Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Earlier this week I took some time out of my merciless schedule of reblogging the trailers for the sequels to 2007 action games to have chat with Danish indies Zero Point. Game director Kim Haar Jørgensen told me about how Hired Guns, System Shock 2, and Deus Ex had all fed into the creation of their Unity-powered co-op sci-fi shooter, Interstellar Marines. You might have already encountered this “AAA Indie” project via Bullseye or Running Man, the browser-based mini-games that Zero Point have used to promote their title. The full game, however, is something much more formidable, as Jørgensen was to explain. It’s quite project for just a handful of devs, so I was keen to find out how they were getting on.

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Zero Point want to explain their (frankly fairly impressive) Unity-powered first-person shooter, Interstellar Marines, to you. To do this they have created a four-minute trailer, which shows off the game in action, and talks about how you can support their attempt to make a full-blown FPS without the resources of a big studio. It’s fun. It’s even got some jokes in. Go take a look.

We’ll be talking to Zero Point about their project quite soon.
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I’ve said it before, but I really like what Zero Point Software are doing with the little Unity teases that they are releasing for their game. The most recent is some “Advanced Combat Training”, which you can play over on the main site.

The training takes place two kilometers below ground deep inside a secret military facility. Here you’ll face an onslaught of challenging Combat Training Robot in a range of different training environments. If you succeed you’ll be one step closer to becoming a part of the elite battalion of Interstellar Marines secretly being established as first line of defense against other sentient species.

And they’ve trailered it for our convenience, below. Good stuff.
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Zero Point Software have released a clever new preview asset of their game, using the Unity plugin. It’s a kind of “3D screenshot” that they’re calling The Vault. You can go in and have a look around, and see some of the titular marines in 3D, frozen in time fighting some manner of shark monsters. It’s pretty neat, and the dates on the vault walls suggest that more of these 3D vignettes will be revealed in the coming months. The sci-fi co-op shooter has been in development for quite some time now, so we’re hoping this indicates the start of a more concerted reveal of just what’s going on with the title the studio are calling a “AAA Indie” project.

Folks who can’t be bothered installing Unity (and given the amount of cool stuff it’s throwing up now, you probably should be bothered) can get a taste of the vault via a new teaser trailer which I’ve posted below.
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Hmm. Interstellar Marines is an indie-developed high-sheen FPS which is… well, I’m intrigued for a load of reasons. Partially because it looks novel (Talking about trying to do a realistic first-contact alien event) and partially because of its route to market. The short version – for more read the press coverage – is that in 2006 they used a high-end game engine to do a demo, which got attention, they turn away from major publishers in favour of indie-dev… which makes the engine too expensive, so they’re moving over to another one. Which they can’t show in game footage publicly. Yet. It’s also got an interesting development philosophy - interesting in that it manages to be both self-deprecating (in its insistence on the import of the community and attention) and self-aggrandizing (not least in calling it “AAA Indie”. As in, if they’re AAA indie, what are everyone else?). Do read. Those videos they can show are below…
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