Playing on your console/PC/Cellular phones may be all fun and games, but the process of designing a game right from the character models to the entire world is as tough as nails. As I spoke to Jesse, Albert and Nisha, it was evident that translating an idea from the blackboard into motion is easier said than done.
Jesse was the co-founder of Artificial Studios and played an important role in the development of the reality engine, which was to be bought by Epic. Artificial Studios now works under the Epic banner and has caught the attention of the media with their games CellFactor (the Physics engine is worth a dekko) and Monster Madness (Xbox 360), I had been thinking for quite sometime that Sony would nail down the power of the PS3 when Crysis from Crytek Studios would go multiplatform (which I still think is a possibility), but Jesse downplayed my belief informing me that even though the PS3 was a more powerful machine the 360 would pull it off better, the underlying cause is the fact that the Xbox 360 has 3 processors, Crysis is being built to support the graphics processor, the Core 2 Duo processor for PCs and Physics processors whereas the PS3 is built on 9 processors which makes it difficult to port the game with the original amount of content, this may be a reason why Monolith’s Ace shooter F.E.A.R. is not looking as good as its PC and Xbox 360 counterparts, plus Microsoft offers a great deal of support to developers, their XNA studio relieves a lot of aches and pains for a developer making it easier to port games, The original Xbox was probably a developers delight, it took less than half the time to develop original content for the Xbox as compared to the PS2.
My fellow gamer, kind of got bugged with the whole deal of Microsoft acting as a monopoly, he was sick and tired of the fact that Microsoft had taken over the PC gaming market completely, games were no longer made for the PCs but built just for Windows. Jesse saw all this humorously and quipped in with a remark of his own, saying that if we weren’t going to play games on the PC where shall we be playing games, the Macintosh might be more efficient than PC but is more expensive to develop on and as a developer he would not make a game exclusive for Mac or Linux based systems because Windows still had a large user base and that is where the market lay, the conversation then went onto the newly launched Vista system which was a mere upgrade to XP, but would find en route to our homes eventually just as any pervious operating system has done.
The artists also have an interesting profile. Albert is from Spain, loves to create models for games and was recently involved in a competition which lasted if am not wrong for 50 hours(Agrrrrhhhh…), he is of the view that technology has probably made the lives of designers a tad bit difficult, earlier art/modeling was not a tedious task as it is now, it would take a week to model all the characters for a game on a system like SNES, but now it takes a week or even more to model a single character for a game, although the tools with which they work help them out to a great extent,but creating a head with a polygon count of 50 million small triangles is not an easy task at all.
Killzone according to me was a game which looks great in still screens but when the game starts to move the frame drops horrendously and it becomes a chore for the player to actually shoot his enemies, but how did Guerilla games make it the community (including me drool…), the answer to it is all very simple, most developers retouch the screens on Photoshop before actually sending them out for the print/online media, they do the same thing with videos unless they show it to the audience that demo/trailer is in real time… Metal gear Solid 4 should have been the game to showcase PS3 power at the very beginning, not pseudo trailers of Killzone 2.
All of them had a different opinion on the gaming Stalwarts, Jesse thinks that the Wii is an innovative console but will not do well due to its lack of processing power; Albert wanted the PS3 to rule over its brethren, Nisha well she loves Quake III Arena and sees online games taking over the globe.
Next, we spoke to Chris Whaley and Anthony Whitaker of RZ2 games, the former being a console veteran who simply loves India and cannot seem to get enough of it and the latter being the only person who might convince my folks that gaming is a serious business.
To be continued…
–Neelesh Mukherjee