Back before Double Fine came along and made video game projects on Kickstarter cool, Colorado-based independent developer Warballoon managed to find lots of traction back in late-2011 for its first game: a title for iOS and Android devices called Star Command. The project surpassed its $20,000 funding goal by quite a bit, racking up nearly $37,000 in pledges from over 1,100 backers. It was an impressive feat considering Warballoon’s origins.

Justin (left) and Jordan Coombs, co-founders of Warballoon.

“Warballoon was started a long time ago,” recounts Warballoon co-founder Jordan Coombs. “[My brother and co-founder] Justin and I have been talking about making a game like Star Command since we were teenagers. The open, indie focused digital market gave us that opportunity.”

And clearly this was an idea that resonated with gamers, if the cash the developer raised was any indication. Jordan explains where he and his brother came up with the concept:

“Justin and I were sitting, watching Star Trek: The Next Generation and we noticed that every time the show starts the crew is in the middle of some very unheroic mission,” he explains. “Scanning star clusters, cataloging nebula gasses…then the Borg or Q or something crazy happens and that becomes the story arc. But we thought it was more interesting to see the boring shit. What’s it like managing a ship when it’s super dull and there isn’t shit happening?”

Of course, each episode of Star Trek has action and adventure for a reason.

“That was the concept, but even in our execution we quickly discovered that the boring stuff is boring and that the fun stuff is the epic stories and battles,” says Jordan.

Steve Tranby, developer guru of Warballoon.

So the Coombs brothers teamed up with developer Steve Tranby and threw the project up on Kickstarter. But after their campaign was successfully funded and the three-man crew finally tackled its first game, the realities of development started to take hold.

Delays stacked up, and what was initially planned for a holiday 2011 release dragged on. Finally, as noted earlier today on their Kickstarter page, Warballoon is a mere 48 hours away from submitting their finished game to Apple’s iTunes store, with plans to bring the game to Android devices and a more robust version for PC soon after.

“The mobile version is done for all intents and purposes,” explains Jordan. “It’s in preview hands and we’re making just a couple tweaks based on initial feedback, but that’s it. Submit to Apple and sit back and watch what happens. As for development, when we’re done with the mobile versions, we switch to PC where everything is tested.”

Part of the reason it took so long is that the team should’ve aimed for the PC in the first place. In fact, Warballoon started a second Kickstarter in summer 2012 to raise funds for the PC version, beating its goal of $100,000 by bringing in $151,000.

“PC would probably have been better for a first time team,” says Jordan. “We could have had the game out and being beta tested a long time ago, just like Minecraft, FTL, Prison Architect…PC players love to get in on the ground floor and really have a high tolerance for a work in progress. Mobile is the total opposite—polish polish polish. That’s the name of the game. And no pre-releases, easy beta testing or periodic updates. They’re just different breeds. Really we made the choice based on wanting to bring some hardcore gaming to mobile.”

But now that the game’s almost finished, how would the Warballoon team rate the crowd-funding experience? And would they change anything about it if they could?

“It’s challenging but we love it overall,” says Jordan. We wouldn’t change a thing about our experience, and much of that is just learning some lessons. You need to keep in regular contact with your fans, and when you’re at the tail end of development and not a lot is actually changing fans tend to get frustrated, which we understand.”

That said, we will never do it again,” he continues. “We will probably go with more of a Minecraft model: you pay for a work in progress and get to help us build it as we go. That would probably fit our development style more. Far more transparent for what we are actually doing development-wise rather than just talking about it.”

Soon gamers will get the chance to check out the long-awaited Star Command. Backers are looking forward to finally enjoy the result of their pledges—and Coombs and the rest of the Warballoon team is looking forward to it, too.

When asked what they’re most excited for their backers to experience, Jordan says, “Just the chaos of battle. Building your guys up, meeting some creepy species and then having them kill your favorite guy. That shit is fun.”

“The other day I was watching Justin play and he had a hull breach on his ship,” he continues. “He had to keep walking his crew members just outside of the vacuum range, and any misstep would suck his guys out. It was funny because he was being invaded at the same time and his team had basically been broken in half because of the hull breach in between them. That stuff is unplanned and just fun.”

Soon Warballoon will have the opportunity to move onto new projects once Star Command is released, and there are already ideas swirling. And the team hope to take full advantage of the lessons Star Command has provided.

“We would love to get a chance to make more games,” says Jordan. “We really love doing this even though this first project has not been smooth sailing. There are about five thousand reasons for that, and we won’t get into that here. But needless to say we have learned more lessons in the last couple years than I can even describe. We would love to see what our sophomore effort would look like.

“But the next game would be something quite a bit quicker. It may be similar in scope, but we just know how to get something like this done a lot more efficiently. And it would very likely be just for PC. Let’s hope we get that chance.”

So, just when is Star Command coming out?

“April, unless Apple’s schedule is just swamped,” says Jordan. “It’s going to be $2.99. And believe me—we can’t wait for you to play it.”

[Star Command HQ]

Yesterday, we learned of a forthcoming PC game called The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, a “weird fiction horror” game that puts players in the role of a detective with supernatural abilities. The game is the first project to come out of Polish developer The Astronauts, comprised of three former managers from People Can Fly, the studio behind Bulletstorm and the forthcoming Gears of War: Judgment.

After yesterday’s announcement, Adrian Chmielarz was kind enough to answer some questions about the new game, his young studio, and what we can expect from Ethan Carter when it launches sometime this year.

The Astronauts’ Adrian Chmielarz.

Machinima: What inspired you to create The Vanishing of Ethan Carter? I see that “weird fiction stories and other tales of macabre of the early 20th century” are a big part of the game’s DNA. So what specific influences and works are you building off of for that project?

Adrian Chmielarz: The key is in the difference between weird fiction horror and other subgenres of horror. I think that terror, gore, slash, etc. – they’re more or less represented in the world of video games, but there’s very little of weird fiction there. And when you read these stories – be it Blackwood or Lovecraft or Howard – you realize they’re not as old fashioned as one may think. Yes, they do rely on the imagination a lot, but at the same time they’re not afraid to reach for shock or macabre. So I think it can be quite interesting to explore this kind of experience – both intimate and spectacular – in a video game. However, we’re not trying to be an extension of any particular author or mythos. We want to do our thing. We’re very respectful, but we want to speak in our own voice. That’s one of the reasons what we went indie: to take full responsibility for what we do.

M: Ethan Carter seems like quite a departure for people who formerly worked on a game called Bulletstorm. Can you go a bit into the transition from that project to this one? What was it like to switch gears to such a degree?

AC: Actually, the first three games that I’ve done were adventure games. I do love shooters – five years of QuakeWorld every single day – and I’ve made three, but I’ve always wanted to come back to the world of exploration and discovery one day. There’s that chance now. Other members of the team feel this way as well: we simply think that games can do more. Just…more. If The Walking Dead or Journey did not open our eyes, then I don’t know what will. So, mentally it wasn’t a challenge at all. We were more than ready and were thinking of making a different kind of game for a very, very long time. What was and still is challenging is making a high-quality game and marketing it when your team has seven people. But the Bastion guys showed us the way, and they’re great inspiration to us and a promise that it can be done.

M: Was a desire to work on this project specifically what led to The Astronauts’ departure from People Can Fly last year? Or was this project what the three of you came up with after you’d already departed? How long as development on Ethan Carter been going on?

AC: Will it further cloud the sky if I said it’s both things at the same time? We were thinking of making a smaller “love letter to the genre” kind of game for a very long time, but had we stayed at PCF, we’d probably never have had a chance to do that. When we started PCF we were all about working hard to grow the studio to the AAA level. When we achieved that – I don’t mean the founders, I mean every member of the team – it now seems that big, spectacular AAA is exactly what the studio wants and should keep on doing. You just wait and see what these guys have accomplished with Gears of War: Judgment. But with The Astronauts, we’re telling ourselves from the start that, this time around, we’re aiming for something different. Even if we grow, we’d rather be doing five smaller games at the same time rather than a single big one.

M: What kind of role do the protagonist’s supernatural powers have in the gameplay mechanics? What kinds of unique or different mechanics can we look forward to seeing in Ethan Carter?

Andrzej “Andrew” Poznanski handles the art duties.

AC: I think what we have is unique, but to be honest we are not chasing after that. Let me actually quote a tweet that Greg Kasavin sent to me the other day; “Uniqueness is not a goal in itself, I think. It can be a positive side effect of being specific and personal in the work.” I could not agree more.

