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Converging Disciplines Breathe Life Into Digital Actors

by Marie-Jo Leroux, Game Director, Artificial Mind and Movement (June 2006)

A sizeable crowd came out on Thursday night at the SAT for IGDA Montreal's final chapter meeting of the season. Hundreds of developers welcomed Jonathan Cooper (Lead Animator) and Steve Sim (Audio Lead) from BioWare, who discussed their much-anticipated title Mass Effect. The latter took the Best RPG of Show Game Critics award this year.

While the season's first presentation, Bob Bates' The Designer's Journey, described a process for developing compelling heroes, BioWare's presentation tied this general theme into a real production process, describing their approach to creating evocative and realistic, yet other-worldly characters.

NPC interactions, an immersive story and highly customizable player characters are important features of Mass Effect, and BioWare uses a multi-disciplinary process in achieving this. The speakers gave a high-level presentation of their character creation process, from the development of a richly detailed character bible to the use of procedural systems and automation tools for sound and animation. They then went into more details when answering technical questions from the audience. Finally, they treated the crowd to a demonstration of branching NPC interactions in the game.

The evening ended with a generous raffle (including game dev books from Charles River Media and A K Peters) and hours of lively networking and merrymaking. Also, thanks again to our volunteers Isabelle Marazzani, Christina Reinards and Guillaume Voghel for welcoming everybody to the meeting.