parker’s desk

It’s funny to think about, but it was really only about 6 years ago that my first ques­tion to a game devel­oper was “what was it like work­ing on a Star Wars game?”  The panel’s adver­tise­ment poster had listed Jedi Out­cast as one of his shipped games, but it turns out his expe­ri­ence was rel­a­tively lim­ited and I got a short, kinda lame answer as my response.  It was a lit­tle dis­ap­point­ing you could say.

A few of my friends have asked this recently though, folks I hadn’t talked to in a long time and while catch­ing up they heard about it and were excited for me (I guess I’ve always been a Star Wars nut?).  It was a pretty cool moment and of course I thought “the cir­cle is now complete…” 

The answer, though…is awe­some.  It was great work­ing on a Star Wars game, mak­ing The Force Unleashed II for the Nin­tendo Wii was a fan­tas­tic expe­ri­ence and one I cer­tainly hope to repeat again in the near future.  I was skep­ti­cal going into it…maybe LucasArts (LEC) is hor­ri­ble to work with, maybe work­ing on some­thing like this will kill Star Wars for me, maybe the project will suck, etc.  Not at all, I even put more hours/overtime/crunch in on this game than any­thing I’ve ever done (a lot of it self-imposed) and I still had a blast doing it.

It started at the end of last summer…one day I get called into our media room and find out we’re going to make a demo of what we would do for a Star Wars game on the Wii — every­one of course knows my affil­i­a­tion with Star Wars as a fan from the lineup of Stormtroop­ers, Man­dalo­ri­ans & bounty hunters all loung­ing about on my desk — and after run­ning a strike team on Ghost­busters and a big push on Mush­room Men for cin­e­mas, they asked if I wanted to head up the demo team.  I wasn’t really sure if that meant actu­ally lead it or just be the cre­ative lead for the demo, but I was cer­tainly excited.

While my actual expe­ri­ence lead­ing the demo team was too neg­a­tive and per­sonal to post on here — pro­fes­sional dis­cre­tion — the demo itself ended up com­ing out great.  We had an intro show­ing a Theta-class shut­tle fly­ing towards Cor­us­cant and then land­ing on a plat­form out­side the Jedi temple…ramps low­ers and out walks Asajj Ven­tress, sabers in hand.  Doors shut behind her and she looks up at the cam­era and her sabers come to life.  The whole idea was to con­vey our pre­sen­ta­tion abil­i­ties, didn’t really have any­thing more to do with the demo than that and then led into her run­ning around with just gor­geous ani­ma­tion, her skirt flow­ing about her so amaz­ingly that it was almost as fun to watch that as it was to watch her cut­ting down droid after droid.  Bat­tle droids and then out came Droidekas and Super Bat­tle droids, it was fairly sim­ple but fun to play and looked amazing.

LEC ended up dig­ging the demo (obvi­ously), we started up pro­duc­tion on the game and while every­one was cer­tainly lim­ited by the very fast paced sched­ule there was a lot of excite­ment in the stu­dio.  There’s noth­ing more that I love at work than feel­ing use­ful, and the sud­den flood of geek-filled ques­tion pour­ing upon me about Star Wars lore was awe­some.  I admit some­times I felt pretty damn guilty that I knew the answer (for exam­ple, I knew when some­one asked “what are those fly­ing things on Kamino?” that they were aiwhas), and one favorite con­ver­sa­tion was when we had a long dis­cus­sion about how TIE Fight­ers actu­ally have no life sup­port inside of them while try­ing to address a story point.  Our…creative lead?  Lead designer?  I’m not sure his actual title on the game…James Claren­don, he really stepped up and immersed him­self in learn­ing too and started shock­ing the hell out of me about how much he’d come to know about Star Wars.  It was pretty great to see some­one  take that much pride in get­ting things right in the game!

Work­ing with LEC, at least from my world of work­ing on CGI for cutscenes and run­ning the Visual Effects for the entire game, was won­der­ful.  I was truth­fully very scared they’d be over­bear­ing and con­trol­ling and just suck the life out of it, but they were actu­ally very sup­port­ive and open to sug­ges­tions.  Just like any­thing there were some sug­ges­tions we had to really push and try to prove they’d work, but they were always open to this and more than happy to admit when we were right.  It was a great, pos­i­tive expe­ri­ence.  As a com­pany I think they’re a lit­tle too gung-ho about lay­offs there for me to ever want to work for LEC’s in-house devel­op­ment — I need job secu­rity I can trust — but work­ing as a devel­oper for them as our pub­lisher is awesome.

The Visual Effects work was insane…it being a com­bat game, I spent a vast major­ity of my time try­ing to intro­duce sub­tle (and not so sub­tle) dif­fer­ences in the impact FX that came from your sabers upon hit­ting an enemy.  To me they always feel very reward­ing while stay­ing authen­tic feel­ing, just push­ing the hell out of the Wii hard­ware and then scal­ing it back some every time our code team came after me (the gate­keep­ers of mak­ing sure that silky 30 frames per sec­ond can be maintained). 

The game itself…I can’t wait for every­one to get to play it.  At Red Fly we don’t do ports — we got a few glimpses of the XBOX 360 build just to make sure we were stay­ing on the same page cre­atively with LEC’s inter­nal team, but that was it…we did our own level design work and con­cept art for the most part, we made our own ver­sions of their look and really opti­mized the approach being taken artis­ti­cally to look far bet­ter on the Wii.  There isn’t much I can say about it yet since it hasn’t actu­ally been released (Octo­ber 26^th), but I can def­i­nitely say that I feel we did a great job stay­ing as true as we could to Star Wars and the fans out there.  We even man­aged to get in some really great fan ser­vice moments, there’s one in par­tic­u­lar I con­jured up that I am dying to see if it gets the reac­tion I was imagining. 

And multiplayer…it’s only been men­tioned that there’s mul­ti­player on a fact sheet so all I can say is mul­ti­player exists…it’s a ton of fun, we held a few tour­na­ments in the office play­ing it and they were always a blast.

And now time for bed…I’m freak­ing tired!  If any­one reads this and has extra ques­tions they want to ask, please feel free to post them and I’ll answer them!

G’night!

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