Low Complexity, High Fidelity: The Rendering of INSIDE

In this 2016 GDC Europe session, PlayDead's Mikkel Gjoel and Mikkel Svendsen detail the techniques used to achieve high visual fidelity in the context of the uncompromisingly simplistic aesthetic of INSIDE, Playdead's follow-up to the critically acclaimed LIMBO.
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[@BenjaminSteber]

The detail Inside has is amazing. There was a hole between two buildings that I never fell into. I watched a lets play today where the guy accidentally falls into that hole and when he hit at the bottom there was a cat that got spooked and ran away. So there is a cat in the game that they thought up, modeled, programmed, everything and you only see it for 2 seconds if you fall down one pit. I mean...I can't. It's so good.

[@Jayy997]

Where is this hole? I've played the game multiple times and I have never seen a cat.

[@BenjaminSteber]

It is between two buildings in the ruined city as the zombies are marching on the roads below. It's an easy jump to make so you either have to really screw it up like I did, or you have to go looking for it.

[@Jayy997]

Incredible. I would bet that 99% of people would miss that. You need to consciously make an effort to fall there to see it. I just tried falling down the very next crevice and there is a custom animation when you land in a shopping trolley... I'm going to start falling into every hole just to see what else they have put into the game.

[@Micro593]

There’s a another lovely detail just after the shockwave area, after the sinking elevator, after swinging into the closing garage door that you have to swing on the rope and run under as it closes, the area right before being reintroduced to the long haired mermaid, a door in the background is slightly ajar with a green light behind it. If you wait in that room long enough, someone from behind that door will come along and close it.

[@leosefcik]

Near the part where you get the helmet to control the zombies (when you ditch the submarine) theres a area to the left if you choose not to jump up the ladder and theres a long hole with a flashlight that fell down there and a big spike. If you precisely land on the spike there are two outcomes, in one of which the boy gets impaled trough the back and struggles to pull himself upwards, but then just gives up.

[@Merthalophor]

i understood about 5% of what was said, but this stuff is seriously interestinh...

[@Clairvoyant81]

That fire effect alone was worth the entire hour. Very clever approach and amazing presentation overall.

[@FoodLiquorCool]

I played around 60 (geez that feels like a lot) games in the seventh gen, and Limbo was my favorite. A clean, straightforward, responsive non-buggy thematic atomsepheric indie that just blew me away in its masterful simplicity.

[@Rokannon]

What was your Top 2?

[@iFukuyama]

Watching noise examples in a KZbin video is probably not a good idea.

[@kilroy987]

A nicely technical discussion. Watching playthroughs, I can make my own assumptions about how they achieved certain effects, but they obviously did a lot of homework honing the processing to achieve all the effects they were looking for - it's a lot more involved than I imagined.

[@SpudMackenzie]

Hoo boy youtube's compression does not like animated noise one bit.

[@Glowbox3D]

Incredible game. One of the best. As much as I love the visuals, the sound design in this game is a masterpiece. As a cg artist, this was an awesome find from GDC. Cheers.

[@chronokoks]

Very very nice simple tricks.. these guys are great since they have a great eye for aesthetics.. many programmers don't have that.. they can program anything but they struggle to create tricks that actually visually are pleasing

[@EcstasyTiger]

I'm an artist first and I know nothing of coding but I'm hoping to learn some and make a game or two over the next three years starting once I build my first good pc!

[@nitras.design]

Simple? They rewrote basically everything:) in my book that is considered mastering.

[@papermartin879]

not sure what you mean, tech artist is literally a whole discipline of programmers doing exactly that

[@chronokoks]

@@papermartin879 now you're just straight up lying - or you're just strongly want to be in denial. You know very well what I mean. Even in the demoscene since the early beginnings, most of the dudes programming the gfx weren't the ones doing 3d models, textures, 2d art or music. Again there are very few really skilled graphics programmers that can actually do nice art.. heck even combine proper colors. Stop fluffing up the reality.

[@papermartin879]

@@chronokoks that's not what you originally said tho, you said "they can program anything but they struggle to create tricks that actually visually are pleasing", something that's pretty much proven wrong by the fact every major studio has several tech artists whose jobs is to do exactly that especially for mobas and MMOs

[@raveltammeleht6278]

Superb presentation!!! I honestly like how they have reused some oldschool tech to achieve such great visuals. Feels like a over enginered PS2 game. And I mean it in a good way!

