Sunday, July 10, 2005

Controlling The Revolution


Well this picture of a controller still seems to be going around. This is what SeriousGamer said was controller? Now of course this is all speculation and is not official in any way, but personally I wouldn't be surprised if this was the controller. Seems to look comfortable to hold, and it could feature some sort of haptic feedback that can make you feel the buttons, and feel the sensation of pushing down buttons, and yes that type of technology is availible.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hello,

I am a member of the German gaming press and wanted to bring this to everyone’s attention. I have been in contact with a supposed employee of Zoonami in the UK. He has been in contact with me through these e-mails and over the phone. He pleads a very good case and from what I can tell from my talks with him he knows his stuff. On the same coin though I will have to consider all of this fake and mere speculation until real proof and credibility is provided. But even so, if it is fake you have to give credit where credit is due. He presents an amazing but somewhat unbelievable vision of this game. He is truly a visionary whether fake or not in my opinion simply because of the intricate details. Either way it is a decent read and we need more people in the industry to be like this. Enjoy.



E-mail #1

How do we evolve a genre…or a controller paradigm, or intuitive user interface? How do we come up with that special product that everyone catches on and the moment they see and play it, it all makes sense? Guts N’ Glory is a testament to our sacrifice and unbridled passion to push our industry but also creativity to their furthest limits. But in the midst of all of these advances in our plans or steps taken to not only be sure that we perfect an art but redefine it. The story and atmosphere of this vision must encompass all that we have envisioned and so much more. The story of Vigo Seforfsky is not a story that you would expect to relate to in an interactive environment, but a violent, melancholy and ultimately action-packed imagining of the story of a broken man before his end. During the Cold War Soviet Russia was busy at work competing as a superpower through espionage, arms manufacturing, and spy and operative techniques were being defined and redefined everyday then. Citing Mother Russia as the pinnacle of the communist ideal and being ultimately corruptible through the Red Army, Mafia and the KGB. Mr. Segorfsky was at the operative positional level with the special ops KGB. As you may expect while in the KGB Vigo Segorgsky has done his share of action you will go back through in-game hip-hop montages on his missions including: Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge: S-21 interrogation building, as a secret operative in the Battle of Mogadishu, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Rwandan genocide among many many more. These will all span different times and will all be based on our imagining of true historic events which we are taking the utmost care in translating into being geographically correct. Our gameplay engine will be constantly evolving to take advantage of the most thrilling and suited situation. We have gone to great lengths that even with the game engine constantly changing the player will change with it and his/her play style will determine that change…based on level of skill and predominant way of playing. So every time you play it is a somewhat different experience.

How do we revitalize a genre that has become stagnate and at the same time complacent? Our graphics engine is a proprietary concept based loosely on the Unreal Engine 3.0, Doom 3, Project Offset, Timeshift and F.E.A.R. engines and a combination of many others. We tried to incorporate all of the strengths of these engines and leave behind the respective weaknesses. As a result we have been able to have up to 90,000 characters on-screen at once each with a respective 600,000 polygons per character running at a locked 60fps. Of course this has all been accomplished in-game also weighing in the most sophisticated AI and physics proprietary technology ever witnessed in a interactive environment. We have also been able to accomplish (weighing in the AI and physics) up to 50 characters on-screen each with a mind-blowing 1,000,000 polygons per character at a constant 60fps. Our main character in the title will sport between 800,000 polys-1,000,000 polys which is still being decided. The physics technology and Artificial Intelligence in Guts N’ Glory is one most outstanding feats this team has been able to accomplish. The physics and AI is in our believe the closest you can possibly get to 100% real world reflection with today’s technology. But as I said before the tech is what really matters the least in the big scheme of production and development in what we are truly trying to do with this title.

Many rumors and speculation have been peddled around the internet and forums since last years E3 and attention to our studio and game has also sparked many a heated arguments. But rest assured Guts N’ Glory is a real game that has been in development for the last seven years (four years of this time spent developing our proprietary technology) and the last three on the true heart of the game. We are planning and hoping to be able to release the title in early 2007 with a Adult Only rating. As with many developing who start out wanting to make a game that will appropriately receive a Mature rating. We knew from the start that because of the pure fact that the combat was going to be as purely realistic as it was it would get an Adult Only rating but more than that the context of the game would warrant that above all else. The idea that your are playing as a man who is very anti-American and who has such a critical view of the social/economic system of many countries. But we wanted going into this knowing what we wanted to do, to really embrace the Adult Only rating instead of diluting it to make it more pliable to the retailers or politicians.

