Six Giant Diaries
Producer Chris Pasetto goes on the road to meet with the game press. Is it love at first sight?
Just got back from a Giants PS2 demonstration tour with Maclean Marshall, our PR guy. Responses were pretty weak at the first few places we went ¿ funeral homes, soup kitchens, underground militia meeting halls, sex change clinics. All regular stops, according to Mackie. And while the people at the funeral were too wrapped up in their own problems to give us any good feedback, many of the post-operative transsexuals that we talked to seemed to enjoy the game immensely.
We had much better luck when we focused our demonstration efforts on the gaming press. In short, people liked it. Maybe I'm biased, but it's a fun and beautiful game ¿ our efforts since the last time people saw it (E3) only reinforced those facts. A tear formed in my eye as one of our listeners grabbed the controller and, after a few unsuccessful attempts, used Kabuto's running kick to boot a Reaper Guard hundreds of feet through the air, sailing in between two mountain formations that resembled field goal posts. God bless the gaming industry.
So what are we up to now? Pushing for a full alpha version of Giants ¿ a build that people can play all the way through. Every mission, beginning to end. It'll be great for us to get that gross functionality out of the way so that we can, 1) get the game into serious QA for bugtesting, 2) go back and re-work things that are essentially functional, but could work better, 3) balance, balance, balance. It's coming together, folks.
One of our big hurdles is auto-targeting. We spent a good deal of time up front transferring the controls from the PC mouse-and-keyboard format to the PS2 controller. This, after some time spent playing, tweaking, experimenting, etc., turned out pretty damn good. It feels right as you fly or stomp across the landscapes. While the default control configuration allows the player to control movement and looking with the left and right analog sticks respectively, some of the other configurations make it easy to do most of the character movement and view control with one stick (left stick controls forward/back movement as well as turning right and left).
But still, it's simply not as easy to use an analog stick to line up the crosshairs on a moving enemy as it is with a mouse. We said to each other, "Yeah, we're going to need some sort of auto-aim feature" and tossed concepts back and forth for a while. Well, the time has come to implement it. It's one of those features that requires quite a bit of playing with in order to feel right. Auto-aiming is still a work in progress ... but we're hoping that by next week, we'll be playing the game with some form of auto-aiming, so that it's as easy to shoot creatures as it is to move around the landscape.
Next week: The ability to save your game WHENEVER YOU WANT!!!
-- Chris Pasetto, producer, Giants