In the latest Prey update, Peter Johnson focuses solely on the Xbox 360 version of this FPS also set to appear on PC. We learn about the game engine, multiplayer, controls, front-end and XBL achievements.
Peter Johnson, Venom
THE ENGINE
As I am sure regular readers of Chris’ column will know, “Prey” is based on an enhanced version of the Doom3 engine. It was initially suggested to us that we would use the conversion of this engine that was being done over at Raven to bring “Quake 4” to the 360, but after waiting nearly 3 months for sight of that code, and it being apparent when we saw it that those guys were very much still in the process of development, shall we say, at the time- we felt that we had little choice but to do it ourselves rather than spend the next six months simply merging their code with Human Head’s without any forward progression ourselves. Taking this approach meant it was then much more likely that we would be in a position to resolve any problems we encountered.
MULTIPLAYER
After the departure of our network programmer in the last week of November 2005, we had a difficult choice to make - whether to take his code and complete it, fixing any bugs we found and hoping we could patch around any problems we uncovered, or throw it all away and start again. This was a difficult call, as time was running short for an area of the game which is always known to be a challenging one to implement.
We took the option we all felt was right, which was the braver/more foolish one of replacing it all. Steve Sharp, the coder we tasked with it has done a great job in a short time in a coding area he was previously unfamiliar with, and we now have all of the Live support in place and working well. The recent addition of speech to the online game over the past few weeks has also added greatly to the player experience.
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Mark Sample, Control system
Assigning the action buttons to the pad was easy, however the fun started with getting the feel of the player movement and looking around right with the sticks. Using a vast array of tweakable values we set about tuning the turn-rate and acceleration. From the get-go we knew it was vitally important that the player felt completely in control at all times. They need to have enough low-down sensitivity to make small delicate moves, as well as fast response for sweeping, super-quick 180’s – as you never know who might pop up behind you =). After much testing and tuning, the stick controls now feel robust and razor-sharp; we’re really pleased with the results and think the gamer will be ready in no time to take out a hunter or two with what we have delivered.
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Phil Nixon, Front-end design
I like the idea that the user interface should relate to the theme of the game itself as much as possible. I'll try and explain a little better what I'm on about...Tommy is aided throughout the game by Talon, his hawk, and we thought it would be cool to use this idea as a concept for the user interface. We focused on a super close-up of the eye, making the pupil dilate and contract in response to flashing lights around it (representing gunfire, or perhaps a smashed up computer). Occasionally the eye looks around too, adding movement in the background. The deeper you get into the interface, the deeper you zoom into Talon’s eye.
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Bruce Brodie, Xbox Live Achievements
The achievements have been a lot of fun to create! Currently there are 33 achievements in “Prey” which will be worth a total of 1000 points to a player’s Gamer Score. These achievements are spread out between single and multiplayer modes. Major achievements such as game completion and death match kills are all present and correct, level-specific awards have also been included for players that attempt the game on the “Wicked” difficulty – we want people to explore the world of Prey and really master it in order to unlock some of the harder achievements – be warned, some of the multiplayer ones will take a lot of skill to unlock!
There are also a number of secret achievements that players will have to look harder to find, which will be worth a good haul of points when discovered.
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Check out an image of the controller layout, a photo of the Venom team and a brand new screenshot below!
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