(synth music)
- Frosti Fresh makes this look easy.
But he knows better than anyone
how difficult doing a stunt is.
In real life or in a game.
- 'Cause it's not just
what height you hit it.
It's what angle you hit it at,
what momentum you hit it at.
It's a very natural thing
when you're doing it,
but very hard to calculate it.
- Frosti fresh is a
world-famous freerunner.
He also served as Ubisoft's
Chief Parkour Officer
for recent Assassin's Creed games.
And he's part of the reason
why the movement in those
games feels so good.
But parkour in games isn't just a matter
of strapping a mocap suit
on an expert like Frosti.
When you dig into it,
a lot of work has gone into
the animations, the gameplay,
and the world itself to
achieve the ultimate feeling
of flow.
- [Everyone] Flow.
- That kind of elusive magical aspect
where you can take momentum from one thing
and turn it into something else.
- Flow is a state of mind,
a feeling of control that you get
from trusting your body
and the world around you
so you can just move
without worrying about
whether you'll be able
to make that next jump.
- It feels so innate in
our bodies and our minds,
and it connects to
something really, really,
almost primordial in all of us.
- Which is a hard thing to translate
into a video game mechanic.
How do you communicate a
feeling that's so physical?
- Usually, it's details,
like the music starting
to increase in tempo.
- This is Henrik,
a level designer on
Mirror's Edge Catalyst,
and he's referring to the
game's responsive soundtrack.
- So when you run, we
have more percussion,
if you stop still, we'll
have (mumbles) chords.
Basically, you control how the music plays
by your actions in the game.
- In "Sunset Overdrive",
every song is broken down into sub-mixes,
and the layers are added
in as the action heats up.
So even when you're just
climbing up a building,
you still get a feeling
of doing something epic.
(rock music)
That's not to mention the
sound of wind blowing past you
or the Doppler effect you get
when you brush past some
chump stuck in traffic.
(car horns)
There are also visual effects
that are so subtle you
might have missed them.
"Mirror's Edge" and "Dying Light"
both give you tunnel vision
when you're really hitting your stride
to help you focus your attention forward,
while more comic book-style games
give you actual motion lines
at the edge of the camera.
In some cases,
the camera bobs more as you pick up speed
to give a greater sense of physicality.
- All those small things together
with a sense of flow or a
rhythm in your movements
kind of all ties it together
to give you an experience
that is kind of unique.
- For "Mirror's Edge Catalyst",
they had that rhythm down to a waltz.
- The player has to do something
or the ability to do
something every three seconds,
otherwise you get bored or you
get overwhelmed by options.
(synth music)
(chimes)
(synth music)
(chimes)
- This rhythm is key in
creating a sense of flow.
And for keeping you from feeling
too frantic or overwhelmed,
which is especially important in games
like "Assassin's Creed" or "Dying Light".
- It's like running on
top of the water surface.
If you stop, guess what happen?
So you can't stop because
you gonna be killed.
- Adrian and Bartosz are part of the team
behind "Dying Light 2",
where every move is a difference
between life and death.
When you're in a flow state,
you feel in control of your character,
which gives you the confidence to escape
a precarious zombie-filled situation.
(character yells)
(zombie groans)
Feeling in control isn't so
hard in third-person games
when you can always see yourself
and the world around you.
But this becomes an issue
in first-person games
when your body mostly just
comes down to your hands.
- The hands for Faith in first person is,
for the majority of the time,
our only means of communicating
what she's doing really.
Unless you're looking
down a lot while playing,
which no one is.
- [Jenna] So your character
is basically just a camera
floating on an orb with hands sticking out
like a creepy Mr. Potato Head.
But first-person parkour games
still give you the feeling of a full body.
- So the character has weight.
It's not a camera moving
through the environment,
but our character with
a weight, with physics,
that has a body.
- That weight comes form
making the animations
feel as realistic as possible.
- So let's say for example
you're going over a wall
and opening a chest or something.
Then you do capture them over
and over from every angle,
and it's a very weird thing to transition
almost naturally from doing
aggressive parkour movements
into like,
and now I'm reveling this treasure.
- Frosti's talking about
contextual animations,
which are easy to take for granted
because they feel so natural
when you're playing a game.
For every input,
the game is making dozens of calculations
to figure out what animations should play.
