Shrygue
November 6th, 2007, 18:34
via Computer and Video Games (http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=175090)
Time Crisis 4 has been in development for a while, yet we know little about it. What we do know is that it'll let you move your character as well as shoot, and these are the first images of the gun that'll make it all work.
Satsukawa explains the intricacies of designing a lightgun shooter of this type. "The Time Crisis team has been eager to implement a solution for moving and shooting to the series for years now - our development tools allow us to do this in early builds of games - but it was too difficult to implement this feature into a full game using only the Guncon 2 controller," he said.
So now he's making a new gun. "With our next title planned for the PS3 system, we began work on our next iteration of the Guncon hardware to bring new functionality to the series and allow us to implement our goals for a free-roaming Time Crisis experience," he added.
Below is a sketch of the initial ideas for a Guncon that could allow for Satsukawa to realise his aim. "We asked our designer to come up with a few illustrations showing a Guncon with one analog stick. After getting the results, we realized that this was going to be a more intimidating project than we had planned."
Protoype software was also made, as Satsukawa explains: "We worked for a month to create a prototype based on the Time Crisis 3 engine in which two players can move freely around a small square environment and try to shoot each other. ... Even though this early prototype only allowed for horizontal aiming, we felt confident enough in the design to move forward with the full game."
He concludes: "As we understood that we would have to implement vertical aiming in our game, we decided to revise our Guncon hardware designs to meet this goal. That was the real jumping-off point for Time Crisis 4, which I will cover in-depth soon in my next entry!"
We're interested to know if the Guncon will overcome the obstacle of working on LCD TVs (which old lightgun techniques won't work with) with a sensor bar like Wii (which doesn't simulate accurate aiming) or another way.
Photographs of the gun here (http://www.computerandvideogames.com/viewer.php?mode=article&id=187628)
Time Crisis 4 has been in development for a while, yet we know little about it. What we do know is that it'll let you move your character as well as shoot, and these are the first images of the gun that'll make it all work.
Satsukawa explains the intricacies of designing a lightgun shooter of this type. "The Time Crisis team has been eager to implement a solution for moving and shooting to the series for years now - our development tools allow us to do this in early builds of games - but it was too difficult to implement this feature into a full game using only the Guncon 2 controller," he said.
So now he's making a new gun. "With our next title planned for the PS3 system, we began work on our next iteration of the Guncon hardware to bring new functionality to the series and allow us to implement our goals for a free-roaming Time Crisis experience," he added.
Below is a sketch of the initial ideas for a Guncon that could allow for Satsukawa to realise his aim. "We asked our designer to come up with a few illustrations showing a Guncon with one analog stick. After getting the results, we realized that this was going to be a more intimidating project than we had planned."
Protoype software was also made, as Satsukawa explains: "We worked for a month to create a prototype based on the Time Crisis 3 engine in which two players can move freely around a small square environment and try to shoot each other. ... Even though this early prototype only allowed for horizontal aiming, we felt confident enough in the design to move forward with the full game."
He concludes: "As we understood that we would have to implement vertical aiming in our game, we decided to revise our Guncon hardware designs to meet this goal. That was the real jumping-off point for Time Crisis 4, which I will cover in-depth soon in my next entry!"
We're interested to know if the Guncon will overcome the obstacle of working on LCD TVs (which old lightgun techniques won't work with) with a sensor bar like Wii (which doesn't simulate accurate aiming) or another way.
Photographs of the gun here (http://www.computerandvideogames.com/viewer.php?mode=article&id=187628)