Pursuit Force Designer Diary #5 - Development Challenges
Now less than a month away from North American stores, Pursuit Force is a mission-based driving game in which you'll be tasked with cleaning up gang-infested streets in and around the fictional Capital City. The North American game will benefit from a number of improvements over the version released in Europe last year, and it's those improvements, along with the challenges that a developer faces when developing for an unreleased platform, that Bigbig Studios' Jonathan Webb discusses in this designer diary entry. And yeah, we know that designer diary #4 was described as the "final" designer diary, so we'll consider this one the final designer diary #2--you've heard of the Final Fantasy series, right?
New, New, New
By Jonathan Webb
Managing Director, Bigbig Studios
In this designer diary I'm going to be talking a bit about the challenges we had in bringing Pursuit Force to the PSP. Let me just start by saying there were a few.
Firstly, we had the double whammy of creating a new game, with new game mechanics, on a completely new console. At the start of Pursuit Force we had no PSP development kits. We knew the specs and we knew what it was capable of, but we were still designing a new game using a large dose of foresight and gut instinct. You often have to when working with a new console. How many cars can we display? How many characters can we have running around? How detailed are the environments going to be? These are important questions that need answering. Aim too high or promise too much and the game will grind to a halt or simply not run at all. Aim too low and yeah it'll run but will look like a bag of spanners. The key is to get the balance right, and this was our initial challenge with Pursuit Force. How do we push the PSP when we don't have a PSP? Thankfully, a lot of the initial decisions we made worked out really well.
For instance, we have some missions that go on for over 20km. This was one of our main hurdles to get over and there are generally two ways to overcome this problem: 1) squash environments so that they fit completely in memory or 2) stream the environment from the UMD as and when we need it. Squashing our environment to fit into memory was just not feasible. They'd have looked just too basic. On the other hand, streaming wasn't something we wanted to do because constant access to the UMD disk was likely to put extra strain on the battery. The answer was a compromise: Reduce environments down as much as possible and, instead of streaming in the environment constantly, chunk in sections of it every now and again.
Thankfully, the PSP has the luxury of being able to display curved surfaces. This has several advantages, one of them being memory size. Creating an environment out of curved surfaces meant that we'd use far less memory than if it was created out of old-fashioned polygons. This meant that we could reduce our environment's memory footprint without compromising its quality. We also had the added advantage of dynamic LOD, meaning that as the environment goes off into the distance we could dynamically reduce its detail and hence speed up the drawing. This was a big decision for us. It had really big benefits but also required a fair amount of undertaking. We had to adapt our existing tools to cater for curved surfaces, and the environment artists had to spend a good few months pulling their hair out before they managed to tame the beast that is more commonly known as curved surfaces. Overall, what started out as a risky decision turned out to work very much in our favor.
Another hurdle to overcome was the game mechanics. We needed a way to be able to test them before receiving development kits. We did this by emulating the PSP on a PS2 development kit, allowing designers to test out certain key mechanics (such as vehicle jumping) without having to wait for the PSPs to arrive. Then, once the kits turned up and we converted our game engine over to them, the game code would simply slot in place. Not only that, but we needed to prove that these mechanics were fun to the player. We decided to focus-test our mechanics, and once we had them up and running on the PS2, we had a number of focus-testing sessions to fine-tune the unique mechanics before we forged ahead with the remainder of the game.
Now, one question that we often get asked is: Why bring this game to the PSP? Why not release it on the PS2? My answer is fairly obvious: Why NOT bring it out on the PSP? Before arrival of the PSP this question was just never asked for one very good reason. Before the PSP, no handheld game console had comparable power to a home console. This meant that portable games often had a very different look to them. Now that the PSP has arrived, you're seeing games that could in principle be brought out on the PSP or the PS2 or both. One of the main reasons why we released the game for the PSP was because it was a completely new console and Pursuit Force is a new, fresh game. There's been criticism leveled at some games released on the PSP for being basically ports of PS2 games. Well, Pursuit Force is no port. It's a completely new game experience on a completely new console. If we brought it out on the PS2, we'd be competing with all the other PS2 games. Bringing it out on the PSP meant that it was more likely to be noticed. Pursuit Force is a game designed and tailored for the PSP. Its pick-up-and-play structure is ideal for gaming on the go.
As you may be aware, the game has already been released throughout Europe. People have commented on why it's not yet been released in the US. Let me just say that we've not simply repackaged it. We've been busy implementing numerous changes to make it a better product. In Europe, the game has gone down really well. But quite a few people found the difficultly curve too steep. We wanted to eliminate this frustration from the US version. We did this by rebalancing the entire game and adding checkpoints to a vast number of the missions. We've also modified the handling on a number of the vehicles and rerecorded most of the speech within the game, using different voice actors and a tweaked script. Finally, we've added the ability to save unlocked images to your memory sticks so that they can be displayed as wallpaper on your PSP. Overall, we've spent a good few months tweaking and polishing the game so that it's as good as possible. I believe the extra wait will be worth it.
Now that we've finally finished working on the product, it's time for reflection. We recently got everyone together to deconstruct the game. What went well? What didn't work? Parts of the game we liked, parts of the game we didn't? How would we improve it further? To me this is a big part of making console games. How do we improve, how do we rise to the next challenge? Overall, making Pursuit Force was an extremely enjoyable experience. There were numerous late nights (too many to remember) and a few stressful moments, but we're not complaining. We had the opportunity to work on a completely new game for a completely new game console. What could be better? As to whether there will be more games in the Pursuit Force universe...well, I guess you'll just have to watch this space.
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