M: Is the game going to be from a first or third-person perspective?

AC: For me, personally, the first-person works a bit better for immersion, and since the escapist factor of video games is crucial for The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, we went with FPP.

M: Do The Astronauts have any other projects planned at the moment? What kinds of projects will The Astronauts be tackling as time goes on?

AC: We could be making ten games right now if we had resources. Every single one quite different from another, but all united by one goal: to take players on a journey that will make them feel and will make them think. We want to entertain, but we also have something to say at the same time.

M: Is Ethan Carter going to be self-published, or do you have a publisher lined up?

AC: I don’t know. Despite the fact that we’re doing the game for PC, it’s not because we have anything against consoles. Quite simply the PC is the only platform right now that can handle our game. Not because we’re eating up processor cycles, but because we’re building detailed worlds that require more than half a gig of memory space. So we’re platform agnostic and we will see what happens in the future, and if we go for the next-gens is it going to be us or is it going to be through a publisher. All we care about, really, is that we have our freedom to make the games the way we want them to be made.

M: What are the roles of your fellow ex-People Can Fly colleagues on this project? How big is the team working on the game?

Michal Kosieradzki is in charge of the game’s graphics and animation.

AC: Here’s a funny thing. The three original founders of PCF are all exactly 194 cm tall. That’s weird fiction right there. Anyway, *cough*. Sorry. Well, I design and generally I’m the face of the studio, while Andrzej Poznanski is responsible for the visuals behind the game, and Michal Kosieradzki is the graphic wizard that can make anything happen. We also have a programmer and three other graphic artists, so the core studio is seven people strong. Of course we’re going to be using quite a bit of outsourcing – that’s the only way this game can happen.

M: Besides just entertainment, what do you hope gamers will get out of your new project?

AC: I believe that games have the potential to be the ultimate from of art and entertainment. But that’s the problem; for a long time it’s been nothing else but the potential. We were inside this big room of awesome fun and we thought we had video games figured out. However, lately a few brave creators who gave us Dear Esther and Journey and To the Moon started to hit the room’s concrete walls with their pickaxes. We want to join them and start discovering new places we can take video games to. We hope that gamers will agree it was the effort.

For more information on The Astronauts and their ongoing progress on The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, check out their website.

Aside from the hours of hands-on time I spent with Gears of War: Judgment recently, I also had the pleasure of shooting the breeze with Epic Games Senior Producer Chris Wynn. We discussed everything from campaign to multiplayer to the involvement of Bullestorm developer People Can Fly. Read on.

The development studio ‘People Can Fly’, who created games like Bulletstorm and Painkiller, have been assisting with development on Gears of War: Judgment. What can you tell me about the capacity of their involvement?

Well, you know, their involvement’s really heavy. We personally wanted to get their entire studio involved, we wanted them to bring their fresh ideas to the franchise. When we finished Gears of War 3 and we got done with that trilogy and decided to do something else, we were, kind of like, free of those constraints of what the original trilogy meant.

We were able to come at it with new ideas, and going straight to People Can Fly, they already had some of those ideas, right?  So we were able to start really quickly and start really fresh. In terms of the process, of working back and forth, they really took the initial reigns and really got the thing going and then we started slowly involving more people from Epic as they wrapped up on Gears 3 and that sort of thing, with the DLC and post-product support and all that stuff.

It is very much a collaborative process — where you have our people here and their people there and we’re playing both campaign and multiplayer on both sides and grouping all of that feedback together from everybody. Then the producers sort of go through and prioritize it all, and we just keep evolving it and iterating on it.

It’s been really successful.

That has me curious. Is PCF an official subsidiary of Epic Games now?

They are now, actually. What was it, yeah — three months ago we bought the rights to the entire company.

Beast mode was introduced into Gears 3. Horde mode came before it. Now you have this new mode called Overrun that sort of blends the two… what was the original inspiration behind Overrun? Was it a fan request or…?

We unveiled Beast Mode in Gears of War 3 at E3 2010, and it was almost an immediate question of “when can we have Beast and Horde mode together?” It’s something we had talked about, we just didn’t have the resources to pull off Beast mode, Horde mode, multiplayer and then Horde vs. Beast [in Gears 3].

It was literally one of the first things we started prototyping in Judgment. The two first things that we prototyped was the defense scenarios in campaign, that was something we had a lot of interest in, and then Horde vs. Beast. The easiest thing to do was, you know, mash em’ together!

So, you know, it was kind of fun, it was just very hectic and just felt too much like multiplayer, right? You just had a different variety of locust to choose from, so we had to figure out how to take it from there, and that’s when we made it objective-based, defense and attack.

We already had these classes with the locust, so we just wanted to make sure they were focused on attacking, so we said “oh, let’s get some defense-focused classes for the COG.” Then we talked about map design. We played around with lots of different map designs and the ones that we kept coming back to were the ones that had two lanes that came to a single point, that were funneled.

We use that as like a module for all the maps, it’s always two lanes going to one point. I think the reason that’s been so successful is it’s just so simple. If I die, I know exactly where to go to get back into the action, I don’t have to wander around wondering where things are at.

What’s it like to balance something like that?

Balancing in Overrun particularly is like a constant scale. It’s almost impossible to get perfect equilibrium. You do some changes over here and this side swings up and suddenly one side’s way better than the other – make changes over here and suddenly it’s the other way. You ease the swings each iteration.

The main way we go about it is we literally play it every day. Down in our play-test lab we open it up to anyone in the company and we play at least an hour a day, sometimes we do two hours a day. So we play, everyone talks for 15 minutes.

Then a small group of us sits down, take all of that feedback, look at what we think is pertinent, go and make changes, get back in the lab the next day and try some stuff again. It’s just that constant, constant iteration. You know, the one thing you have to be careful of is you get that same group of people that sort of start to not change, like one guy who only plays the engineer. He’s naturally going to want the Engineer to be the best character in the game.

You have to make sure you balance for that. You have to balance your feedback, but it’s mostly just about playing your game otherwise it’s just all theoretical.

Let’s switch gears (ha) to campaign, which I really enjoyed. The difficulty felt like, well it didn’t feel like hair-pulling, but it was a lot harder than previous Gears’. Especially when I got to hardcore mode. Was that intentional for you guys, to ramp up the challenge.

Yeah it was. During Gears 3 we’d done a lot to make it more accessible to people. One of the things we did was make it a bit easier. And we felt like Hardcore lost the “hardcore”, it was a little bit too easy. So we absolutely wanted to make it more challenging.

It kind of tied into one of our first pillars, which was “let’s make this intense.” We always use the word “sweaty palms” – we want people’s palms to sweat when they’re playing. We want you to always feel like “am I gonna make it it, am I gonna make it? I’m so close to dying!” To do that we definitely had to ramp up the challenge.

I really enjoyed the tower defense-style segments in campaign. Was that something, from the start, that you really wanted to implement or was that an idea tossed back and forth with People Can Fly perhaps?

That and Horde vs. Beast were the first two prototypes we made for this game. It came from two things, one was the fort mission in Gears 3 – it was super popular. You’re constantly be attacked by groups of Locust, falling back and falling back and falling back. People really liked that and it felt really cool.

In Gears 3 we wanted to implement elements of Horde into the campaign, so that’s how [in Judgment] we ended up with like these defense scenarios. And you’ll see again, like Overrun, there’s usually two paths that they’re attacking from – so it’s about controlling and defending those paths. We give you the tools to do that, fortifications like turrets and sentries that you can move around and develop a strategy to help you through it.

There’s a lot of interesting choice opportunities in the campaign. Do those classified moments that change the narration and gameplay actually have an effect on the story and how it archs?

It doesn’t branch it, but it does change it a little bit through that particular section. Those came about as a way for us to add replayability. We wanted people to be able to go “Oh, I played through this one this way, how can I play through it a little bit differently?”

We actually tried several different things and settled on this as being the most fun. You can try it with, like you said, different weapons that you can use and environmental conditions and time limits – just different variances that make it a little bit more challenging for you.

But the important thing is, it’s your choice. You don’t have to do it if you don’t think it sounds like fun. But if you want that extra challenge, then yeah, go for it. And we’ll give you some benefit – you’ll earn stars faster, which in-turn unlocks stuff.

Then of course we tied it into the fiction with the marshal’s testimony. People never tell the full story when they’re in court and testifying, so wouldn’t it be cool if you could play through the things they didn’t say?

Why choose Baird for this game?

