The Art of Firewatch

Cool. Maybe we should get started.

First thing, I'm supposed to remind you to please turn off your cell phones.

And I guess otherwise, people still filing in. Okay. I guess we should begin.

Hello, everyone. Thank you for coming to this session instead of going right to lunch.

My name is Jane Ng, and I am an artist at Campo Santo. First, a little bit of background about myself.

I've been doing environment art for games professionally for over 12 years.

Before I joined Campo Santo, I was at Double Fine Productions for six years. Most recently, I was the lead artist on the cave.

Before Double Fine, I was part of much larger teams at EA.

I was a senior artist on Spore, and in the PS2 era, I was a lead world artist on Godfather.

I am now working on Firewatch, due out later this year, and this is a behind-the-scenes look at how we are translating a very graphic 2D art style into a 3D world that you can explore in first person.

Let's jump right in.

This is a poster we made for the announcement of the game almost exactly a year ago, actually right before GDC last year.

This poster art was also actually kind of the key art for our game.

At that point, the company was only three months old. Not everybody had started. We hadn't found a graphics programmer yet.

We knew the story we wanted to tell, but visually speaking, this was really all we had. This was the goalpost we set for ourselves.

While this aesthetic didn't just jump out of nowhere, the look of the game had been brewing for a few months. Let me show you.

This was the first concept sketch by Olly Moss when Sean and Jake, the co-founders of Campo Santo, first started talking with him about maybe working together.

And this is about maybe mid-2013. And here are some more early sketches.

The basic premise of the story was already known then. like we know that this happens in the National Forest,

that you play as a fire lookout, who spend a lot of time talking to another lookout in another tower.

Now let me show you how the game looks right now.

Thank you. Thank you.

For the next 23 minutes or so, I will explain how we were able to create this game world

with a very small art team in the last 12 months. And if you like what you see,

we have a public demo this Friday, actually. I will share more details at the end, and you can come see it for yourselves.

Okay, let's back up a little bit. What is Firewatch? Firewatch is a mystery set in the Wyoming wilderness.

where your only emotional lifeline is the person on the other end of a handheld radio.

It is a narrative exploration game made in a Unity engine.

We were using Unity 4.5 all last year, and we have just transitioned into Unity 5.

You play as Henry in first person, and you have full body awareness in the game.

You can look down and see your body, see that maybe you should hike outside a little more often,

see your boots going through the grass, your hands interacting in the world,

and you spend a lot of time talking to Lila over your handheld radio, and she's your supervisor.

Henry's story takes place in a very specific time in a very specific place.

We are trying to evoke, not necessarily recreate, a piece of wilderness in the Shoshone National Forest in Wyoming in the summer of 1989.

The world of Firewatch is visually very stylized, but for Henry's story to be believable and immersive, the world has to feel real.

We really want the player to feel physically connected to Henry in first person.