This week we have Technical Director Nick Slaven joining us. He’s going to share his thoughts on the important tools we’ve developed to build all the things we need for our narratives, like cutscenes, missions and dialogue:
Quests and princesses and chat, oh my.
Here at the Chinese Room we are all about storytelling. Our games are rich in narrative and the way we tell them, and for the story to make sense, we need to give the player something to do, other than just walking.
My name is Nick and I make sure that our team are able to tell stories and give the player things to do. As a studio working on two large projects, we have to be smart about how we use our technology. We’re building systems that are used on both Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines 2 and Still Wakes the Deep and fits the needs for both those teams and makes everyone’s work easier. As a narrative studio, that means tools for storytelling.
Storytelling involves more than just the spoken word. We may want to travel across the land to obtain the magical artefact that unlocks the door to the princess’ castle. I’ll stop here before I embarrass myself more with my lack of narrative ability. The point remains, in a few words I can describe something of a story and it materialises in your imagination.
Let’s back up a bit, it’s easy for us to interpret, but how do we get the game to recognise that you have got the magical artefact and how does picking it up then unlock a door to allow you to progress in your quest. How do we do that?
Our answer was to develop a way of describing the story as a sequence of events that the game engine can interpret, we call this mission scripting.
Mission scripting is a high level way of representing a sequence of events that the player may need to solve in order for the story to progress. For instance, you may need to find a key to open a door. We do this by representing the state of the game story and the event that will drive the story forward. In this case, opening the door; we look for a key, and only once we’ve found the key can we open the door, and face whatever is in the room.
Here's a screenshot of how this might look in our mission scripting system.
Example mission in the scripting system.
In a proper game story, there will be hundreds of states, on many story paths, here’s a small snippet of one of the missions in one of our current games.
There’s a lot happening, but having a simple way of defining the mission structure allows our design team to quickly iterate on the missions and get them as good as they can be.
That’s the doing bit, but what about the talking?
Branching narrative is complex. From each decision point the story can go many ways. Rather than write our own tech for this we decided to use Ink, an open source narrative scripting language created by Inkle studios. We needed to port this from C# to C++ to get it working with Unreal, but this was way quicker than writing our own narrative scripting system from scratch.
Visual example of a text in Ink. Not part of Bloodlines 2.
Ink allows our narrative team to create the spoken word that accompanies the mission scripting to tell the story of the game. This is written as a narrative script, much in the same way that screenplays are written for film and tv.
Arone, our principal narrative designer, had this to say about using Ink for narrative creation.
Arone Le Bray: “It's interesting... There are definitely a bunch of things that I like about it and I think those are mostly from the point of view of how we have integrated it. We can use the basic scripting language inside it to make scenes that are non-linear and have reactivity without having to re-write the same scene multiple times.
Then, being able to put a single conversation file into a block that fires in-game, without needing to be fiddly with a lot of scripting there? Also lovely. But yes, it doesn't have a huge barrier to entry for using it as newbies, or even sharing our work with other teams. At its base, it's a word document, but the fact that the Ink formatting is present lets us make that word document (which most people already understand) into a functional, nearly-live game development tool? That's a HUGE win.”
How do we then make that into animation and audio?
Our solution was to introduce the ‘dope sheet’. We stole this name from the animation industry, but essentially for each line of dialogue the authors create, we can specify an audio event, along with animations for the face and body and a bunch of other things. The dope sheet is like a spreadsheet in excel, but with bells and whistles that allow us to preview audio and animation as we set up the scenes for dialogue in the game.
When the player makes a text choice in the game, the system presents that choice to the Ink runtime, in return we get a text response which we cross reference via the dope sheet to get the animations and audio to play to show back to the player.
Combining mission scripting and Ink have given us a very flexible and powerful system in which we can tell stories. We are using these systems on all the titles we are creating.
