Furi Community Week – Fan Art Winners Revealed!

Posted by on 11.29.22
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Hello everyone,

Thank you so much for participating in Furi community week and to the Furi fan art contest on the theme “Peace: what if Rider became friend with one (or several) guardians?”.

We received many submissions and we were very impressed with your work! It’s inspiring for us to see how you bring the characters from Furi back to life, in this peaceful alternative future that many of us have thought about. Thumbs up to some of you who sent fabric dolls or text submissions, a lovely variation from drawings and paintings. And a big thank you to all of you who made us smile or touched us with the subjects of your artworks!

Our judges consisted of:

  • Emeric Thoa (Creative Director)
  • Audrey Leprince (Executive Producer)
  • Anthony Beyer (Lead Artist)
  • Marjorie Deneux (Game Artist on Haven)
  • Mylène Lourdel (Marketing Specialist)

It was hard to chose, but, without further delay, here are the winners:

1st place: New kayaking buddy by Multi

2nd place: Peace by Afrosus
3rd place: A Friendly Game of Cards by ZowerLemon

For the Coup de Coeur, 3 entries got the same score, so we decided to award them all 🙂

Warm breeze by Aru53840337

Forgiveness by Vadanel

Fan Art by Esidisi-86

Furi Community Week – Interview with Chris, CG Animator

Posted by on 11.11.22
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Hello everyone,

The community week is still going on! Today, we are happy to share an interview of Chris Hoareau, Lead Animator & Artist at The Game Bakers. To learn more about his work on Furi, read below!

Hi Chris, can you present yourself and your job on Furi?

Hello! I am Chris and I am a French CG animator and artist, living near Paris. I’m 33. I always drew and wanted to work in entertainment. Fun fact, according to my school teachers, I did my first flipbook at only 4 years old. In animation, I like moves that use the whole body (like fighting, you know). I also like to add unnecessary details, and I’m always the guy who’s late (I am sorry about this, truly). In life, I like speed, having fun, learning things – I actually want to learn everything – and, I’m also the guy who’s late.

For Furi I was in charge of the gameplay animations: that includes the long walk on the path, the fights, and some cutscenes. I also rigged* all the characters. I also storyboarded The Flame’s cutscenes. 2023, it will be my 10-year anniversary at The Game Bakers, so cheers!

Furi is about creating intense satisfaction to players, as Emeric Thoa, Creative Director, explains in a blog post. How is animation part of creating satisfaction? What were the keys to making Furi’s animation?

There are at least two categories of animations in the game that create satisfaction for players, without talking about cutscenes which make the story go forward.

First, the ones we call “Melee Attacks” (when the boss is stunned, and the player attacks to trigger a short cutscene) are very pleasant to watch. The player can appreciate the nasty blows the bosses have to swallow.

Then, Furi’s gameplay lets players do really quick moves to avoid, parry or attack bosses. Our animations just push up those actions to a next level, that makes them even more satisfactory. 

But I want to say it’s really the work of the whole team, animations alone wouldn’t be enough!

Furi is also a game about facing challenge. What was the biggest challenge regarding animation on Furi?

The biggest challenge was to make fighting animations that were fast but also readable to the human eye. It was my intention, but it was pretty hard to do, especially as I was a junior back then. I had not that much experience in animation. Some of the fighting animation length was something like 2 frames (Furi was animated at 30 frames per second, so that is pretty short in time). I hope players managed to see all the nice details we added!

Can you share some references you used to animate some of Furi’s bosses?

For sure!

First, Takashi Okazaki (character designer of Furi) drew some cool and original posings for Rider. I’m thinking about Rider’s running stance: holding his sword in two hands right in front of him while running at something like 50mph, haha.

I love and grew up with Japanese culture, mostly anime (precisely « shonen neketsu » like Dragon Ball, Saint Seiya, Hokuto No Ken, etc…) so I am imbued with these brutal accelerations, inhuman movements and iconic posings.

I also practiced martial arts for a few years, so I recorded myself with my smartphone smashing pillows in the living room of my previous apartment to reproduce and adjust my moves in the game. (Don’t ask, I will not share those videos).

Emeric, who has a big movie culture, shared some movie scenes that help me a lot, for instance from the Miyamoto Musashi movies. He shared ideas coming from fighting games like Soul Calibur or Metal Gear. He already had an excellent vision of the game before its conception.

