Filed: Community, Games, PlatinumGames, Vanquish

Hi. Takeo Kido here again. I was in charge of effects on Vanquish.

For this blog, I thought I would talk a little bit about Boosting in the game.

One of the unique gameplay elements in Vanquish is the main character, Sam, and his ability to boost at high speed across the stage. Our original development name for this feature was simply “sliding.”

During production, it was said that moving across the stage wasn’t fun, and that we needed something both visually appealing, and relevant as a special gameplay element to spice things up. That’s when we came up with the idea…

“Why don’t we modify the big protrusions around the hips like this, then shove some jets out of the back and have him go flying around! That’d be cool. “

“And if we made it so that jets could fly out of multiple directions, it would be a great excuse to have Sam do some really unbelievable actions that would look visually stunning, don’t you think?”

And so it went…

The effects team went to Sam’s modeler, Hattori-san, who did a great job of adding on the little pluses that we were looking for, and the end result is the Boost function you see now. Making games at PlatinumGames is often like this, where the staff start rolling with ideas and don’t stop until they’ve made their way into the game.

Boost may stand out most for its enabling of high speed movement, but it is also integral when Sam is jumping over things, or when he does other, more subtle, quick actions. Moreover, they don’t stand out as much as the jets on his legs, but Sam also has the same jets on his arms, which allow him to put even more force behind his punches. Kind of like a rocket punch where the hand doesn’t go flying off! It looks like something dangerous enough that if he misused the function of the suit, Sam would end up with two dislocated shoulders.

There are tons of these little details in Sam’s ARS suit. If you are into this sort of thing, keep your eyes peeled!

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Tagged: Boost, Dislocated Shoulders, Effects Design, Going Really Really Fast, PS3, Shinji Mikami, Takeo Kido, TPS, Vanquish, Xbox 360