He was actually the most popular character among fans. After every game release, Microsoft puts out a customer satisfaction survey and they did one for Gears 3. One of the questions was “Who is your favorite character?” You had a choice between everyone who was in Delta Squad and some other supporting characters, and Baird was #1. Marcus was like four or five, he wasn’t on top. But I think it surprised all of us that Baird was the most favorite – I would have guessed Marcus just because he was the central figure. I always felt like Baird was somewhat polarizing, but some people just really hated him, and some thought he was funny and cool. So to see him come out on top was like “Oh, wow. That’s pretty interesting.

I think I’ve mentioned before, we never really told his backstory, you didn’t know anything about him. We, of course, knew some stuff that we’d written in-mind, and so we knew that at some point in his career he was an officer… and stuff happened and he was no longer an officer.

That sounded like a cool story to tell. It’s a cool period – right after E-Day. It features Baird and it features some cool things that happened to him.

He’s got a signature look – his goggles. Are we going to learn their origin story too?

[Laughs] That’s an interesting question. He had his goggles from the beginning. There was a period of time in the beginning of the project where acquiring his goggles was going to be part of the story. So when we started to go down that path and we took the goggles off him, he started to not be Baird. It was weird.

You’re so used to him having the goggles – when we removed them, it was like when Marcus takes his do rag off at the end of Gears 3. It just didn’t feel like Baird anymore, so we decided “Hey, let’s just let him have his goggles because that’s who he his.”

—

Now that you’ve finished our enthralling discussion, go check out our preview of the game and tell us what you think!

Last weekend, I took the long train ride up to Washington D.C., where the Smithsonian Museum was celebrating the opening of their new interactive entertainment exhibit focused on the art and history of video games. Among the inductees was the Metal Gear Solid franchise, developed by prolific designer Hideo Kojima, head of Japanese game company Kojima Productions.

Press folk were invited to sit down for a lengthy Q&A with Kojima to discuss his role in the games he creates, as well as the history of the Metal Gear franchise, its many characters, environments and stories.

Read on to learn more about how Kojima’s next game will focus on delicate real life events, why he’s set on killing off Solid Snake, and how his son brought Snake into the world of Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros.

Kojima Productions has been working on Metal Gear games for 25 years now; some would say that Metal Gear defines not only your studio, but you as well. Would you agree?

I don’t have any problems with Kojima Productions being equated with Metal Gear, but I don’t like, necessarily, people thinking that my name equals Metal Gear (laughs).

So you know, of course, I’ve worked on Metal Gear for 25 years now, and don’t get me wrong, I love Metal Gear, but at the same time, as a creator, I really want to work on other projects and games too.

As I’ve mentioned before, I do really want to do new things, new creative things – things that nobody has done before. So, even if I keep on producing Metal Gear, from now on, I want to have something else apart from Metal Gear — something that pushes boundaries. It might not even sell, but something new – I really want to try that.

Looking back across the Metal Gear games, you’ve used “fourth wall” breaking tactics to invoke a reaction from the player.

One of the more memorable experiences was the Psychomantis “vibrating controller” phenomenon, and the “corrupted memory card” scare.

Was this something you pushed for originally, or generated over the course of development?

So you know, now that I’m looking back on it, a lot of people look back on that (the codex code on the back of the box and the Psychomantis tricks) with respect and have offered praise for that. But at the time, actually, there were a lot that were more pissed off at me for it, saying: “this isn’t how you should do a game.” Even a lot of people in my team said that “this isn’t how a game should be”, but I actually really enjoyed being yelled at for that. I like doing something different, and I’m not going to change that – I hope people look forward to more exciting things like that.

One thing I can tell you is that, back when I was making Snatcher (a PC game), you know, we used floppy disks. One thing that I wanted to be able to do was have a secret message on the disk, to have something actually written on the disk. I wanted to have some sort of chemical used for that, maybe you put it in the disk drive and after a few minutes the heat from the drive interacts with that chemical and creates a certain smell. It could smell like blood or something like that. Then, when you’d pull it out, you’d see like a dying message on the disc.

Unfortunately, I got yelled at for it and they wouldn’t let me do it.

Since we’re on the topic of older games, have you pondered revisiting the original Metal Gear for retelling or remake?

You know, when I made the game 25 years ago, I wasn’t thinking about making a sequel. But, we actually did make a sequel, and for the past 25 years we’ve been making games. Each step of the way, I wasn’t sure if we’d be making another sequel, but here we are 25 years later.

With these (technological) advances, we’re allowed to do new things – characters can talk, we can express emotion through wrinkles on the face — and whenever that happens, it prompts me to try things in a new way.

We’ve come a long way since the original Metal Gear, and looking back from this perspective, there are a lot of things with the story that don’t mesh or make sense. So if I were to make it again, it would be quite an effort – a lot of things would have to be changed to bring it up to modern standards.

I suppose if I were to redo the original Metal Gear, I’d have to rewrite them. I’d really rather not have to do that.

Perhaps we’ll see the original game in a future HD collection then, as opposed to remake?

Regarding HD remakes that we’ve recently released, the problem with MGS1 is that even if we “up” the resolution and remaster it in hi-res, the polygon models themselves are just too low. It really wouldn’t have made that much of a difference.

MGS1 was, to some, the most respected game in the series, and I want to make sure that it’s done right (and HD version). If we did remake it, I want it to be on the scale of something like Metal Gear Solid 4 – that kind of quality, a true remake.

That said, I don’t have the time to do that remake personally – though, I’m always on the lookout for someone that could maybe help me do that.

You’ve mentioned in previous interviews your repeated attempts to kill Solid Snake.

Is that something you’re still trying to do or have planned? (Spoiler-Free)

Well, with Metal Gear Solid, I made it a story about clones, but I never intended to make a sequel to it at that time. But once you start talking about clones and things like that, it becomes very hard to create a sequel. I thought that it maybe wasn’t best to continue with Solid Snake.

From that standpoint, it’s not that I don’t like Snake, there’s a lot of things that I like about him as a character, but from a story telling standpoint I felt the story would be much easier to tell if he were to die. That’s why I made that statement a while ago, and it’s been kind of a big problem for me after I said that (laughs). People, you know, attacked me on twitter and whatnot.

Your games have oftentimes dealt with issues of taboo; take real life events like the Cuban Missile Crisis for example.

Is this something you’re implementing in your future/current projects?

I don’t really shy away from that, I try to bring this issues to the forefront, so I’m always pushing for that. Of course, at the same time it has to be something that’s fun. We can’t just be making a statement; it has to be fun as a game as well.

The game I’m working on right now actually deals with quite a few issues that I feel are…pretty delicate and taboo. I’m not sure if they’ll end up being in the final product or not, but that’s something that I want to continue to strive for.

Like many games, we don’t see Snake appearing in many titles outside of Metal Gear.

On that note, what are your thoughts on the inclusion of Snake in Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. Brawl?

Was this a result of Nintendo approaching you or did it arise from another collaboration?

You know, my child likes Super Smash Bros. so we play a lot. One point he told me while playing: “There’s no character you made in this game”.

Aside from Twin Snakes, there hasn’t been a lot of Metal Gear on Nintendo platforms. I figured this would be a cool way to expose people to this character (Snake).

Of course at the time, Metal Gear was more associated with PlayStation, so it was a little difficult.

I’m actually good friends with Mr. Sakurai, and when I talked to him about this (inclusion of Snake in SSBB) and pitched the idea, I was lucky in that he allowed me to put Snake into the game. I think the end result is that Snake is now in Super Smash Bros and is actually one of the more popular characters.

Recently seeing what’s happened with Tim Schaefer and Double Fine, and Brian Fargo and InXile Entertainment and their fan funded games, it seems we’re seeing a new phenomenon of fan funding and direction.

Is this a viable option for the future of the industry, perhaps you’re interested in doing something similar?

It’s a really exciting era we live in now, where we have the web and developers can interact with the fans and the gamers. I think it’s wonderful what these guys are doing with their Kickstarter programs, and it’s something that I myself would really like to experiment with – interacting with the fans.

I think it’s a wonderful thing.

When I was young, I wanted to be a film director – mind you there was no internet at the time. Perhaps if there were an Internet, I might have made use of that and distributed a movie online or something like that.

That opportunity exists now for game creators to get their vision realized and get funding that way, and it’s something I want to see continue. I want to really see Indie games be successful that way.

Metal Gear is 25 years old.

As someone who’s invested much of their life into creating and crafting these games and experiences that so many have grown to love and appreciate, what advice would you offer to someone who enjoys the games you create, wants to do what you’ve done and craft these gaming experiences themselves?