As we’ve had so much of a step up from using ink, we thought it only right to give something back, and so we have created Inkpot, which is a lightweight blueprint friendly wrapper of our C++ port of the Ink runtime. This is now freely available from our GitHub site. You can download this tool and use it in Unreal for yourselves. If you do, let us know! We’d love to see what people create.
Coming later this month is the much awaited extended gameplay reveal video. In another two weeks we will also bring you a developer diary.
A Dive into Next-Gen Game Development
My name is Andrea Sancio, and I am the Associate Technical Director working on Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 at The Chinese Room. Together with Nick Slaven, our Studio Technical Director, it has been my honour to lead our talented team on the technical side of the game.
I’m going to share with you now a behind-the-scenes look at what our team has been doing on the game, and when you play it, we hope that you will all love it as much as we do.
In the ever-evolving world of video game development, staying at the cutting edge is a continuous pursuit. With the release of Unreal Engine 5, the landscape has shifted dramatically, presenting game developers with an array of groundbreaking technologies and tools. I wanted to delve into our experiences and challenges with some of the experimental technologies that have come to define UE5: Nanite, Virtual Shadow Maps and Lumen. These technologies play a pivotal role in creating a realistic and dark world that aligns perfectly with the neo-noir art direction of our game.
An important milestone in our development was the upgrade from Unreal 4 to Unreal 5. It was a big risk because normally you lock in the version of your development engine early. The changes touched every part of the game, and all our scenes, lighting and assets had to be converted. All the dev teams communicated with us brilliantly to make sure the new tools were exactly what we needed to make the game look amazing and run smoothly.
Lumen is a new real-time global illumination tech. It brings a level of realism to game lighting with raytracing to simulate the path of light and how it interacts with surfaces and materials. It can simulate indirect (bounce) lighting and reflections. However, integrating Lumen into our games was no small feat. Ensuring consistent and smooth performance was the key to achieving the atmospheric lighting required for our world. Working with dynamic lighting and shadow has always been a challenge. In performance terms it was expensive, placing lights is an art and overlapping lights exponentially increase complexity and the costs of rendering the scene because a lot of calculation must be done for each pixel hit by each light. Normally, the solution is to “pre-bake” lights. All the shadows were saved to the level before release, and you couldn’t change them. This provided great quality results for a cheap cost, but the lights and shadows were... well... faked. You would then have to include other tricks like light probes to show that on objects moving inside that space.
Lumen lets us change the colour, position, and intensity of lots of lights that can change dynamically. So to figure out the best way to include these new lights, we spent a lot of time working with our artists. It works by storing all the surfaces hit by light in a memory cache. This cache is at a lower resolution than the output. This means it’s way faster to calculate the effects of lighting. Then, Lumen uses Temporal Upsampling which makes the lower resolution larger without losing quality and detail. None of this can work without Nanite, Cached Virtual Shadows and Temporal Super Resolution so we adapted all those technologies too!
Virtual Shadow Maps introduced a fundamental change in how we handle shadows in Unreal Engine 5. By decoupling the shadow resolution from screen resolution, this technology delivers razor-sharp shadows with minimal performance overhead. Implementing Virtual Shadow Maps required a rethinking of our shadow casting and rendering techniques, but the result was a marked improvement in the visual quality. This was especially crucial in creating the dark and mysterious shadows that are synonymous with the neo-noir genre.
If you want fast frame rates, Programmers have always had to contend with draw calls. Draw calls are instructions sent from the Central Processing Unit (CPU) to the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). To understand it in simple terms, think of a draw call as a request to draw or render a particular set of graphics. Each draw call carries information about how to paint a part of the scene - this includes textures, shading information, and geometry (like vertices). However, too many draw calls can slow down a game because each call requires the CPU and GPU to communicate and process information, which is valuable time spent when one frame is a fraction of a second. Nanite marks a seismic shift in how we handle geometry in games. Rather than relying on traditional Level of Detail (LOD) systems, Nanite virtualises geometry, allowing for detailed assets and performance. With Nanite all the meshes that use the same material get placed in what is called a "bucket” and are processed on the same draw call, greatly reducing their number. It reduces the complexity of asset creation but also opens the door to photorealistic environments that were previously unattainable. Now we can have some ornate architecture and densely detailed environments in our scenes.
