Quantum Break provided Remedy's team with
a challenge: How to visualize time breaking down?
Simply freezing the world wasn't an option
as the game required a feeling of instability and danger
We wanted Stutters, as these time anomalies
are known in the game, to be unpredictable and scary --
like a glitch in the physical laws
of nature.
We started prototyping with a simple fluid
simulation projected over the world, distorting the vertices
To achieve perfect sync between audio and
visuals, we ended up driving the intensity
of distortions with audio
Light behaves differently within these anomalies
Distorted version of the fluid simulation
texture is projected over the scene as a light source
We wanted distortions to have a prismatic,
faceted look
It's an important part of the game's visual
identity and went on to inform other things
such as Monarch architecture
On top of this we spawn particles from the
largest distortions
They receive the underlying surface color,
creating a feeling of a disintegrating world
Light trails, inspired by long exposure photography,
provide a recognizable visual cue
complementing the glitch aesthetic
Finally, Stutters have a distinct color grading
that was influenced by infrared photography
Creating this dynamic system, and building
our effects and carefully crafted destruction
sequences on top of it, allowed us to reach
a complex look throughout the game with a
level of consistency that would have otherwise
been very difficult to achieve
