In Exographer, taking pictures reveals many clues and you can do it in any situation. That includes in the middle of an animation or while using a power, or when you’re on a moving in mid-air or in an elevator. You can take as many pictures as you like, and the last picture you took is your save point.
That led to two technical challenges. The first one is about recording and restoring fidelity.
Our developer, Tony Cottrel, had to make sure that everything you see on the image you capture is actually what you are going to get the moment you load back the picture. That implies recording the states of not just the player’s progression, motion, and activated powers; but also the states of puzzles, props animations, moving objects, and even some audio configurations! Of course, he also had to keep track of world elements that are located outside of the frame canvas, such as other puzzles you have beaten, and paths you have opened in the past, as in any regular save system.
So that “taking a picture” is far from just “storing a jpg file”.
The second challenge is time. When you take a picture in Exographer, you have a designed freeze of 200 milliseconds to give the sensation of “Say Cheese!” to the player. That is also the time budget we had to fill heavy task executions. First of all, the recording of the whole world listed above, and then the recording of the main camera itself, plus a couple of special effect cameras. On top of that, you add up all the feedback effects that occur when you take a picture. To beat this challenge, we choose to optimize some tasks, delay others, such as the serialization of files. The result for the player is that you can shoot many pictures in a row without noticing the processes happening in the backstages.
Will I fall down in the mud there if I load this back? No you won’t, says Tony.