Debugging and optimising our code and the world environment became increasingly complex, and we were acutely aware of the constant need to stay up to date with frequent engine upgrades. These upgrades were essential for acquiring crucial fixes and performance improvements. This is a process that many studios might prefer to avoid, as such transitions rarely occur without their own costs. With limited documentation and a scarcity of experienced individuals to consult, our journey involved extensive research, talking with Epic, trials and errors.
It feels cheesy to say but making all this work for our team made everyone’s bond stronger because we all had to communicate constantly. The results were worth it because our art team used it to realise the neo-noir direction they were looking for. And because games are made with tools and technology developed during previous games, The Chinese Room’s future titles will benefit from this hard work too. Everyone did a great job to best use the new workflows. Personally, after many years on projects that used similar approaches, this was a fresh and exciting evolution!
Your experience of playing the game should be seamless. In a way, the less you think about the tech as you’re playing, the better we did our jobs. It’s been a pride of our careers to take on a project that is already so complex on many different levels, and to give it a chance to be ground-breaking in the realm of visual fidelity.
What’s Next
Following the holiday break, we’ll be back in January with more dev diaries and an extended gameplay reveal of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2.
Clan Reveal: Ventrue
Good evening Kindred,
Last month, we announced three of four playable clans in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2: Brujah, Tremere and Banu Haqim. Today, we’d like to share the fourth clan with you: Ventrue. The clan assets for Ventrue are in the process of being finalized, and we will share assets and gameplay showing off the playstyle of Ventrue during next year. Ahead of that deep dive we’re showing off an in-game render of Phyre in one of the Ventrue-themed outfits (all clans can earn all outfits).
Following launch, two additional clans will be made available in DLC: one giving you a new way to experience the main-game and another offering a completely unique Seattle story.
Nicknames
The Clan of Kings, Blue Bloods, Tyrants, Warlords, Patricians, Borgias
Who are the Ventrue?
Ventrue vampires usually choose their progeny from mortals familiar with power, wealth and influence. Seeing themselves as the rightful leaders of vampire society, Kindred of clan Ventrue take up the mantle of leadership wherever possible, often in the form of high positions in Camarilla Courts.
What can you expect from playing a Ventrue?
Ventrue are blue blooded tyrants who incite obedience in both their allies and their foes. Using the Disciplines of Presence and Dominate, they can mesmerize as well as awe their prey. Feeding builds up Fortitude, allowing the Ventrue to soak up more damage in case any enemy is powerful enough to resist their force of will.
Render of female Phyre with one of the Ventrue-styled outfits. All clans can earn all outfits.
Concept Art
Ventrue powers focus on domination, forcing foes to obey your commands.
What’s next?
Following the holiday break, we’ll be back with an extended gameplay reveal in January 2024 before going into depth on each playable clan during the opening months of 2024.
Clan Reveal: Banu Haqim
Our Third Playable Clan
Good evening Kindred,
Earlier this month, we announced the first two clans of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2, Brujah and Tremere. Today at PC Gamer Most Wanted, we introduce the third playable clan of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2.
Following launch, two additional clans will be made available in DLC: one giving you a new way to experience the main-game and another offering a completely unique Seattle story.
Nicknames
The Clan of the Hunt, Assassins, Children of Haqim, Saracens, Mediators, Lawmen
Who are the Banu Haqim?
Cursed with a thirst for the Blood of other vampires, the Banu Haqim stalk the night as judges and lawbringers. To this end, most Banu Haqim adhere to a strict code of conduct - derived from law, faith, or personal ethics - sating their Hunger on those that breach these convictions.
What can you expect from playing a Banu Haqim?
