How to draw a life
How we turn nearly fifteen hundred written scenes into frames set in four different decades.
Yasper Games
Everything in Hayat Dosyası starts with writing. A scene is first written as a short moment: who is there, what time it is, where the light comes from, how the player feels.
Then that moment becomes a picture brief. The brief describes the people's ages, faces and clothes, the things in the room and where the camera stands. We generate the frames from these briefs on a computer, all in the same hand-painted style.
The real work is in the decades. The same scene is drawn four times, depending on the decade the player was born in. In the eighties the living room has a tube television and a wood stove; in the nineties a cassette player; in the two-thousands a flat screen; in the twenty-tens everyone holds a phone. We collected these objects year by year in a dictionary so that nothing from the wrong decade shows up in a scene.
There is one more rule: you always see the player over the shoulder or from behind. The face of the person across from you is clear; yours never shows. Because the one living that life is you.
The frames enter the game piece by piece, the most seen scenes first. If a scene does not have its new frame yet, the frames drawn so far are used.