Finally, I can tell that there was also a big part of “feeling”. I mean, the characters’ designs have strong personalities. Just looking at Takashi Okazaki’s artworks was often enough to know how to animate and give life to each boss.

What did you enjoy the most while working on the game?

To be honest, as an animator, Furi was the first game I worked on for PC and consoles. Just wow ! Secondly, this is a fighting game! I’m keen on fighting games. As I said before, I practiced martial arts and I really love them. It was just like a dream come true to animate all those incredible fighters! Thirdly, there was a big creation part. I was and felt really free to create some fighting moves. Every time I worked on a new boss, it was like entering a new world, with new feelings. It was enriching to try to imagine the mindset of each boss.

How did you proceed to animate Onnamusha, the new rider? What did you have to do to make her move as the rider?

I can’t reveal all the magic tricks, right?

Actually, Onnamusha uses almost all the same animations as Rider. The reason was that Onnamusha had to play correctly the existing cutscenes as the new Rider. To do this, I had to set up the 3D model (made by the awesome CG artist Anthony Beyer) so she had more or less the same body proportions to share the same rigged skeleton as Rider. In addition, Onnamusha had to keep her female shape, and that was the tricky thing: to have a female body share the skeleton of Rider. The more the two characters had the same proportions, the more the game and cutscenes animations fit.

Was there anything unexpected that happened during the development?

Developing a game IS a source of unexpected things! There is always something new to learn and something new to fix.

One thing that wasn’t really planned and gave me some trouble was that I had to animate (by hand) Rider’s hair and cape. For the first iterations of Furi, these parts relied on the physics of the game, and it was very beautiful. Then came the optimization pass (it was obviously very important to have a good frame rate to be able to play properly) and we had to make compromises.

Fortunately, I had already done that before on The Burst hat bands. It was already planned to animate the ribbons « by hand », so I knew how to do it. At that time, we already knew that it would require too much resource to have her bands animated by the game physics, so, it was not an option. Everything was planned in the rig* and the animations of The Burst, and baked into her animations files.

So, I had to adapt Rider’s rig by adding bones to his hair and to his cape. To have something like a natural rendering, I simulated the physics of the hair and the cape and I created the animations one by one. I added wind effects and played with gravity when it was necessary. For example, when Rider runs, his hair and his cape had to go backwards. It meant I had to re-animate, re-export, and reintegrate the animations of Rider with the hair and the cape animations in the files. It was a lot of work!

Do you have any last word for Furi’s players?

For players: if you haven’t finished the game, please do!
For animators: don’t hesitate to do weird new things that can lead to great ones!
For me (how snooty): don’t forget to enjoy life!

* Like for a puppet, rigging is the creating the elements necessary to animate a character. First, we create a skeleton which will more or less influence the body parts that we want to move. Then, to animate it more easliy, we create « controllers » of the skeleton, which allow the bones to be moved as desired. A rig = skeleton + controllers on the CG model of the character.

Furi Community Week – Interview with The Toxic Avenger!

Posted by on 11.07.22
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Hi Furist!

We know how much you love Furi’s soundtrack, as we receive a ton of feedback about it. And it’s keeps going strong, and we regularly hear from players who discovered the game through its music! This community week is the perfect time to share some up-to-date data on the success of the OST.

Thanks to the spectacular work of Danger, Carpenter Brut, The Toxic Avengers,  Waveshaper, SCATTLE, kn1ght & Lorn, streaming equals to over 600 years of listening 😱.

To celebrate the community week, we had a chat with The Toxic Avenger about his work on the OST.

Hello, you worked on Furi’s original soundtrack and composed two tracks and in particular Make This Right, that became emblematic of the game, and was in the launch trailer. Can you introduce yourself to those who don’t know you?
Sure! My name is Simon, I’ve been making electronic music for almost 25 years now, I’ve released 5 albums and participated in several movies and video games soundtracks.

What is your connection to video games?
I am 40 years old, I started playing with Galaga on NES, which means I’ve been playing for almost 35 years. At times a lot, at times a little, but there is always something to play near me. For the last ten years I’ve been able to see the behind the scenes of gaming and work together with video game creators.