The one biggest piece of advice I could give them would be to do something other than games first – look outside of games for inspiration. Experience new things and try to take that experience and that unique view of things and apply that to creating a new type of game.

It will be very hard, I think, for game creators to fight these big, established franchises out there by using this approach, but as I’ve said before, we now have the internet, where people can share these ideas using the many more options available today.

I hope people will be innovative and pursue new ideas.

—

Agree or disagree with Kojima’s thoughts? Have anything to add on the subjects discussed in the interview?

Drop them in the comments below and let your voice be heard!

We were so intimidated by someone named Kiki Wolfkill that we made Rob Smith wear the coolest sunglasses we could find. I still don’t think that we lived up to that name though. Damn.

Though the Tony Hawk Shred and Ride games were not exactly commercial or critical successes, the Skateboarding legend remains firm in his belief that those games weren’t completely given a fair chance by critics or fans. He admits though, that Ride specifically “was a bit rushed” – mostly due to time spent designing the board peripheral.

“I think that Ride was a bit rushed for a number of reasons, mostly because probably for about the first half of the development process it was just figuring out how to make a board and how to make it work — we were in uncharted territory.

So the game was a bit rushed, but I still feel like the critics never really gave it a chance in terms of learning how to play. They got on it and went straight into expert mode, because supposedly they’re expert gamers. And they didn’t really learn the mechanics of how the board works, and so I felt like they already had their mind made up before it came out. It was a gimmick and it was a peripheral and whatnot, and they never really took the time to learn how to play it.”

Hawk believes though, that Shred (the sequel) was the game that Ride should have been in the first place.

“I thought Shred was the game I wanted Ride to be, because I really felt like the board was more than just a skateboard, and it could be used as a snowboard.

But by the time Shred came out, the peripherals were fading away, so it was bad timing in that respect, I guess. But I’m proud of the idea and I’m glad we took a chance because it was something bold to try and it was bad timing in the end.”

Hawk attributes the creation of the board to the focus on peripheral-based gaming at the time. Titles like Guitar Hero were dominating the market – and everyone wanted in on the sales. Additionally, the Skate series came around at about the same time, not to mention that the Pro Skater franchise had since become “diluted.”

“It was mostly because the (Pro Skater) series had gotten really diluted. Skate was coming into play and that really split the market for us. So I thought it was really time to do something new and peripheral-based games were very big right then and I felt like we could do something that is more revolutionary — that’s what we set out to do. I really do feel like the board we created was ahead of its time. It read your every motion.”

Though an obvious competitor of his branding of games, Skate was a series Hawk showed appreciation for and didn’t mind applauding their attempts at a new control scheme.

“I appreciated that someone could come out with a new control scheme for a skateboarding game. That was very unique and progressive.

Honestly, I was happy that skating had come so far as a genre in video games that you could have two main titles. Prior to that, some people had tried to do skating games, but they were just copying us.”

Hawk’s main focus now is on the soon-to-release Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD, a culmination of his first two titles bundled into one HD remastered package. He hopes to build upon the game with more DLC characters and levels from other THPS games going forward.

Let’s just hope they don’t ‘skate’ through the development process this time around.

[via Joystiq]

I got a chance to sit down and interview the man behind Street Fighter X Tekken, Ono Yoshinori at the Street Fighter X Tekken Launch Event.  In the interview we discuss the character decision-making process and the Gem system issues concerning the tournament scene.

What was the decision making process of what characters are picked to make the final cut in Street Fighter X Tekken?

Ono: We try to look at it from a fan’s point of view. We know which characters are particularly popular, which characters people like to see facing off.  This is done through internet research and surveys. And we use common sense because we listen to what the fans say anyway.  So when it comes to fighting games you normally want to fill in a grid and make sure everything is pretty well balanced.  You don’t want too many characters that do command-style throws, players like Zangief.  You don’t want too many projectile-style characters.  We didn’t do that this time actually.

We put aside the usual method of character selection.  We replaced it with what the fans want to see.  So it was kind of a unique way to approach it. So in the main game these are the first stringers.  We announced the PS Vita version getting an extra 12 characters.  Those are the guys that almost made it but not quite, but they’re coming a little later in another version.

Since Street Fighter X Tekken was announced at EVO, the fighting community has been a little concerned about the Gem system and how is that going to work in the tournament scene?  Will the use of USB be used in order to upload Gem sets?

Ono: This is an issue we have been trying to tackle.  We mentioned USB solutions as one possibility as something we are researching.  There are other ways as well.  We are thinking for instance, we might do a special tournament mode that we will distribute by downloadable package a month or so after release.  They will allow you other ways of inputing code numbers or something to get the gems to appear.  And especially for tournaments there are some things that come into play.  Special gems may only be downloaded or they’re not on the disc and there is some disconnect there.  We are thinking there is some solution as well for those people to do tournaments.  Perhaps we can find a way to “lend” these special downloadable gems to people temporarily at the stages like that for tournaments.  We are recognizing the situation and we are looking to solve it.  I don’t know if the solution will be solved this very instant, but we know it’s an issue and we will definitely find a way to have this worked out so that everyone can play on an even playing field.  And go to a tournament confident, knowing that they can play with the same style that they use.

Ed Boon is actually interested in a Street Fighter X Mortal Kombat.  Is this possible?

Ono: It’s quite possible that I can meet with Ed Boon.  Maybe we can share a meal at McDonalds or something.  Whether we can do it beyond that I don’t know.  I’ll be interested to talk about it.

There were talks of Sega, Namco, and Capcom working on a title.  Can you say anything about that and is it Street Fighter related?

Ono: Maybe it’s Virtua Fighter 10! (laughs)

If you were a Tekken character, which one would you be?

Ono: Probably Kazuya!  I think of myself as a strategic thinker.  I’ll try to bob and weave to try to stay in the game.  That’s who I think is already like me in the Tekken universe.  If I had any choose to be any character in Tekken it would be Nina! (laughs)

What was your biggest issue to convert 3D Tekken characters into a 2D fighting game?

Ono: Interesting enough it wasn’t as hard as you may think. In Tekken you have side steps so there is a 3D game in that sense but it’s not as three-dimensional fighting wise as like Virtua Fighter.  When it really comes down to it the actual fighting takes place on a two-dimensional plane.  So it actually was not that difficult.  The more we talk to the Tekken team the more we analyze the game.  And they actually showed us their code and we actually see in the script they actually have the word “Hadouken” in some of their moves.  And you see just how close these games are in gameplay style when you really strip away the graphics and everything.  So we thought it would be a big hurdle going into it.  Once we rolled up our sleeves and started doing it, it wasn’t that hard.  We figured if we preserved what was best about Tekken, the Tekken feel and the Tekken aesthetic and pull it into this universe, we feel like it will still feel sufficiently “Tekken-ish” and I think we did it.

After the success of Super Street Fighter IV AE there was a release of Street Fighter III: Third Strike Online Edition.  Are there any other older games in the works that may make its way as a downloadable game? Capcom vs. SNK HD version maybe?

Ono: There’s a lot of game I would like to do that with.  I’m sure a lot of games that fans would want to see that type of treatment given to.  I can say this:  I talk a lot about Darkstalkers and I think if I was able to do a title like that, that will probably be the direction I would hit.  Believe me I know that a lot of fans want to get a new version of Capcom vs. SNK.  I totally get that.  The problem with that is that these SNK characters belong to SNK.  There are a lot of very complicated rights issues going on there.  It wouldn’t be impossible but it could be really difficult to get that all licensed and properly done.  Not impossible but it could take time.  We know people want it.  It’s not necessarily that easy to do right now.

Look for our review of Street Fighter X Tekken next Tuesday.

Demure Rob Smith was an excellent pick to interview Valhalla Game Studios Founder Tomonobu Itagaki. Frankly, I’d like to see the two in a buddy cop movie. Smith could politely ask a thug a question and then Itagaki could walk in, kick that chump in the face, and then piss on him until he decides to come clean.

Of course, he’ll never truly be clean again. Oh yeah, the interview is really good too.

Late last week, I had a chance to check out BioShock Infinite and sit down with Tim Gerritsen, Director of Product Development over at Irrational Games. The focus of the interview was a deep dive into some of the new mechanics and story elements we saw in the demo.

Inside Gaming: The first thing I want to talk about is the relationship between Booker Dewitt and Elizabeth. At the on set of BioShock Infinite, Dewitt is in debt and down on his luck. He gets offered a job to travel to Columbia and rescue Elizabeth from imprisonment. I was given the impression, from today’s demo, that Dewitt is in this for the money and nothing else. Is it safe to assume this relationship will develop over the course of the game?