[@okzz2]

great video. i wish they showed the shockwave though :/

[@mitaywalle]

one of the best talks on GDC I've seen

[@zenithquasar9623]

I love how much technical work was put into to have the concept art to reality! Love your work so much! Well done and thank you.

[@awesomeguitarshorts]

Just finished it on my ps4. Probably the best game I have ever played and one of the best game ever made in gaming history. Great job Playdead.🙏🏼

[@HarhaMedia]

That simple GI Faking trick is really neat! Great talk.

[@nitras.design]

HarhaMedia would you be so kind to point me to the time stamp?

[@erickh555]

this might be the most technical and hard presentation i ever watched, i watched it 3 times already and i keep serching words in google every 5 minutes

[@thisisfyne]

I don't recommend the talk about Shading on Ghost of Tsushima then o_O /watch?v=LC8VedwibkI

[@erickh555]

@@thisisfyne mmmmmmmmmm no thanks then

[@IRDean]

This was an insightful presentation. The examples, pictures, etc were excellent.

[@mhnoni]

I came here since i thought they baked the light in Vray somehow and bring it to game, but seems not, on of the best light ever seen in any game.

[@ErrorNamenotfound-so2gt]

Gave me some of my own ideas for visual effects in my game, thanks!

[@MichaelPohoreski]

Excellent talk -- I really wish all the effects were _also_ shown in **wireframe** -- would make it easier to understand the mapping.

[@mBrajan]

amazing stuff! i would looove to see their take on character animation too.

[@snazztacular]

hey I know your comment is like three years old but, I know right??? how is it so good? everything moves so fluidly

[@gnt3c]

They have one of best character animations I've seen in games

[@BlueEdgeTechno]

@@snazztacular yeah actually, it's feels so natural and authenticated.

[@siddharthrajsoni]

This is just incredibly clever the way Playdead uses resources. You can't of course achieve this in 3D games where you can't shade pixels due to variable perspectives but after watching this I am confirmed Playdead is the most revolutionary game studio there is atm

[@stevethepocket]

Ha, a "time to crate" reference. The spirit of Old Man Murray lives on.

[@trev3d]

Coming back here after watching (second) Mikkel's talk on Cocoon's graphics this year.

[@zetetick395]

Does he realize that when he wears his jacket it makes his T-Shirt say "DIE" ?

[@forgottenmohawks8734]

@Zetetik yeah it’s German, it means “THE” :P

[@robotomato13]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/hV6ylYurmdyEp9E

[@p5rsona]

To this day this is the most beautiful, stunning game I ever played.

[@JohnDaniels]

These talks are amazing, but I wish I understood more of how you implement all that. I work in the unreal engine and I understand a direct light and I understand post-process volumes and atmosphere fog and skylight and height fog and I understand blur but I can't understand how You would implement what they're talking about into the game maybe they're working at a lower level in the game's code but it is absolutely amazing what they have done very cool there masters of their craft

[@D00kerT]

I've played both games. Fantastic stuff. Can't wait until you guys make the 3rd!

[@Baleur]

17:10 sadly KZbins shitty bitrate still produces color banding no matter how cleverly coded your graphics are :D

[@ws6nick]

Is the audience dead or what? That was an awesome talk!

[@Crowborn]

There are no microphones pointed at it

[@hellbladerulez5799]

ws6nick probably just wanted to pay attention as well. When we have lectures from companies at my university we need to stay as quiet as possible :)

[@rafaielw]

OH YES!!..Thank you guys so much!.

[@mr.hashundredsofprivatepla3711]

Off topic, but I like how both of the graphics programmers in this video are named Mikkel

[@sophiabeebeeboo4579]

1:44 is also another foreshadowing of what’s going to happen in the game. Remember how the blob was tricked into going underneath into the water imprisonment? It’s almost the same exact setup we see here. That’s just something I picked up on like rn. There’s so much more to this game it really is mind blowing. I’ve played it three times now. And I honestly don’t get tired of it. Sucks that I can only do certain things though... as the game is all about ‘control’. (even us)

[@ramiru3264]

Wow. They abuse the unity engine into good extent to create graphics illusions. I love it.

[@Ermude10]

Very impressed! These guys are so pro!

[@алешагордый]

Playdead you genius

[@erikm9768]

Very good with all the details, thanks for sharing!!

