In Quantum Break, a failed Time Travel experiment causes a growing Fracture in time, causing time to start breaking down, leading toward the End of Time. During the same experiment, both the hero and the villain of the story, Jack Joyce and Paul Serene, are both caught in a blast of Chronon energy, gaining a number of different time-related superpowers.
All the different elements related to this, time breaking down and with that the Stutters in time, the Time Powers, the Junction moments where Paul Serene can see glimpses of different potential futures, the energies and effects related to the technology involving Time Machines and other experimental devices of Chronon technology, the Chronon Syndrome Serene suffers from, even the elusive Shifters, all had to feel and be a part of the same family of effects.
What does time look like? How do you visualize the concept of time breaking down? We knew we wanted the normal time and broken time to feel like two different worlds.
But it took a lot of brainstorming and prototyping, a lot of hard core tech and engine work to get there. We started from simple ideas, things move when time works normally; everything freezes when time stops. Simple enough. But it didn’t really offer us much to work with and it got a bit boring after a while. We wanted more—more danger, more visual fireworks. How to make the broken time feel fragmented, stretched, unstable? We looked for visual inspiration from Cubism. We looked into Glitch art, slit-scans, long exposure photos, strobe photography. Bit by bit, we created a palette of different effects and techniques, one simulation essentially with these different elements that by tweaking them in different ways we could create our family of Time Powers and effects.
What follows is a step-by-step guide to visual changes caused by time breaking down. It’s worth noting that many of these effects are effects in motion and, as such, while you can get an idea from still images, they will never truly do justice to how it feels and looks in the game.
When time breaks and a Stutter hits, the overall ambiance and grading of the scene changes. For this we took inspiration from infrared photography and created an overexposed and intense look.
We wanted to create a feeling of dangerous energies, and unpredictable, unstable look to broken time. Distortion waves sweep through the environment, animated by simple 2D fluid simulation projected over the scene. The intensity of distortion is driven by audio to make it feel more authentic. Indeed, audio plays a huge role in this process. Waves create complex layering of effects. In addition to geometry changes, waves emit distortion prisms, causing additional prismatic screen-space distortions and flakes—small particles taking their color from the underlying surface. Finally, waves project caustics over the scene, providing another layer of movement.
This is done by taking the 2D fluid simulation texture, distorting it with prismatic shapes, and projecting it as a light source over the scene. Light’s intensity is modulated by audio.
Inside Stutters, motion trails, inspired by slit-scan and long exposure photography, provide a visualization of an object’s movement through space and time. The sky and the stars are a good example of how trails are used. When a Stutter hits, the visualization of the sky changes completely. Stars and other objects in the sky draw out paths of light. Other important sources of light trails include bullets and the warp trails of Monarch Chronon tech Strikers, using the Chronon tech devices on their backs to simulate the effects of Jack’s Time Rush power.
The Stutters can be a chaotic, cacophonic experience. It’s easy to get lost in them. This quickly became clear to us. It was obvious that we needed to provide guidance to the player. We do this in multiple ways, but one important device is color. Inside a Stutter, only the accent colors punch through the bleached world. This provides structure to these scenes. Yellow is a clue and sign for the player: this is the way forward. At the same time, it’s no accident that it’s also the Monarch brand color.