Banu Haqim takes the role of a strategic stalker, using shadows to their advantage. You are a predator on a hunt, and your discipline powers focus on stalking, assassination, and silently moving faster than your foes can track.
Render of female Phyre with one of the Banu Haqim-styled outfits. All clans can earn all outfits.
Banu Haqim powers focus on strategic stalking, avoiding attacks and assassination.
What’s next?
Banu Haqim is the third clan we’ve revealed for Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2, we'll be back in December for the next clan reveal. Following the holiday break, we’ll be back with an extended gameplay reveal in January 2024 before going into depth on each playable clan during the opening months of 2024.
Dev Diary Recap #2 - Phyre & Narrative
Good evening Kindred,
This week, we have another recap diary where The Chinese Room Community Manager Josh Matthews meets Ian Thomas, Sarah Longthorne and Arone Le Bray. In this recap, Sarah recaps parts of her dev diary, and is joined by Ian Thomas and Arone Le Bray to go into more depth on the main character, as well as answering a few fan questions relating to the main character and the dev diary on Narrative Atmosphere and Themes.
Render of female Phyre
What’s Next
Tomorrow, 30th of November, we are revealing the third playable clan, at the PC Gamer Show: Most Wanted, and we’ll be back with a new dev diary in two weeks. This time it will be Andrea Sancio, Associate Technical Director sharing his thoughts on how TCR are working with Unreal 5. After the holidays, we’ll be back with more dev diaries in January.
Dev Diary Recap #1 - Atmosphere and Art
Good evening Kindred,
This week, as mentioned in our last dev diary, we’re bringing you our first video recap. Straight from The Chinese Room and their Community Manager Josh Matthews, you’ll hear from earlier dev diary authors Michele Nucera (Senior Concept Artist), Alex Skidmore (Project Creative Director) and Ben Matthews (Associate Art Director). In this recap, they’ll summarize their individual diaries, share additional thoughts and answer fan questions.
What’s Next
We’ll be back with the next dev diary in two weeks and we’re looking forward to our third clan reveal at PC Gamer Show: Most Wanted.
Clan Reveal: Tremere
Our Second Playable Clan
Good evening Kindred,
Last week we revealed the first of the playable clans for Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2, Brujah. Today we’re excited to be sharing the second playable of the four available at release, in Fall of 2024. Following launch, two additional clans will be made available in DLC: one giving you a new way to experience the main-game and another offering a completely unique Seattle story.
From the ashes of the attack on their main chantry, the Tremere know the clan is injured, but far from fallen.
Nicknames
The Broken Clan, Usurpers, Warlocks, Haemetics, Thaumaturges, Transgressors, Blood Mages
Who are the Tremere?
Clan Tremere embraces scholars, academics, researchers, and other relentless pursuers of knowledge. These Kindred have an obsession with blood and vitae — vampire Blood — beyond even that of other Kindred, an obsession which extends to its control. Whether the blood coursing through their enemies veins, or a Tremere’s own vitae, a drop of red can turn into a deadly weapon in the hands of an experienced Warlock.
Tremeres are experts in Blood Sorcery, giving them Discipline powers that can shape vitae.
What to expect when playing a Tremere
As a Tremere in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2, you use your arcane powers to control your own Blood and that of your foes. The playstyle is rewarding when keeping your distance in combat, making enemies scream in agony as you boil their blood, shaping your own vitae into projectiles, or even ripping the blood from their veins.
Render of Phyre as a female with one of the Tremere-styled outfits. All clans can earn all outfits..
What’s next?
Next week, we’re on hiatus for Thanksgiving, but we’ll be back with a third playable clan at the PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted on the 30th of November.
Clan Reveal: Brujah
First Playable Clan
Good evening Kindred,
Today the countdown begins! We’re revealing the first of four playable clans available at release in Fall 2024 in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 today. Following launch, two additional clans will be made available in DLC: one giving you a new way to experience the main-game and another offering a completely unique Seattle story.
