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Leo Joins Anarchy Reigns Cast

May 26th, 2011 by

Platinum Games

Filed: Anarchy Reigns, Community, Games, PGTV, PlatinumGames

Here comes a new challenger! (Can we say that!?) Leo joins the Anarchy Reigns cast!

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Introducing Nikolai

April 20th, 2011 by

Platinum Games

Filed: Anarchy Reigns, Community, Games, PGTV, PlatinumGames

Welcome Nikolai, the newest member of the Anarchy Reigns cast!

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Introducing the Blacker Baron and Mathilda

March 23rd, 2011 by

Platinum Games

Filed: Anarchy Reigns, Community, Games, PGTV, PlatinumGames

He’s bigger. He’s badder. He’s Blacker.

Pimps, Playas, and Pain Purveyors – The Baron is back, baby!
And this time, he’s got some Super Sexy Fists of Fire to unleash mayhem on the masses!

Of course, a man is only as strong as his lady. However, the Baron’s got one of the strongest women around – Mathilda.

She may not say much, but she’s guaranteed to work you over.

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Anarchy Reigns Gameplay Trailer

February 8th, 2011 by

Platinum Games

Filed: Anarchy Reigns, Community, Games, PGTV, PlatinumGames

Here is our first official Anarchy Reigns gameplay trailer! Check it out and let us know what you think!

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Anarchy Reigns Teaser Trailer

January 28th, 2011 by

Platinum Games

Filed: Anarchy Reigns, Community, Games, PGTV, PlatinumGames

Here is the first teaser trailer for Anarchy Reigns!

“There are plenty of ‘versus multiplayer games’ where gamers face each other down the barrel of a gun. Anarchy Reigns is unique in that allows a large number of players to go fist to fist in online multiplayer battles. The challenge of creating a brawler like this is second to none, but neither is the gameplay. The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat are both amped far beyond what you would ever experience in a shooter. I’m making this the game that I have always wanted to play, and I won’t stop until that goal is met. I hope you all look forward to brawling online.” -Masaki Yamanaka, Director

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Last Time Up

December 13th, 2010 by

VANQUISH

Filed: Community, Games, PlatinumGames, Vanquish

Well, this is the last entry for “my blog”…

For this entry, I think I’ll let you in on something that went on behind the scenes, and that is what we originally wanted Vanquish to become.

In our original vision for Vanquish, no one was actually inside Sam’s suit. Instead, it was a remotely operated robot with three different pilots who would take turns controlling the unit from afar.

(These are character designer Makoto Tsuchibayashi’s original designs.)

The robot would change forms according to the pilot in charge, as each pilot had been specially trained in areas such as shooting, melee, or hover and snipe. This single robot was capable of being battle effective in a variety of situations. I thought we could make something interesting out of how these three different pilots interacted with each other, much like Kamen Rider Den-O. This idea died a quick death early in the project, but personally, I still think the idea has its merits.

When making a game, there are plenty of ideas like these that get rejected, but they build up and can end up finding their way back, like in a sequel for instance, so you can never say that an idea is completely out of bounds. I don’t know what I will be making next, but considering how fickle I am, it will probably end up being a game completely different from Vanquish.

Well, until we meet again, in the realm of the video game.

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Working as a Game Programmer

November 25th, 2010 by

VANQUISH

Filed: Community, Games, PlatinumGames, Vanquish

Hello, I’m lead programmer on Vanquish, Kiyohiko Sakata.

It’s been about a month since Vanquish hit the streets; is everyone is having fun with the game?

I wanted to write this blog entry about what it is like to work as a game programmer. I think that people have a vague idea of what game programming is like, as some sort of difficult job where you just write a whole bunch of code that makes the computer work.

Of course, they are right. Most of the job is staring at a computer screen and writing code. If we consider what sort of code gets written, there is a nearly endless list of different types, and in making a game, these stretch from the tools needed for artists to the development environment needed for game designers to create the game itself. There really is code is in every direction.

But to accomplish an endless list of work, you have to establish a set of clear goals. If you try to pour all of your strength into everything at the same time, all you will end up making is some wishy-washy junk, so you have to figure out where to focus your efforts and what challenges you want to step up to. Doing this allows you to create something of incredibly high quality. Also, if you have too many goals, it won’t work out, as many failed projects fail because they either did a poor job of setting the bar or they were simply too ambitious.