For Furi, it was the first time you composed for a video game. How was the collaboration, and how did you approach this new adventure?
It was indeed the first time I composed original tracks!
My music had already been used in games like Need For Speed or Watch Dogs.
The collaboration went very well in the sense that I understood quickly what The Game Bakers wanted, and they also understood me very well, it’s always very nice to understand each other!
I took the work to heart because I know the influence that video games can have, and I was immediately charmed by the little I could see of the game before working on it.

In Furi, the music adapts to what is happening in the fight, especially the phases of the bosses. How did you manage this?
For me, it was a first! Composing differently. When a character moves from A to B, let’s say, B being a more tense moment in the game than A, the music has to adapt, become denser, and intensify.
For that, I had to compose in parts of tracks, with layers of layers and elements that can be assembled and removed if the player decides all of a sudden to go back closer to point A. I had to cut the track as in making different scenes, a bit like movie editing… but I don’t know if I’m very clear 😀

What was your biggest inspiration to compose Make This Right & My Only Chance?
I was lucky that The Game Bakers approached me and asked me to do what I am used to doing! So it was very easy for me, but obviously, the big inspiration was what I saw of the game. Graphically it influenced me a lot, it looked sumptuous!

What do you enjoy most about composing for video games?
To wake up the teenager in me (he’s never really asleep anyway). I also love to make music to the image.

Thank you! Do you have any news to share for our players?
Yes! I just released my new album, a double album in fact! It’s called « Yes future » and I’m pretty proud of it!

Furi – Community Week – Fan Art Contest

Posted by on 11.05.22
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Between November 5th and 11th, we are celebrating Furi’s amazing community with a lot of events and content. You can see all the details here.

We are running a fanart contest on the theme “Peace: what if Rider became friend with one (or several) guardians?”. The fanart can take the shape of your choice (drawing, illustration, sculpture, collage, installation…) but has to be created especially for the contest. You have to be the original author of it. The contest runs from today until November 19th at 11:59 PM CEST / 2:59 PM PT.

 

To participate, please send your fanart, your nickname, your social media profile and the name of your art to fanart@thegamebakers.com. Don’t hesitate to share it also on social media with #furifanartcontest or in our community hub on Steam ! Be careful, you have to email us to participate, only posting on social media doesn’t count.The jury consists of Emeric Thoa (Creative Director), Audrey Leprince (Narrative Director), Anthony Beyer (Lead Artist), Marjorie Deneux (Game Artist) & Mylène Lourdel (Marketing Specialist).

Here are the prizes for the winners:

  • 1st: Limited Run Edition Collector (Switch) + Original Soundtrack on Vinyl + Furi Artbook + T-Shirt
  • 2nd: Furi Limited Run Edition (Switch or PS4) + Furi Artbook + Original Soundtrack on CD
  • 3nd: Original Soundtrack on CD + Furi IndieBox (PC)
  • “Coup de coeur”: Original Soundtrack on CD + Furi IndieBox (PC)

Since the release of Furi, you have created a lot of amazing fan art and we can’t wait to see the results of this contest!

Furi – Community Week

Posted by on 11.05.22
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Hello Furists!

It’s been a good year for Furi with the launch of Onnamusha, bringing a new fighter to the game, and the update of the game. We’re always impressed by your continuous support over the years, and we thought it was a good time to celebrate you and Furi in a new Community Week!

This Community Week, we will share some behind the scene about Furi and the Onnamusha DLC, our favourite fanarts, interviews with team members who worked on Furi and more! We are also hosting a new fanart contest on the theme “Peace: what if Rider became friend with one (or several) guardians?”, all the details are available here. Show us your best creations and win some Furi’s merch!

We will host two Ask Me Anything sessions. The first one will take place on Discord on Monday 7th at 6 PM GMT+2 / 09 AM PT, focusing on Onnamusha. It will be the perfect time to know more about the new Rider and the creative process behind the DLC. On Wednesday 9th at 10 PM GMT +2 / 1 PM PT, Emeric Thoa and Audrey Leprince will also hold an AMA session on r/Gaming on Reddit.

That’s not all! We are discounting the game this week, so you can encourage your friends to try it.

The game is available 70% off on SteamGOGHumblePlayStation and Nintendo Switch. And cherry on top, Onnamusha is discounted for the first time, with 30% off!

Make sure you follow us on our social networks and join our Discord server in order not to miss anything!
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