ECTS 1998 Ubi Soft Entertainment Press Kit (Europe)

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Wrap

Text File | 1998-08-21 | 7KB | 236 lines

So what's so interesting about D-Jump? It's unique mix of action and adventure! For the action part, the gameplay is very varied: within the same map, you jump, you fight monsters with a torch, you waterski, you transform into a snake and slither along the ground, you swim, you might even dance! We made a great effort to avoid the artificial and boring "map-in-which-you-hop-from-leaf-to-lea f-from-beginning-to-end." As in all of Ubi Soft's games, there's no real violence. Isn't an action-adventure game with no shooting going to be boring? Quite the contrary! There are so many different attack modes: self-explosion, torch battles, throwing projectiles, setting magical spells, underwater attacks - we may not like violence, but we love action! In the beginning of the game our hero, D, realizes that his body has been changed into wood - which is going to have get him into all sorts of tricky situations: set on fire, nibbled at by termites, dried out by too much sun in the desertΓÇª no blood maybe, but lots of sawdust! Will D-Jump be a difficult game? More of a long, deep, rich game than a difficult one. However, if you finish it in one setting, you win your weight in Egyptian dates! What's your game design philosophy? Variety, playability, "movie-like production" For instance, the camera behavior is as programmable as the characters' movements are, which allows us a great amount of variety, as well as interesting interactivity in the different points of view available to the player. Despite the technical constraints of real-time 3D,do you think you can make a graphically original game? Yes. It is definitely possible to create the style the illustrators were seeking, by working with, and sometimes around, the technical requirements. And to get a better feeling for the 3D effects, Cyrille and Mauro, the men who created all the characters, created them first in modeling clay. There isn't any one game designer for D-Jump, but rather a whole team: how does graphic design work when there's a group doing it? A good team is a team where each person has his or her specialty, but also where everyone knows and understands what everyone else does. For example, in order to explain to the animators the movements they have to animate, it is the French designers who "act out" the different roles on videotape (granted, we can't do it for the non-humanoids monsters, but we've done it for baboons, and it worked great!) Elisabeth, the head game designer, has many talents: a killer gamer (when she hires a new game designer, he or she first has to face her in a Quake deathmatch ΓÇª only those who can stay alive more than 3 minutes get hired!), she's also a graduate of Paris' Arts & Decorations school. When you have a team of strong personalities like we do, it's obviously hard to agree on everything. For instance, our scriptwriter St├⌐phane is a fan of The Lord of the Rings (he can practically recite it word for word in English!) as well as Celtic myths; while Cyrille, our lead artist, is more amused by big farting monsters and the like. Two ways of looking at the world that are often sometimes hard to reconcileΓÇª. St├⌐phane (the scriptwriter) and I often have heated discussions about self-censuring. We toss about existential questions like: "Is 'shit' a dirty word?" We ended up giving our character a slang vocabulary all his own, full of inventive and inimitable words: "Holy Bast!" instead of "F***!" for instanceΓÇª But in the end, we all agree on music: we listened to dozens of different CDs before determining of a common accord that the style we wanted for the game was groove, funk, stuff with a real beat, with drums and bass, ragga, rap ΓÇª these styles work perfectly with our hero! The game is produced in a joint collaboration between Ubi Soft Montreuil and Ubi Soft China... The French team, (composed of 20 people ) is responsible for the conception, the plans, the 2D roughs. The Shanghai team (composed of 35 people, including programmers, animators, and 3D modelers) completes a version of the maps and the animations which are later finalized in France. To work with China, we use email, which is the fastest and easiest method. When we send each other updated versions of the engine, we end up sending 80 emails ! Exhausting, but much quicker than regular mail... Regularly, people from the French team (game designers and graphic artists) travel to China to work alongside the China team on the maps in the process of development, the more delicate character animations, the specifics of the game engine and to eat snake...Graphic artists from the China team also come to France at important periods to learn how to completely finalize work on a map, share our work techniques and eat crepes...The problem is that they are so excited when they come to France that they sometimes have trouble concentrating on their work. They find Paris magnificent and they take pictures of all the dogs that cross them in the streets. (because in Shanghai there are not many dogs, and they are all of the same breed), and they go to the flea market... The collaboration is very profitable, but there are sometimes some odd cultural differences between China and France. In one of the maps we esigned chickens that turn into Village People chickens when they take special seeds. It was therefore very difficult to explain to them exactly what we wanted in the animations. An ambitious project such as D-jump involves many different skills, people, and tasks to be managed, so there are therefore always good moments and difficult ones. .. For example, of course, the realization at E3 that somebody else, on another project, had the same " wonderful " idea as you for your game... We must also be careful to always stay open to external opinions (professionals or just friends going by...), but at the same time we must hold on to certain personal convictions, so that we manage to have a game that pleases, but is not a mediocre consensus. A long project (a year and a half), is also a project that evolves. For example, when we start we of course have an idea of the technical constraints, but we always discover these best as we go along with our experimentation. It is sometimes hard to adapt all the time... but necessary for a nice result, so we do it ! The wonderful moment comes when you are finally able to integrate the first elements of the game (the animations, maps, AI), and all of a sudden you see your game materialize before your eyes, day by day, especially when you have worked blindly for so many months ! A particularly good memory ? Yes : 3-0!!!!! We are the champion, my friendsΓÇª I meant a good memory in the production processΓÇª To be noticed at E3 with a pre-pre-pre version; the day where the last 25000 words of dialogue was written and recorded; the distribution of whistle pops by Mauro to the entire team, whistle pops the neighboring teams will remember...