So when you press a
button to execute a jump,
the game is checking
vectors like your speed,
the distance to landing,
the angle you're moving at,
and much more,
to prepare the appropriate
landing animation.
But despite the variety of
physics-based animations,
most of these games aren't
really going for realism.
Although the developers for
the first "Mirror's Edge"
tested out motion capture for Faith,
they found it actually
looked too unnatural.
- To use motion capture
on a first-person rig
is like you,
you sort of feel like
you move in molasses.
It's slower than you would
expect your player to move.
- So instead,
they created her every
movement in animation by hand.
And because it was all
done with such attention,
the developers could, well--
- We could cheat a little because
the FOV is limited
so the hands can pop up
on the different spots
or the body can move outside of the camera
in an unnatural way,
it still wouldn't matter for the players.
- [Jenna] Not just that,
but parkour games cut a lot of corners
when it comes to making the
gameplay more forgiving.
- We fake a lot of things to
make it look nice or feel nice.
Our job is to make you not know
that we're actually helping you out a bit.
- And it's my job to
expose these cool tricks
so that we can better appreciate
the hard work that went into them.
See, Henrik's talking
about helper systems,
which most platforming
or parkour games use
to improve the experience
of controlling a character.
- One helper system was,
you're allowed to run a
little bit outside the ledge
before you start falling.
- This goes by a lot of names,
like "ledge assistance",
or more colloquially, "coyote time".
(roadrunner chirps)
(orchestral music)
And it's a common, if invisible
feature, in lots of games.
Basically, you don't start falling
immediately after you stop
standing on the ground.
There's a grace period
when you can still launch into a jump.
And if you jump too early--
- We predict where you gonna land.
And if we see you just missing
the ledge for instance,
then we can adjust that mid-flight,
and kind of make you land
where you're supposed to be.
- In a first-person game,
it's easy to hide this
because your perspective is so limited.
But even third-person
parkour games still do this.
"Sunset Overdrive" and "Assassin's
Creed" use edge detection
that snaps your character into place
when it detects the right kind of ledge.
It happens so naturally,
you usually don't notice
until you make a jump that's
a little awkward.
It's all in service of
keeping that feeling of flow.
But if you're like me,
you probably thought you were
just good at these games.
And this comes as huge blow to your ego.
- We know that you will miss,
but unfortunately, it
would look so unrealistic
that we couldn't help you.
- Now you know that if you missed a jump
and plummeted to the ground,
you didn't mess up a little,
you messed up a lot.
Flow doesn't just play a part
in the body and how it moves,
it also has a huge effect on
the design of the environment.
- I call it hills and valleys.
So usually when you enter a new place,
you stand on top of a hill
looking down on the environment,
and it's a way of us
introducing a new area.
- [Jenna] Not only does
this build a sense of pace,
like the ups and downs
of a rollercoaster--
- It's also a good way of
letting the player take
in this new environment
and plan their steps ahead.
- If you have a sense
of where you're going,
you don't have to stop as
much to find your bearings.
Which would seriously stutter your flow.
The world for a parkour game
needs to unfold slowly for new players
to give them time to step up their skills.
"Sunset Overdrive" starts out with areas
that are relatively open,
with long lines and easy bounces.
As you get more movement
options and develop your skills,
the levels get bigger.
As you progress in "Dying Light",
more and more loot spawns on rooftops
and those rooftops get
higher and higher up.
The designers also need to
remove any ambiguous elements
to cut down on the frustration
of trying and failing to
interact with an environment.
In "Dying Light",
every wall that you can climb
is no higher than 3.3 meters.
- You don't have to try, you have to know.
This is our rule.
- [Jenna] So once you've played the game
and get a sense of the scale,
you immediately know if you
can or can't climb something.
- By making it more directional,
making it more exploratory,
it gives you a better sense
of you doing something
even if you're just holding
down the sprint button.
- Basically, the more
active your character is,
the more in control you feel.
The more control you feel,
the more connected you
are to your character.
And all of this makes doing cool stunts
feel super satisfying.
A good parkour game
makes me feel like I can
swing from buildings,
break through glass windows,
and confidently leap off Zeus's ass.
- I also think it's what makes it fun.
Because if all of the characters
that we played in games
could just do what we could do,
then we would just go
out and do it ourselves.
- Well, speak for yourself, Frosti.
(upbeat music)
