Overall, mainly my recent consumption of seeing CD Projekt RED Quest Direktor Paweł Sasko play Cyberpunk 2077 leads to this post. You can join in this source of knowledge and inspiration on his twitch (or YT) canals.
Staging
For any game with seamless camera direction (meaning e.g. no or almost no cutscenes), staging is probably one of the main tools to create cinematographic effects. To understand what I mean, let me first state that seamlessness implies no cuts or changing camera perspectives – leaving the player in control of his cinematic experience.
Now staging, if we follow the classic book Film Art, is the movement and performance of objects or living things in the space captured by the camera. This encompasses thus where and when things are arranged.
If we think of the player as an actor in the scene, then we can see that by staging things in certain ways, we may guide the player into staging themselves appropriately.
This idea has been discussed on the abovementioned stream many times, and was elaborated with more focus in the following wonderful video (I can only recommend):
Ocularis: Scenic Moments
While Ocularis is in 3rd person perspective, it does have seamless transitions between its gameplay modes – namingly exploration, combat and dialogs.
For dialogs – since free movement is still enabled there – it is important to at least show the player where they should be. That way the chance is good that they won’t strive too far away from the scene, limiting thus potential immersion breaking.
Here are some examples of how we employed the idea of staging in various dialogue moments:
In playtests it showed that doing this work alone is not enough: Having the freedom to walk (and actually standing the whole time) creates a feeling of “wanting-to-move”. The video gives some tools to work around that and I myself have some ideas too, but I haven’t come to try them out yet. Maybe in some future post 🙂
Feedback Suggestions
- What is your understanding of the term “staging”?
- Do you have any proposals of how to lock the players attention on one spot?
Conclusion
Viewing that video really got me interested, some might say hooked, in some further matters which I have not or only barely touched so far: attention, emotions, personal relationships with characters, to name a few. With some, I also don’t feel confident enough yet to write about them. But we’ll see and time will tell.
Hope you’re having a good (christmas) time!
Gregor Sönnichsen 