Good morning! I’m excited to share with you that Arashi: Castles of Sin launches exclusively on PlayStation VR tomorrow, August 10th.
In Arashi: Castles of Sin, take on the role of Kenshiro, an elite shinobi assassin. With an arsenal of feudal weapons and your wolf companion, Haru, you’ll avenge the ruthless bandits who terrorized the countryside and claimed the castles of feudal Japan.
One of the keys to creating this game was to keep it small, disjointed, and flexible. We’ve kept our approach as DIY as possible by using cutting edge mocap tools like an inertial motion capture suit for full body capture, mocap gloves for finger capture, and an app that captures high facial movement. quality. We captured all of this on a laptop under $ 1,000, proving it can be done without huge, expensive desktops.
By having these tools, we were able to have a mobile mocap studio capable of filming with a quality that would typically require a mocap scene, a dozen people, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in gear and equipment – the all with someone from Forrest Söderlind, Patrick Jandro and myself from our office last summer.
To provide motion capture for the fighters you will fight, we worked with Master Russell McCartney, Japanese Saber World Record Holder. As our Creative Director Tom Doyle likes to say, “You won’t just be fighting a villain with a sword; you are in fact up against one of the greatest swordsmen alive.
Your katana isn’t your only weapon though, it’s just one of Arashi’s ten different weapons. Meaningful player choices and expressive play is paramount to our Design Director, Peter Carlson, so we’ve made sure that each weapon has its own strengths and drawbacks, allowing players to take on challenges in the style of game of their choice.
Our team were passionate about presenting this story entirely in Japanese with subtitles. We have a deep love and appreciation for Japanese cinema from the 40’s and 50’s and wanted to transport the player straight into their own movie Criterion Collection.
We thought it was important to find a way to represent the cultural ways specific to Japan. Our solution: send a cell phone all over the world to Japan, set up a tripod and record to capture software while our Japanese comedians performed. As excited as we are about it, presenting the entire game in Japanese was an interesting challenge as none of our animators speak Japanese. Luckily, our 3D art manager Louis Lu and his wife are fluent and helped to make the lip sync and captions as consistent as possible.
There was still a lot of work from there and Forrest and Pat say it was one of the most complex and rewarding experiences for them on this project. To give you an overview of part of the process, we’ve prepared this video of Ayane, Kenshiro’s cousin and guide.
We wanted Haru to be not only a powerful weapon, but also your companion. To capture Haru’s spirit, we took a trip to a wildlife preserve, Predators of the Heart, and had an amazing day studying and playing with wolves.
Haru was a bit less DIY part of our process. Our plan was to be in a mocap studio and shoot some animations for her, but due to pandemic reasons it was a failure. We called our friends at Beyond Capture in Vancouver, Canada, who coordinated with us for a remote capture of four German Shepherds, each with a different role: neutral, aggressive, cinematic, and playful. In all of our careers doing a remote quadruped shoot was completely unprecedented and a huge undertaking, but we’re so happy with Haru.
Oh, and can you stroke the dog?
Yeah. You can stroke the dog. Well, the wolf.
When I play Arashi I feel like a stealthy, strategic ninja assassin in a playground with all my awesome toys. I burst out laughing with joy the first time I faced two enemies, one fighting with my katana and the other with my tanto. One of my favorite things is dropping a mine near a group of enemies and ordering Haru to distract them, luring them straight into my trap. Boom!
Our team is delighted to have you playing starting tomorrow, August 10th. We can’t wait to hear about your adventures in the shadows.