We had two goals for Vanquish. One was to make a true-to-form third person shooter. The other was to develop this game as a multiplatform title for PS3 and Xbox 360.

Since we are a company that has created many action games, we didn’t really have a collective knowledge on how to make a TPS, so we approached initial production as an extension of creating an action game. However, we quickly found this wasn’t going to pound out. The way AI works in a shooter is a different beast, so we played all the major titles made overseas as research, read white papers written by foreign developers, and even talked with some of them directly during development of the game. Each individual enemy’s AI is important in the overall scope of a TPS’s AI, but so is situational awareness of the stage and scene that is playing out. To strengthen this, we created a system that gave us minute control over the situations in the game, making the effort put into the tool chain and development on Vanquish far greater than the norm for us.

Of course, the foundation for the AI lies in our core of our action game skills, so while the game is a “real” TPS, you can also enjoy an action-game-esque feeling, which I am proud to say makes our game a fun experience that is probably something that you don’t see elsewhere.

As for multiplatform development on the PS3 and Xbox 360, the most difficult part about making the same game for two platforms is the technical differences between those two pieces of hardware. Both systems have places where they excel and are deficient, and even if you set out to make exactly the same game on both, you may end up developing to the least common denominator and ending up with a mediocre game on both platforms.

This isn’t a problem if you can fit everything you wanted to make into this lowest common denominator, but we wanted to do a lot with Vanquish, and this type of development quickly showed its limits, so we had to make some decisions on how to move forward. We decided to work on the places where the hardware exceled, then we put a huge amount of energy towards compensating for the places where each piece of hardware is lacking, remembering that the most important thing was to maintain the same visual look and feeling to the gameplay.

This was the hardest goal we set for Vanquish, and with the title being our first shot at PS3 development (we had no prior know how in this area), I was honestly worried as to whether the bar was set too high. We had a really talented staff on the game, but even then, we still had to go outside the company to some really talented engineers at SEGA and elsewhere to help us make up for any areas where our technical expertise was lacking. They stayed with us for a few months, and thanks to their help, we were able to finish up production. As a result, we ended up meeting our goals with a very high quality product, and I feel we were able to pass on that product to gamers around the world.

Finally, I wanted to thank each and every one of you who have played Vanquish. For those who haven’t played it yet, you obviously have some interest if you are on this blog, so I really hope you give the game a shot. At the very least, I am confident in recommending the game as something you will not regret playing, so definitely give it a try!

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Putting a Face to Vanquish

November 11th, 2010 by

VANQUISH

Filed: Community, Games, PGTV, PlatinumGames, Vanquish

Hi all, I’m Vanquish facial animator, Masanori Takashima.

It’s been a month since the game was released, huh?
I suppose that those of you who have become captive to the exhilaration of traversing (gliding) across the battlefield are taking a crack at God Hard mode or possibly going after all the achievements/trophies. For those of you who haven’t played the game, I hope you make Vanquish a part of your holiday treats. We will be waiting for you on the adrenaline filled battlefield.

Anyways, that intro got a bit long in the tooth, so I’ll get to the topic at hand – facial animation in Vanquish.

Let me start by explaining the nuts and bolts of facial animation. I was in charge of making sure that the character model’s face could show expression by setting up a facial controller and then animating the face. It is a very specialized, almost geeky field; however, I am incredibly passionate about the challenge it provides.

When people try to understand other people, they rely on their appearance, the tone of their voice, their behavior, and their expressions. Amongst those, the face is incredibly important because it transmits expressions as visual signals. These signals show the depth of one’s humanness, from changes in feelings, to thoughts, personality, and even sometimes lies. Furthermore, humans are able to detect slight changes in expressions and guess at their subject’s feelings. It is truly a wonderful ability, and all the gamers have this trait, so to make sure that they understand each character’s individual expressions, you need to have the right animations, as well as an easy-to-use, robust facial controller. It’s a job that takes perseverance, perseverance, and then some more perseverance, but the minute you see life breathed into a character, it is addicting!

So here you go, recruits… Vanquish!

To make the player feel as if the characters in Vanquish are real, living human beings, we wanted to have a more realistic touch to the facial animations. Instead of trying to fill things with idiosyncratic animations, we decided to go with an approach that separated things into rough animation categories. Our plan was to come to grips with the general framework of all of the characters over the course of the game, then give them out of the ordinary expressions (or perhaps their true colors) at key moments, providing a hint as to where they were heading. Put simply, we wanted the characters to hit the beats in the story and turn things on their heads.

