Genre: Fighting, Shooter, Hack and slash/Beat 'em up, Adventure, Indie
Furi
Furi Community Week - Speedrun with commentary
Hello Furist!
As you know, we are celebrating Furi’s community all along this week. You can read all the details here.
Speedrunning has always been part of the DNA of Furi, and we wanted to give it a dedicated spotlight during this event. You can now what the world record with Onnamusha by Dircashede, with commentaries from the speedrunner himself Dircashede, along with NerfyFox.
Thank you so much for your dedication to Furi!
Furi Community Week - Interview with Chris, CG Animator
Hello everyone,
The community week is still going on! Today, we are happy to share an interview of Chris Hoareau, Lead Animator & Artist at The Game Bakers. To learn more about his work on Furi, read below!
Hi Chris, can you present yourself and your job on Furi?
Hello! I am Chris and I am a French CG animator and artist, living near Paris. I'm 33. I always drew and wanted to work in entertainment. Fun fact, according to my school teachers, I did my first flipbook at only 4 years old. In animation, I like moves that use the whole body (like fighting, you know). I also like to add unnecessary details, and I'm always the guy who’s late (I am sorry about this, truly). In life, I like speed, having fun, learning things - I actually want to learn everything - and, I'm also the guy who’s late.
For Furi I was in charge of the gameplay animations: that includes the long walk on the path, the fights, and some cutscenes. I also rigged* all the characters. I also storyboarded The Flame's cutscenes. 2023, it will be my 10-year anniversary at The Game Bakers, so cheers!
Furi is about creating intense satisfaction to players, as Emeric Thoa, Creative Director, explains in a blog post. How is animation part of creating satisfaction? What were the keys to making Furi’s animation?
There are at least two categories of animations in the game that create satisfaction for players, without talking about cutscenes which make the story go forward.
First, the ones we call “Melee Attacks” (when the boss is stunned, and the player attacks to trigger a short cutscene) are very pleasant to watch. The player can appreciate the nasty blows the bosses have to swallow.
Then, Furi's gameplay lets players do really quick moves to avoid, parry or attack bosses. Our animations just push up those actions to a next level, that makes them even more satisfactory.
But I want to say it’s really the work of the whole team, animations alone wouldn’t be enough!
Furi is also a game about facing challenge. What was the biggest challenge regarding animation on Furi?
The biggest challenge was to make fighting animations that were fast but also readable to the human eye. It was my intention, but it was pretty hard to do, especially as I was a junior back then. I had not that much experience in animation. Some of the fighting animation length was something like 2 frames (Furi was animated at 30 frames per second, so that is pretty short in time). I hope players managed to see all the nice details we added!
Can you share some references you used to animate some of Furi’s bosses?
For sure!
First, Takashi Okazaki (character designer of Furi) drew some cool and original posings for Rider. I'm thinking about Rider's running stance: holding his sword in two hands right in front of him while running at something like 50mph, haha.
I love and grew up with Japanese culture, mostly anime (precisely "shonen neketsu" like Dragon Ball, Saint Seiya, Hokuto No Ken, etc...) so I am imbued with these brutal accelerations, inhuman movements and iconic posings.
I also practiced martial arts for a few years, so I recorded myself with my smartphone smashing pillows in the living room of my previous apartment to reproduce and adjust my moves in the game. (Don’t ask, I will not share those videos).
Emeric, who has a big movie culture, shared some movie scenes that help me a lot, for instance from the Miyamoto Musashi movies. He shared ideas coming from fighting games like Soul Calibur or Metal Gear. He already had an excellent vision of the game before its conception.
Finally, I can tell that there was also a big part of “feeling”. I mean, the characters’ designs have strong personalities. Just looking at Takashi Okazaki's artworks was often enough to know how to animate and give life to each boss.
What did you enjoy the most while working on the game?
To be honest, as an animator, Furi was the first game I worked on for PC and consoles. Just wow ! Secondly, this is a fighting game! I'm keen on fighting games. As I said before, I practiced martial arts and I really love them. It was just like a dream come true to animate all those incredible fighters! Thirdly, there was a big creation part. I was and felt really free to create some fighting moves. Every time I worked on a new boss, it was like entering a new world, with new feelings. It was enriching to try to imagine the mindset of each boss.
How did you proceed to animate Onnamusha, the new rider? What did you have to do to make her move as the rider?
I can't reveal all the magic tricks, right?
Actually, Onnamusha uses almost all the same animations as Rider. The reason was that Onnamusha had to play correctly the existing cutscenes as the new Rider. To do this, I had to set up the 3D model (made by the awesome CG artist Anthony Beyer) so she had more or less the same body proportions to share the same rigged skeleton as Rider. In addition, Onnamusha had to keep her female shape, and that was the tricky thing: to have a female body share the skeleton of Rider. The more the two characters had the same proportions, the more the game and cutscenes animations fit.
Was there anything unexpected that happened during the development?
Developing a game IS a source of unexpected things! There is always something new to learn and something new to fix.
