Summary
God of War (2018) was a first-party action-adventure title focused on a narrative-driven presentation that weaved the player in and out of gameplay and cinematic. From January 2016 to June 2017, I implemented several of the cinematics and in-level VO segments. Using a proprietary engine and Lua scripting, I maintained and iterated upon each setup.
With most of the cinematics, they would start with an interact prompt or walk-in funneling. These systems were created by the technical design and gameplay engineering departments. They gave us function hooks that we were able to setup in Lua to fire off the animations on the participants.
One of the more complicated setups were the World Serpent scenes. Aside from the massive size of the Serpent in these scenes, the water and the boat were also participants in the scene. The boat, in the scene for the introduction of the Serpent specifically, required updates to the syncing system due to the water level drop that occurs in the scene. Also, the water of the Caldera is not a synced participant of the scene and needed to be timed to the cinematics through script.
Probably the most complicated narrative sequence in the game was the sequence from the mountain back to the Caldera. The sequence required Freya, an AI entity, to lead the player through the space while also participating interaction with the environment. An AI system was created for Freya to be the leader of the group and impede the player from passing to avoid breakage of the sequence. This was toggleable through script for the player to go ahead of Freya to interact with doors. The arrow firing sequences were setup similar to the cinematics, just without the player being a participant in the animations. As for the doors, the normal interaction animations needed to be overridden in the sequence to add Freya as a participate.
Nick Murphy 