outline effect was done before. Also a quick update on new videos, there probably won't be any this week. Fae and I both caught colds so we never got a chance to record this weekend. If we do get something out, it won't be until Wednesday at the earliest.
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Feb 21, 2017 00:09
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Fedule posted:I have completed my analysis and determined that video games are fascinating. I'd love to know how Wind Waker fall under that category! It looks great, though I don't know much beyond "it has cel shading and lacks long loading times". poorlywrittennovel posted:Yo this is a really solid post on a lot of things I love about how this game achieves it's art style. I never even thought about how the outline effect was done before. I didn't either until you posted the last video and I saw Ammy run around the tree. Then something clicked and I couldn't unsee it.
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Feb 21, 2017 00:24
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Anaxite posted:I'd love to know how Wind Waker fall under that category! It looks great, though I don't know much beyond "it has cel shading and lacks long loading times". Polycount has the deets. TLDR:
A guy on Medium is also doing a load of writeups about various Wind Waker effects, including an entire article about the ocean.
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Feb 21, 2017 01:03
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Fedule posted:
Holy poo poo.
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Feb 21, 2017 01:09
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I probably only understood about half the words in the those writeups but that poo poo is still fascinating to me. Though if I could just have one point clarified, what is occlusion and why is it a big deal?
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Feb 21, 2017 01:37
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YggiDee posted:I probably only understood about half the words in the those writeups but that poo poo is still fascinating to me. Occlusion is simply preventing stuff from being drawn. (not to be confused with "ambient occlusion" which is a lighting thing) Without going into details... game engines differentiate between what's loaded and what's being rendered; they know what stuff is around you at all times, but don't bother actually drawing that stuff unless you can see it - that way the stuff that is drawn can have more detail or more effects or whatever. Games can go to frankly obscene lengths to identify things that can't be seen and thus can safely not be drawn, to eke out every drop of GPU power available. (Crash Bandicoot, another deep vein of technical wizardry, blew everybody's minds (Sony included) by being able to occlude objects through complex-shaped textures like leaves.) Wind Waker just goes "gently caress it" and renders everything, even stuff you can't see, because its assets are just that streamlined and the GameCube is just that good.
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Feb 21, 2017 01:57
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Holy poo poo, that is crazy.
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Feb 21, 2017 02:00
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poorlywrittennovel posted:
And there's the one. Must have taken about 20 tries to get the Wii control to register properly on that Mr. Orange tree sequence. And every time you fail -- you get to watch the whole animation again. I held a grudge against Mr. Orange for a very long time.
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Feb 21, 2017 05:29
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So that black border thing is distinct from actual cel shading used in Wind Waker, Sly Cooper, Dark Cloud 2, etc? I always thought Okami looked different but I couldn't put my finger on how exactly
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Feb 21, 2017 05:57
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Mak0rz posted:So that black border thing is distinct from actual cel shading used in Wind Waker, Sly Cooper, Dark Cloud 2, etc? It's possible that one of those games renders 3d outlines in the same way, but I think rendering similarities stop there. Wind Waker doesn't even seem to use borders on 3d models, instead opting for the flat shading part only? Still, the intent is similar: recreating a style found in a 2d physical medium. Anaxite fucked around with this message at 07:09 on Feb 21, 2017 |
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Feb 21, 2017 07:06
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Anaxite posted:Wind Waker doesn't even seem to use borders on 3d models Phantom Ganon  That said, I actually kind of like how the black borders disappear like in that gif you posted. It's hard to explain but it looks unnatural in just the right way to me. It probably looked much better on the lower resolution PS2. And I forgot to mention in the previous post but using that technique is just brilliant. It really gives it a unique look.
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Feb 21, 2017 07:46
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Oh man, Okami!  I spent hours upon hours on the PS2 version and didn't even mind backtracking (it's not a spoiler to say there's gonna be backtracking, is it?) because everything was just so damned pretty.
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Feb 21, 2017 14:38
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