Bonus Content Disc/The Making of Mass Effect

This is a transcription of the documentary "The Making of Mass Effect" found on the bonus content disc of the 2007 Limited Collector's Edition of Mass Effect as well as on the bonus content disc released in 2008.

The interviewees are:

• Jonathan Cooper – lead animator
• Dusty Everman – lead technical designer
• James Henley (uncredited in the documentary; listed in the game credits as cinematic designer)
• Casey Hudson – project director
• Drew Karpyshyn – lead writer
• Matt Rhodes – concept artist
• Steve Sim – audio director (listed in the game credits as audio lead)
• David Sitar – uncharted world designer (listed in the game credits as technical designer)
• Ken Thain (uncredited in the documentary; listed in the game credits as lead cinematic designer)
• Mike Trottier – lead level artist
• Preston Watamaniuk – lead designer
• Derek Watts – art director
• Shane Welbourn – cinematics lead (listed in the game credits as cinematic director)

Menu Description

Looks at the production of Mass Effect, and shows how the art, design and programming all came together to bring the game to life.

Content

Casey Hudson: When we finished Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic around mid-2003, then we did the PC version, but through the last half of 2003, we were starting to really think about what we wanted to do next. And in general, we wanted to take what we had done with Knights of the Old Republic, which was a huge space adventure. You go to a lot of different planets. It's in the Star Wars universe, so you've got... just a good basis for adventure and combat, and things like that. We wanted to take the formula that we brought to that kind of role-playing game experience, where you can create a character, be who you want to be, and really develop that character over the course of the game, and take that into a new universe where there was really no limits on what you could do as a character and what we could do with the story. So that meant basically coming up with our own intellectual property, our own galaxy, universe; new spaceships, new powers and things like that. A really fresh look at how to do a space adventure.

Writing the Story

Casey Hudson: The origins of the story for Mass Effect really come from the principles of the world that we wanted to create. Actually, when you think about issues like: "Should you have time travel?" "Should you be able to warp somewhere?" "Is there cloning?" "Is there artificial intelligence, there are robots that are as smart as we are?" Those kinds of things actually dictate the things that you can do in the story, because if you can do time travel, or even if you can warp across the battlefield, that radically changes everything about your story, the way the game plays, everything. So we had to lock those things down first before we started building our story. And then the story itself came from, again, the larger ideals of "What kind of moments do you want to have?" and "What do you want to be able to do?" So we wanted the player to be able to have their own ship, just because that's a great way to feel empowered and be able to get around the galaxy. We also wanted it to be a ship that wasn't just a vehicle that you hopped into. We wanted it to feel more important, so it's an actual military vessel that has a crew, and as you do different things on missions and all across the game, your crew actually responds to you and you can go up and talk to them, you can walk around inside the ship, and you can decide where you want to go. So it's these kinds of things that kind of started contributing to what the basic structure of the story was.

Drew Karpyshyn: When we write something at BioWare, there's usually three, four writers on any given time working together on a project; maybe six, seven writers across the whole life of the project. We also take input from all the other people on the project. The artists help you understand what the vision of the game is going to be. The programmers give you an understanding of what the gameplay is going to be. Your character artists show you the characters you're writing for, you see them coming to life. The animators make them real. And everybody has an understanding of what we want the final product to be.

Matt Rhodes: When we're designing characters, there's input from everywhere. Beginning with story, the writers are going to write. We need to know who's who in the world and what they're doing, where everyone's going, what their motivation is... That's absolutely essential when it comes to character design. If you don't have a story, there's no point in drawing. They say a picture says a thousand words, but... yeah, it says way more than that. I've tried writing a thousand words, and I usually end up scribbling notes in the side anyway, scribbling designs and drawings.

Shane Welbourn: To me, storytelling is the most important aspect. If you haven't told your story right, and you've ended up wasting the whole audience's time... Really, it's about taking people to places they haven't been before.

