Finishing touches go on Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

Staff writers | Jun 25, 2008 2:44 PM
Krome is busy putting finishing touches on Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. We spoke to them about the game, Krome's new Merkury3 engine and more.
The LucasArts game lets you indulge your dark side as Darth Vader's Secret Apprentice, and is set in the era between Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith, and Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope. The goal? To "rid the universe" of Jedi. Highlights will include appearances by Vader, the Wookiee homeworld of Kayshyyyk, and an imperial TIE construction facility.

The game will be released on September 16 in the Us and September 17 in Australia, both on Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, PSP and Wii.

Ahead of Gen Con, the Brisbane-hosted game convention beginning July 3rd, PC Authority caught up catches up with Steve Stamatiadis, the Creative Director at game development studio, Krome, which is devleoping the PS2, PSP, and Wii versions of the game. Krome is busy putting finishing touches on Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, and we asked Stamatiadis about the game, Krome's new Merkury3 engine and more.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed has been a major undertaking for Krome. How long has the company been working on the games?
We’re just doing the final touches now because we’re about to go through final submissions with Sony and Nintendo so most of the team is now done with it. All up we’ll have worked on it for about two and a bit years. It hasn’t been a really long project, but it’s been a good length of time so we had plenty of time to try things out and really work out how to push the machines.

On the PlayStation 2 front we’ve really been able to push that machine insane amounts and it was the same with PSP. For Wii there was some learning around how the control scheme works... that was rather interesting! It’s not meant to be a light sabre game for Unleashed, but it was mixing that in with Force powers and getting that visceral experience and not just kind of waving the stick around like some other games we’ve seen.


Being an Australian company, how did Krome come to work on Unleashed in the first place?
A lot of it comes down to reputation and delivering games on time and working with a number of publishers. One of the guys we’d worked with previously, a publisher, was actually at LucasArts and so our name came forward through that. It literally all happened the day after we came back from a Christmas break. We were asked if we wanted to work on a project with them, and we were ‘sure! What is it?’ So we get this email back and it said Star Wars Force Unleashed. Straight away we all just wanted to do this game. A lot of developers early on used to have this attitude that developers were evil and weren’t needed but they’re not at all. You just work with them in order to make the best game possible. It’s a partnership, and that’s the way to make a game.

With such a big franchise, it must be under some scrutiny from LucasArts. What role did they play in ensuring it remained true to the Star Wars universe?
I think most people assume they’d be really difficult to work with, but they were really great. The storyline actually came from one of the guys at Lucas, Hayden Blackman with Lucas himself, so it got the stamp of approval! When we came on board, they just wanted us to take the stories, and characters and levels and make the best game we could for the various consoles we were working on. It also came to the point where Hayden said, ‘we’re happy with the levels, now we want you to come up with new stuff. Don’t feel like you need to regurgitate old Star Wars stuff, we want you to add to the Star Wars universe.’ So they were very supportive. That’s kind of scary when you think about it, but with that kind of support it was awesome.

When we first started it was a bit scary but after that anxiety it was cool – we were confident in our love of Star Wars – we’d been fans ourselves for thirty years. We realised we knew our stuff better than anybody, so once we got past that it was game on. LucasArts gave us tons of stuff to reference. We had a couple of GB worth of materials, every movie. I’d ask them for reference pics of say Admiral Akhbar... you wouldn’t just get one shot. You’d get like, fifty different shots in different costumes. That was the best part of it to be honest, it was fun coming up with all the new stuff.


Was it a difficult exercise in logistical terms, being in Australia?
Not at all. And because we’re offset by a few hours from the States... when we came in in the mornings, it would be when they’re finishing up their day. So when we were talking with the Producer they’d be able to give us feedback or let us know of any problems that may have come up which we mean we could work on it during their night time. It’s really a faster turnaround then what you’d have working within the States.

Even if we worked with a publisher in Sydney, we wouldn’t see them every day and we’d be working via email and phone so it’s the same deal. Plus, I wouldn’t have been able to get a trip to San Francisco to visit Skywalker Ranch!


The game is said to be set between III and IV. How stringent is the story guidelines and key aspects that LucasArts deliver to Krome?
There was a lot of talk between Hayden and George Lucas about what the story needed to be. They’d been working on it for a couple of years already and they’d gone down a couple of different paths and looked at different concepts for different characters. Because this is set between those Episodes, it was a big deal for LucasArts so Unleashed definitely went through a long and big process...

