This morning, Remedy sent out a new issue of A Dose of Remedy, a newsletter which explores the weird and wonderful world of game development. In their latest post, the studio shares updates on the Oh Deer Diner thermos, their adventures at GDC, and their retirement of the WED (The World Editor) after almost twenty years of service.
This newsletter is recreated in full below as an archive of Remedy's history, but we highly recommend subscribing directly to receive all the goodness via your inbox.
24 April 2024
This dose will take you 4 minutes to read.
Welcome to A Dose of Remedy
Dear Remedy community,
Although spring has already sprung, our team has been tirelessly working behind the scenes since last year. Among our many projects, we’ve been busy with developing the expansions for Alan Wake 2. We’re eager to bring more thrilling adventures to you and can’t wait to share more in the coming months.
Remedy at GDC 2024
Recently, we had the pleasure of participating in the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2024, where we delivered 11 talks about the creation of our most ambitious game yet, Alan Wake 2. One of the speakers was our Senior Gameplay Programmer Alexander Balakshin, pictured above.
GDC is an annual event that brings together video game developers, industry professionals, and enthusiasts. It provides a platform for knowledge sharing, networking, and showcasing the latest developments in game design, technology, and business.
It was a week filled with exhilarating discussions, knowledge sharing, and invaluable learning from our peers amidst the dynamic industry climate. A heartfelt thank you to everyone who attended our talks or that took time to chat with us!
For those with access to the GDC Vault, all our presentations are available for you to check out. Dive in to discover the insights and experiences our team brings to the creation of our latest game.
We’re also immensely proud that Alan Wake 2 was nominated in several categories at the GDC Awards, and the conference concluded on a high note with Alan Wake 2 winning the award for Best Visual Art!
“The GDC Best Visual Art award for Alan Wake 2 is a big win for our talented team, showing off their creativity and hard work. We're so proud of the incredible detail and innovation we managed to do in the game. Special thanks to our Art Director Janne Pulkkinen, who’s vision and leadership were instrumental in bringing our game’s visuals to life. This recognition will inspire us to keep pushing the boundaries and delivering stunning visuals for our players to enjoy. The best has yet to come!”, says Principal Environment Artist Nazareno Urbano, commenting the win.
Alan Wake 2 Developer live streams!
This April we kicked off a series of live streams, where we showcase Alan Wake 2 and how it was brought to life through the years. Each stream, we’ll bring in a few of the developers from various disciplines who will talk about their craft and experiences in developing Alan Wake 2. As we chat, we will be going through video material on the topic we’re discussing, and we’ll also aim to have time to answer questions from chat during every stream. The streams are hosted by Remedy’s Senior Community Manager Vida Starčević, and we will be streaming every two weeks.
The first live streams have already been done, but you can still watch them online even if you missed them.
In the kickoff stream, join Game Director Kyle Rowley and Communications Director Thomas Puha as they go behind the scenes and show what Alan Wake 2 looked like years and months before its release.
The second developer stream featured composer Petri Alanko and Audio Director Richard Lapington, who took a deep dive into how audio and music was done in Alan Wake 2.
Upcoming streams include Cinematics & Live action (May 2nd), how the Pacific Northwest in the game was born (May 16th) and The Dark Place (May 30th). More will follow.
At the start of April, a certain era here at Remedy came to a solemn end. The World Editor, better known internally as WED, was used by our development teams with every game we’ve done since the first Alan Wake. It was a source of myriad selection of feelings to our developers throughout the years. In the end, WED was a remarkably reliable tool, but after 20 years, it was time for it to retire to greener pastures.
“WED lived a long and singular life. The fact that it could still be used to not only ship a game, but a cutting-edge, world class title like Alan Wake 2, speaks volumes for the effort put into maintaining it over the years. While working with WED wasn’t always easy, together we accomplished great things. With that, let’s raise a glass to WED. Requiescat in pace!”, eulogized Tommi Lind, Development Director in our Northlight technology team, in the memorial service held at the office.
The initial WED submit contained only 27 files, most of which were empty stubs for future implementation. After 20 years and many individuals contributing to it, the number of files removed from the Northlight codebase was 1905, totaling 256401 lines of C++ source code.
WED will be succeeded by NWED, which hopefully will learn from what WED did and surpass it in every way.
Meet the developers
This is where we let the people making our games talk about their work. This time, we’re talking to Kiya Kandar from the Northlight team and professional rigging artist Elina Sievänen.
Kiya Kandar
Graphics Programmer
From the UK. At Remedy and Finland for roughly 3 years. Worked on Alan Wake 2 in the Northlight rendering team.
Previously worked as a VFX programmer at Cloud Imperium Games for Star Citizen, and as a graphics programmer at Codemasters for Grid Legends.
Is currently Graphics Programmer in Northlight team. Has had fun working on a mix of different genres, big sci-fi MMO’s, racing games, and now on story-driven single player games.
“I joined Remedy as a big fan of Alan Wake and Control, so it’s been interesting to peek behind the curtain at the engine code that got those games running.”
For Alan Wake 2 I primarily worked on our geometry pipeline, improving it, optimizing it, and adding new features. I especially enjoyed working on our large-scale procedural animation system which runs on the GPU. It was something brand new for the Northlight engine and I’m not sure any other games have done the same before, so it was an enjoyable and iterative process developing something that performed well and that our artist were happy with. We used this tech to animate the forests in Alan Wake 2 and more.”
This, and our compute shader-based skinning methods were the subject of my GDC talk this year (‘Large Scale GPU-Based Skinning for Vegetation in Alan Wake 2’. It was the first GDC I’ve attended and had a great time. There were quite a lot of interesting presentations this year. It was also good to meet and talk to other developers, I got the sense that many are very impressed with the technology we have in the Northlight engine.”
Elina Sievänen
Rigging Artist
At Remedy for 5 years. Joined the company as a junior fresh from school during the final year of the development of Control, where she worked on office workers, maintenance workers, enemies and quest givers.
Has since worked on two Crossfire episodes, Alan Wake 2 and several ongoing projects.
Rigged Robert Nightingale, Mayor Setter, Kiran Estevez and Alex Casey among many other rigs for Alan Wake 2.
Currently working as a Rigging Artist in project ██████.
“The coolest part of my job is to study interesting details, like musculoskeletal structures or the mechanics of historical weapons. I also like the fact, that I get to do daily technical design and programming, while still doing manual artistic work, like skinning or modeling structures for simulations.”
More Oh Deer Diner thermoses on the way!
The iconic Oh Deer Diner thermos from the Alan Wake -series is a genuine collector’s item, but fear not, a new batch of them is arriving soon!
The second batch of these will be available on Amazon Germany (shipping Europe-wide) and Amazon Sweden (shipping in Sweden only), and through iam8bit (global shipping available) - in the near future!
The Oh Deed Diner thermos is done in collaboration with Airam.
As we continue our journey into 2024, your passion remains our greatest motivation. We’re grateful for every piece of feedback, and every moment of support you’ve shared with us. Thank you for being part of our community.
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