Building the Universe

Derek Watts: One of the first steps we do is we usually start looking for a lot of photographs, find stuff that is actually on Earth that is interesting, start painting concepts around there. We'll do a couple of planet ideas, maybe five to fifteen to twenty. Maybe do a rock environment, maybe a garbage planet, anything like that. [laughs] Just throw it out there. Let the writers start to look at some of these ideas, let them pick and choose about the ones they can really work with. One of the areas we did was Virmire, which was kind of based on some islands in Vietnam and Thailand. We really worked with that with these kind of clean pads that're kind of connected them all together you can walk through. Originally the concept started out as this utopian vacation world that was very clean, that you'd want to go to. Eventually, we just turned it into an evil base, [laughs] but we had to do some adjustments on that one.

Mike Trottier: To create an environment, we start with the concept that Derek wants to create, and we work with the designers to rough in a block level of the set to make sure it fits the needs of all the design and story requirements for the area. So we build a lot of the stuff the same way we did in our past generation games. We still construct them in Studio Max, we pull them into or display them with our engine, there's just a lot less restrictions on things for this generation. We can have a lot more polys, a lot more textures, higher texture resolutions. It all holds up a lot better than it did, and the artists are free to make it look exactly like what they wanted. From there we move on and we start applying textures and lighting and everything else to refine and make sure it's believable. Lighting, especially in Mass Effect, is incredibly important. It's one of our big focuses. After everything is looking and acting correctly in our game and the designers are comfortable with how things are working, we spend a lot of time on trying to get the lighting just right, making sure that the colors are controlled and that they hold up well, that they match our style and our art direction.

Casey Hudson: Mass Effect is actually structured in a way that allows us to not only have sequels that extend the main story in ways that we've actually planned out ahead of time, but it also has the basis for a larger galaxy outside the core story that's constantly expanding. We do this through what we call "uncharted worlds." So in the game you actually have a starship. You can go to the galaxy map in the center of the ship and you can actually look at the galaxy, look down on it; look at all the different star clusters and kind of explore planets and asteroids and things; and then you can actually go to these places.

David Sitar: We add creatures, we add things like bases or maybe lost satellites or something that you would want to-- whatever it is that you saw in orbit, beckon you to come to and explore this place. Some sort of anomaly, you could be set up for an ambush by some other race in the game. There could be minerals there to explore and recover. These are basically unclaimed planets so there could be new creatures that are nowhere else in the game. Those are the sorts of things you'd encounter on an uncharted world.

Casey Hudson: If you were actually able to have your ideal adventure in space, what would you want to do? Have your own starship. Have some kind of superhuman abilities. Be put in a position where you, as a character, are somehow empowered, even beyond where you can grow in a normal RPG; but even at your starting point, puts you in a position where the kinds of things you're dealing with are really epic. So those are some of the principles that helped us form the basis for what the intellectual property would be, what the universe would be.

Creating Characters & Races

Derek Watts: We get the concept artists started quite early on in characters. We give them a rough idea of what we want, some people we're trying to think of; medics, marines, armors, ambient characters... So, Matt Rhodes did these. These were some sketches he did to get an early idea of what we wanted. It's a futuristic look, but still clean and stylish. He looked through fashion magazines, and so on. We kind of wanted to get these arcs in there on the clothing, he was playing around a bit with that. The clothing is quite tight. These are maybe some ideas of formal wear for the humans. This is a quick early drawing of maybe what an asari head looks like.

