Mastering the Harbor

When I joined the “Anno – The Harbor”-team there already existed a small prototype of the game. It contained one level with a rough background sketch. The ships were just a single image which was scaled from the horizon to the dock and back. It already had a good quality and so I got a feeling for how the final product should look like.

Getting the animation done

The game design required 4 harbors, 6 ports for each harbor, 8 ships and 3 animations for each ship. Wanting to get 576 animations done in 6 weeks it was obvious: a solution had to be found for how to get that done. To reduce the animation work we decided to use the same perspective for every harbor. We provided a range of 9 ports from which 6 could be chosen for each harbor. Early on we decided that not every ship needs to enter every port. Big ships couldn’t enter small ports and not every ship was needed in every harbor. That narrowed the animation count down to 138 – still not a small task.

Blocking

When it was clear how the project could be realized, blocking was the first and most important step. The positions of the ports had to be usable at multiple harbors but the harbors should look different and not generic. Furthermore Ralf could not start with his background paintings without the blocking. Luckily he could already work on the UI which gave me some more time.
There were two basic needs for the blocking. Firstly it should enable the game designer to create unique situations like blocking ships. Secondly it had to ensure that ships wouldn’t cross their paths while entering or leaving the ports. Some ports were never in the same harbor, so the crossing of their paths could be ignored.
After having set the port positions, I built the four basic harbors in 3D. Having these dummys enabled us to see any collision of the harbors and the ships. At this point we were sure that our cheat was not too obvious. The final screenshots were given to Ralf as a basic layout for his background paintings.

Rigging the ships

Fortunately we could use the original “Dawn of Discovery”-assets without editing them for the small resolution of the iPhone. But to be able to animate them easier it was necessary to add a small rig to the ships.
After building one basic rig it could be copied onto every other ship. Rigging the sails needed extra attention. Because of their individual shapes, hoisting the sails had to look different. They had two attributes build in: one for moving the sail up and down and one for blowing wind into the sails. The wake was realized with a combination of a particle system and an object with animated texture.
The rig of the ships enabled us to copy some of the animation which was really helpful to accomplish the work in the given time frame.

Rendering

To differ the harbors even a bit more we decided to vary the lighting situations for every harbor. The occident harbor uses more neutral colors compared to the golden colored orient harbor, the bluish night setting of the corsair harbor and the pastel colored venetian harbor.
For rendering I wrote a small 3Ds Max plugin to speed up the process. Ships, harbors and slots that were ready to render could be selected with that “Anno Harbor Render Tool”. The script loaded the necessary animation and added the light sources as well as the 3D harbor model for matting the ships. After adjusting the render settings it rendered the final images.
When the background paintings were finished and polished, they were sharper than the previous versions. It turned out that the ships were too blurry for the new backgrounds. Without the tool we would not have been able to render all of the 138 animations. But with it I could add a simple checkbox which enabled us to render the animation with a different antialiasing to match the sharpness of the ships. The new antialiasing also reduced the artifacts of the animation compression.

Conclusion

Through my education I am used to switch fast between the logical and creative world. So my work also included working as a translator between programmer and artists to provide them with all the necessary information.
We figured out how the parallax scrolling worked best and how the water could be animated easily while still looking good. The last days I animated some people walking around on the docks to add life to the harbors.
In the end it was smooth sailing thanks to thoughtfull planning and a great team:
Andreas Suika – the game designer – was the only one I have worked with before – mostly on settler 4 and 5. It was fun to cooperate with him again.
The programmer Christian Shell had a wonderful idea creating this game and it was nice to work with him as well. I had great empathy for him having to share his Mac with the game designer.
Ralf Marczinczik is not only a skilled artist but also an awfully nice person.

It was a great joy and honor to work with you, guys!!!