Pushing forward with Condemned 2...
As the action adventure, Condemned 2: Bloodshot reaches the alpha phase, Senior Producer Dave Hasle from Monolith Productions, fills us in on its progress.The butterflies start to grow in my stomach around this time every project cycle – and it’s a good thing. It always happens with every project – no matter how much planning, schedule updating, and iteration on features has been completed; time is rushing quickly by when you’re ‘pushing to Alpha’. If any Producer says they’re not feeling any butterflies, or strain for that matter, during this time, then they are either lying or don’t care about the game they are producing…so I’m glad to feel those old familiar flutters.
The halls tend to get rather quiet as everyone starts to get their ‘focus-face’ on. We’ve just recently completed our internal Engineering – Content Alpha. This means all primary and secondary game systems have been implemented and a primary amount of content has been created to allow the Level Designers to create their core gameplay experiences in the levels they own.
We're now pushing forward with our Game Design Alpha. It’s at this phase that we’ve turned our attention more closely to the specific needs of the Level Designer. All the models, animations, engineered systems, audio files, world art prefabs and environments are now coming together to hopefully give us that gameplay experience that we all want so badly. If the Level Designers find themselves with a blocking issue (i.e. an animation doesn’t play properly or an engineering bug prevents a feature from working properly), we all do whatever we have to so they aren’t blocked. There are occasional verbal blurts as a blocking bug may pop up or a final implementation of a sub-feature isn’t quite working out and a decision is needed quickly – but the focus remains strong and people continue to move forward as we all know our dates can’t, and won’t, change.
Click for larger imageKeeping the balance in the tasks on everyone’s plate becomes very critical. For example, Michael Drummond, the Lead Level Designer on both Condemned: Criminal Origins and Condemned 2: Bloodshot, had a last moment request for two thrown weapons to help further flesh out some gameplay on a garbage scowl: a skull with a skull pile and some metal trash balls for any AI type. Of course, once the skull is created, there is a push to have it as a player-side weapon. Even though, as a Producer, I want everyone’s final weapon requests to have been done by our Engineering-Content Alpha, there is always going to be needs for assets and iterations for ongoing gameplay creation and tuning. It really becomes a balance between ‘art’ and ‘business’… The ‘Art’ is finding that compelling, beautiful, strong gameplay experience that is fine-tuned and enjoyed by all and the ‘Business’ is keeping it on track and within budget – and many times these two goals collide. So this means trying to leave some schedule room for iteration and evolving the gameplay experiences – even though usually the schedule is tight already at this phase.
Click for larger imageAs we move into Alpha, and then through Alpha into our final Beta, we’re going to give you some ‘inside views’ as to what each team is working on here at Monolith Productions and how we strive to bring it all together into one product. We hope to give you some insight as to some of the common issues that creep up and how we deal with them.