A NieR Death Experience

Say hello to my latest obsession, the masterpiece that is NieR: Automata. When your character dies in this game, you get to form a sentence from three split text strings, which you can then leave for other players to read when they pass by your corpse in the game.

The cool thing about this is that these precomposed sentence fragments work in any combination with each other, and they're all very evocative of the tone and world of NieR. It's a cool glimpse into the minds of the other players and can often also serve as warning message for particularly dangerous scenarios in the game. I found myself reading these for every corpse I came across and was quite enchanted by this system, so I decided to make a little something as a tribute.

This was a great excuse to tinker with some text glitch and distortion in After Effects. There's quite a bit going on here, with a wiggle expression for the constant text shake and a character value offset + anchor point offset + randomized magnify offsets for every text transition (I may have gone a little crazy with expressions), giving it that somewhat broken and barely held together look, which is also thematically appropriate for the world of NieR.

This was a cool little experiment. I'll certainly be making presets for this next time, because my composition turned into a nightmare with the timing and transitions of three different pre-compositions.

I'm finding that a lot of my stuff lately has been influenced by games. It's such an inspiring medium, with a treasure trove of incredibly beautiful worlds, powerful stories, and insane gameplay mechanics to pull from and make something of your own. There will be more! Until then, it's time for more NieR: Automata.