The Story Begins - The Game Maker's Companion: Game Development - page 308

Cutting the Scene
Cut scenes are an opportunity to get the player to get emotionally involved in the game. Chapter
9 described the cut scene leading to the Rouges' Rendezvous level as follows:
The pirate ship sails with all speed now. Flynn wonders why nobody notices that the lookout is
missing (shh, Flynn is being lured towards the Pirate King, remember?), but is relieved to be left
alone.
After days at sea, the ship reaches a hostile-looking island. Huge cliffs loom out of the ocean
and the captain seems to be steering the ship right into the rocks. But then at the last minute, a
small inlet is revealed and the ship slowly negotiates the narrow channel into an inner pool,
completely hidden from the sea (see Figure 9-10). Flynn looks up in awe. A sprawling town inhabits
the cliffs. Makeshift houses and huts made from what looks like driftwood fill the gap above the
ship. Rope walkways connect the different buildings and pirate flags are flying proudly everywhere.
“Welcome to Rogues' Rendezvous,” whispers Archie. “This is where all the pirates meet and
barter their newly stolen goods. I don't know if the Pirate King is here, but there must be someone
here who can tell us more.” Flynn spots a dangling cage hanging high above. A skeleton foot pokes
out from the bars. “What's that?” he asks with dread. “Oh that,” Archie says with a chuckle, “is a
captive held ransom for money. I guess his family didn't raise the money in time.”
Flynn looks sideways at the parrot. He seems very much to be on the pirates' side; laughing at a
poor prisoner. And this is his mother's pet? Does that mean that Mary is as ruthless when it comes
to making money? He hopes not. The skeletons tie up the ship and, except for a grumpy-looking
crew member left as guard, the ship is quickly deserted. Flynn sneaks past with ease. Archie says:
“Let's go find out if Mary has been here and whether the King is here himself. We better avoid the
skeleton crews, but some of the other bandits must know something.”
To set about turning this description into a cut scene, we began by turning it into a
storyboard (Figures 13-1 and 13-2). It's fairly easy to create a low-effort animation sequence by
panning a camera over a set of panels like this. With the addition of music and text to tell the
story, you can quickly create an effective cut scene entirely from 2D artwork.
Music is probably the fastest way to provoke an emotional response in a player and it's more
likely to happen with higher-quality music. Fortunately, there are many web sites that provide
access to professional-quality music that you can license for use in games within a limited
budget. Using the word “anxious” as a search term, we quickly found a track that really seemed to
fit the bill. As an orchestral piece, it fitted the period of the game and the horns rising and falling
really seemed to conjure up the image of cliffs rising out of the ocean.
As we didn't have editorial control over the music, we were forced to fit the images to the
music. This meant that only part of the story could be told, using some of the images, but this is
probably not a bad thing, as cut scenes shouldn't outstay their welcome.