Classic Game Postmortem - Another World
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN points to it whenever Another World comes up, as one of the better GDC talks by the game's creator.
What it is
Eric Chahi's GDC 2011 postmortem of Another World (Out of This World), describing how he built the game. He shows his polygon art approach, rotoscoping and animation tools.
Recommended by 4 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2020 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Recommends newnewpdro · 2020-01 · on “The Polygons of Another World”
Another World's original author Eric Chahi gave a great GDC "Classic Game Postmortem" talk about creating the game: [this video]
Recommends JohnBooty · 2020-01 · on “The Polygons of Another World: Amiga 500”
Here's Eric Chahi explaining his decision to use polygons - he mistakenly thought that the Amiga version of Dragon's Lair used them! [this video] Very cool video, wherein Chahi demonstrates his rotoscoping system, where he could use the Amiga's genlock to trace live video in his (extremely impressive) homemade animation/code tool. The polygons in Another World are a bit different from today's games. In a modern game, game models would contain fully 3D representations of each model. Each polygon vertice would have X, Y, and Z coords. The CPU/GPU then render these out. In Another World, the polygons are 2D representations only, like paper cutouts. The animations are precalculated, and then at runti
Recommends slmjkdbtl · 2021-06 · on “Another World: Genesis”
Also check out Fabian Sanglard's articles [0] (there's a lot more on his article listings) about Another World if you haven't yet, also the author's GDC talk [1]. [0] [LINK] [1] [this video]
Recommends pengaru · 2023-07 · on “Another World Ported to FPGA”
The original developer of Another World did a GDC postmortem, it's one of the better GDC talks: [this video] IIRC He shows some of his development tools including how he could modify and step through animation directly line by line in VM bytecode.