Anyone who has played stray, crowned Best independent video game of the year at the Game Awards, was inevitably amazed by the way in which the hero behaves. This stray cat, to whom the player makes live the craziest adventures, has everything of a real tomcat. His way of moving in this cyberpunk world, his reactions, his little nonsense… Everything about this feline is reminiscent of the real ones. How, at BlueTwelve Studio, the Montpellier studio (Hérault) which developed the game, did we make this cat more real than life?
“There is one thing, above all, that we have not done, it is to use motion capture”, confides to 20 minutes Swann Martin-Raget, the producer of stray. No question, for the developers, of equipping cats with combinations covered with sensors, to reproduce their movements as faithfully as possible on a computer. “We know it exists, there are companies that do it, with cats, but we decided not to use this technique, he continues. We have a lot of situations in the game that would have been too dangerous. It would have been complicated to ask a cat to reproduce them. »
“The biggest challenge was for the cat’s simple movements and jumps”
For stray, everything was done “by hand”. To bring their furry hero to life, the BlueTwelve Studio team watched loads of cat videos on the internet. “It feels like the internet was invented for that, so we had lots and lots of things to inspire us! smiles Swann Martin-Raget. But above all, the studio observed a lot, on a daily basis, Oscar and Jun, two cats adopted by two members of the team. A sphynx and a ginger alley cat, too cute. “Every day, they come to the studio, continues the producer of stray. Obviously, it was very useful for us to have them in front of us all the time. And then, we are all, anyway, completely immersed in their universe, since 80% of the team has at least one cat at home! This is important, of course, when trying to create the most realistic cat possible in a video game. »
At the start of the game’s development, the Montpellier team drew up a long list of movements and behaviors inherent to felines that they would like to see appear in the game. its nose everywhere… Before getting down to reproducing them as faithfully as possible. “The biggest challenge was for the simple movements and jumps of the cat, assures the producer of stray. We wanted something believable. Rémi, our programmer, and Miko, the animator, spent an extremely long time working to make it believable. It was a lot of trials, a lot of errors… And a lot of playtests. We made people play, to see their reactions. It was a very long-term job. »
Because, for the team of stray, for it to be successful, it had to be as realistic as possible, in terms of the tomcat’s movements. ” Sure ! Our hero is a completely normal cat, explains Swann Martin-Raget. He doesn’t have superpowers, he doesn’t fly, he doesn’t shoot lasers with his eyes… He’s a very well-known animal, there are lots of cat owners. All are experts, they know all their companions by heart. That required, for us, a very high level of loyalty. And the best reward, for the team, are all of its videos posted on the social networks of owners, who filmed their cats reacting to the behavior of Stray’s hero. “We say to ourselves that we have succeeded in our bet”, rejoices the producer of the game.