Long interview with Rhianna Pratchett over at Gamasutra. Here are the parts about Heavenly Sword.

Moving to specifics a bit, the character of Kai in Heavenly Sword is unconventional and eccentric — a lot of that is conveyed through her animation and character design as well as her dialogue. Can you talk about that interplay?

RP: Kai’s visuals came first and then it was all about breathing life and motion into her avatar. We wanted her to be quite feline and playful in her movements as a contrast to the heavy brutality going on around her and her subsequent detachment from it all. That’s also a sense that she may be cavorting with, or even speaking directly to, something that can only be seen by her.

It’s always tricky when you’re dealing with a younger character (although Kai’s mental state is a fair bit younger than her physical state) that they don’t become annoying. There’s a fine line between cute and weird and just plain irritating. I think it actually helped us that we didn’t use a child actor to play her. Given that she’s actually pretty violent, it could have been… complicated.

Kai was probably the most challenging role in the game and consequently I spent quite a while talking to Lydia Basksh (the actress who both voiced and acted Kai) about the character, her past and her journey during the game.

Lydia was able to capture Kai’s layers brilliantly; her resilience, determination to hold onto lost innocence and her sheer devotion to her adopted sister, Nariko. I’ve always maintained that in some ways Heavenly Sword is a love story. It’s just not a love story about a boy and girl, but one about sibling love.

And can you talk about the storytelling functions of characters that are left-of center in game stories?

RP: What I think worked well for Heavenly Sword was that from a narrative point of view, we didn’t waste characters. We had a small cast but they were all tightly wound into each other’s lives. One of the themes of the game was about the sometimes screwed-up nature of familial relationships. Initially it was demonstrated through Nariko’s relationship with Shen, as both daughter/father and student/teacher, and her bond with Kai.

It’s then reflected and distorted in Bohan’s volatile (and equally problematic) relationship with his son Roach and the childish machinations of his generals, Whiptail and Flying Fox. In Whiptail’s case she is instrumental in sending the relationship between Nariko and Shen spinning out of control, tearing the two characters apart, whilst Flying Fox is a predominant player in Kai’s story.

I think NPCs (although Kai was a lot more than that) can be vitally important for highlighting story themes and important traits in both protagonists and antagonists. They really are the narrative pillars of a game world.

Thanks to Portent of Doom for the heads up.

I’ve found a couple more photos taken at the Art of Games conference in Italy. Ofcourse this includes some Heavenly Sword ones.

Click HERE and HERE for the photoalbums.

We know Rhianna Pratchett isn’t back with Ninja Theory for their new game, but I wanted to post this anyway since she mentioned some things about working with Andy Serkis back in the Heavenly Sword days.

GM: How is it working with the likes of Andy Serkis? Is Hollywood the next step for Rhianna Pratchett?

RP: Andy was great to work with on Heavenly Sword. He was a wonderful asset and an awesome King Bohan. I think he had much more of a genuine impact than most Hollywood types who get involved in games and just phone-in their lines. As for me, I have an agent now, so who knows where that could lead. I don’t want to ever completely leave games, though. They’re my first love.

Read the full interview here.

This weeks edition of Faceoff pits two of Sony’s premiere action/adventure titles against one another. In one corner we have God of War, a franchise three titles deep, with a fourth (and supposedly final) title hitting store shelves in March 2010. And in the other corner, we have the underdog title, Heavenly Sword, which didn’t recieve the amount of praise and support it should have from the media and gamers considering it’s quality. Many people accused the title of simply being Goddess of War, because on the surface, the titles looked very similar, but anyone who has played both will testify to how very differenct they both play and feel.

Once again, we’ll be comparing the games in the key categories of Story, Controls, Gameplay, and Graphics. Who will emerge victorious? Let Faceoff begin!

Read the full article and see which game won.

I don’t know how new/old these pieces of work are, but I just found them a minute ago. I really like them, especially the second one. Made by Simon Buckroyd. Click on the picture to go to the artists page.

It’s hard to recall but this was one of the big PS3 releases, drumming up massive E3 excitement over the rolling demo several years ago. On first glance it’s just Goddess of War, twin blades twirling, quicktime eventful and featuring an epic, mature, Conan-style fantasy storyline. To be absolutely honest, the first impressions aren’t too far off. This is every bit as action-packed as Kratos’ journeys, if considerably less gruesome. What sets HS apart is the level of elegance, both in the games heroine, and the design and flow of the game itself. Rather than just mashing the buttons and flailing the blades of Chaos, there’s a little more Ninja Gaiden-style switching of stances and timing of blows. Hammering square will get you blocked and killed fast. You have to time and counter. Nariko arcs about the screen, a lady-shaped death-machine, but each button-press has to be managed. There’s no hand-holding here. You have to earn your awesomeness.

Read the full article

Instafilms.com have added a feature so you can make your own little Heavenly Sword movie. Check it out here.

And also check out this example.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5wnQb4c9u4]

Have fun!

Found this today, maybe you can make something out of it. It’s about mixing music and sounds or something like that in Heavenly Sword.

—————————

Heavenly Sword (2007) PS3
Tom Colvin, audio director, Ninja Theory

“Heavenly Sword also used FMOD. FMOD provides the ability to create a hierarchical bus structure as described in the section above. Each bus can have its own volume and pitch values, which can be modified in real-time. At the time, FMOD had some performance constraints related to the number of sub-buses within the bus structure, so we tried to keep the hierarchy as simple as possible.

The Ninja Theory tools team built our own proprietary GUI, which allowed us to configure mix snapshots, and adjust the mix in real-time. We were able to prevent the game from updating the mix if desired, so we could play with a mix template without the game suddenly changing the mix on us while we were working. We also had an in-game onscreen debug UI that showed us what mix templates were active, their priorities and so on.

Mixer snapshots were largely activated and deactivated by scripted events. This was one of the weaknesses of the mix system — the game scripts were not the easiest things to work with — they obviously couldn’t be changed while the game was running, and reboot times were long, so it was pretty time consuming getting the mix templates to switch on and off in the right places.

We decided to set up a blanket set of empty templates before the mix session, so we wouldn’t have to spend time actually getting the templates to switch on and off whilst mixing. This constrained the scope of the mix somewhat.

NT’s audio coder (Harvey Cotton) devised a snapshot priority system, which simplified implementation a great deal. The priority system made sure that the snapshot with the highest priority was the one you actually hear. Here’s an example of how this would work. You’re in a combat section of the game, and you perform one of the special moves, and then pause the game during this special move — what would happen with the mix system?

A default low priority mix would always be active. When the special move was initiated, a higher priority “special moves” template would be activated (we used scripted events fired from animations to do this.) When the user pressed pause, the pause mix would activate, and having the highest priority, would then take over from the special move mix.

At this point, three different mix templates are “active”, but only one is audible. The game is un-paused, and we move back to the next lowest priority template, the special move ends, and we move back to the default. The priority system is important because it prevents you from needing to store the game’s previous mix state, in order to return to it once any given scenario has finished.

Throughout development we constantly checked the mix on as many setups as possible — a reasonable spec TV, our own dev-monitors, crappy PC speakers, etc. During mastering, we had a week to set up the final mix templates. The mixing environment was a calibrated mix room. Our one week of mixing didn’t really feel like enough. There were all sorts of content changes we wanted to make at the mix stage, which just weren’t possible due to time constraints.”

Source.

Here are a my favorite Heavenly Sword cosplays, this includes some Kai’s, Nariko’s and 1 Whiptail. Most of these are taken from Cosplay.com and google. Click on the name of the cosplayer for a link to to their webpage (if available).

Click for them pics!