Tim Gerritsen: “Well, yeah. At first this is just a job for him but it evolves into something more. It starts out where you rescue her but then you realize that if you want to stay alive you need her. Internally, we hate escort missions. They’re always like ‘Oh shit. I forgot to watch that guy for five seconds and in that five seconds a sniper popped out and shot him.’ They suck. So we wanted to make sure we did everything possible to make sure it wasn’t a crappy escort mission. We made the conscious design choice that Liz could take care of herself. You are really just trying to guide her. She’s never going to die because of your inaction but, ironically, what sort of happened is a reverse escort mission. She assists you. She helps you.”

IG: In BioShock it was clear that Jack, being a faceless and nameless protagonist, was meant to be an extension of player. Is that your intent with Booker? With him being a much more flushed out character does that make that much more of a challenge? Is that even what you’re going for?

TG: “It is certainly more of a challenge but it’s a challenge we wanted to take on. As a player, yes, he’s an extension of you. We want his goals and his experiences to be something that you want to be doing. From a dialog perspective, from a narrative perspective, it creates a lot of requirements we wouldn’t have had. But at the same time, with BioShock, it was a very lonely experience, it was a very individual experience. You’re in this world after the shit has happened and you’re just trying to figure out what’s going on and what happened here. People are talking to you through radios, through audio logs. This time around, we’re like ‘no.’ We want you to be part of that experience. We wanted to create a narrative experience where you’re living it live and Elizabeth is part of that, narratively, she’s part of that from a gameplay perspective. She’s our chance to continue to tell a story without mindlessly talking to yourself all the time. But at the same time it’s crazy challenging for us. If at any point you don’t feel what the character on screen is feeling, if they’re in disagreement, then you’ve got a problem.”

IG: Right. This actually brings up an interesting point. Often times in games, I find that I never feel more disconnected than when I meet a character or experience an event that the character I’m playing as has already met or experienced. Whereas when you’re coming to Columbia you’re meeting Elizabeth for the first time, right?

TG: “Oh sure. You’re meeting Elizabeth for the first time, you’re interacting with her for the first time, you’re seeing what she’s about, you’re learning her powers, she’s learning who you are. This is all for the first time.”

IG: Keeping with the theme of talking about Elizabeth, I felt, through that demo, that she, having been a prisoner her whole life, seems like a tragic and virtuous character. But a virtuous character in this otherwise uber-Patriotic world that has sort of gone to shit.

TG: “Well, she’s also kind of an enigma, right? You don’t really know. She’s never really experienced life so she’s never really had a chance to be virtuous or not virtuous.”

IG: Then I guess “innocent” is maybe a better word to describe her?

TG: “Innocent is definitely the right word for her. She hasn’t had a chance to determine who she is as a person. You don’t know if she’s going the good route or the evil route but she’s definitely an innocent in a world that isn’t so innocent.”

IG: And I’m sure her exposure to that world will have an impact on her character.

TG: “Absolutely. You can kind of see that in the demo. You’re running for your life and trying to figure out what’s going on in this world and she’s like ‘Hey! I’m going to be Lincoln.’ She’s very much an innocent unlocked for the first time.”

IG: Is it fair to compare the relationship between Elizabeth and Songbird with the relationship between the Little Sisters and the Big Daddies in BioShock?

TG: “I think that’s really going to be in the perspective of the player to decide. Certainly it’s a BioShock game and there are similarities and influences there. But at the same time there are big differences. I think it’s fair to compare them but it’s also fair to contrast them. We didn’t set out to make a direct correlation.”

IG: Sure but I guess I mean thematically. There’s a moment in the demo in which Elizabeth prevents Songbird from attacking Booker. To me that felt so much like BioShock 1. You know, the idea of an innocent girl being protected by, but also having control over, a large, and physically powerful beast.

TG: “Sure. But this time you’re truly a wild card in that. You’re not just this external interloper who stumbles upon that. This time around it’s a much more intense experience and I think there’s a lot more depth to it.”

IG: Cool. The other big thing I wanted to touch on was the world of Columbia. There are obviously the two warring factions of the Vox Populi and The Founders. Is their conflict responsible for the state of Columbia?

TG: “The current state of Columbia, yes. Columbia started out as this dream that was, literally, given wings. But what happened was this guy, Comstock, comes along and takes over control of Columbia. Then there’s this international incident that happens and he leads this group, The Founders, who have a very different thought process. You see, at first, Columbia is truly a melting pot of different people and cultures but then a sense that we were here first and can’t let anyone else in and we own this place sort of develops and The Founders take it to the logically extreme. They are the white Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, ultra-xenophobic group that forms. ‘It’s us or the foreigners and who are you going to stand with?’”

“Of course there’s going to be a reaction to that. In any type of society where an extreme develops, you’re going to have a counter group. At first it just started as a counter group to stand against The Founders but eventually the people that run that start twisting it further and there’s a series of actions and reactions and counteractions and eventually it leads to blows. That’s where you come in.”

IG: That seems in line with some themes of BioShock, right? Political extremism gone wrong?

TG: “Absolutely. In BioShock you saw what happened when you have unbridled ability to take your personal beliefs to their extreme. Here it’s the same thing. What happens when this ultra-nationalist, xenophobic group is allowed to take their beliefs to the extreme and is countered by an ultra-left, ultra-liberal group that takes their beliefs to their extremes? But this time around, what happens to the people caught in the middle?”

IG: Is there any sort of message or commentary you guys are trying to rely to players about the state of our current political environment?

TG: “Well, that’s just it. We’re all history geeks and these aren’t new concepts. It’s interesting because we came out last year with the concept and people were like ‘This is ultra-Conservative. Oh my God, what are they doing?’ But these aren’t new things that are happening to us. What’s so fascinating about that time period is that it really sort of was a revolutionary time in our society. It’s the end of the old, the end of the renaissance. The kings and queens are going away and now there’s science and democracy and communism and all these competing ideas in the marketplace of people’s psyche. At the same time there’s new technologies, for the the first time you have recorded word. What kind of impact does that have on society? I can hear music anytime I wanted. That’s a huge impact in a world where before you had to play music if you wanted to hear it.”

“We take all this stuff and we add to it scientific ideas of the time. If you look at Tenenbaum in BioShock, who was the progenitor of Plasmids, that was based on the ideas of Crick and Watson who were the first to experiment with gene splicing and genetic biology. We played with that in BioShock and took it to the logically extreme. Now we’re playing with the ideas of Heisenberg and Einstein. Physics means something different than it used to.”

IG: So for the sake of clarification, you can explain the concept of Tearing and how it factors into not just the combat but also the narrative elements of the game?

TG: “Essentially [Elizabeth], and everyone in Columbia for that matter, can see these alternate realities, these tears in space and time. But somehow she has the ability to manipulate them. She has this power within her to draw forth something from these Tears. The thing is she can’t necessarily shut it down. Once she starts the process, the further she goes, the more it starts to take over and spiral out of control. You saw with the horse. She couldn’t control it. She had to fight really hard to shut it back down. And she’s just learning this. These powers are new to her. This is something that she doesn’t quite understand. From a narrative perspective it allows us to talk about these heady things, it allows us to have these interesting moments.”

“But from a gameplay perspective, you saw these Tears in combat, and how do they impact you in combat? How do they impact you in areas where there isn’t combat? These are things you’ll learn over the course of the game. But she has a finite level of power. Whenever she uses this power, it drains her, it has a physical effect on her. She’s not something you can just tap on demand.”

“[In the demo] when you’re in combat, she’s like ‘I can see a few different things, what do you want?’. In that particular instance she saw a piece of cover, and a box of weapons, and a doorway. You as a player have to control that. You can ask her to do something for you and if she’s rested, she’ll do that for you. In our case it was like ‘Okay, I want cover.’ But depending on who you are as a player, you can be like ‘hey, I want to go for the weapons’ or ‘I want to get the hell out of here, let’s go for the doorway.’ But as the game progressed she’ll gain more confidence, she’ll gain more control.”

IG: Can we assume that her ability to manipulate the Tears is part of the reason why she is such a prized possession?

TG: “Absolutley. She’s sort of the center of it all. There’s a reason why she’s been kept for fifteen years in a tower. There’s a reason everyone wants her. How does all that work? That’s something we really want players to explore.”