One thing that wasn't really planned and gave me some trouble was that I had to animate (by hand) Rider's hair and cape. For the first iterations of Furi, these parts relied on the physics of the game, and it was very beautiful. Then came the optimization pass (it was obviously very important to have a good frame rate to be able to play properly) and we had to make compromises.
Fortunately, I had already done that before on The Burst hat bands. It was already planned to animate the ribbons "by hand", so I knew how to do it. At that time, we already knew that it would require too much resource to have her bands animated by the game physics, so, it was not an option. Everything was planned in the rig* and the animations of The Burst, and baked into her animations files.
So, I had to adapt Rider's rig by adding bones to his hair and to his cape. To have something like a natural rendering, I simulated the physics of the hair and the cape and I created the animations one by one. I added wind effects and played with gravity when it was necessary. For example, when Rider runs, his hair and his cape had to go backwards. It meant I had to re-animate, re-export, and reintegrate the animations of Rider with the hair and the cape animations in the files. It was a lot of work!
Do you have any last word for Furi’s players?
For players: if you haven't finished the game, please do! For animators: don't hesitate to do weird new things that can lead to great ones! For me (how snooty): don't forget to enjoy life!
* Like for a puppet, rigging is the creating the elements necessary to animate a character. First, we create a skeleton which will more or less influence the body parts that we want to move. Then, to animate it more easliy, we create "controllers" of the skeleton, which allow the bones to be moved as desired. A rig = skeleton + controllers on the CG model of the character.
Furi Community Week - Interview with The Toxic Avenger!
Hi Furist!
We know how much you love Furi’s soundtrack, as we receive a ton of feedback about it. And it’s keeps going strong, and we regularly hear from players who discovered the game through its music! This community week is the perfect time to share some up-to-date data on the success of the OST. You can find a brand-new infography here.
Thanks to the spectacular work of Danger, Carpenter Brut, The Toxic Avengers, Waveshaper, SCATTLE, kn1ght & Lorn, streaming equals to over 600 years of listening 😱.
To celebrate the community week, we had a chat with The Toxic Avenger about his work on the OST.
Hello, you worked on Furi’s original soundtrack and composed two tracks and in particular Make This Right, that became emblematic of the game, and was in the launch trailer. Can you introduce yourself to those who don’t know you? Sure! My name is Simon, I’ve been making electronic music for almost 25 years now, I’ve released 5 albums and participated in several movies and video games soundtracks.
What is your connection to video games? I am 40 years old, I started playing with Galaga on NES, which means I’ve been playing for almost 35 years. At times a lot, at times a little, but there is always something to play near me. For the last ten years I’ve been able to see the behind the scenes of gaming and work together with video game creators.
For Furi, it was the first time you composed for a video game. How was the collaboration, and how did you approach this new adventure? It was indeed the first time I composed original tracks! My music had already been used in games like Need For Speed or Watch Dogs. The collaboration went very well in the sense that I understood quickly what The Game Bakers wanted, and they also understood me very well, it’s always very nice to understand each other! I took the work to heart because I know the influence that video games can have, and I was immediately charmed by the little I could see of the game before working on it.
In Furi, the music adapts to what is happening in the fight, especially the phases of the bosses. How did you manage this? For me, it was a first! Composing differently. When a character moves from A to B, let’s say, B being a more tense moment in the game than A, the music has to adapt, become denser, and intensify. For that, I had to compose in parts of tracks, with layers of layers and elements that can be assembled and removed if the player decides all of a sudden to go back closer to point A. I had to cut the track as in making different scenes, a bit like movie editing… but I don’t know if I’m very clear 😀
What was your biggest inspiration to compose Make This Right & My Only Chance? I was lucky that The Game Bakers approached me and asked me to do what I am used to doing! So it was very easy for me, but obviously, the big inspiration was what I saw of the game. Graphically it influenced me a lot, it looked sumptuous!
What do you enjoy most about composing for video games? To wake up the teenager in me (he’s never really asleep anyway). I also love to make music to the image.
Thank you! Do you have any news to share for our players? Yes! I just released my new album, a double album in fact! It’s called « Yes future » and I’m pretty proud of it!
Patch Notes - 21 june 2022
Hello everyone,
We hope you are well and that you enjoyed fighting the guardians with Onnamusha, as well as the last free update. We would like to thank you for all your support on Furi, it’s amazing to see how much you are involved with the game 6 years after its release.
We just released this small update to fix some bugs, you will find the patch notes below.
Fixed a bug that permitted to skip the Edge fight in Practice mode
Fixed a pattern in Furier difficulty during the Line fight
Fixed missing feedbacks while tweaking the audio settings
Fixed the visual quality setting being reset after restarting the game
Fixed the loading screen on SteamDeck
Furi Onnamusha DLC: New fighter, new skills, new challenge!
Hello everyone,
The new DLC Onnamusha for Furi is now available!
The Onnamusha DLC will let you play as Onnamusha Rider, a powerful fighter that alternates between two stances: fast and agile or slower but lethal until she's able to unleash the devastating power of the Star. The new gameplay mechanics bring new challenges, for a complete rediscovery of the game.
With Onnamusha Rider, the game can be played again in Story, Speedrun and Practice modes.
