Ask the Developer: Black Rock Studio (PURE)

[Darksaviour69]

Ian Hudson (forum name PURE_DEV (http://www.dcemu.co.uk/vbulletin/z/profile.php?z-profile=PURE_DEV)) is a member of the Black Rock studio development team (Environment Designer) and is willing to answer any questions you have about Pure, Black Rock Studio or game development in general.


http://www.dcemu.dreamhosters.com/pics/d/415-4/pure-logo.jpg

Ian started out in the games industry in 1996 working as level designer for Acclaim Studios London. He moved on to Climax Racing (the former name of Black Rock studio) in 2000 shortly before Acclaim went under and is currently working for Black Rock studio since the Disney acquisition in 2006. For 12 years he has been designing game worlds and racing tracks for various platforms from the N64 through to the 360. Games that he has worked on include Forsaken, The Italian Job, ATV Offroad Fury 3, ATV Offroad Fury PSP and PURE.

If you have a question you would like to ask, post it here (via comments) and "PURE_DEV" will answer.

There will be a launch event of PURE on Leicester Square, London, on Wednesday the 24th of September. This event is open for everyone, and you will be able to try out the game and get the best PURE experience throughout the day. The event will run from 8am until 4pm.

Pure will be available for the PC, PS3 and X360 this Autumn/Fall

http://digg.com/gaming_news/Ask_the_Developer_Black_Rock_Studio_PURE

[yaustar]

Q1. What did you find during the prototyping stages that worked and what didn't?

[DA_SHREDDER]

Hi, my name is Eddie. PSN DA_SHREDDER, from the US. Im glad that I found this article on n4g.com. Ive been wanting to contact BlackRock by phone, but I dont know how to call out the states. Wow, am I relieved.

Question 1. Are you guys gonna implement custom soundtrack in the ps3 version? Dude, you dont know how much it would mean to us if you guys did that. Screw the trophies,, we want in game music.

Q2. Is there gonna be DLC in the future? New tracks and tricks, maybe even customizable tricks?

Q3. Please tell me your working on Pure 2 soon. Are you?

I have many more questions, but I think I've wasted enough of your time. Please fill me in, im really enjoying your game btw. Its the best offroad racer since ATV on the ps2. I even wrote a review of the ps3 version yesterday at gamefly.com. It was my first review,, you should check it out and tell me what ya think. 10/10. Thank you, god bless and have a nice day. Email is [email protected]

[PURE_DEV]

Hi there yaustar, good question.
We spent a lot of time R&D’ing different ways of to create the worlds in PURE. We looked at using polygons, heightfield and patches. It all came down to what would give us the most flexibility. We new that we’d want to be able to tweak the tracks through focus testing so the way we went was to use hightfield. We tried a method of authoring the worlds using heightfield and then exporting this out to polygons so that the art team could build in to it and texture the worlds, but this proved far too inflexible for us. It was all too one way. We needed a pipeline that would allow us to go back and forth from art and design.
We had some really good heightfield tools written by our code team from our PS2 days of working on ATV Fury so we revamped these to cope with next-gen visual requirements. This worked out much better for us. I think the old tools have seen their last game now though!

[PURE_DEV]

Thanks for the great review DA_SHREDDER! I’m glad you picked up on not get punished too much. This was one of the design briefs for the track designers and the physics guys. We wanted to keep you going forward as fast as we could as much as we could. Possibly ATV riders may think this is ‘fake’ but its integral to the experience of PURE.

Now, about your questions..
Q1 and Q2 – we’re looking at the possibility of DLC of some kind for PURE at the moment but I can’t comment either way right now. Sorry for the copout.

Q3 – Currently we are looking at ideas for what we’d want to see if we did a squeal. We’re looking at new game modes, new environments and loads of new tech so we can really ramp up on the visuals. If you speak to the art team about this, they’ll tell you there is seriously unfinished business with the environment art.

[yaustar]

Thanks for replying. Some more questions if I can:

How long was the development cycle and how manageable was crunch? If there was no crunch, what steps did you take as a team to prevent this?

Did any of the ideas from the mini game week (http://www.developmag.com/news/29400/The-Curious-Story-of-Disneys-Minigame-Week) make it into PURE?

[DA_SHREDDER]

@ Pure Dev.

Okay thanx for the info. I really amazed that you guys actually feel that you could have done more to the graphics in the game. If you read my review, you will see that I think your game is spectacular when it comes to visual effects. I cant think of that many games that has the detail and polish that you guys gave to this game. I can tell that your very dedicated, and I more than appreciate you love for making games. Alot of Devs out there always worry about the technical issues instead of fun factor in games, but you guys define what a true Game Developer is. Thank you so much for this wonderful game. I hope,, no , I pray to God you guys make a sequel,, or at least another game because you guys are seriously one of the most talented Dev team's on this planet. And no Im not just saying that. Ive been getting really mad at how many bad games there are to good ones. Its at least a 100:1 ratio. No pun intended.

