Foul-Mouthed Firearms Flying ‘High On Life’

20 Feb

*Frenetic interstellar shooter becomes the top single-player launch in Xbox Game Pass history.*

**Studio**: Squanch Games
**Release Date**: December 2022
**Platforms**: Xbox Series X I S, Xbox One, PC
**Genre**: Narrative FPS

Mission Launch

Squanch Games’ High On Life follows the misadventures of an unmotivated high-school graduate who becomes Earth's last hope following an alien invasion.

These interstellar creeps are constantly searching for their next intoxicating experience, and, unfortunately, they discover that humans provide an exquisite high. As the protagonist, your only solution is to become a bounty hunter, tracking down the kingpins in the alien cartel to stop their horrifying harvest!

Squanch Games used Speech Graphics’ SGX software to bring their obscene animated weapons, named “Gatlians”, to life with disturbing emotional accuracy.

Speech Graphics Character Artist, Gabor Toro, enthuses over the collaboration: “For each behavior mode, Squanch provided a sample pose from which we created variations of each expression. These expressions are built up from our muscle library, which is included as part of our standard package, but we also provided additional support during the setup process through our extended mode library.”

This 1-minute clip demonstrates how an audio file is used to generate animation using SGX Producer at a processing time of 1 :1 or better.

Quality and Comedy

Nathan Griffin, Gameplay Programmer at Squanch Games, detailed how Speech Graphics’ software impacted their animation pipeline during the production of High on Life.
“Since High on Life keeps our characters so close to the screen at all times it was important to us that we provide the highest fidelity facial animation possible.”
“Speech Graphics provided by far the best facial animation generation from all the systems we tested”

“Speech Graphics easily integrated into our existing facial animation pipeline with its ability to control emotion and performance. We were able to build a pipeline that allowed us to choose what characters would get the Speech Graphics treatment without struggle or lots of back-and-forth support. I highly recommend Speech Graphics to anyone looking to improve their facial animation performances.”