Matt Rhodes: Character design for Mass Effect was great. It really was wish fulfillments, in that we were able to design a whole, well, plethora, for lack of a better word, of just, new aliens, new species that we could really just play at and have our own fun with. There were the humans. The idea behind designing the human race in this game was that it wasn't that far in the future; far enough that it was something new, but not so far that it was unrecognizable, that it was alien to us. Having the chance to design new aliens in particular... There were aliens like the salarians, for example. The salarians were actually one of the easiest to design, in a way. Some of the first drawings kind of seemed to hit it fairly close. And then it was just a matter of finesse, just back and forth, trying to find out "where do we relax?" or "what are we trying to say with these guys?" In some ways we based them a little bit on, at least from a design point, a little bit of the Japanese sort of poet warrior persona. The krogans [sic] are bad asses. They're the warriors. They're the guys who are running through the galaxy, pushing everyone around. Intimidating. Everything in their-- even their physiology says "we are going to kick your ass." The asari were the most fun to design, by far. We had a design brief that basically says: "design blue skin space babes with no men". It's like: all right, good, can do. A lot of the inspiration from the asari, especially in costumes, came from sports gear. There's a lot of scooby gear and climbing gear and a lot of stuff that was really pliable, really flexible. It was every nerd's design dream. The turians would be the warlords. They're the guys who are probably, when humans show up, they're the best of the best. They're the ones who are the scariest and the most together. Like a mix between the krogan and salarian, in a way, but just pointier. The design of the geth was probably one of the longest character designs that we dealt with. It was on the table the longest. It started out not even as a machine very early on. They weren't a machine race. This was before the story was sort of written about them. But there was one sketch in particular that I ended up latching on, that people latched onto. I did a drawing of a guy, almost with no skin. Like Bishop from Aliens with his white plastic insides, but basically just a muscle chart clinging to the walls in this creepy spider pose. People just kept coming back to that and saying "can we have this? Can we have this in the game?" And slowly but surely as time went along, we thought, well, this living creature geth isn't really working out that well, we might-- maybe machines, you know? That might actually serve a bit better. That's when the design process really started going. The original design for the geth was based kind of on a human, the white plastic muscle one. But eventually we started to twist him and push around and try to get a few more of those alien features, some of that stuff that really sets you off and makes you really uncomfortable. So, we got rid of the head, gave him the big sort of hood tube over his face, and just gave him some of that anatomy that just makes you a little unsettling. But the one thing we knew we ended up having to keep was especially the musculature. Something that seems very much like he's been skinned and that he's not cozy at all. He's not enjoying his life. The geth in particular were great to design. It was fun to design, but after the end of it, none of us wanted to see them again.

Unknown interviewee: Here I've just got a geth trooper that I'm working on. We're just basically setting up some level of detail meshes. You can also notice in here the green and blue is the character rib that the animators would use to pose a character.

Unknown interviewee: This guy is approximately five million polygons, and so there's a lot of surface detail. You can see all the wrinkles and folds and anatomical elements and all the intricacies behind the modelling that gets brought into the game and gives the models the great surface treatment, the weight of the light, how it plays over the surface. In previous generations, we were looking at poly counts of maybe 1000-2000 polygons for the heads. So, there's a tremendous difference between what the Xbox 360 is capable of, compared to the previous generation.

Sound & Music

Steve Sim: One of the guys that actually wrote this story is our music map maker. Along with the levels and what's going on in the levels, we have a music map that will define changes in music as the story changes. Certain story moments are going to have very critical music that you'll only hear in that point in the story. Then other times we'll take the general level music that you typically hear while you're just exploring the world. That will be-- it's going to be extended in a way that the music will sound different even if you decide to come back, the music will sound familiar but it'll be different. Back in the days before we had all this digital technology, the guys only had tape. They had tape decks. And the only thing they could really do is a little bit of pitch here and there, manipulate the tape decks, slow it down, speed it up. So they had to be really creative in how they actually recorded those sounds. So a lot of the things that someone like Ben Burtt would do is he would go out in the field; I'm sure everybody's seen the videos of him topping the tension wires to make the lasers zap sounds. And the one thing that I found the most fascinating: the way that he got a lot of the ship sounds was he went to the Los Angeles Freeway, pointed a vacuum cleaner tube at the freeway, stuck his mic in the vacuum cleaner tube, and all of a sudden, the sound got really focused. And it had this pitch to it because, much like a flute, a vacuum cleaner tube, the pitch is defined by the length of the tube. So he was trying different pitches until he got the sound he wanted. Then once it's on tape, he could manipulate it, and speed it up, slow it down, and that's how he got a lot of the ship sounds: just by getting freeway noises modified at the source. So that's the type of thing we're trying to do, is go out and record our ambiences but modify them at the source so that when we're not doing a lot of digital post-processing. A lot of times, it's all about happy accidents, you know? In your mind you'll say "okay, I think the sound will come up like this" but until you try it and it's like, "wait a second, that's really neat, that's really unusual, that sound there" and then you can manipulate it a little bit digitally and get it into the game. One thing that we found is that in the national parks there's some... I don't know if they have them everywhere but I know in our national parks in Alberta, we have bear-proof garbage cans. So what they are is these garbage cans, the lid lifts up and it's got a hinge on it and then there's a little latch that locks so the bears can't get in and steal the garbage. So those are everywhere in our national parks and basically those garbage cans are quite big and they've got these big, raggedy, rusty hinges because they're outside all the time. So we found this one that we were just goofing around, stuck microphones in it, we're lifting the lid and it's... [makes creaking sounds] ...making all these groaning and moaning noises and then after we were just like "yeah, whatever, it sounds okay." Then we bring it back, we pitched it down about an octave, added a little bit of reverb to it and all of a sudden: "wait a sec, that sounds like the inside of some alien vessel!" And it's just all these groaning and moaning and stuff, and actually what that turned out to be-- is actually going to be the Sovereign sounds. So that's probably, I would say the single most defining sound is that one particular sound. It's in the trailers, so I mean, it's been floating around a bit, but that is the sound of Sovereign. And what it is, is just a garbage can lid. There we go. So we got the before and after. So basically the before was just... It's just a garbage can lid, being manipulated. And then the after... turned into that, which is our money sound. [laughs] This is probably the-- I guess that would be the single proudest sound in the game because it was a happy accident, and that's really just a garbage can lid pitched down an octave, with a little bit of reverb on it to liven it up.