Also,, I'll make this short. I probably should have just gotten the 360 version, but I played the demos to both games, and the ps3 version just looked more polished. Im not a fanboy whatsoever. Its just my opinion, but now me and several others are stuck with the fact that Microsoft put a patent on freakin in game music in consoles, and now I cant listen to freaking Pantera, or Slayer while im doing back flips and break dancing on my atv. It sucks beyond comprehension. You guys should really think about adding that in the game. You would not just be doing us a favor, but it would look good on your guys' part and actually showing people your dedication before they actually played the game. I can seriously think of 20 or more people that didn't get the game because Mx. vs. Atv pissed them off with no voice chat , and lack of in game music. Im just saying that you should really consider it. You would get alot of media attention as well,, that means nothing but good things to say about you guys.

Thank you for your time, and sorry for making this so long. I love what you guys do. Also, if you guys need a tester or something, let me know. Will work for video games! Ha haha . Rock on boys..

P.S. Put some heavy metal in the game like you guys did for the ATV series on the ps2 version. Alice and Chains Bones was pretty sic. Peace!

[dejkirkby]

I originally decided to get this game as a stop-gap between MotorStorms, but the game was so impressive that it will be played alongside Pacific Rift.
Now onto the questioning!

How much of an influence was the look and feel of MotorStorm in making PURE?

How big of a team did it take to create PURE?

Are there any game devs/directors that you would cite as an influence on your development style?

Is there anyone who you look up to in the gaming world?

What games (aside from your own) do you enjoy playing?

[lumo]

There are so many games now that ignore local play and focus on online multiplayer (which is great in pure, 16 players online), why did you decide against split screen play for pure and will pure 2 get a split screen mode?

[basilb]

Qa. What did you implement in PURE to take it out of the shadow of games like Excite Truck, Motorstorm, Burnout et al?

[PURE_DEV]

To all – I’m sorry that my replies are coming in as a big batch. I’ll try and answer everyone tonight.

@ yaustar
The dev cycle for PURE was about 20 months all in all. As for crunch, it was the easiest run in to a game that I have ever worked on. I think I only worked one weekend throughout the whole project… and I maybe wrong at that. There were two big differences this time round for us as a team. One was that we were bought by Disney so we were now an internal studio rather than a work for hire studio. The other difference was that we adopted an agile development process. This made us focus on getting features done to a final standard before moving on to the next one. We didn’t have a load of loose ends at the end of the game that would make us crunch. The fact that we were part of Disney now meant that we could work like this. There was trust between us that you don’t get when you work for hire. We set out to do a few things and do them well, rather than promise the kitchen sink with no time to do it. This really did feel like a luxury project after some of the games we’d done in the past.

Mini game week had an impact to all the projects at Black Rock. The idea was to get use to quickly prototyping ideas and working in small teams to achieve this. To get us used to doing work that would be thrown away if need be. It’s kind of the approach we take now. We rapidly prototype ideas for the game to see if they will work out. If they don’t we bin them before we commit serious time to them.

[PURE_DEV]

@ dejkirkby

I’m glad you like the game.

How much of an influence was the look and feel of Motorstorm? Well, we look at all games when they come out to see what other teams are doing and how they have made their games. We look at what worked and what didn’t, but we always do this. It was really interesting to see what they were doing with the off-road racing genre back then though. I wouldn’t say that MS changed our vision of what PURE would be though. We’d been working on ATV games for many years before PURE so we had a good idea of what we wanted to do. The design of our game with its speed and huge jumps was more the driving force behind it’s feel rather than anything else.

As for our development style we looked outside of the games industry. We looked at how other successful companies operated and that’s when we started the agile development style. It seemed to work for us!

I really like the American McGee games. I love the style of them, especially Alice. I would have really liked to have worked on that title!

Games I love playing are sports games. We play PES loads at work. Too much in fact (if that’s possible). We’ve been banned many times from playing near other people because we are too loud :)

Thanks for the questions!

[PURE_DEV]

@ lumo
We had to make a choice early on when we were looking at the things we wanted to do with PURE. We wanted to focus on the things we really thought would be best for the game. Did we want to do split screen (we did that on all the Fury games we had made), or did we want to really go all out for 16 players online? We decided that 16 players online would fit in better with the gameplay of PURE.
We’re looking at features right now for a possible sequel. We’ll see how popular split screen is and add it if it’s a feature people really want with PURE.