IG: So there were these two quick moments in the demo, that Ken [Levine] compared to the ‘Pull the Trigger’ Paragon and Renegade moments in Mass Effect, in which you hold ‘A’ or don’t hold ‘A’ to euthanize a dying horse and save a man that’s about to be hung. Are these basically the moral choices of the game?

TG: In the original BioShock, we had sort of a binary moral choice system. Harvest or Save. This time around we wanted to do it more subtly. You noticed those two events, you can euthanize the horse or save the postman. You didn’t have to do those. Those are moral choices but they aren’t the only ones. Sometimes it will be obvious, like hold ‘A’ or don’t hold ‘A.’ Other times you just won’t know. There were points in that demo that you were actually presented with a choice and you don’t know what the impact of it was. And subtly that may come back and haunt you.”

IG: At one point in the demo Elizabeth says ‘Hey, we can go this way or we can go this way.’ So it’s no necessarily open but there are moments of, like, multi-pathing?

TG: “We’re not doing it open world and we’re not even trying to present it like an open world. But there will be branches you can choose from. In the Skyline section you saw, the route he did was the route he did. You don’t have to take that route. You can navigate how you want to navigate as a player. Even though it’s not a true open world game, it is large world and the areas you go or don’t go may have implications.”

IG: You mentioned the Skyline stuff which seems to be a pretty big navigation element of the game. Can you explain the origins of this stuff?

TG: “It was really an iterative process. We had this idea that we wanted the freedom of flight but flight is really daunting. How do we create that in the world? We started with simplistic zip lines that were very linear. Then we criss-crossed them which was cool but the linearity of it was not very exciting. We spent a lot of time just getting a feel for it. Our first experimentation was okay but we wanted to make it feel a little more like a roller coaster. We wanted to play with the vertically of the space. We kept playing with it, kept working at it. There’s a lot of learning we had to do, there’s a lot of failure we had to go through. Success is just a series of failures until you take the knowledge of those failures and put them together.”

IG: So having spent a lot of time in this industry, tell me, from a personal perspective, are there important lessons you’ve learned that you’re bringing in to the development process of Infinite?

TG: “One thing is carefully growing. I came from the trenches, started out as a designer. I was at Dynamix when it was, like, 40 people. Then it turned to a 140 people almost literally over night. That had a profound effect on the culture of the company. When Ken was like ‘Hey, I want to grow this company, I want to do this big, amazing thing.’ I spent a lot of time just thinking about how we can do that without losing what Irrational is all about, without losing the special sauce that made BioShock possible. We were very careful about how we grew and who we hired. We still have a lot of openings at our studio while we’re trying to finish this game because we don’t believe in just putting butts in the seats. If someone joins the fold, they have to be the right person.”

“Another thing is get it on screen early. You can debate issues to the point where you’re paralyzed by choice. You could do this, or you could do this, or you could do this. Well, let’s pick one and see what happens… You know, if we’re doing our job right, it should be invisible to the player. It just feels awesome. The best features in any game in the industry are almost invisible to the user because they just feel right. So much thought goes into that and so much iteration, and so much blending of UI, and physics and feel and all that has to come together to make that feature work and at the end of the day we just want players to pick it up and say ‘Yeah! That kicks ass.’ You don’t ever get to that stage without putting it on screen.”

Today, Obsidian Entertainment is known for creating sequels within the IPs of other developers such as BioWare and Bethesda Softworks, but that wasn’t always the case. Before Obsidian, there was Black Isle Studios which developed the original Fallout, Planescape: Torment and Icewind Dale. It wasn’t until Black Isle closed that some of its team members went on to found Obsidian and create Knights of the Old Republic 2, Fallout: New Vegas, and Dungeon Siege 3.

“What I grew up on” said Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart, “was obviously roleplaying games that had the fifth and the sixth and the eight and the twelfth [in their titles]. So I think in general, RPGs have a lot of sequels, because you can keep on adding on to the world, you can keep on coming up with new stories. I think from that perspective, it’s great to be able to make these, even if they’re sequels, because you get to go play in someone else’s world.”

When Obsidian was just getting started, they struck a deal with Lucasfilm to create Knights of the Old Republic 2, and thanks to their pedigree from Black Isle, they were granted a great deal of trust with the IP — the owner only requested three changes be made to the game: “They told us, ‘Don’t use Alderran…We had the horns tilted the wrong way on the race that Darth Maul is, I forget what it’s called, and then there was one other thing. So what I mean by that is that we’re generally pretty good about it” said Urquhart.

Obsidian’s latest sequel under development, Dungeon Siege 3 has caused concerns as to whether another entry in the series is even necessary. Much like with Fallout: New Vegas, the next Dungeon Siege bears little resemblance to the original game, but Urquhart doesn’t believe a sequel has to function like the original because “You could say, ‘was Fallout killed by becoming Fallout 3?’ And it wasn’t, because Fallout is about getting to be in that world…if I want to play a Fallout game, it’s because I want to play in that world…The more RPG it is, the better, but most of all, it’s about that world.”

Now that Dungeon Siege 3 is being prepped for its May 31st launch, Obsidian is looking to the future, including original IPs. Their last original title, Alpha Protocol, suffered both financially and critically, and Urquhart admits this has made it hard to pitch new original projects to publishers. Nonetheless, he said “We have a whole big cool world idea that we can hopefully talk about soon. That is a whole new world, a whole new thing. It’s being put together by Josh Sawyer, who was the project director on Fallout: New Vegas, and Chris Avellone is involved.” In addition, he said “There is a property that we are working on, that we can’t talk about yet. It’s something we’ve been working on since the middle of last year, just with a small team, it’s only been five or ten people. It’s a license that you would go, well you gotta do it. It’s not a license where it’s, ‘Ok, we’ll take that and we can do something with it.’ It’s more like, well that’s once in a lifetime.”

Be that as it may, Alpha Protocol has shown that for whatever reason, Obsidian has trouble creating new worlds of its own. Let’s hope that between all of the projects they’re working on, there are enough resources to make their next original IP excellent.

[via Joystiq]

Developer: People Can Fly/Epic Games / Publisher: EA / ESRB: M / Release Date: February 22

Some time ago, as the Bulletstorm PR machine was revving its engines and testing the waters for how a new-style/old school/new IP shooter could make a play in a franchise dominated genre, developers People Can Fly trotted out producer Tanya Jessen to outline the goals and ideals. In a preview from that and subsequent showcases, I labeled her a potty-mouth. And I wasn’t sure: was it a genuine personal portrayal of getting excited about their own game, or was it showmanship for a testosterone-laden, kick-ass-and-chew-bubblegum styled shooter being directed by <shock> a woman?

I mean, we’d just seen a cutscene as notable for its “adult/military” dialogue as for its plot setup. Then bad guys were leashed into the air, dropping to slo-mo speed, and shot in the ‘nads as many times as possible. An Achievement popped up. A guy wounded in those ‘nads who was then put out of his misery with a bullet to the brain earned more reward. Kicking fools into razor sharp cactuses or into the maw of man-eating overgrown triffid-like Venus fly-traps were enough to generate pained winces even from a crowd of hardened virtual war-veteran press. With a “this is fucking awesome,” and a “you get to kick the shit out of <insert enemy>” Jessen reinforced the spirit of this new action game.

As the single-player story starts, you’re introduced to the essence of your protagonist, Grayson: a bad-ass former official military type bent on revenge, ravaged by post-traumatic battle scars, and succumbing to the demon drink. His story of revenge is the launch pad for a single-player experience that lands you on a once lush planet now inhabited by crazy enemy foes and dotted by dangerous flora. A macro story involving some galactic war, corrupt leaders, and those pesky corporations ruling the corporate and military worlds serves as the backdrop for your reasons to kick ass.

In our hands-on time, the game really opened up once we earned possession of the Leash. This is the electric blue lasso device that grabs enemies, thrusts them towards you in slo-mo, and presents the opportunity to shoot them in the head, the balls, or the gullet. Between your boot that impales enemies on handy props on the levels and your leash that can drag targets onto those ubiquitous exploding barrels, one thing is for certain: enemy death in Bulletstorm is original and styled by your own actions.

You do work with sidekicks along the way, though it was tough to tell exactly how they were helping. On occasion it seemed their bullets had “stopping power” in that they slowed enemies racing to your position, but lacked significant “killing power” in actually dropping them. More opportunities for you, of course, to kick them off ledges (Vertigo reward) or squash them after kicking down a door (Pancake) among the other visually–as well as gameplay–rewarding takedowns.

