Brink Developer Diary 2 - A Contrasting Reality
"What do you mean, they're building it?" That was my first reaction when Richard Jolly, our Media Director, told me about the Brink stand at Gamescom 2009. Even though he pulled out the plans, I still couldn't believe him: "They're building a life size Container City?! Surrounded by water? And an 8-metre replica Founder's Tower sitting in the middle of it all??"
We jumped in my car and drove to the workshops in Woolwich where the stand components were being prepared for the show. Just like in the game, the outside walls of the stand were made up of rusty shipping containers that had been hastily converted into makeshift homes.
Actually seeing our art team's in-game designs come to life was an amazing experience. Everything from scavenged shi…
Brink Developer Diary 3 - Ed Stern
- 1 The Writing on the Wall
- 2 The Problem
- 3 A Salt Solution
- 4 Constructing the Ark
- 5 Creating Conflict
At Splash Damage, we believe that a game's environment is the best narrative medium we have. Compelling environments allow players to pull in information from their surroundings without having to be held hostage by an NPC lecturing them on The Way Things Were. We knew we wanted to use our game environments to tell the story, so they'd need to be packed with detail.
We created a design goal internally called IDC: Instant/Deep Context. Basically it's the old axiom "Show, don't Tell". If we get IDC right, then when the player looks at a game asset they immediately and intuitively grasp where they are (that's the "Instant" part). And the more they look at…
Brink Developer Diary 4 - Aubrey Hesselgren
Here's a scoop of dev diary 4:
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Random Terrain...
- 3 ...meet Smooth Movement
- 4 Jumping to Conclusions
- 5 Under the Hood: How SMART Works
- 6 Semi Automatic for the People
- 7 Conclusion
Six or seven years ago, for a brief period, I wasn't fat. I was lean, fast, agile and well exercised. For once I had a hobby which could reasonably be mentioned in polite company. Friends and relatives assumed (wrongly) that I took to the roofs of Southampton at night, doing back flips over cool bad guys. Not quite, but I had discovered Parkour: the art of efficiently moving up, over, across and through whatever obstacle gets in your way.
And then two years ago, I joined Splash Damage. They showed me pre-production work on what would later become Brink. What real…