State of Emergency Q&A

State of Emergency's impending appearance on the Xbox is being handled by the game's original developer, Vis Entertainment. Rather than do a straight port of the PlayStation 2 game, the developer has opted to beef up the Xbox game with refined gameplay and a new multiplayer mode. We had the chance to talk to Richard Reavy, head of research and development, Jonny Dobson, head of software, and Jamie Bryan, director, to see how it's going.

GameSpot: Tell us about the animation for the main characters.

Jamie Bryan: A lot of time was spent on perfecting the player's moves. We wanted to give the characters loads of personality so the players feel like they actually are the character they are playing.

Each of the five characters has two special moves that fit their personality. For example, Bull, the big guy, can take an opponent and swing him around his head before flinging him into a wall. The characters can also do dash attacks. Phreak, the computer hacker, will do a break dance kind of move to knock enemies off their feet, while Spanky, the ex-gang member, does the meanest flip you will ever see to bash his enemies to the ground. We also spent a lot of time on the NPCs--some of them will cower in fear, and some will fight back. If you can get a gang member to follow you to a member of the Corporation, they will fight each other while you walk away quietly.

GS: Can you tell us about the addition of gang leaders in the Xbox version? How does it affect the gangs in the game?

JB: It made fighting the gangs much more personal and gave more life to the gangs. Having a unique boss character added to the atmosphere of the fight as well as gave the gangs an added unique personality. Gang leaders also helped tighten the story in the revolution mode, making the game more cohesive and giving the player a key enemy or ally.

GS: Can you use gangs to your advantage in gameplay?

JB: Hell yeah! You can lead gang members to fight other enemies or members of the Corporation. A gang member can take a swing at you and miss, hitting someone else in another gang, starting a full-on riot, and you can just walk away from the mayhem you've just caused and continue with your objective. In the deathmatch multiplayer mode, you can recruit civilians to be in your gang that will fight for you to the death.

GS: Can you tell us about the technology involved in putting so many characters onscreen?

Richard Reavy: Once we got our hands on the dev tools, we took the box apart and started from scratch. The character and animation renderer are hardware coded and were written after we knew how the machine worked and what it could handle. We are really proud of the results--we managed to get 250 characters onscreen at once and process over 500 AI paths simultaneously in each map.

This took a great deal of work and investigation on how the Xbox hardware works, but it was more than worth the effort.

GS: Can you tell us about the AI for all those characters?

Jonny Dobson: We created a system for State of Emergency in which each character on the screen had a set of behaviors (for example, running, fleeing, and attacking), and the character chose which behavior to do based on the events happening around them (for example, someone being attacked or a gun firing). As a result, each character reacts to events in different ways, and their reactions create new events, which causes the other characters to react, and so on. In a nutshell, there is a domino effect where one character reacts off another.

GS: What was the inspiration for the art style in State of Emergency? What about the individual characters?

JB: The game is over the top, in your face, and played at 100mph. We wanted the style of the game to follow the feel of the gameplay. We wanted the characters to have a strong onscreen presence, so we decided to exaggerate the proportions of the characters, making them a lot of fun to watch and play. The environments follow the same rules, so you can have fun and take out your aggressions and feel like you're almost part of a cartoon. As for the characters, Spanky was based on a sketch I did of my little brother. One of our top modelers did a fantastic high-end render of Spanky that we cut down to the in-game character. With Rockstar's help and a lot of discussion, we designed the rest of the characters to be as crazy and fun to play as Spanky.

GS: Thanks for your time.