 |
            
 
  |
|
Developer's diary: Part II(April 5, 2002)Welcome, dear reader, to the first sequel in this developer's diary series. I would also like to thank everyone - who has shown their interest in the first part, and for all the support our whole team has received. I would also like to invite anyone who is interested in the game to take part in the discussion about UFO: Aftermath. Any comments and suggestions are welcomed (if not accepted) there. Memoirs: The practical considerationsIt was in July 2001 when we really decided to face the challenge and go ahead with Dreamland Chronicles. The first obvious step was to find out where Mythos had left off. Four CDs arrived at our office, neatly marked as Milestone 14. There was some code on them, and some art, and even an executable.But really nothing even remotely like the screenshots we saw floating around the web. The executable only showed the strategic game (albeit very pretty). There were some models from the tactical game, and some of them could even be opened. The code did not compile (other people's code never compiles on your computer) and, as far as we were able to tell, it did not contain any part of the tactical game. On the other hand, there were SDKs of almost every engine known to mankind - NetImmerse, Havok, Miles. None of them working, their licenses having expired long ago. "No, there is no other code. No, the licenses cannot be renewed," our publisher assured us. In case you are not familiar with the concept of middleware, there are many packages that aim to "pre-invent the wheel", i.e. to provide a developer with a package that handles certain tasks common to most games. A well-known example is the graphic engine - be it LithTech, the Quake engine, or, as in our case, NetImmerse. These engines handle the actual display of the game, as well as exporting the 3D models from 3D modelling programs (like 3DS Max or Maya), and building the scene in custom editors. But you can also have e.g. a sound engine (Miles in our case) that plays sound f/x and music for you and automatically handles e.g. playing multiple samples at the same time, sound compression and other things. In any case, if you use an engine, you use its API, which means that you only tell the engine what to do and do not care about how it is done. This is convenient as long as the engine works. If it does not, you can throw most of that code away. It is always a nasty business when a project is cancelled. Obviously, there must be a lot of personal animosity. I have but scant knowledge of the circumstances of the cancellation DC: FR, but any developer in such situation would have little inclination to carefully gather all code and assets to make sure somebody else can take up right where they left off. One thing we had, however, was the original Design document. Different perceptions of the general role of design documents aside, this was the most specific thing we had in our hands and was also the one that actually helped us the most. Diary: First shotsThe past month was not clear sailing. It was not sailing at all. I hope I'll be able to write more about it one day, when it will be just one of those funny stories, such as, you know, when you lost your way in the mountains, and almost froze to death, and then, at the last moment, you met the St. Bernard... I surely hope a St. Bernard is just around the corner now.But besides the frantic phone calls, there was some development actually going on, and that is, I assume, what is really interesting to you, not the industry gossip. The most important thing was our first playable. Did you know that "playable" is a noun as well as adjective? That's how publishers call something that cannot be shown to press for the want of graphics polish (otherwise it would be a "demo" or "trailer"), but has at least some rudimentary functionality (i.e. you can control the units, maybe give them some orders). Our first playable features one city level (I wrote about it extensively last time), four soldiers, and four aliens. You can order the soldiers to shoot the aliens and aliens will shoot at you if they spot you... and whoa! there is a game. We were very eager and little bit afraid about how it will play. We already built a little program that used standard Windows interface to display top-down map, with soldiers displayed as circles and aliens displayed as rectangles. There we tested our concurrent turn based system (I hope to write more about it in the memoirs section, next time) and it was working fine. But how will it feel when you can't see all the soldiers at the same time? When you have that big 3D building obscuring the view? When you can rotate and zoom in and out? It is different. It's more personal. The circles and squares in the bird's eye view are but tokens, symbols you move around and manipulate. Sometimes one of them blinks and disappears. In the playable, you can see real men walking around, sporting real weapons, meeting real aliens, with real ray-guns. You can actually see the shooting and get the feeling of combat. On the other hand, yes, it is not as clear as a neatly ordered grid with some well-defined symbols. At present we have not yet implement the "hidden unit highlighting" feature that will show the ghosts of units hidden behind (or inside) buildings. Therefore you have to constantly rotate the camera to keep your units in view. And the camera controls are also not as good as we want them to be. But this is beside the point. The point being, that we finally moved from abstract to concrete, from the model to the real thing. We can see how the play dynamics work and we can adjust the game parameters to make the game flow as smoothly as we can. We can tweak and twist the ways the player controls the game to achieve the same goal. We can and will add various things to make the situation more clearly to the player. But doing all this we must be very careful not to lose what we already have - that bond of care and attention between the player and the little men moving on screen. I believe this is the key issue in our game: this game is not only about tactics; it is about people as well. You control your men and women, but you also care about them. Their lives matter to you and their deaths - though sometimes inevitable (or rather unpreventable) are not to be taken lightly. I am starting to sound like our marketing department again, and some people complained that the last piece was too long, so I will stop it right here. Looking forward to meeting you in the next instalment! Martin Klima, ALTAR interactive |
|
Buy UFO: Aftermath online! 
 |
|