00:03Grazie a tutti i nostri amici che abbiamo chiesto di Ressor Gun
00:05questa neoretro estetica, con le voxelles, che hanno chiesto alla grafica del genere.
00:16Abbiamo bisogno di un nome che potrebbe capire questo spirito in un modo,
00:21e è stato un grande parte di definire l'identità del gioco.
00:26È un grande nome.
00:32La prima volta che abbiamo iniziato il progetto, abbiamo fatto un rendere concepto di il gioco.
00:39Questa era una raffa estetica e il gioco il gioco.
00:44Abbiamo capito che ci sarebbe in un cilindro,
00:47e che ci sarebbe un tipo di risultato di shoot'em up action.
00:51E mi ricordo quando Harry Tikanen, il creativo director, mi mostro il video,
00:56mi stava iniziando a lavorare su questo gioco.
01:01E un paio mesi dopo, abbiamo iniziato il sviluppo di sviluppo.
01:08Come abbiamo iniziato a implementare il gioco?
01:12Abbiamo iniziato a implementare il gioco di Super Stardust Delta.
01:15Quindi questa è stata la fondazione del gioco.
01:17Abbiamo permesso di prototipare la versione di Wrestle Gun molto rapido.
01:23E dopo questo, credo che era solo un'interazione.
01:26Abbiamo detto che il prototipo è il final del gioco.
01:30È solo una verità molto buona.
01:32È solo una versione di questo, certo?
01:33Oggi stavamo a avere una versione di PS3 e Vita della versione.
01:39Ma questo è stato anche quando è stato apprezzato alla versione di PS4.
01:45Quindi, dopo un po' di parlare con Sony,
01:49tutti accreditati che sarebbe meglio di rendere questo, inizialmente,
01:52una versione di PS4,
01:54di rendere tutto l'acqua dell'acqua dell'acqua dell'acqua del nuovo sistema,
01:58e rendere Wrestle Gun the most impressive shoot'em up ever made.
02:02We started working on the PS4 version 8 months before launch.
02:06Pretty much everything we aimed to achieve,
02:08we managed to get in by that time.
02:13Voxels are essentially 3D pixels,
02:16and they're quite literally the building blocks of the Wrestle Gun universe.
02:20So, the great thing about working with the PS4
02:24was that we had so much memory and so many options there,
02:28that we could actually have this really huge 3D textures for the game,
02:33and basically use voxels as they were meant to be used,
02:37to blow things up in the most spectacular fashion.
02:40It's just really satisfying to have all of these extra features there,
02:46where we have the voxels colliding with the environment,
02:49when the player is actually boosting through,
02:52he interacts with the detached voxels,
02:54so it's a really dynamic kind of experience overall.
03:00Yeah, well the physics that we're using in the game
03:04are pretty simple,
03:06so we don't have any really complex interactions,
03:10or any real physical simulation going on there,
03:14but all of the cubes do interact with the environment,
03:19and they do interact with the player,
03:21and enemy explosions and so on,
03:23so I think we're using this physical module, you could say,
03:28to just make everything feel really reactive and dynamic.
03:32So, having feedback is a really critical part of our games,
03:37so everything that the player does,
03:39whether you're shooting an enemy,
03:40you're boosting,
03:41you're unleashing a shockwave,
03:42you need to feel it, and it needs to feel good.
03:45And having this dynamic physical reactions for all the cubes,
03:50greatly emphasized that kind of dynamic reaction with the environment that you had.
03:58Our development process at Housemarque is really iteration intensive,
04:04so usually we just try something simple,
04:08see if it works,
04:10and if it does we keep it and we make it better,
04:13if not we discard it and move on.
04:15And I think something that is really common in the game development community is the notion of
04:22iterating and failing quickly.
04:24So, if you have an idea,
04:26a lot of the time it's actually faster to just hack it in and try it out,
04:31rather than have a three hour meeting and discuss the pros and cons of it.
04:35So, we tried out a lot of crazy things for WrestleGun.
04:38The first level that we prototyped had a huge tree in the background,
04:42so we're trying to go for a bit more of this naturalistic kind of approach,
04:47with humans in small huts and kind of have this contrast between like peaceful human life
04:53and crazy enemy invasion action.
04:56Initially, we had a tower building mechanic that was pretty similar to what we ended up with
05:03Protector mode, actually.
05:04And there was a version where you would collect all of the humans on this tower,
05:08you would build up multiple layers,
05:10and the humans would be accumulated at the top,
05:13and they would be running around kind of like on this treadmill and generating power-ups for you.
05:19We had this weapon shop where you would accumulate this in-game currency,
05:24these kind of tokens or orbs as they were called in the game,
05:29and in between phases a weapon shop would come down and you would purchase new upgrades for your ship.