In the Furi free update that is available today too, we have included all previous content that was released on the game, and in particular the previous “One More Fight” DLC with The Flame boss fight (and secret boss Bernard).
The DLC ($/€6.99) and the free update are available now on Steam.
It's time to go back, and fight for freedom again!
We’ve read all the Furi fans messages and this request really stuck with us: “I wish I could forget Furi to discover it for the first time all over again”. We asked ourselves: how could we achieve that? Is there a way for players to rediscover Furi?
A couple of weeks later we were working on Onnamusha.
The Onnamusha DLC will let you play as Onnamusha Rider, a powerful fighter that alternates between two stances: fast and agile or slower but lethal until she's able to unleash the devastating power of the Star. The new gameplay mechanics bring new challenges, for a complete rediscovery of the game.
With Onnamusha Rider, the game can be played again in Story, Speedrun and Practice modes.
The studio will also publish a free update to the base game on all platforms, that includes all paid and free content available for Furi: One More Fight DLC and all the improvements made since the release (Invincible Mode, Furier Speedrun, Alternate controls...).
The DLC ($6.99) and the free update will be available on May 17th.
Benjamin Le Moullec was the combat designer for Furi (and he is now working on the boss fights for Cyberpunk 2077!). For this special fighting sale, he agreed to return to the fight against The Burst to give you some insights on the design of this very special boss. We know The Burst has seen a few of you throw their controllers at their screens, and she also gave you the immense satisfaction of finally defeating her...
"You can't see me, but I can see you." - The Burst
What the whole idea behind The Burst combat design and mechanics? How did he manage to balance it? What are the best tips to beat her?
Be there today at 11 PM CET / 2PM PT!
Haven will be available on December 3
Hello everyone,
We're so pleased to tell you that our upcoming game Haven will be available on December 3. We are also happy to share with you a brand new story trailer "Can love conquer all?" Watch it below:
[previewyoutube="bVmGYPrzOxc;full"]
In Haven play as a couple in love, Yu and Kay, who have left everything they’ve known to escape to an eerie and unstable planet in hopes to stay together. Play both characters at the same time while exploring an authentic and relatable relationship. Synchronize the combat of both characters while battling to protect their lives and the relationship. Glide together through a mysterious landscape, craft, cook, and gather resources to make a cozy home, repair your ship, fight in real-time, and make the ultimate choice about if it’s worth sacrificing everything for love.
Haven is a departure from Furi. While they share a similar theme of fighting for freedom, the context and game feel is entirely different. Haven allows players a look into the everyday life of Yu and Kay while inviting players to follow their adventures, relax, laugh, and connect to the characters. While Haven is not without fighting, thrills, and unexpected surprises, it does take you on a journey often not explored in games: one of a true adult relationship.
We hope that you will ponder nuanced questions about the meaning of love and freedom and if love is worth sacrificing everything for, a theme that will not be unknown to you if you finished Furi.
We hope you will enjoy it!
The Game Bakers
Fan Art Winners Revealed!
Hello everyone,
Thank you so much to everyone who participated in both Furi community week and to the Furi fan art contest.
We’re so honoured to say we’ve received 33 submissions! It was so hard for us to narrow it down to just 4, to be quite frank.
Our judges consisted of:
Emeric Thoa - Creative Direction, Design, Production
Anthony Beyer - Art Direction and Tech
Simon <> Troussellier - Concept Art
Mylène Lourdel - PR & Marketing
And me, Trish! Aka Community Management
And without further ado, here are our 3 winners: 1st place is: sproong, deviantart, vk
Coup de Coeur is: Esidisi_86, twitter Congrats to all 4, we will be in touch shortly about your goodies. ;)
We also want to give a special shout-out to everyone else, because we’re honestly in awe by the amount of fan art we’ve received. So, please enjoy the rest of the submissions below:
Hello everyone, The celebration week for Furi has now come to a close.
We’re so grateful and humbled to have an amazing community such as this one.
In case you missed it, we posted an article about all the behind the scenes that went into making Furi.
In addition, we also had a in-depth analysis by our Boss Designer, Benjamin about what it took to create the Boss Burst and the challenges around her creation:
The music of Furi is so integral and important to us, and it’s also equally as important to us to keep supporting the artists. We encourage you to check out the thread we created about what all the artists have been up to since the release of Furi:
Lastly, in case you missed it, there are still a few more days for our Fan Art contest!
To participate, please send your fan art, your nickname, your social media profile and the name of your art to fanartcontest@thegamebakers.com. Don't hesitate to share it also on social media with #furifanartcontest or in our community hub here! Be careful, you have to send us an email to participate, posting on social media doesn't count.
Here are the prizes for the winners: 1st: Limited Run Furi Definitive Edition (Switch or PS4) + Furi Artbook + Furi Original Soundtrack LP (Vinyl) + Poster Rider Victory + Poster All Bosses 2nd: Furi Artbook + Furi Original Soundtrack CD + Poster Rider Victory + Poster All Bosses 3nd: Furi Original Soundtrack CD + Poster Rider Victory + Poster All Bosses “Coup de coeur”: Furi Original Soundtrack CD + Poster Rider Victory + Poster All Bosses
