#2 Taking and keeping pictures

In Exographer, you can take a picture whenever you like. That means in the middle of an animation or power use, or even a lift mouvement.The save system lives within the pictures you take. Your last picture is your save, and you can take as many pictures as you like ! 

That led to two technical challenges. The first one is about recording and restoring fidelity. We had to make sure that everything you see on the image you capture is actually what you are going to get the moment you load the picture. That implies recording the states of not just the player and it’s progression, motion, and activated powers on screen ; but also the states of puzzles, antimatters, props animations, moving objects, and even some audio configurations ! Also, we had to keep track of world elements located outside of the frame canvas, such as other puzzles you have beaten, and paths you have opened in the past.

Thus, « taking a snap is far from just saving a .jpeg file »

The second challenge is speed. When you take a picture in Exographer, you have a designed freeze of 200 milliseconds to give the sensation of Cheese ! to the player. That is also the budget we had to fill heavy task executions. First of all, the recording of the whole world listed above, and then the recording of the main camera itself, plus a couple of special effect cameras. On top of that, you add up all the feedback effects that occur when you take a picture. To beat this challenge, we choose to optimize some tasks, delay others, such as the serialization of files. The result for the player is you can shoot many pictures in a row without noticing the processes happening in the backstages.

Will I fall in the mud if I load a Snap here? No, Tony guarantees!