No huge surprise in which clan’s boot is kicking open the door first… Don’t get too comfortable though, there’s always something unexpected in World of Darkness.
Nicknames
The Learned Clan, Rabble, Punks, Hipsters, Prometheans, Rebels, Philosopher-Kings, Hellenes
Who are the Brujah?
The learned clan, the clan of radicals, the clan commonly misjudged as punks looking for trouble, the Brujah are guided by passion and dedication to an ideal. And if they have the supernatural strength to back that passion up, who are you to argue? Rebellion unites their blood, whether that rebellion is of the subtle lend me your ears kind or the fists out, fire in the streets sack of Rome kind is down to the individual.
Brujah powers enhance your speed and power.
Playing a Brujah in Bloodlines 2
If you’re a player who leaves the shadows to the cowards, knows the frontline is where the fun is and idealistically rebels against power, Brujah is your clan.
In Bloodlines 2, Clan Brujah will offer a brutal melee playstyle with its abilities (in Vampire: The Masquerade, known as Disciplines) getting you into the fray and rewarding you for staying there. Exemplified in the video, our Brujah uses charge to gain a burst of momentum, grab an enemy, drag them with you and body slam them into a wall. Don’t assume you’re limited to charging just one enemy either. In early 2024, we’ll be back with a complete list of Brujah discipline powers you will be able to use in game.
Render of Phyre with one of the Brujah-styled outfits. All clans can earn all outfits.
What’s next?
Brujah is the first of four clans available at release in Fall 2024 and next week, we’ll be back with the second playable clan. The following week, we’ll be on Thanksgiving hiatus, before coming back to reveal the third playable clan.
Creating Vampiric Concepts in Unreal
Hi, I’m Michele Nucera, Senior Concept Artist. I’ve been looking forward to showing you the hard work that our art team has done to bring life into our game. We’re using a relatively new technique in concept art to help us. Normally all the screenshots you see are fully finished levels with lighting and details in-game. But today I’ll be showing some of the earlier versions that we use to visualise what that final product will look like.
The first thing we keep in mind is the Bloodline 2 art direction. We want to create a foggy, dark, and neo-noir environment where the player can hide and attack from the shadows. The perfect setting for a vampire!
Paintover, View of Seattle – Art: Jordan Grimmer
Our goal is to provide the 3D team with a few images to show them our idea for a location or a character. We try to keep our concepts grounded to the real world, but we try to push reality up to 11 (as our Art Director John McCormack always suggests) so the player can experience something unexpected and never seen before.
Why make concepts in Unreal?
Building worlds directly in the game engine is incredibly easy and fun. Thanks to our experience on other TCR titles, we had the chance to learn Unreal and experiment with a Concept Art pipeline to add this piece of software to our workflow.
Bloodlines 2 was the perfect game to push our skills in Unreal to the next step. We had a huge asset library available in this game, including props, characters, and materials. The most logical step forward was to use Unreal to create our concepts rather than creating everything from scratch.
The fog system and the lighting in Unreal are much closer to reality than other real time engines, especially with the recent update to UE5. So this was the perfect tool to visualise our version of Seattle. We have built these underground scenes in Unreal 5, using a fog volume and lights with volumetric options active. Once the composition is approved we then rendered them and quickly painted over in Photoshop.
Paintover, Underground area – Art: Jordan Grimmer
The Creative Process
Before working on an environment, we usually receive a brief from Ben Matthews, Associate Art Director, who provides us with a rough idea of the environment he needs, together with some references. After spending some time searching for references we jump on Unreal and start working from a block-out scene done by the Level Design Team where we import our 3D assets and give “life” to their level.
As always when designing, we start from the big shapes first and then place some provisional lighting and fog. Traditional concept art generally captures the world from one perspective and you have to start from scratch if you’re painting something from another angle. Choosing a good camera angle early on is important and we usually set up a few cameras so our art director can choose what shot works better for him and then we are good to go with the final touches.