We wanted to portray Vigo Segorfsky as a man who is very unlikable but at the same time you could really connect with on a emotional level. We wanted to give him and his story many layers just like any real person who has been through all that he has been. He is not your Kratos or Leon S. Kennedy or Dante…he is a real person with as real a past and life that we could give to him. He is not someone with a unbreakable spirit or body, we wanted above all else to portray him as a man with real fears and real weaknesses as any real man would have (emotionally or physically). Facial expression and animation of the rigid bodies (especially the eye’s of characters) was key to expressing this vision, to truly give him lifelike emotions and reactions to any event that happened in our title (unscripted or not). The idea for this game was not to make a game that was a forgettable blockbuster hit. It was meant to be a masterpiece of interactive entertainment comparable to a independent film, whether that be its ultra-violent combat or its depressing story or the extremely controversial context of the game. But above all else for it to be a milestone in the art of interactive entertainment and interactivity as a whole.

Now, I’ll move on to the combat which will likely become half of the reason why it will be the most earned Adult-Only game ever. In past games that are action or gun heavy you would see somewhat realistic damage to a point and then they would just die with one or two kinds of damage. In our game we have implemented what we and Nintendo like to call the first complete anatomical physics technology. Which means in lamens when you shoot someone their body will morph and react exactly like it would in real life and be anatomically correct. I.E. if you shoot someone with a 9mm handgun from 20 yards away in the forehead, you would see a small hole in their head and they would fall and collide with their environment. But lets say you shot someone with a .357 in the same spot in the forehead from 20 yards away you would see a large chunk of their head blow off and those particles would collide with other rigid bodies and the environment. The physics will of course change depending where you shoot them and the angle or spread or distance or the type of weapon used. If someone is dead instead of when you go up and shoot them nothing happens…in our title the rigid bodies will continue to react to the realistic morphing physics while alive or dead. We have even done extensive work so that everything in the environments reacts the same way. The combat engine itself we take great pride in because not only have we combined all of the great features of recent engines (Resident Evil 4, Gears of War, Oblivion, Half-Life 2, Ultima Underworld, Halo etc.) to work in tandem better than anything but we have redefined how a action title should play and work through the new Nintendo controller. The only other game that I am excited about its combat engine as much as this one is the new Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, which will have a revamped combat engine that has me very excited to play with, but this has not been revealed to the public yet. We want to keep most of the combat engine details under wraps for now as we are excited to see how this great new technology will effect the way action games are made for years to come.

Another thing worth noting in the new technology that we have been able to create to great effect is our texture morphing physics engine. The easiest way to explain it is lets say if you have a dried grease spot on the counter and you can touch it and smear it. We have been able to do this exact subtle detail in this title with everything from blood, water, oil, and so on. The idea was to have layer upon layer of physics based textures on literally everything that can be morphed and manipulated in a number of ways. A big hurdle was not to get everything up and working but to get all of these blood and body fluids and physics based textures to realistically collide and interact with all of the other rigid bodies and environments and even our main character. That was a big challenge and took well over a year to get everything working perfectly and tuned.

This was originally supposed to be a launch title for Nintendo’s next-gen console but after 9/11 and the Iraqi war and now Hurricane Katrina we wanted some extra time to incorporate those events into our game. We also didn’t want these events to bore people over or relive the same old thing. We wanted to weave this sort of science fiction conspiracy into these events as if the media and white house had twisted these events so that the public wouldn’t get wind of these much more sadistic and elaborate conspiracies. As in the White House’s fax machine goes right into Fox news’ fax machine and this is one of the main reasons the public is oblivious.

The weapons in the title will be very assorted and suited to the situation. All of the modern day and antique weapons will be identical to their counterparts and fully customizable. They will also bare their real life names. But we also have included a fair assortment of supernatural weapons and some real plausible futuristic weapons and ammunition. Melee weapons will be very well balanced into the equation also and will give a true guttural sense of action. The use of vehicles (including flying vehicles like helicopters and planes) will be an important part of this game also and will of course be fully customizable.

