Behind the Creative of Cavalier: Conqueror of Excellence
Your Majesty’s culture is based on three principles: Chivalry, Courtesy and Excellence.
These aren’t just words for our about page. They’re values that guide everything we do.
The Cavalier Project is an internal initiative we have created in order to develop interactive experiences that combine our passion for research and development — staying on top of emerging technology — with our core principles.
Posture & Balance
To launch this project, we developed Posture & Balance. It’s an interactive game that uses new technologies to explore our value of excellence.
Excellence
Your Majesty is a close-knit knighthood of designers, technologists and thinkers who achieve excellence through the application of art and craft to provide memorable solutions for the brands we serve and people we connect.
This value means a lot to our agency. Every day, we strive to achieve excellence for our clients. Frequently it’s recognized by our peers with awards. But more importantly, it’s recognized by our clients meeting and exceeding their objectives.
We’ve come to learn that excellence isn’t a goal or an accolade. It’s an attitude. It’s a desire to know more, push harder and master every aspect of what we do. And when every single person at our agency is committed to the value of excellence, we can achieve the impossible.
The Game
Posture & Balance conveys a sense of knighthood in modern days — the pursuit of excellence. The trailer, poster and intro of the game are all very dark and only show a light in the far distance. Excellence is something that needs to be worked towards. Upon starting to play, the scenes slowly brightens. The light becomes a goal to reach, just as Your Majesty constantly reaches for excellence.
When finishing the game, after galloping for 40 seconds, the light becomes brighter to indicate that the goal has been reached — making it to the end and getting a step closer to excellence.
Game Design
The design and animation showcase Your Majesty’s brand identity in motion. It’s influenced by heraldry and chivalry updated and repurposed for the modern digital world. So the game design is polished and well crafted, set in a dark, mystical and scary forest. A forest of obstacles that need to be overcome to reach the light of the castle. Just like our creative process of working through projects.
The Knight and his horse dressed in heavy metal armor, charging through the dirt, dodging trees and branches — demanding the best from yourself. Not just challenging the forest and your goal, but also your inner thoughts and fears.
Process
We started with the story we wanted to tell. Then we used the project as way to learn new technologies and improve the capabilities of our agency. Our Art Director taught himself Cinema 4D to create style frames as a base for the WebGL development.
The complete game was inspired by medieval times, with a modern twist. This concept was applied to every aspect of the game, from the game scenes, to the UI, animations, sound design and music.
To promote the game we created a matte painting as a poster and a fully 3D animated trailer. All of these elements were made in-house.
Animation
The trailer has a similar dark atmosphere as the game start screen. Preparing for battle, creating tension and mystery, by using close crops of the horse. Not showing too much so there’s something left to imagine.
For the logo animations we used a mix of elegant and technical styles, tightly tied to the Your Majesty brand. These animations were created in Adobe After Effects and then exported as SVG animations using the bodymovin plugin to keep file sizes down, browser performance up and support for both regular and retina screens.
The main buttons and page transitions are using smoke-like transitions to tie in with the mystery of the scene, and was on its own another technical challenge.
Sound Design
The 3D sound design, which we made in collaboration with Studio Takt, is a big part of the full experience. In the beginning the sound and music go from very mysterious, dark and empty, to more intense, and pushing you to keep riding. Once you reach your goal, the music becomes euphoric.
The sound design, just like the game design, contains a mix of modern influences and medieval times. During the gameplay the sound design provides feedback when certain actions appear, like picking up a gold nugget, hitting a tree, correctly speeding up by hitting the space-bar, or even notifying when the user is running on the left or right side of the game. We did this by balancing the sound effects and music on the left and right audio channels. This gives it a true 3D immersive experience.
Listen to the Cavalier music loops on SoundCloud
To top things off we hired a voice actor to introduce the concept of Cavalier and congratulate the user at the end with the score results. Based on the score results, the user will either be praised for their excellence or told to get back on their horse.
Crafting Posture & Balance was a fun and rewarding experience. There was a tight collaboration between design and development, resulting in a distinct aesthetic and highly polished overall experience. Read about how the game got made by our developers; Behind the Tech of Cavalier: Conqueror of Excellence or challenge yourself at cavalierchallenge.com
