(Or both!) They’re coming out of the wallsĪs usually happens with games like this, we ended up with considerably more footage than we were able to use. Pulling the sequence off required sacrificing some other potential content for the game, but it resulted in something truly great-or truly nasty. Animators, programmers, and asset artists had to take stock of each other's work and become especially cognizant of what the other disciplines were doing at the same time, the sequence itself had to be separated down into extremely granular details and tackled one tiny bit at a time. Tackling these problems turned into a multi-month slog and required the team to take a development approach that was at once both holistic and also layer-focused. The sequence required its own specific animations for Isaac's falling, struggling, and shooting the animators also had to account for the fact that the tentacle could be destroyed by Isaac at any point along its route.

In spite of how smoothly it appears to happen, the sequence is not a fully scripted single animation-the tentacle actually locates and latches onto Isaac programmatically, and where and how it drags Isaac through the hallways is dependent on Isaac's positioning.

It's a memorable sequence, but creating it took an almost unbelievable amount of work. Suggested strategy: snuggle.īut it wouldn't be a War Stories video without a singular challenge to overcome, and for Dead Space, that singular challenge turned out to be the infamous 'drag tentacle.' First encountered in Dead Space's third chapter, the drag tentacle interrupts the player's progress with an unskippable (and surprisingly difficult) arcade-esque sequence where you must shoot the tentacle's glow-y yellow bits before it hauls you away into its hidey hole and murders you into tiny pieces.

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