Dinosaurs have to
eat Huge, imposing dinosaurs will be on the loose in the brand new next-gen
Turok game, being developed at Propaganda Games in Vancouver. We can''t
wait to get this
game out to Xbox 360 and PLAYSTATION 3 gamers
everywhere.
Joel''s Desktop Picture
Joel''s Blog
thumbs<1> = 37; // current # of thumbs
alpha on Turok
posted at 05/01/2007 10:43 PM PDT
37
Thumbs
Hello everyone. This is Joel Manners, the Game Director for Propaganda''s next-gen shooter, Turok.
As we cruise into spring here in Vancouver, we are also getting very
close to alpha on Turok, and the game is playing very well. For those
that don''t know, Turok is a high-intensity game about a band of
hard-core soldiers fighting their way through a world filled with
lethal dinosaurs and deadly enemy soldiers. It''s a cool mix of
high-tech gunfire and down-in-the-mud predator versus prey primal
brutality.
Anyways, getting to alpha is always a very interesting time for a game
team. The game is coming together, people are playing it, you are
finding out what really resonates and what still needs work. And you
are rapidly running out of time! So we thought -- "perfect time to
write about it."
Here''s the first thing -- it is super-fun to fight dinosaurs. Either
they are tearing off your head with their jaws and throwing you in the
air and gulping you down and roaring in satisfaction, or you are
tearing them in half with your railgun and performing dental hygiene
with your knife and chucking fragmentation grenades into their caves.
Plus, dinosaurs are just plain terrifying. They scream and roar and
rush through bushes and grass (or flatten them, depending on sheer
tonnage). So right now the office is full of people creeping through
jungles and laying into dinosaurs with glee.
Most of the work happening right now is adding layers of polish to that
glee -- over in animation they are going crazy coming up with ever more
imaginative ways for you to gut, fillet, carve, take down, brutalize,
and in all ways, get medieval on dinosaurs. There''s a debate on how
high exactly the larger chunks of dino meat should fly when they
encounter a grenade. The weapons team has had a breakthrough on that
most iconic of Turok weapons, the bow, which is making it the current
favorite to play with. Oh, and last night I got to do a play-through of
the latest glory from the world team -- a climactic section of the game
where the dinosaurs run rampant through a fortified base that has
finally been breached. As I fought my way through the heart of the
base, I got to witness glory played out dynamically all around me:
soldiers fighting insmall groups to get into defensive bunkers, dinos
pouncing on then from the outer walls, base defenses lighting up the
larger dinos. Total pandemonium. It was great!
Alpha also brings with it a huge time pressure. There are only a few
more days of work to be done and then it''s all hands on deck for bug
fixing and optimization tasks, so you know that every day you spend on
something is a critical one. When you have a fun game on your hands it
makes it easier to remain passionate and focused on your work, and the
development team on Turok is definitely that.
Folks are working extremely hard, although I do want to say that one of
the things I love about Propaganda is that people here are dedicated
and work hard and work as a team, even under time pressure, but there
is an overriding respect for the team and for the game that means no
one is being asked to row an oar on a slave ship. Here''s the thing --
when you do that to a team, make them kill themselves just to get a
game done, that means that there is no time to put in passion and love.
People in those conditions are always stretched thin just doing the
basics, which leaves you with just the basics. That''s what kills the
creativity of many games right there. I love that Propaganda is full of
folks who value the team''s creativity and passion, that makes time for
that, and it shows in the game.
I think everyone in the industry, from the publishers to the
development teams to the players, can tell easily when a game was made
on an assembly line by overworked developers who never felt a part of
the process, as opposed to when a game was made by people who were
passionate about the game and given the chance to invest that passion
to make it great.
And while I''m talking about work loads -- you need passion for your
work right now in Vancouver, or else you would never show up. My grill
is calling to me. I spent yesterday on the deck grilling steak and
drinking margaritas and I came to the realization that I could actually
do that every day for the rest of my life and never worry about
changing it for something better. Especially since winter up here is
really wet, and now it is finally going away. Man, it is wet. I mean
ridiculous wet. We''re downtown in a tower and I can see roofs out of my
window that are just COVERED in moss. Moss on the roof, moss dripping
down the sides. Concrete isn''t grey, it''s kind of a pale green. I saw
moss growing on the highway the other day. How wet does it have to be
for moss to grow on a major road? Very. People reading this in the
northwest are probably thinking -- "what the heck is he talking about?"
but take it from someone who grew up in Texas -- the world is not
normally covered in moss. That is too wet.
Sorry, anyways, from now until the end of summer this is the most beautiful place to be on the planet, so don''t send letters.
That''s the intro, but now I see that the roads have cleared up, thus
improving my chances of really letting it rip on the drive home, so I
must go quickly and see if I cannot once again achieve that perfect
blend of engine rumble and tire noise that means "speed." My plan is to
follow up with more posts about the game where I can get into details
and show you some wicked cool screen shots, and surround that with info
about the studio and the people here, and basically life at a game
developer. Only exciting and interesting! And I may make some Canada
jokes too, because I have to put up with America jokes all day long up
here, and listen to stories about hockey.
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