The myriad of new characters... were these already fully fleshed out in terms of who/what they are once it has been received by Krome?
Say for one of the characters, Juno Eclipse. We got the original concept art, reference art of the facial scans of Nathalie Cox, who’s the actress who plays Juno. There was videos of them talking, we even had the models that the next-gen guys built for the characters... we had full access to all the internal LucasArts stuff pretty much.


Which platform would you say was the easiest to develop for in the end?
They were all hard because they all had their own little challenges. PSP had the multiplayer stuff, Wii had the controller and PS2 was about pushing the hell out of the machine. I guess the Wii was easiest because it was most powerful but the controller had its own hassles. We really pushed those machines to do stuff.

Krome developed its own engine – Merkury – some years ago. What led to this point?
We had the Merkury engine from the very start of Krome. In some ways it pre-dates Krome; it was something that we had in place but it just had a different name. The idea was just so we had a simple language that would help the program work with the hardware better. Once we started Krome up and began doing multi-platform stuff, Merkury gave us the ability to work completely cross-platform. The engine side would handle all the platform-specific stuff and then we could just, say, put a model on screen and worry about the game side of things. We always just kept along that path from Merkury 1 to Merkury 2 - which was used on Ty and was the standard-def last-gen engine - and now we’ve got the next-gen version, which we call Merkury 3. It’s specifically for PS3 and Xbox 360. The other plus-side is that it works for PC so we can develop on PC, for console. We do our work on PCs for console, which gives us a flexibility that you don’t always get with other engines.

We came to a point where we had to make a decision when it came to next-gen – about whether we stick with Merkury or look at things like Unreal or some of the other engines out there. We decided it would make more sense to have more control over our destiny, as it were. So we stuck with our own engine.


How has the engine evolved over time?
It’s always getting new features based on what we need to work with best at that time. We might say, we need to use a certain kind of animation system or need to change the rendering pipeline a bit... With next-gen stuff a lot of work needs to be around shaders and flexibility is just so important. That helps us decide how we develop it because it really is about giving us more options. It’s not just about the programmers; it’s about the tools the artists also have now.

What we originally had was some basic tools for the artists - and they always worked - but now we’re pretty much doing most of our cut-scene work with Merkury tools. From the first Ty game to Star Wars Force Unleashed - which had 90% of the cut-scene work done – the engine has changed a lot.

How significant an investment is it for the company, in terms of resources that needed to be dedicated to it?
Our engine team is probably as big as some studios. There are around 30 people, split between Brisbane and Melbourne and Adelaide working on it. These are some real smart guys working on the engine across the board. It’s a huge investment on our part but it pays off when it comes to develop games.

You mentioned the possibility of Krome looking at other engines. Has there been any interest in other companies using the Merkury engine?
We have been approached on occasion and it’s something we may look at more in the future but we want to get it to the stage where we’re really happy with it internally first. We also want to get all our tools really polished first as well. Engines can fall down depending on where its tools are. It’s about letting the artists and programmers have all the access to the technical stuff, so they can make games as good as they can possibly be. How the tool set interfaces with the code is important, and we’re focussing on that.

When it comes to laymen, how do you describe what a game engine is?
It’s basically the film, if you will, the medium that you make the game on. If you’re making a movie you’d say you’re working with film or video, and that’s what you’re putting your story on so that it can be transported around. Actually, film may not be the best example. It’s more like the building blocks of putting a game together. A Lego set... that’s probably a better metaphor. There are all these pieces you can use and the program is about working out which piece you might need to do a certain thing. The base level engine lets the game coder talk with the hardware.

Can you share some of the more specific performance aspects of the engine? Does it handle particular things well?
Merkury’s biggest strong point is that it’s a jack of all trades. It can do a lot of everything pretty decently. I wouldn’t say it does it super-better over anything else but the sheer amount of possibilities that you have with Merkury and what it can handle is huge. We’ve used it on every single game we’ve done so you’ve got games going through Ty and surfing, through Hellboy and Star Wars. It’s a pretty powerful engine; it’s not tied down to anything in particular. It lets us do what we want to do, so that flexibility is its biggest strength.

You said all the work is done on PC first...
Everyone (here) has a PC platform they can run and that helps us get the feel right when we’re playing the game. Everything from that point, where we want to check it out on a console, gives us a faster turnaround. If you’re making it for console, you want to move it across as fast as you can because obviously the controller and frame rate and those things are all very different to PC. But doing it that way gives us quick feedback and turnaround on stuff.