[@chucktrier]

Mikkel*(Gjoel + Svendsen) you Rock!!

[@batchprogrammer108]

Question to all the pros out there, this was nearly 3 years ago so now with Unity's custom scriptable render pipeline is it possible to have the level of control that these guys had in your own game, without working with the Unity team?

[@SkyIsTumbling]

yeah basically, and most of the features in here have already been implemented to stuff like hdrp, urp, or just the post stack i think.

[@entitynull3761]

2 years late to this, but I've implemented the occluders, bounce fakery, and blue noise dithering on my own SRP renderer. Currently figuring out volumetric lights and non-uniform light scaling, but many of these concepts translate over pretty well as long as you're doing deferred/pre-pass.

[@hepzibah4573]

How to get this in unreal engine?

[@CellarPhantom]

Very good presentation!

[@rahadik.8072]

been waiting for this. thank you!

[@sugulee4060]

Great presentation!!

[@SyamaMishra]

I'd love to see some comparison shots of using the hardware to do RGB>Limited conversion vs your own implementation.

[@tomasxfranco]

Great, finally a technical talk.

[@TheDataArchitect]

First game i purchased on my Iphone, and finished

[@michaelforrest]

This is really inspiring. My problem is I don't have a good shader development workflow - I always seem to be playing with text files more or less. Does Unity offer any advanced GLSL authoring and debugging tools? It seems to be preoccupied with its own funny markup language but I want to be able to write shaders for use outside of Unity.

[@Waffle4569]

Unity supports raw HLSL or GLSL, although HLSL is much better supported and I believe it cross-compiles it too now. Text editor with good syntax highlighting and autocomplete for the keywords/methods is all you really need, especially since shaders recompile in milliseconds.

[@bobloudly4733]

Can you please do some sort of noise removal on your audio? I can't hear any of the voices in any of them and I really want to :P

[@Zilushy]

This talk was so Good !!

[@jesuschrist7037]

Nice work Mikkel

[@artfeel]

Wow, awesome game, very useful presentation!

[@snazztacular]

The fire is incredible holy moly

[@alexds9]

This whole talk is 10k feet above my head.

[@DCFTW68]

Optimization for AMD latest cards seems to be really bad, tried going for a second playthrough since the game's release but it stutters every 10sec.

[@dredwick]

GREAT video

[@arshero]

I've been using unity for about 2 yrs now and didn't understand a lot too how or where can i learn this stuff?

[@iwandi2]

You also can just write this in Unity. Starting from raw Open GL will take a lot longer to get some similar results. Start with the fire effect. This can be done in a shader. On a Cube or Plane - Adjust UV so you Display a single sprite instead of 9 - Add a option to Choose the Tile with row, column - Drive this now via random - Instead of Hard switching make the Switch Scroll from bottom to top - add a gradient to the switch - Render the cube to a Render Target and Render this as a new Sprite - Apply a Shader ramp maps to the Render Target to change the Fire color.

[@Waffle4569]

A good amount of this you can now do in Shader Graph

[@dustmote3550]

does anyone know what coding language this dev is using? 10:17

[@anmaral-sharif1381]

Dustmote GLSL

[@habsi70]

Such a great talk! I will spend the next year digesting all this great information :D

[@arshero]

do you know where could i learn about those things?

[@алешагордый]

Inside my game. Very nice

[@hablerochris7508]

When is the release on Android

[@eddynardo]

he forgot to mention he created SpaceX,Tesla and Paypal

[@OrangeIND-]

These is My Favorite #1 Game Ever mAde I relilise Real advantaure

[@IPhonixI]

would it be easier to do all these things if they could use Unity 22?

[@GameDevBox]

yeah but they made the game in 2010 when unity almost had nothing :D and they implement everything by their hands

[@DavidB-rx3km]

Are the characters 2d sprites or 3D?

[@tojynick]

Everything is in 3D :)

[@rkpixeldesign]

everything gone over the head

[@Haze_Nexus_real]

2:07 bro, why is there a 13 year old kid here?

[@chilli1472]

i'm going to pretend that i understand anything he's saying

[@astro_case]

i know nothing.

[@CirnoInTea]

Chou lfhfah

[@MecegguemMohamed]

a lot of graphics programming and math hhhh

[@jan050375]

people really need to learn to get rid of their "uhhhh..."'s before getting on stage, this is unbearable.