Designing a Living World

Dusty Everman: We really kind of have three portions to the design department. There's the writers who do all the story. There's the cinematic designers which mostly make our dialogues and some of our cutscenes very cinematic. They're responsible for making that look. And then everything else, all the collection together, is what the tech designers do. We take all the resources from every other department and we script all the combat and script everything together. We do most of our work in Kismet, which is a visual scripting language. Sometimes you can get kind of crazy, a little complex, like for example this is the innards of this action station I'm talking about, which is kind of where the intelligences for what kind of twitches. There's a lot of logic flowing through all these and saying what twitches the guy might do when he's in this station.

Preston Watamaniuk: We have three different types of combat classes that all deploy different powers and abilities. And it's how those-- it all sort of comes together into a combination that we're hoping really creates a lot of really cool fun gameplay with the player.

James Henley: The animators, they have mocap for all of their scenes and they tend to spend a lot of time on the very key scenes that take a lot of work. And what we do is we actually work with the existing animations that we have, and try to basically through camera trickery and a whole lot of kind of "behind the scenes", "sleight of hand" work, make it look like something new.

Ken Thain: One of the things we tried really hard to do in Mass Effect is to allow our designers and our artists to be able to create the kind of NPCs that they want to, simply with a few sliders and a few presses of the button. For example: just one slider to control the skin tone; we can tint the color of the bone. Basically we've got a lot of different things we can do. Along with the materials, we're also able to control all the features of the face. So for example we can adjust the height of the eye, we can adjust the width... We can pretty much pick any of the features we've decided to allow customization on and, really, we can do quite a bit with it.

Jonathan Cooper: Unlike previous games I've worked on, we were really close with the character designers right from the start of the game. When we're creating the rigs for every single creature, they'll typically send us all the concepts, and also animators, and production, and anybody that's going to be involved in bringing the characters to life, which covers a lot of disciplines and we all have sign off on it. We're all able to say things like-- animators will be able to sign off on that, if the arm was to lift up there then the character will break at this point. So we're able to catch all that as they're making the concepts. And then we'll move onto the next stage where they'll actually create a low-res model, and then we can actually stick that in the game and start playing around with it, and try and find out all the-- iron out all the flaws with it before they go into doing the high detail meshes. This here is the character you'll see that-- we make sure we have the eyes turned on here. And if I was to simply turn the eyes off... You'd see the difference in how much the character looks alive. This is what we typically expect in games.

Casey Hudson: We always try to build in layers of depth, and so there's always the core story, and then we also have side plots, and part of the interest in this side plot is that you don't have to do it, which usually something that you don't have to do is therefore even more tempting. And with Mass Effect we kind of took it even further, and then we actually added places on the map that are outside even the plots that you know about, even if there are side plots there are still other places for you to go. So again, it kind of adds to what you can do if you want to. But even if you choose not to do the additional side plots, or go and explore the extra worlds and asteroids and things that are out there in the galaxy, it actually just makes the main story more interesting because you know that that main story is set inside a larger galaxy. So, just the fact that you can go past something and say "no, I'm not going to go there, I am going to stick to the main story", that little choice kind of reinforces the fact that you have freedom in this game.