[PURE_DEV]

@ basilb
What I believe sets us aside are the huge jumps, the huge tricks and the risk of coming off your ATV while you are 300m from the ground (some jumps are really this big!) Excite Truck does have some big jumps alright, but you’re not back flipping your ATV while busting a seat grab at the same time :)
Having a multi-tiered trick system also sets us aside.

Another thing we looked at was vehicle customization and to see what people had done. If we were going to include it, it had to be more than any other off-road game had done. Build Your Ride was our answer to this.

Ian.

[yaustar]

@ yaustar
The dev cycle for PURE was about 20 months all in all. As for crunch, it was the easiest run in to a game that I have ever worked on.
That is pretty impressive, I would really like to know more about your team's implementation/interpretation of the Agile methodology as it looks like you have had great success with it.

Q. Did you do any focus group testing? If so, was there anything that really surprised you?

[PURE_DEV]

Our game director Jason Avent did a talk on Black Rock’s interpretation of Agile at this years Develop conference. I’ll see if the talk notes have been published and post them up.

We did do a lot of focus testing, yes. It started off with feature focus testing. This would determine what key features we should focus on. Then as the game developed we started blind testing the tracks we had. This started with one tester coming in at a time for a few hours. We wouldn’t tell them anything other than what the tutorials would end up saying to see how they got on. We wanted to test the controls, the handling and how well the tracks played. This went on for several months.

When the game’s structure was intact we started having groups of 8 testers in at a time. This would last for 2 days at a time. At this point we were testing the difficulty curve, how the frontend worked and did the tutorial mode do all we needed.

I guess what’s always surprising is how bad people can be at your game when you start doing these tests. We made so many changes to the tracks, tutorial mode and ai difficulty after doing these sessions. But on the flip side of this you can be surprised when you get a young tester come in and nail one of your tracks no problem. It’s trying to fix this kind of inconsistency that is the challenge. Thankfully I was in charge of the tracks playability. Someone else had to deal with the ai this time round :)

[DA_SHREDDER]

Wow,, ignore people much? Is it because Im american, or because Im a ps3 owner? Probably both,, whatever. Looks like I know which game I'll be trading in for Motorstorm 2, and Ill beable to listen to Pantera.

[yaustar]

Wow,, ignore people much? Is it because Im american, or because Im a ps3 owner? Probably both,, whatever. Looks like I know which game I'll be trading in for Motorstorm 2, and Ill beable to listen to Pantera.

There wasn't a question in your last reply to respond to. Please stop being paranoid and rude to our guest.


Our game director Jason Avent did a talk on Black Rock’s interpretation of Agile at this years Develop conference. I’ll see if the talk notes have been published and post them up.

That be great, cheers.

[Shadowblind]

Question: How difficult was it to try and make the game's quality the same with both the PS3 and Xbox 360?

[lewislite]

I love this game so far even though it is really difficult! It has the best game soundtrack ever!

Here are some (a lot of) q's:

1. Could the visuals be tweaked to look even better on the consoles? I sometimes feel the visuals could look a little sharper my self but they are truly stunning non-the-less. I mean, the sky for example it looks so... pure! :D

2. Will there be a Pure Soundtrack available to buy? I love the soundtrack it suits the game perfectly!

3. When will the podcasts start coming out? Are the team inspired by Criterion's openess/community involvement (I'm a big Burnout fan), will there be an official Pure forum to discuss the game?

4. What was the update I got for this game when I went online on X360?

5. Do you think the game could have been better if you had more time? If so, how?

6. Are the environments stable enough to freeroam over them? I'm always trying to drive somewhere I shouldn't be but get respawned!

Thank you for your time. :)

Please make a sequel! I imagine this could open up to be a great franchise like Burnout! :thumbup:

[PURE_DEV]

In reply to your question Shadowblind, from a track building process there was no difference.

The assets in the levels (detail in the models, texture sizes and amount placed in the worlds) are the same on all formats. Both games shared a single asset database.

The code team lead on the 360 at the very start of the game until we had something up and running. From then on though, both platforms were developed in parallel. Some of the art team would use PS3 and some would use 360. The leads would then check everything was running ok on both platforms from a visual and performance point of view. You should find both games look and run the same.

I can’t really speak for the code team as I should think there was a great deal of difference for them to deal with!

It was great having them both being developed at the same time. When you demo the game to the press you could just say “what platform do you want to see?”

[PURE_DEV]

Hi lewislite

A1 - We want to do a lot with the terrain next time round. It needs to be really rez’ed up. We want to add loads more detail to it so it feels and look more realistic. Plus a load of other things, but I can’t say just now!

A2 – That’s a good question. I’ll find out for you next week. That would be cool!

