Weeks 17 & 18
Lots of news in the last two weeks. For of all, last week we went to the ECTS. We drew lots to decide which two members of the team, besides the "bosses", were being invited by the company. Fate, blind and deaf as usual, chose Pierre and Simon.
Omikron was presented only backstage this year. Following the official presentation at E3 we preferred not to reveal anything else until next year's E3. But we took advantage of the occasion to have a look at what the others were doing. No great revolution this year. Metal Gear and Crime Hunter from Interplay pleased us, as did Forsaken, which is truly beautiful with a 3D card. Otherwise nothing very exciting.
But we didn't spend all our time out and about. We also did some work. Antoine is now working on an animations editor which will enable us to view and edit animation as well as controls. This should be really useful for the game play of the combat part of Omikron. Fabien is finishing off the 3D engine, adding some new functionalities, and continuing to interface with IAM, our adventure editor. And Simon has not been idle, since the dialogs part of the editor is now finished.
Hakim is now working on the camera system. In its conception we tried to implement a type of camera management that is both fluid and easy to program. True to our philosophy we are developing camera tools that will allow anybody to place fixed or mobile cameras without having to type one line of code.
In the graphics department Pierre continues to make progress with the decors for Section 1 of the adventure, particularly the hero's apartment, the morgue and the sex shops in the red light district. For the end of the month we aim to have all the graphical resources for Section 1 ready and thus be able to start work on the game play. Neighborhoods 2 and 3 are coming along and promise to be very beautiful.
I have been writing the interactive dialogs since the beginning of the month. I though I had the hardest part behind me when I finished the scenario, but the dialogs are at least as difficult if not harder. Rather than a simple system where the player would press the space bar to scroll the different responses we opted for a dialog system in a tree structure. Although the result is undoubtedly preferable for the player, it is also much more complicated to design. We have to make sure the player is provided with all info essential to the adventure, whatever path he follows through the tree, that he really can choose the attitude he wants to adopt, and avoid having quadzillions of responses — otherwise the game would take up a whole stack of disks. At the same time we have to make sure the dialogs are interesting but not totally mind boggling for the player. In short, it's a real enigma!
We continue to work hard and the regular encouragement we get from Eidos UK and Eidos USA leads us to believe we're on the right track. Now we've just got to hang on in there to the end of the road...
That's all, folks!
Congratulations to John and Sarah.
Autor: David Cage
Source: Quantic Dream
11/01/1999 Eidos Interactive ships Omikron: The Nomad Soul
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Monday, September 15, 1997