Another thing we are proud to announce is our extremely sophisticated AI. Your actions and different things you do in the game will produce a sort of domino effect on the society and in effect everyone will react and talk about things and carry out their lives in different ways than they would have normally. Of course it wouldn’t be AI if they all reacted the same so every single NPC and there are hundreds of thousands of them, and they will all react differently from everyone else. This is really a very enhanced form of Radiant AI. Their will also be sequences in the game where you will have to figure out a way to create environmental domino effects which can be executed in hundreds of different ways. All the while keeping the stylish depressive nature of the title in tact. There is one sequence where you will have orders to assassinate the President of the United States. Which can be done in hundreds of ways. You could walk up the steps of the White House and battle your way through the Secret Service through the accurately portrayed White House and take him down with the orchestrated soundtrack blaring (my favorite way). Or you can even use stealth to get through the White House. But you can also take hundreds of other methods into account to carry out the same task. Such as gathering intelligence as to the path the motorcade will go en route out of the White House and rig the surrounding sidewalks and streets with plastic explosives and destroy him and his motorcade that way, go in afterward and mop up the stragglers. Of course these are just two of a hell of a lot of ways to execute this goal.

To answer your question about the new Legend of Zelda and the work that has gone into it. I know that the combat engine has been entirely revamped for this entry. I know this because a couple months back we received a demo that was sent to a few others I think Retro, Intelligent Systems, Free Radical, Capcom, Square-Enix, us and maybe a few others got that demo that the public has not been shown yet. The demo was just showing what they have been doing for the combat in this game. I know that they have implemented many in-game interactive cut scenes which are very polished. The one they mostly showed off aside from the cut scene with the big horned guy playing chicken with Link on the bridge. Was one where Link could ride up alongside another rider on a boar and stab his sword through its back, and then fling him into another rider on the other side. After that you could leap onto the boar with an A button interactive cut scene and ride him. The boar seemed slower than the horse but it could knock the riders to the ground and trample them. Then it showed Link using the Y button to call his horse back to the side of the boar and you could fire an arrow into the boar’s head and leap back onto your horse with another A button interactive cut scene before the boar collapsed to the ground. It was very cool looking, very stylish and gave a true sense of speed and intensity. Think Burnout 3: Takedown with horses and boars. The horse was also shown in different areas of the game where it would run and react differently just like Link. At times in the demo it would run like the horse in Shadow of the Colossus with a wild free-flowing gallop and other times it would have a strong menacing aggressive gallop. The last part showed off the on-foot combat where Link can now target I think five or six enemies at a time and it switched to a sort of POP: Warrior Within or God of War free-form combat style. Which was triggered when he had locked onto those five or six enemies. It looked like he had a lot of the same moves that he had in the Soul Caliber 2 GameCube version when that was triggered. This is probably why the delay happened as I speculate they needed more time to fine tune everything and maybe add some new stuff.

As to the interview with Martin Hollis I know that GameSpy and here at Zoonami choose not to release that interview since it was leaked and just deny it. The person I sent it to I asked not to post that and just wait until GameSpy posted it themselves. But since there was very little belief in the interview’s credibility they choose not to post it until after the trailer is shown at E3 next year. This title was originally supposed to appear on the GameCube platform entitled “Game Zero”. We have since been working on it and have thus renamed it Guts N’ Glory.

We are a small developer and thus we have been expanding and receiving help from many other studios. Retro Studios-help with character and art direction, Ubisoft-outsourcing/expansion, Grasshopper Manufacturer-combat beta build/expansion, Clover-intellectual story guidance expansion, Human Head Studios-Critical help in excising what we liked and didn’t about our Doom 3 engine source code components, and Real Time Worlds (David Jones and his team has been a great help at scooping out our open-area vision for the cities and places in the world) have all been a huge help at realizing our vision to its fullest. We alone could not have nearly been as successful as we have been without all the help from these talented developers. We have let Valve know that the door is still wide open for their cooperation if they ever choose. I hope that I have answered some of your questions about our game. I know I can offer no credibility at this time, but please wait until E3 2006 and you will see that I was not lying after all. Please know that we are doing our best to make this title one to remember. Keep the faith and take care.

1:04 AM  

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