uzz about the Hollywood videogame mashup usually centers on visual
effects action in sports simulations and first person shooters, flashy cinematics, or realistic humans.Omar Khudari has a different idea: Incorporate game play into an interactive animated film. In August, Cecropia, the company Khudari founded, raised the curtain on “The Act,” the first release in a genre the company has dubbed “filmgame.”
“The Act,” a three-act romantic comedy, features eight interactive game sequences. Game players influence characters’ moods by spinning a knob. In doing so, they create a ‘toon with animated drawings. And not just any ‘toon, the animation was created by former Disney feature animators.
“We could have used anything,” Khudari says, noting that they even tried videotaping actors. “[2D animation] was the first thing, the only thing that worked. The art form of personality animation has been refined and practiced at Disney over generations.”
The filmgame opens with a scene of Edgar, a window washer, working outside a hospital room. He spots beautiful nurse Sylvia inside. In his fantasy, they’re in a nightclub that looks like a Rick’s Café in Casablanca. The scene shifts and becomes interactive. Sylvia, looking slinky in a cocktail dress, perches on a barstool. Edgar, now dapper in a white jacket and black bow tie, sits at a table nearby. The player must convince Sylvia to dance with Edgar within a limited amount of time.
The knob controls Edgar’s actions and his actions influence Sylvia’s reactions. If the player turns the knob too far or too fast to the right, Edgar’s aggressiveness toward Sylvia causes her to huff from the bar in revulsion. To tame that boldness, the player reverses direction, turning the knob to the left - but not too much or Sylvia becomes bored with Edgar’s shyness and leaves.
It takes a fine touch to give Edgar the right ‘tude before time runs out. Put the characters in the right mood and you advance to the next level and can eventually win the game. Put the characters in the wrong mood and you lose. “The Act” has no dialog; drawings and music alone guide the players. Beneath the hood, hundreds of 2D animation clips combine and branch to create a web of possible behaviors. As the knob turns, Edgar changes his behavior. Sylvia looks at Edgar and her own mood, and then decides what to do depending on her current state. A proprietary engine composites the separate clips for Edgar and Sylvia in real time.
“That’s the trick,” says Khudari. “We do a visual incarnation of personality in a canned way with pre-drawn 2D animation. It might seem simple, but it’s hugely complex. There aren’t infinite possibilities, but there is a lot of randomness and a fairly rich simulation in terms of what the characters can do.”
Although many artists, animators, writers, entrepreneurs, and colleagues were instrumental in bringing the project to fruition, “The Act” is Khudari’s game, start to finish and it isn’t his first.
From 1982 to 1987, Khudari was a programmer with Tom Synder Productions, a video game / educational software company. In 1987, he and fellow programmer David Kaemmer founded Papyrus Design Group, which created autoracing simulators.
“We were two programmers in our twenties,” he says. “David was the genius who made the simulation happen; I was the business guy. That was my business education.” By 1995, their initial investment of $2,000 had grown to $15 million and they sold the company to Sierra On-Line. Khudari then became COO for Viaweb, which Yahoo! bought in 1998. And after that, he became an angel investor, funding several early-start technology companies including, eventually, his own company, Cecropia.
