Gorgies « PlatinumGames Inc.

Filed: Community, Games, PlatinumGames, Vanquish

Hi. I’m Noriyuki Otani, and I programmed the Gorgies, Burns, and friendly forces in Vanquish. I thought I would take the chance and write a blog and shed some light on the Gorgies themselves.

When I was creating the Gorgies, our “grunts”, the thing I paid most attention to was how to make sure that people wouldn’t realize that the Gorgies were actually going easy on them.

Going easy on the player might be the wrong way of putting it…

For example, when Gorgies faced off against the player, even though you would expect otherwise, you couldn’t fire upon them before they spotted and fired upon you. Even people who were used to shooters and great at aiming couldn’t do it. The worst would be trading attacks, and if you weren’t any good you would lose the exchange, which is guaranteed to stress you out. At Mikami-san’s suggestion, I tuned the game so that there is a gap before the Gorgies fire. It seems really simple, and I am sure that teams with tons of shooting game experience have plenty of know-how in this regard, but we started everything from zero, so this was just one of the many examples of us falling back on our tried-and-true method of “crash-and-build” development.

The Vanquish that emerged from all of these trials has tons of little tuning adjustments where the “game goes easy” to make things more fun to play. There aren’t very many places in the game where you will actually notice these things while playing, but every place we’ve put in these tweaks, we consider them as an act of love from us to you.

I hope you give Vanquish a whirl and enjoy the hell out of those bloody robots!

If you don’t want any of our love, you can get a real taste for what the robots can do to you by trying God Hard mode. I took great joy in not only powering them up in lots of different ways, but also making sure to remove their limiter. Even though our friends usually end up scrap metal, it would make me really happy if you give this mode even just a short try to see what the Gorgies are truly capable of.

26659 Comments 2010-09-30+01%3A13%3A40PlatinumGames / / Read More

Tagged: Game Design, Gorgies, Noriyuki Otani, Playstation 3, Programming, PS3, SEGA, Shinji Mikami, Vanquish, Xbox 360

Filed: Community, Games, PlatinumGames, Vanquish

Vanquish was originally an open battlefield type of game, where the goal was to move around crushing enemy positions; however, once we got started with development, we quickly made the decision to change to a more linear structure. We abandoned the open battlefield and focused on making each stage as visually dense as possible. As a result, I think the graphics in Vanquish are really quite wonderful. It is one of the main points of Vanquish I want to recommend to people. (The only regret is that our decision decreased the amount of times the player uses boosting.)

Of course, arriving there was a struggle. Upping the visual density, increasing the contrast, making the special effects especially eye-catching, throwing tons of enemies on the screen… In an environment where we were doing whatever we pleased, it became pretty obvious that there was no good way of keeping your eye on the prize – the enemies you are targeting. I felt like I was being pin-pricked by the staff talking about how hard it was to see the enemies. Moreover, the enemy character that you see most often, a robot we call a Gorgie, was predominantly white. We had primarily gray backgrounds with white enemies. When you think about it from a realism standpoint, camouflage exists to make things difficult to see, so in that way things make sense, but from a game standpoint, it was not the best idea. I really liked the white enemies, so it took me a long time to come around to the idea of making them red. We also had to limit the number that we could put on screen at once due to hardware limitations. (This had the effect of limiting the huge amount of information we were throwing at the player, so I’m sort of on-board with this one.)

I’ve written quite a bit about it, but our art lead, Naoki Katakai and programmer Ryoichi tend to do whatever they please, and what they came up with was great, and I think our visuals are quite spectacular as a result. Thanks to all the staff that worked so hard on them.