We did get to play the Anarchy multiplayer mode, which highlighted exactly how cooperative this experience has to be in order to succeed. Faced with 20 levels of ever more challenging enemies, you simply have to work together to execute advanced takedowns. This is not just a game about killing the marauding enemies, it’s about doing it with style, and with friends. The various levels present new environmental tools like an electricity-fused pool or a perpetually rotating automatic door to force fresh thinking on exactly how you execute enemies. It’s not just about gaining personal points (a simple shooting kill nets 10 points, where the collective takedowns earn hundreds, and so are vital to attaining the point requirements to progress to the next stage) but about using your talents through spending earned points on the weapons you got a feel for in the single-player experience.

This four-player game could be regarded as a fascinating microcosm of online gamer frailty. Simply, if you don’t cooperate, you will never get to the last level pay-off. The other challenge mode recreates the single-player maps and enemies, but shapes your actions with a time limit and extra awards based on the number of skillshots you execute during your run. So it’s a game of speed blended with making sure you can physically manipulate your fingers to perform the special takedown moves. That’s not to say that they’re exceptionally difficult, more that it engages a response time more akin to a fighting game than a straight first-person shooter.

The overall Bulletstorm style is absolutely compelling for shooter fans. Its attitude may garner as many groans as guffaws, but it’s definitely not your Call of Duty-like military shooter experience. As Jessen confirmed to us, her OTT attitude early on was part fueled by her own enthusiasm, and part marketing types encouraging that bad-assery. At the very least, it’s consistent, and we’ll see on February 22nd whether it’s enough to encourage gamers to buy into its unique style.

–

We sat down with Bulletstorm producer Tanya Jessen–who previously worked with developer People Can Fly on Gears PC–to talk about how the game came to be, and the ideas behind it. For the record, there was not a single uttering of profanity the entire interview (aside from one direct quote)… until the recorder was turned off!

Inside Gaming: You’re done?

Tanya Jessen: Almost.

IG: How do you feel?

TJ: Tired. <laughs>

IG: What did you learn about developer People Can Fly through the development process?

TJ: It reminded me of Epic during Gears [of War], a family atmosphere, more wild west, no rules. It’s interesting to come to that again.

IG: So Bulletstorm was born after Gears PC. What were you setting out to do?

TJ: Three and a half years ago the game was completely different, but the tone and the style hasn’t changed at all. It was something that was very colorful, pulp sci-fi, over the top and it doesn’t take itself too seriously. We knew from the beginning that we wanted to do humor, but we didn’t know if we could pull it off because humor in games was so difficult. But we always wanted the player to feel like a bad-ass.

IG: What was that original game?

TJ: It was a third-person shooter that was cover-based, set in a dystopian future, and had a lot of the same over-the-top elements. There’s a prototype that was the pitch we gave to EA, in the very first level one of the highlights was dynamic moments in the environment. So for example there was this one door that you kicked. It doesn’t open. So you kick the door again. And it doesn’t open and instead, because you’re on this platform made of other pieces, everything else falls except the door. So that was the whole tone of what Bulletstorm was from day one.

IG: How did it get to this game–a third-person cover-based system sounds similar to another popular Epic franchise?

TJ: Adrian Chmielarz [head of PCF] loved Gears, and pretty much the entire team was into Gears. They saw cover-based shooters as the future. But we wanted to do over-the-top weapons, and when we added unique movements we didn’t know that third-person was so good for that visceral feeling of getting in enemies faces. And especially when you’re talking about empowerment more than punishment of the player, it was just a cooler feeling to be moving in first-person. So then when you switch to first-person, some of the cover doesn’t make so much sense… Once that was gone it was more about kicking and sliding, that more visceral feeling of movement.

IG: How do you make it so that players learn about the creativity in taking out enemies without punishing them for trying something new?

TJ: The first hour of the game was pretty contentious, because it doesn’t start out being Bulletstorm. We want you to feel what it’s like to play a regular shooter without the Leash, without the skill shots, then every step of the way you get one piece of the puzzle, and you explore that piece, then you get another piece and explore that. And hopefully then it clicks when it’s all together and you’re not afraid to try things because you’ve already been doing it. Like, the moment you get the Leash you get a playground in which you get to leash a bunch of dudes, and the moment you get the skillshot system you get to use that system and see how you can use it to buy stuff.

IG: Another game character that had an attitude, kicked things around, then disappeared, er, Forever…

TJ: Oh yeah, I know who you’re talking about.

IG: To me it felt like there was a void for that kind of attitude. Was that part of the thinking?

TJ: Oh definitely. It was not about Duke Nukem so much as it was about making the game we wanted to make. We love shooters, and we feel there’s room for plenty of kinds and this was one that we felt really hadn’t been made in such a long time.

IG: Do you have a favorite line of dialogue?

TJ: One of them is in the very beginning of the game, and the first time we put in this dialogue it perfectly set up the tone for me. So it’s after you’re drunk, you tip the bounty hunter out of the ship, you’re joking with [sidekick] Rell, and you’re chuckling, and you have to kick something out of the way and Rell turns and says “does everything you touch have to turn to dog shit?” and you say “your mom survived…barely.” You start chuckling, then Rell responds with “so that’s how that old gal got the limp.”

IG: In playing the Anarchy multiplayer mode, I don’t think I’ve played a first-person action shooter that was so insistent on teamwork.

TJ: Except for Counter-Strike, right… unless you’re in a clan, right…though I guess if you’re not in a clan it’s a free-for-all.

IG: Once in the wild, do you have expectations of how it will play out?

TJ: People grief no matter what, but in Bulletstorm, you get no personal gain for not cooperating. There’s a really fine line of balance between how many points you get, and how many you get if contribute. You get way more, you get more unlocks, and stats.

IG: Do you expect those four-player teams to be friends who know each other?

TJ: We did a lot of testing where people in different locations and seasoned with unseasoned people, and people who were trying to grief, so the balance takes that into account.

Raised as an unabashed skeptic, I wasn’t exactly ready to drink the OnLive Kool-Aid when the service was announced at 2009’s GDC. The promise of an on-demand video game streaming service that required nothing more than a mid-level PC and and a solid Internet connection seemed a little too good to be true. Since then, OnLive’s venture for world domination has continued with a slow-paced but still surprising amount of success. PC and Mac users have logged over “2 million sessions” and there’s no sign of them slowing down. The month of October saw more OnLive usage than all the previous months of usage combined. Combine this with a growing army of publishers on board, including Ubisoft, THQ, 2K Games, and Warner Bros, and I think it’s safe to say that the future of OnLive isn’t looking too shabby. I recently had a chance to check out the brand new MicroConsole (which is now available for pre-order on OnLive.com) in action and chat with OnLive’s CEO, Steve Perlman about the company’s past, present, and future. Hit the break for a long, long interview.

Inside Gaming: “Last month you announced that OnLive would be dropping it’s required monthly fee. Players can now jump into OnLive for nothing. What was the motivation behind this? Was this move a direct reaction to negative feedback that you received about the subscription fee.”

Steve Perlman: “Look, we never wanted to have subscription fees. We had no data to go by. When we announced $14.95 a month… nobody minds when you go down in price. We’re not a Microsoft and we’re not a Sony. We can’t afford ten years of loses. You know what I’m saying? Let’s put it this way: the worst case scenario we could imagine as far as usage would have required us to charge $15 a month. But what we did between the announcement and launch was what we call a commerce beta where people were buying games to test the credit card purchases and everything because you can’t get real usage numbers until somebody actually buys a game. It’s fascinating watching how usage for the exact same game, free or purchased, is different. So we were rolling up to release in June at E3, we’re like ‘jeez, I don’t think we’re going to have to charge anything.’ But we couldn’t be sure. So we decided to go this way: we partnered with AT&T and announced that the first year is free and after that it’s $4.95 a month. Okay? Just to get people on there so we could get real usage and track that usage. We collected the data and tuned the system to optimize it for usage and after three months we were able to conclude that we don’t have to charge any on-going fees. Which is great.”

IG: “Was that sort of the plan from the beginning? When you you guys started was it like ‘Ideally, we won’t have to charge monthly fees?’”

SP: “So here’s the thing. The plan was to make it so there were no monthly fees, if you play a game, either way, we get paid because you’re playing a demo [Editor’s Note: Steve mentioned to me earlier in a presentation that OnLive is compensated when users play free demos] or we get paid because we get a revenue share on a sale of the game. But we had to go and ran the numbers. You know? You’re a start up so you go and run the numbers. ‘Here’s the best case scenario and here’s the worst case scenario.’ By the way, the only reason we could afford to do is we were so worried about the worst case scenario we built in all these optimizations in the servers to minimize the cost of operations. And it’s because we built in all these optimizations…that we are able to offer a free service. If we just took off-the-shelf servers, we wouldn’t be able to. But what you just saw there is that you’re sharing servers amongst a lot of other people and it’s using them very, very optimally.”

