Nyheter
Herdling gives the animal kingdom and an underused mechanic the respect they deserve
F
Francisco Dominguez
Taking to the alpine heights over the salty seas, Creative Lead Don Schmocker concedes herding is an unusual and underexplored choice of mechanic for the developers, players, and their protagonist alike. From the moment they rise from an inauspicious slumber on a mattress beneath a dark forgotten bridge, “she's totally new at it and you, as a player, [are] also new to the whole thing. You have to learn the same way she has to learn it.”
The mechanic operates by indirect control, a sort of repulsion: as you move towards your domesticated beast, it moves in the opposite direction. This is a familiar experience, whether you're cornering a top-hat wearing bunny in Super Mario Odyssey or one of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s glowing, elusive Petanks, but Okomotive has expanded this somewhat niche occurrence into a core mechanic. There’s a reason The Last Guardian didn’t inspire a wave of pet-training imitators.
“If you don't have a crosshair or something, it's really difficult to make it intuitive,” says Don. Herdling’s solution is simple: hold the right trigger and move to usher them in the opposite direction from where you’re standing. Feed them enough plants, and you can stampede, sprinting beside them in a stirring gallop. But this counts for little without giving the calicorns the enthusiasm and unpredictability displayed by real animals, which meant bending the cold dictates of programming logic.
“From a coder perspective, it is really easy to make the animals just behave like robots,” says Technical Director Isabelle Roesch. “For example, if you just repel them away from you, they just walk in exactly that direction. They felt like Roombas! It didn't feel like an animal.”
With a significant amount of fine-tuning, the team slowly made the herd feel more alive and less like an army of autonomous vacuum cleaners. Adding the hierarchical structures which a real herd follows, like a self-appointed frontrunner leading the way, and giving each individual calicorn its own personality—some may be curious and frolic away from the group, others walk with a distinctive gait—all benefit from what’s swiftly become one of Okomotive’s specialities.
“Animal animation is severely underrated,” explains Marketing and Communications Lead Alice Ruppert, who balances her role at Okomotive with an unofficial position as video games’ foremost horse expert with her website, The Mane Quest. “A lot of people have no idea how to do quadruped animation,” says Ruppert, who’s been impressed by animator Martina Hugentobler’s passion and mastery for recreating furry friends in an industry prone to prioritizing men in armor, tanks, guns, and swords.
“So much focus goes into humans or objects—I'm sure more money has been invested in making accurate reload animations for firearms than has ever been put into animals,” adds Ruppert. “I think that's bad! It would be a lot cooler if more people took animal animation seriously, done with the care and love and passion it deserves.”
The team’s close study of animal behavior included embarking on an alpaca trek and spending significant periods of time in the company of cows, learning about mountain goats, yaks, and all manner of mountain-life. And that strategy worked. Despite the formidable size calicorn herds reach over time, playtesters became very attached to individuals in the crowd.
“It was good to see. When an animal got injured or died, they were really sad,” says Roesch, although achieving the emotional bonding they aimed for had unfortunate consequences. One player’s randomized calicorn shared the same name as a playtester’s sadly departed pet. The calicorn died too, and they were devastated. The sympathetic team added an easy mode where calicorns never die to avoid these emotionally confronting scenarios.
Yet a sense of threat remains important to underline that somber responsibility for a herd’s well-being. “It's not just like walking your dog. You have a job to do,” says Don, who understands danger brings you and your herd closer together. Certain objects and animals can damage your calicorns, and cliffs and crevices can cause harm, or even the unfortunate death of a calicorn or the need for an urgent rescue operation.
Those calicorns may be lovable and distinctive, but Okomotive also wanted to give them a hint of eerie strangeness alongside those familiar animal mannerisms. “One of the main inspirations were Kukeri,” says Don, referencing the yeti-like fur costumes of Eastern European spirit-warding tradition. “They're Bulgarian folklore costumes, sometimes they have bells and lots of decorations, and they look really spooky. Switzerland has something similar and as a child I was really afraid of them. You can imagine there's a person under this costume. I really wanted to bring that a bit into the game, so there's like a mystery to it, what's under all the fur?”
Given their Swiss location, it’s tempting to draw the inevitable comparison between Herdling’s vast, mountainous expanses and the Alps, visible from Okomotive’s hometown of Zurich on a clear day. Don reveals they looked further afield, to the peerless peaks of the Himalayan mountains. “In Switzerland, it feels a bit smaller,” Don continues. “You feel like you're still in control. You have paths, it feels very beautiful and ideal for tourists. We wanted to bring something to the game where it's a bit more untouched and get into more fantastical areas.”
When it came to creating these fantastical areas, shifting from FAR’s 2D designs to full 3D wasn’t as scary a proposition as they thought: The series always used 3D backgrounds. Camera behavior was another matter, as it took a new hire months to handle Herdling’s unique demand to focus on both player and herd at once. The sumptuous vistas regularly seen in the likes of Journey could rely on the player's focus remaining on a single point of interest; thatgamecompany didn’t have need to keep a wayward herd in frame.
With the team’s passion and fondness for their endearing yet ever-so-slightly creepy creations, there’s no doubt Okomotive feel their offbeat, lovable calicorns are worth the effort. It won’t take long for players to share the same feeling.
Herdling is coming out soon on Epic Games Store.