The stunts and the motion capture (mocap for short) wasn’t ignored by Bluepoint Games and the already essentially dead Sony Interactive Entertainment Japan Studio when they were developing the remake of Demon’s Souls.

Eric Jacobus is a veteran stunt coordinator and mocap artist with twenty years of experience. He explained on the PlayStation Blog that he essentially had to relearn how to move over the 1.5 years, as he needed ultimate precision, due to the attacks and the doges having had to be playable, and the animations couldn’t be too slow or too fast.

„When performing combat animations, each move has five stages: opening pose, anticipation (‘antic’), attack, recovery, and end pose. Anticipations should match the attacks so that they can be anticipated by other players. Recoveries are short for light attacks, long for heavy ones. Being a Japanese game in spirit, the movement in Demon’s Souls is ‘pose-heavy.’ Rather than performing brutal, character-infused attacks, [Creative Director] Gavin [Moore] directed me to be character-less and focus instead on final poses,” Jacobus wrote, adding that he had to go through the process for each of the twenty weapon classes. He had to do „walks, runs, sprints, pivots, starts, stops, turns, and strafes, all done to a rhythmic metronome.”

„These movements were combined into complex patterns that we called ‘dance cards,’ [Animation Director] Chris [Torres] decided to capture the walks in the morning to warm up, build up to sprints, and when I gassed out in the afternoon we captured the ‘encumbered’ movements. The first dance card took us an entire day to capture, but gradually we economized and could finish one in 70 minutes,” he added.

This is an interesting look behind the scenes, showcasing that not only the game’s code needed a lot of attention.

Source: PSL