What do you think about AMD working with Havoc to optimise their CPUs for Havoc’s physics engine?
Yeah, that’s pretty cool. It sounds sort of like the PhysX stuff that nVidia is doing. I’m a real physics convert. A couple of years ago I’d be going, why? But after spending the past two years working on Unleashed, which is a lot about physics and stuff, it’s given me a lot of new whole new in terms of what you can do with physics within games. The more PC stuff out there that supports it, the better.

So you see these sorts of co-operative things happening more within game development?
I hope so. I mean, it’s good for the industry in that as a games designer, it gives you more tools to play with. PCs being able to handle physics better is obviously a good thing, and I think consoles will follow soon after because there’s always a better way to do things that’s also faster. The more these companies talk to one another the better because we’re all trying to make games.
Do you think there has been an increase or decrease, or neither, in the level of human talent in the Australian games industry in the past five to ten years?
There’s been a huge increase in talent. A lot more people have come into the industry. Krome itself has probably tripled in size but across the board everyone is getting some really cool gigs. About five years ago you’d be lucky if anyone had a big game but now any studio in Australia is likely to have a big game that they’re working on with a big publisher. That shows how the industry is growing.

You might hear that some people may argue that other countries are cheaper than Australia in making games but the one thing about Krome is that we’re not about doing things cheaper, it’s about doing a better job and that’s pretty much the same with a lot of the other developers. Some of the other countries might on paper, be able to say they have 500 people to work on a game but that doesn’t mean they necessarily have the skills or resources to make the best games. In Australia it has grown to a good level by people who understand games and have a lot of experience.


What have some of your earlier games taught you over the years?
Yeah... we’ve learned to keep a good eye on the scope of a game. It’s easier to make a game on paper a lot bigger than they really need to be. I don’t mean that in terms of the player, but I mean in terms of more work for the developer, with not as much pay-off. Over the years we’ve learned to do ‘less better’.

Take Ty 2 for example. We had so much going on in that game. It was big and grand but we never did all those things absolutely perfectly. It wasn’t half finished, but compared to what we wanted to put in the game...
With Unleashed, we’ve able to focus on Force powers and the combat stuff. With Viva Pinata (Party Animals), we also focussed on key elements of the game. When you do that, you can really polish it up and it makes the games better.

What recommendations would you give to Australian gamers looking to get into video game design/production?
The best way to get into the industry is to make games. Look, make a Flash game and put stuff into practise. It’s the best way to learn all the tricks and there’s nothing better than taking that along to a developer. That’s the way to show you’ve thought out all the elements of a game, and that’s better than someone who comes along who just says they have a degree and wants to make games.

So you encourage people to keep that bedroom-coder culture alive?
Yeah, and if you’re an artist work on mods. Put stuff together, you’ll learn more and your skill set will be far greater than anyone who’s gone through and done a course.

Hellboy: The Science of Evil is in development for Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PSP. Any plans for PC?
No, not at moment.

With console gaming so huge now – do you think that has that made PC gaming a smaller, more specialised area?
Yes and no. I personally don’t play as many PC games as I used to but at the same time, console games are becoming more like PC games in the way that you play them. Having said that, one of my favourite games last year was Peggle so PC games aren’t necessarily going to always be the niche stuff that some PC gamers might be expecting. The internet and browser-based games is a big area and a huge market for everyday people who browse the internet and want to play a game at the same time. The non-hardware pushing stuff might actually be the games that shine, in some ways.

What is the next big thing that game developers face? Is it working with emerging challenges such through technology, like 3D screens?
A couple of weeks ago I was thinking about when I started out doing 2D artwork and how it got to a point where I wondered what else there was to learn. But then 3Ds cards hit and suddenly there was a lot more stuff to learn. At that point I realised that was the reason I was doing it, because there is always something new. I don’t know what will be next but I do know there will be something.

Just look at multiplayer and physics, there’s always something that will pop up or there was an old way of doing something but then something will come along that gives us a whole new idea of playing with this stuff which basically re-opens up the canvas of game design. Every year there’s something new that makes you re-look at something. Even digital distribution, like Xbox Live, there’s all these new things popping up and keeping up is the challenge. It’s also the beauty of it all.