Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Earlier this week we spoke to Antti Summala, the lead designer on astronaut shooter, Shattered Horizon. The resulting interview covers a bunch of topics, including the advantages of self-publishing, the reasoning behind making the game DirectX 10 only, and the problems of control systems when there is no universal up or down. The game itself is out on Steam for €20/$20/£15 on the 4th of November. Read on for a peek into Futuremark’s adventures in near-future sci-fi.
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Usually when I meet a person that’s selfishly occupying one of my dream jobs, I end up spiking their drink, driving them out to a secluded Forestry Commission car park, and setting Bosnia and Hernia (my pedigree Romanian Fighting Badgers) on them. Paul Jackson, CEO of the company that makes train sim RailWorks, was lucky. He got away with a light grilling.

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When we heard news that Sword of the Stars’ maker Kerberos were, as part of the route to sci-fi RPG Northstar, making a town-based zombie-defence game by the name of Fort Zombie, our response was immediate. To do lots of stuff. And part of that stuff was dropping them a mail, and asking if they were up for a chat about their imminent undead-escapades. And lo! the Lead Designer Martin Cirulis was. We present the results here, in what we call “An interview”.
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We’ve been raving about Aaa(Snip-Ed) for the last couple of weeks. We’ve been charmed by their personal Youtube response to the RPS comments threads. The time has come for the inevitable: The RPS vs Dejobaan interview where Messrs Ichiro Lambe and Rohit Shenoy tells us what’s what. Topics including hitting on ladies at Salsa classes, what they’ll do when they sell the 76th million copy on Steam and the debristling of pigs. Read. You really have to.
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Yesterday we spoke to The Secret World project lead Ragnar Tørnquist. He revealed a whole bunch of new information about the urban fantasy MMO of monsters, secret societies and mysterious evil, which is now sounding increasingly awesome: a (sort of?) real-time combat system for PvP, a subterranean city for the secret societies for fight over, and a mutual war against evil and darkness in the real world. Along with the three factions he’s revealed a little about their HQ buildings, the share social hub for each faction, and the PvP impact of guilds, or cabals as they will be known. More promising, perhaps, is an MMO that eschews traditional vertical structure of RPGs, opting for a “horizontal” advancement that will allow people to contribute to higher end PvP stuff from the very start. Yes, there’s every reason to believe that Funcom might finally be on the right track. Read on for our chat with Tørnquist, or go here for our previous interview.

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A couple of weeks ago I had a chat with Nicholas Francis, one of the founders of Unity 3D, the game development suite. I’d already been looking at Unity because we’d seen a bunch of games using it. The guys over at Blurst use it to make their crazy output, and things like the lovely PuzzleBloom have been turning up on the web more and more. I even downloaded the 30-day trial and messed about editing terrain and adding weird noises to seagulls for a while, at which time Paul Barnett from Mythic dropped me a line to say he was using it to prototype new game projects. I can’t say I spend a great deal of time playing around with development suites, but the accessibility of this one certainly intrigued me. I was glad to be able to put some questions to Francis, and ask a bit more about what his company was up to. They were, it seems, making a nuclear-powered toaster…
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A while back, I got together with Jerome Gastaldi – Monte Cristo CEO and lead on Cities XL – to talk about Cities XL. By “a while back” I mean, January. RPS has been busy with not doing anything. Since the demo has just been released, I thought it time to go back to the recording of Mr Gastaldi’s splendid Gallic accent and forthrightness – I’ve avoided about half the swearing – to talk about Cities XL, the construction genre, and the future of the PC. It’s worth noting that the interview is six months old – I’ve concentrated on discussion of concepts to avoid any details being out of date. And here we go!
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Earlier today we talked to Positech’s Cliff “Cliffski” Harris about his new game, Gratuitous Space Battles. There was also some discussion of a Saddam Hussein sim, the pitfalls of outsourced indie art, and the problems of small-playerbase multiplayer.
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Anyone who has played Ben There, Dan That! and Time Gentlemen, Please! will know why to be excited to hear there’s to be more from the mad-walking heroes of time travelling point and click adventures. From an outside glance they’re 2D scratchy indie games made in the AGS engine, but then you need to sit up and take notice when you realise the second game, TGP, has a Metascore of 89 (five reviews listed, but many other 9/10s should be added). We officially liked it a lot. Why this very day Zombie Cow got in touch with us to let us know that after meetings and alcohol, they’ve decided to continue the series, this time episodically.

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Let’s side-step the foot-to-ball gags for this one. The Championship Manager story fascinates me.
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