Peter Wanat, The Chronicle of Rid****'s producer within publisher Vivendi Universal Games, is a self-admitted hype machine. He tells us, when we sat down with him, that he can hype the game up more than we ever want to hear. And he's right, as we learn when he gets randomly excited over his game halfway through sentences. But given that Rid**** was his idea from the beginning -- and the game is now complete and scheduled to be in stores next week -- his last two years are about to pay off.
"The original game concept overall was mine, but that was presented to [developer] Starbreeze," says Wanat. "We worked together and flushed it out.
"We realized there'd never been a great prison escape game, and we thought that would be an incredible idea for a game. It instantly tells a story. I can tell you 'prison escape game' and you automatically start conjuring images in your mind about what's going to happen in that game. 'I'm going to go out; I'm going to be sneaky; I'm going to sneak up from behind people; I'm going to take things; I'm going to tunnel through black areas; I'm going to go down to the mine areas; I'm going to try to sneak around; I'm going to run through ventilation shafts -- all those things that a player would want to do."
"The original game concept overall was mine, but that was presented to [developer] Starbreeze," says Wanat. "We worked together and flushed it out.
"We realized there'd never been a great prison escape game, and we thought that would be an incredible idea for a game. It instantly tells a story. I can tell you 'prison escape game' and you automatically start conjuring images in your mind about what's going to happen in that game. 'I'm going to go out; I'm going to be sneaky; I'm going to sneak up from behind people; I'm going to take things; I'm going to tunnel through black areas; I'm going to go down to the mine areas; I'm going to try to sneak around; I'm going to run through ventilation shafts -- all those things that a player would want to do."
Over at Starbreeze in Sweden, producer Lars Johansson and his team started working on an initial prototype for the game in August of 2002. Johansson lays out their game plan: "First off, [we decided to] tell the back-story of Rid**** the character, and not have it follow the back-story of the movie -- make it more about the character and the universe. We wanted to have a sneaking action game, but at that time it was in third-person…We had a prototype going for like three months, where we used the Enclave technology to present what we wanted to do with the game. At that time, when we were done with the prototype, everybody agreed that [first-person] was what we were going to go for."
When Starbreeze decided to make a first-person game, they wanted to do something other than a standard shooter: they wanted to put a focus on making hand-to-hand combat work in a first-person perspective. "We started off with the first-person melee fighting, which is kind of a bold way to go," says Johansson. "We made a mockup with animation to show off exactly how we wanted to do it. Then we presented it in the prototype."
It wasn't a simple process to come up with a fighting engine that worked well, though. "We made lots of iterations of the first-person fighting," says Johansson. "We started off with having a locked fighting system, where you engaged the opponent. You had a fighting mode, more or less [along the lines of holding down one of the triggers to enter the mode]. After that, we tried [a system] where you're not locked to the enemy, [and you have] free movement and so on. We played around with that…We looked at a lot of different games and how they solved it."
Once they had movement down, Starbreeze focused on making the fighting feel realistic, a problem many first-person games have struggled with. "We wanted the player to feel that when you hit someone, it feels like you're really hitting someone, [and] when you get hit, you also feel it," explains Johansson. "A lot of that is based on facial expressions and how [enemies] get bruises to the face."
The Making of (Chronicle of Rid****'s)
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Originally Posted by Koopa
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