A3 – There is an Official PURE website. You can get to it from the main Disney website. Are you US or UK? If you are from the US there is a lot of community stuff on there now. The first PURE podcast has just been released this week. There is also a MySpace blog just gone live as well. More of my ramblings I’m afraid. Also, if you ask a question on the official site forum it will be me again :)

A4 – I’ll ask the QA manager for you.

A5 – I think we achieved everything we wanted to with PURE really. If we had more time then I guess Sony would have released support for Trophies in time for us. We would have included them as well. The timing was too late for us.

A6 – There is a freeride mode in online play where you don’t get respot so much. You still can’t go everywhere though. When you optimise a track you do it from all the visible places the player can get to. The more you give them the more you have to draw. If we let the player go everywhere (we did this in Fury 3) the levels would have less in them around the main track as you’d have to populate all the areas the player ‘might’ go as well. Maybe next time.

Thanks for the questions.

[PURE_DEV]

Hi DA_SHEDDER
It’s interesting you commented about the music choice and about the Fury games. As ATV Fury was 99.9% for the North American market (it was never that popular in Europe) the music was chosen to suit. Sony had a big hand in the tracks selected. I always liked them.
For PURE we tried to go for a more global soundtrack with artists we went with.

Believe.. I’d rather have some metal in there as well, but I think what we have is really good. One guy on the team kept on about having Jump from Van Halen in there. Dunno why?

Cheers.

[lewislite]

Thanks for the answers!

I checked the Disney site and when I went to the podcast section it said "coming soon". I'm from the UK and I see no community stuff at all on there. Can you get someone to make the Disney site use html because the flash is really annoying! It slows my computer right down and it's not even high quality! :p

I've read that the X360 update was to fix the online leaderboards? I downloaded the update and every time I check the leaderboards my Xbox completely locks up so I guess the patch didn't work.

As for the freeride mode, that sounds cool. I accidentally found out when you crash and the screen turns black and white, if you hold in the right stick you can actually watch the full crash with out it ending quickly (just don't try it in the water levels cuz the camera just sits on the water surface and the driver stands up on the water to 'pull himself together' :eek:)! Was this a secret feature?

[dejkirkby]

My son and I have been hammering this game. It is one of our favourites on PS3 right now, and we are disappointed with the review scores on it.

Kudos to you and your team for such a great game!
(I can't believe this is from the same Disney that brought us Hannah Montana!)

[PURE_DEV]

Some unanswered questions. .

Hi guys, I said I'd find out a few things for you. Here goes.

lewislite -
There are currently no plans for a soundtrack release for PURE on CD.
The patch for the leaderboards will be available very soon. We are just waiting on verification and release.

As for the community, its all online if you view from the US site. They have the message boards, the first podcast is live (I've just watched it myself) and there are various other cool links on there. As well as this there is a PURE MySpace page with new stuff on it.
Your right though, if you view from the UK site it will all say "coming soon".

yaustar -
I said I would look out Jason's notes for you. I don't have them, but he did talk to Gamasutra about this. Here is the link for you - http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20336

Make sure you read the comments at the bottom as he talks some more on it.

Ian.

[yaustar]

yaustar -
I said I would look out Jason's notes for you. I don't have them, but he did talk to Gamasutra about this. Here is the link for you - http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20336

Make sure you read the comments at the bottom as he talks some more on it.

Ian.

Cheers.

Q. Do any of the team work on their own games in their spare time? E.g. Homebrew (GP2X, DS, PSP, etc) or Indie games with the intention to sell (PC, Apple Store).

Q. How many projects are usually on the go in the Studio?

[Triv1um]

Seeing as PURE is Disney.

Will we see any Mickey Mouse DLC?

Mickey Mouse riding a quad bike sounds pretty epic to me.

[PURE_DEV]

Hi yaustar
A1 – Yes, some of the team do work on their own PC games in their spare time. I’ve installed a rather excellent puzzle game recently that one of the coders wrote. It’s amazing well polished.
Other than that I’ve played an F1 racer and a feespace shooter (X-wing v Tie Fighter stylee) game. As far as I know these haven’t been released. It’s just for fun.

A2 - We are currently a two game studio at Black Rock. When we were Climax Racing however we were a three game studio. Since moving from PS2/PSP to PS3 and 360 the team sizes have dramatically increased. Size and space has become an issue for us now.

[PURE_DEV]

Hi Triv1um,

No Mickey DLC for PURE I’m afraid. Maybe for PURE 2 though :)

[foxim8ly]

hi this is my first time, so pardon me if i dig the wrong place of asking quetions. just wanna ask if there is a psp screensaver w/c u can controll the time shorter than the original 3.5 mnts? and does`nt reboot when u press any key? can u pls give me the download link if there is.. thanx fox