Once the first pass gets approved, we then move onto detailing our scene and this is the most fun part. This stage feels like playing a real-life simulator game where you can create little dioramas and add storytelling to the scene. If needed, we create additional assets with Blender and then import them in Unreal Engine. For example, in this bathroom piece we have modelled the toilet and bath using Blender and then imported the assets in Unreal where you can easily assign materials to them.
Paintover, Abandoned Building Bathroom – Art: Isobel Hine
Finally, we render our scene using the high-resolution screenshot tool in Unreal, import the render passes in Photoshop, compose the scene and paint over it adding more details and pushing the mood even further.
We are also lucky that we can easily import 3D characters and plug specific animation loops onto them so our environment will instantly come to life! Here we have used our 3D model of a Hunter done by Kjartan Tysdal, Senior 3D Character Artist, to populate the scenes and add storytelling elements.
Paintover, Radio Tower Callout – Art: Jordan Grimmer
Paintover, Hunters Entering an Underground Area – Art: Michele Nucera
A Fresh way to make Concepts
If you are in a rush, you can skip the thumbnailing process and do it directly in 3D, also you can show a real-time 3D scene rather than one single image so it’s easier for Directors to have the right feeling of the space. Lastly, you can provide the 3D art team with your scenes so they have a base to work with when building the scenes for the actual game… if they can figure out how to deal with our very messy layers!
The below concept shows the police looking for you in an abandoned building. To showcase this, we have built a few rooms and a corridor using our assets in Unreal Engine and then rendered a few shots to follow the story of this policeman looking for you. Since the scene was done in Unreal, the Art Director could easily navigate the space and experience the flow and mood of it.
Paintover, Abandoned Building – Art: Michele Nucera
Bloody Murder
Obviously this game contains a LOT of blood. We were lucky enough that the 3D Art Team provided us with a few blood decals to use directly in Unreal. We placed them in our scenes and lit them in an interesting way to enhance their shiny property, adding a slight hue of red light so the blood colour is not affected by the mood of the scene!
These pieces show a vampire haven under attack. We placed a lot of corpses and blood directly in Unreal and then did a paintover to add all the extra details we needed to sell the story and mood.
Paintover, Vampire Haven – Art: Jordan Grimmer
I think that creating concepts in Unreal is the future of Concept Art. A lot of Concept Artists are expanding their skill set to learn this fantastic tool. Being able to create a real-time scene that your directors can navigate and give you live feedback is priceless and it makes the game better.
We’ll be back in another two weeks, but this time with a Video Diary where we will summarise the content from our latest Dev Diaries. If you have any questions relating to the first four dev diaries, feel free to send them to us on Discord and we’ll try to answer as many as we can.
RPG & Narrative Stream
Good evening Kindred,
Today we shared some very exciting news on our Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 news stream! We were joined by Sean Greaney (EVP of Darkness) and Ian Thomas (Narrative Director at TCR), who discussed some of the game’s features relating to both narrative and roleplaying. In case you missed it, you can find it below.
In the stream, we were introduced to the protagonist of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2; Phyre, an Elder vampire at odds with the voice in her head, who confronts Seattle’s powerful elites at war over the City’s fate.
Players choose Phyre’s clan and gender and begin exploring a reimagined Seattle filled with compelling characters while maneuvering through complex relationships. Choices and conversations (even outfits!) shape how the environment and characters react to Phyre, changing how the story unfolds.
Render of Phyre as a female character.
We are happy to share that over the coming weeks we will reveal the four clans playable at launch. The first will be revealed next week. In addition to these four clans, an additional clan will be made available via DLC. A sixth clan will appear in a unique, standalone DLC. Details on the DLCs will be shared during 2024. Some of the clans will be familiar to Bloodlines players, but some will surprise!
If you still want more, we can recommend checking out our live-play chronicle Seattle By Night season 2, as Jason Carl leads our Coterie on a journey through Seattle, encountering challenges linked to the events that will unfold in Bloodlines 2.