IG: “So, in my mind, the biggest up-hill battle that OnLive has is having to prove that this technology works. Obviously we are in a controlled environment right now and everything is working great. But how do you instill faith in the everyday consumer that OnLive will work in their living room, on their home Internet connection?

SP: “The way we did it is we let people try it on their PC and Mac on OnLive.com, it’s free, and if it works their then it will work just fine on the MicroConsole. We had to do this very gradually. First we said you needed a wired connection and we went and tested literally millions of connections around the United States to see what the performance was with like. Then we gradually introduced Wi-Fi…and we now have extremely high reliability through out the United States and through out the world. Now that we now everything has been really reliable we are introducing the MicroConsole. We’ve taken a very slow, methodical path from beta, to live PC/Mac, to wired, to wireless, and finally to the MicroConsole because that’s the way we had to do it. It’s a little slower than maybe any of us wanted to do it but you’re exactly right, we had to instill confidence.”

IG: “Where do you see Microsoft and Sony relative to you guys? I know you mentioned briefly that you don’t see them as direct competitors. Do you see them complimenting you guys? Do you see them potentially using your technology in their next machines?”

SP: “Absolutely. Look, both those guys have Netflix on their machines. Sony has a movie studio and they have Netflix on the PlayStation. They sell Blu-Ray players. They actually have Netflix running on their Blu-Ray players. So I think everyone is getting to the point where they recognize that they’ve got a brand, they’ve got a world of products they can use to reach customers and so long as they’re participating in the ecosystem they’re pretty happy to see good things come out of it. I mean those guys have uncertainties about us just like everyone else does. Right? We had to essentially prove ourselves. But you’ll be seeing OnLive built into TV sets next year. There will be NO MicroConsole…”

IG: “Along those same lines, what about Steam and other digital distribution platforms?

SP: “We’re very happy to send people over to Steam. We don’t have an agenda. I do think that doing a 6 GB download on Steam for a demo then doing a 10 GB download for the game, it’s much better for the guy to demo it on OnLive and say ‘I like’ or ‘I don’t like it’ and then do the 10 GB download. If somebody wants to own a copy of the game then God bless them. Maybe they want to mod it, or have a particular performance capability they want. Who knows? We have no agenda there. It’s a $50 billion dollar market and we’re a 200 person start-up. We don’t need to make a very big splash in order to pay our bills.”

IG: “So you mentioned mods. This is one of the concerns I’ve heard whispers of. You’re esstentially buying the PC version of the game but with everything on your end, there’s no ability for the owner to mod. Right?

SP: “So we usually start with the PC SKU but not always. In fact, some games we are working on for next year are not going to be released on the PC. And some of the games are different. Sometimes it’s fairly subtitle but the OnLive version of games will be different from all the other versions and you’ll see that gap widen over time. So what we want to be able to do is make it so that if there are some cool modes out there that are stable, we want to be able to showcase them. You’ll be able to play the game with this mod or that mod. I think the good thing about that is for people who are not technical enough to do these things, they’ll be able to get into that. And here’s the other thing. When you play multiplayer, who wants to play with a guy who has an auto-aim mod that you don’t have? But it would be perfectly cool to have the auto-aim version of multiplayer and the non-auto aim version of multiplayer… That brings up another cool thing that you can do. Because there is no cheating to speak of, we can do cash prize contests and you could never really do that before in multiplayer because there’s always somebody who’s going to do a mod that gives someone an advantage. So we want to have the good part of mods which is that you can do things that weren’t there before and the publishers are generally okay with it. And as I mentioned before, the machinima elements of this whole thing. These guys [publishers] want to open up the worlds and give you direct control along with video editing stuff and the ability to post it. Take Assassin’s Creed, you open up that world for machinima and do a whole story that takes place in ancient Venice and it may have nothing to do with the game.“

IG: “And how about retail? You guys are currently just taking orders on OnLive.com but can we expect to see this box on store shelves?”

SP: “I can’t name particular stores but yes, the MicroConsole will be hitting retail next year… We’re survey hounds so we asked people how interested in this thing and we’re like ‘oh my God, how many can we make this year?’ and so we said ‘Alright, looks like we’ll just have enough to sell them from OnLive.com.’ And the other thing is that you have to vie for shelf space around Christmas and we didn’t want to get into fights like that.”

IG: “Yeah,  Activision has it all taken up with their Guitar Hero boxes.”

SP: “They do, or Rock Band 3. Which we just picked up for a Christmas present for our kids… It’s all wrapped up. I can’t play it until they open it (laughs)… and actually Lego Universe, too. That’s a good game and I don’t want to pick on them but I was trying to install that for my kid. And first there was what must have been a 3 hour download, why even bother with the disc?…  And then all this registration crazy stuff. By the time we were done he had to go to bed because it was a school night…. I worked all night on that damn thing. Anyways, people are so fed up and I as a parent am so fed up with installing games.”

IG: “You’re no stranger to working on innovative technology. I know you worked with Apple on QuickTime and more recently on WebTV. How have your experiences shaped the direction of you guys are taking with OnLive?

SP: “It took a whole career to do what no one has ever pulled off. And that’s launch a successful video game platform from a start up. It’s only been done once and that was called Atari. The other time they tried it was the 3DO and they couldn’t get it off the ground… And that’s why you’re seeing such a cautious unveiling. This is already a pretty ambitious thing. And we don’t have everything. We don’t have Call of Duty… and those guys don’t need us. But it’s just like Netflix. Netflix doesn’t have everything… And I think when a lot of people look at the console market they see a dog-eat-dog thing… And it doesn’t have to be that way.”

PC Gamer chatted with Final Fantasy XIV developers Hiromichi Tanaka and Sage Sundi recently to probe a bit into what went wrong with the launch of their newest MMO. The developers acknowledge they could’ve added more content if they had more time, but you can never really “finish” an MMO.

“Because it’s an MMO, time is always not enough. We always need more time, especially because we expect players to enjoy the game for five years to ten years. Release timing is only one of the points that we go past – it’s not a final goal we achieve,” Tanaka said. “So we will continue working on it with the players, and listening to them. This will continue, and the development team is really working hard to improve the game.”

Sundi then jokingly forwarded a workable timelime.

“If we had three more years [laughs], we would’ve had three more years worth of implemented content,” Sundi said. “But we had six months [from the first stage of alpha testing], so that’s where we are with the game.”

Aside from the lack of content, another common complaint is the game’s dated interface. Unsurprisingly, Tanaka hasn’t played World of Warcraft, and intentionally did not want to draw design from other games.

“One of the main focuses we had for FFXIV was introducing the excitement of MMOs to Final Fantasy fans, so that’s why we didn’t want to have a copy of other existing MMOs,” Tanaka said. “We don’t think the amount of experience of the development team has of MMOs was actually affecting in any way.”

Check the full interview for more explanations for the game’s state and planned expansions of content.

[via PC Gamer]

Ghost Trick is a strange game. Any story about a ghost that possesses different objects and can travel four minutes back in time would make for an unusual game, but this one is also made by Shu Takumi, the creator of Ace Attorney.

Take, for example, his answer as to why his main character is a ghost:

“With Ghost Trick, I wanted to create a continuous story throughout the game opposed to the episodic case system. Also, I wanted to create something where the focus is on the characters. Ghost Trick has a variety of characters, over 30 that appear in the story. In order to interact with so many characters and interact with them and to be an influence in their lives it turns out the best way is to have a ghost.”

Wait… what?

So, he’s a ghost in order to make a continuous story and meet lots of characters? Doesn’t that describe just about every work of fiction ever? I don’t think they all feature ghosts as the main character. Maybe he explains it better later in the interview:

“If you have a character who is alive it is very hard to have that one character be connected to all 30 of these characters. We choose this character to because we wanted to create a story driven narrative.”

Okay, he’s just out of his mind. He does eventually say that he wanted to show other character lives from perspectives he couldn’t otherwise. For example, I suppose it would be really creepy for a guy to just sneak into your house and overhear your conversations, but that can’t be the only reason why the main character is a ghost.

In any case, he doesn’t make a lot of sense in the interview, but it makes a good read and a close look at the mind of a very creative Japanese developer.

via Siliconera