For instance, Sam is usually a cool, smoldering character, with a cigarette casually in one hand; however, when Burns doesn’t just forsake his troops, he smiles. On the other hand, his look of bitterness at seeing men left behind, or the shock when something emerges from a certain character’s chest, were all points where we wanted to lock down the ebb and flow of his character arc and give him a bit more human emotion.

Burns is normally a powerful, rough and tumble guy, and when he talks we wanted to make sure he reinforces the image of a tough as nails drill sergeant type at all times. Yet, his fiercely sheepish face when Sam jokingly welcomes him back from the dead, or the change in the look of his eyes when talking with Sam or seeing the battlefield, are interwoven with his desire to suppress his varied emotions from coming to the surface.

Elena calmly and indifferently explains the state of the battle during the game, and we wanted her to seem like the elite, convincing support role that she fills. She works to hold in her emotions, and is careful to make sure that to the best of her abilities she didn’t end up seeming sexy. However, there are places where her true colors shine through.

She gets irritated when Sam rants, and she can’t hold back when the danger continues on for too long. When Elena is verbally dressed down by Burns, all she can muster is a “Sorry,” but you can see in her face that she doesn’t really think she was wrong. Another one of the things we did for Elena, at my request, was giving her an animation during a scene where she runs her hands through her hair even though she is hard at work in her support role. I was looking for a place where a career girl would make sure that her hair looked good while she was working. At least that was my justification for it. And when I found the scene, it fit perfectly.

Even if you are playing through the game again, skipping the cutscenes, or if you’ve taken a step back after completing Vanquish once, I would love it if you took this opportunity to step back into the world of Vanquish once again. Until next time.

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Telling the Story in Vanquish: Cutscenes

November 9th, 2010 by

VANQUISH

Filed: Community, Games, PGTV, PlatinumGames, Vanquish

Hello. My name is Kunihiko Tsuda and I was in charge of creating the cutscenes for Vanquish.

With a game a speedy, well-paced game like Vanquish, we had to take care to make sure that cutscenes didn’t bring down the tempo of the experience. Normally, cutscenes take a game’s script and expand upon them with direction and ideas; with Vanquish, the focus was on two main types of scenes – the areas where we wanted to show incredibly explosive shots, like the action scenes and opening, and scenes where we needed to push the game forward with exposition. Ultimately, there was a good variety in the scenes when you look at the total volume of what we created.

This post contains content intended for mature audiences. Click more to verify your age.

More…

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Balancing a game like Vanquish

October 28th, 2010 by

VANQUISH

Filed: Community, Games, PlatinumGames, Vanquish

Hi, I am Junichi Oka, one of the game designers on Vanquish. I was also in charge of checking the strategy guides that were produced for the game.

Speaking of Strategy guides, I would often look at western guide books while we were producing the game. Since it was my first time working on a shooter, and I didn’t really know where to begin for just about everything, I did a lot of studying.

This is our stocked reference room. Filled with the helpful knowledge of those who have walked this path before!

Once the game started taking shape, I didn’t really look at them anymore; instead, it was time to take our own route through things. One of the reasons was because the game was so fast that there was no way traditional TPS level design would match the tempo we were after. If you haven’t seen what I mean about the game being fast, please download the demo of the game and give it a try!

Vanquish is a game where we couldn’t allow anything that would harm either the speed or the strategy required to play the game. We made the game so you couldn’t just hide under cover, but you also couldn’t recklessly move forward without dying. And we never forgot that it wasn’t an action game, it was a shooting game. For those of you who are playing the game and getting stuck, keep those principles in your mind and I think things will go better for you.

Move too far forward in the fight and you’ll soon be a sandwich topping – Swiss cheese, perhaps. Kinda works like the real world.

Vanquish is a game that rewards you putting time into it. What may seem like an impossible situation can be overcome easily by studying the terrain and cover points, and then picking/changing your strategy. We made the game so there is never an instance where you can say “This is it!” like there was only one right way of doing things. Instead, I think it is a game where you can look at someone else play and want to steal away the controller thinking, “No. This is how I would do it.” So, please, steal the controller from the person next to you!

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