If you’re of a certain age, the words “Broken Sword” will bring to your mind adventures, mysteries to solve, and unprecedented graphic quality. At least in 1996, when the first game in the series was released. Back then, Charles Cecil was 34 years old, and his company, Revolution Software, sold over a million copies of the genre. But now, 30 years later, barely six people work full-time (along with some freelancers), so preparing the sixth installment of the series as well as the remake of the first one is proving to be more challenging than they thought.
Broken AI
Some time ago, fans of the original game, who usually have some gray hair, have been requesting a remake with current technology. The problem is explained by Cecil himself: there are 30,000 hand-drawn sprites… And they need a time (and money) they don’t have, considering that each one takes about an hour to complete. “30,000 times one hour, at 15 or 20 pounds per hour, is a lot of money.” 600,000 pounds, to be more exact.
So Cecil and his team realized that the only possibility to release the game was the omnipresent and always controversial artificial intelligence. The idea was to produce a few hundred sprites to train it, but the result was far from perfect, so they went to the next level, something that has been used for some time in animation and video games: frame interpolation between two key frames.
Basically: if you put the sprite of a person walking and the sprite of that same person stopping a few meters later, the machine will be able to infer that the character is walking all the way, creating the animation. “Instead of taking an hour for each one, it takes between 5 and 10 minutes. We’re training the model on our own sprites… mainly on the silhouette and body details, because there’s no way the head and hands are going to look good, so we have to draw them manually.” Hands, done manually.
On the other hand, all those who want to see a new sequel of ‘Broken Sword’ can rest assured, although perhaps not entirely in agreement with the direction of the series, because it will be created in 3D. The date? Maybe next year. Maybe not. Sit tight while the AI finishes creating the corresponding animations. Hopefully, afterwards, it won’t feel like conquering the world.