05:35We decided to discard that because it actually slowed down the pace of the game a lot,
05:40so just as the intensity was ramping up and you were getting into the zone,
05:44we would pull you out of the zone and throw a weapon shop in front of you.
05:47And that was unacceptable.
05:50Another thing we tried was having a world map to connect the levels.
05:54It was an ambitious plan.
05:58We ended up discarding that as well because once again it affected the intensity of the experience.
06:05So in between levels you would be thrown to this world map and you would be able to select
06:11which route you actually take and which levels you complete before the final one.
06:17I think our overall philosophy has been to add depth to the game without adding complexity,
06:23so a lot of these things they seemed like they didn't add anything meaningful enough to the game
06:28for us to keep them, so we discarded them.
06:33So once again we iterated over a lot of different ideas for the humans as well.
06:39And originally we did start with humans that would be easily killed by enemies,
06:46so even if they were just touched by an enemy or if they were shot by a bullet they would
06:50die.
06:51Needless to say that was really chaotic and really hard to keep track of.
06:57And later we iterated over humans that had these extra glows around them and extra kind of rings
07:04and these different effects, so different humans would give you different power-ups.
07:09The problem with that was once again it was hard to notice, hard to get a feel for it,
07:15so once again we just made all humans the same, so it would be easier for the...
07:20Well, the gameplay benefited from this simplification.
07:27When we got the first prototype of WrestleGun running,
07:34of course one of the first things we tried was having 360 shooting, just like Super Stardust had.
07:40And it's actually kind of interesting because although it gives the player more freedom,
07:45in a way it kind of... in my opinion it damaged the gameplay a little bit because you ended up
07:53feeling
07:53like you're just a moving turret, so you would just move to a safe location, shoot around all of
08:00the enemies that were coming, move somewhere else, shoot, so it was less... there was somehow less
08:05gameplay there. And by removing the 360 shooting and by forcing the player to shoot only horizontally,
08:12you force the player to move vertically a lot more as well. So if there's a ground enemy you have
08:17to
08:18actually get down to its level to shoot it. And that automatically means that you have to risk
08:22flying through bullets, hitting other obstacles there and so on. So it actually... this constraint
08:29that we applied ended up enriching the gameplay a lot and creating a more balanced experience overall.
08:38Of course the 360 shooting has always been at the back of our minds along with a lot of other
08:44of these discarded gameplay ideas. And a lot of them have had an opportunity to live on recently
08:51with the recent expansion for Reservan which was called Challengers, which has all of these
08:58specialized challenges and mini games that play with the core gameplay rules a bit.
09:06First of all, from a gameplay perspective, in a shoot-em-up you absolutely need to have 60 frames
09:12per second. So that's something we definitely did not want to compromise on, because even though the
09:20game is still playable at 30 frames per second, you miss out on a lot of the fluidity of the
09:26experience.
09:27And of course seeing the potential that the PS4 carried with all of its technical abilities,
09:32we thought that 1080p is definitely doable with the amount of visual fidelity we're going for.
09:41You also have these really cool particle effects, like for example the overdrive beam that you have
09:45for the player, or even the shockwave, like all of the swirly particle effects. All of those are updated
09:52on the GPU side. The RAM of course was a big thing as well, so we're using more memory than
09:59the PS3 had in total,
10:00just for the levels for example. And just for the cube meshes that we have, which the cube meshes are
10:06used
10:06for the enemies and all of the interactive objects in the world, I think we're using about a gigabyte of
10:12memory just for those.
10:15On the audio side we've enjoyed working with Ari Pulkinen, of course throughout many of our projects
10:22here at Housemarque. I think the process for WrestleGun was once again fairly painless and effortless in
10:33many ways. Of course a lot of things do feel effortless when you're just looking back on them.
10:37In reality, of course we had to iterate over a lot of different approaches to the style of the
10:43soundscape and the music that we'd have. We knew from the start that we wanted something
10:49a little bit retro in its aesthetic, but it also needed to sound fresh and new at the same time,
10:56and I think Ari managed to pull off a pretty sweet balance there.
11:02It was fantastic that we were given the opportunity to be a part of the launch of a new console,
11:10and be essentially in the spotlight along with the other few games that came out in that launch window.
11:17Of course we did distribute the game freely through PS Plus during this launch window,
11:25so a lot of players ended up trying out WrestleGun, even from what I've read even a lot of
11:32players who were initially skeptical about the shoot-em-up genre in general. Because it was free,
11:38they downloaded it, they tried it, and a lot of people ended up loving it and even getting the
11:42platinum for the game at that time as well. So overall we've been really really happy with the
11:49reception we got for WrestleGun. There were a lot of ideas left over and a lot of cool stuff we
11:53had in mind that we weren't able to produce until later with the expansions that we released over
12:00the last year or so.
