Ask the Developer: Black Rock Studio (PURE)

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.

@ 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!

@ 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.

@ 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.

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Originally Posted by PURE_DEV

@ 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.

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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?

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 :)

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.

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Originally Posted by 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.

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

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Originally Posted by 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.

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That be great, cheers.

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

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: